I have been bitten too many times by locked down software to want to get a Tivo. I love the concept, and I'd even feel good about supporting an innovative company, but not at the expense of putting up with DRM. Tivo as lost sales with me precisely because they lock things up, and if they switched to GP:v3 and unlocked things, they would gain sales.
Counselor is a job. Commander is a rank. Anonymous Coward is a loser. Get out of your basement and head on down to the recruiter and go learn of what you attempt to speak about.
The Nazis began building U-boats again in 1935, and they were largely a continuation of WWI designs from 1918 or 1920 at the latest. They were small and cramped. The Type VIIC was the most common U-boat, and they began building in 1940, IIRC. They were only around 700 tons. For an example of how cramped they were, they had two heads, one of which was almost entirely used for stowage of provisions, and the entire crew (44?) had to use the one other head. It was not a pressure head, and could only be dumped either when surfaced or possibly near the surface. At any depth beyond that, the crew used buckets and cans and whatever else would hold the sewage until it could be dumped overboard once surfaced.
There was no forced ventilation system; they relied upon open hatches. Once surfaced, it took a long time for the ends of the boat to get fresh air. Combine that with buckets of sewage and you do not have a happy crew.
These problems were typical of the rushed repeat designs carried over from WWI. There were some design considerations between the wars, typically such as making safer electrical wiring and going to hydraulic controls, but nothing close to a proper design bureau.
Yes, convoys were introduced right in the beginning, and yes there was a severe lack of escorts. The US, altho not involved for two years, had a typical problem. They had rushed thru massive building programs in 1917 when they entered WWI, most of which (the famous flush deck four pipers) were not built until the war was over. As small as they were, and as obsolete as they gradually became, Congress was in no mood to discard them for new designs in the tight economy of the Depression of the 1930s. Those were the 50 ships transferred to the British, and in spite of them being half the necessary size, and having puny 3" guns in most cases, the British were glad to accept them, even after the war had been going on for a year, simply because they were desperate for escorts.
The Wolf Pack of WW II was thought up by Donitz long after WW I. It was not effective at first because there were so few U-boats. I believe there were only something like a dozen U-boats at sea at any given time during the first few months of war, including those in transit. These first U-boats had good pickings because they dove deeper than the British had expected and because the British were as unprepared as the Germans were. There were very few escorts to protect the convoys, but there were every few U-boats to take advantage of that. If you look at the stats, you will find that sinkings per U-boat dropped alarmingly as time went by, averaging something like one sinking per boat per month, annd most boats were sunk without ever having sunk any ships.
Contrary to your belief, contact exploders were by far the most successful. Both the US and Germans gave up on the too-clever idea of magnetic exploders and went back to the tried and true contact exploders. The US problems were compounded by having both magnetic and contact exploder problems, and by the original testing being done in cooler Atlantic waters as opposed to operational use (and failure) in the warm south and central Pacific. There were quite a few well documented cases of ships coming into port with unexploded torpedoes embedded in their sides.
There is a general myth about the superiority of the German military because they had so much secret development between the wars. Their U-boats were awful designs, successful only at first and only because the British were equally unprepared. Their battleships were lousy bang for the buck, being just overbuilt WWI designs with poor armor placement and poor guns; they survived only from being vastly overbuilt, not from good design. Compare the Washington (35,000 tons, 9x16 inch; 27 knots) vs the Bismarck (42,000 tons, 8x15 inch, 30 knots). Their tanks at the beginning of the war were no better than anybody else's; it was their continuation of their new late WWI strategy and the French continuation of old WW I strateg
I posted this a few days ago, may as well repost it..
The usual pro-confederacy arguments are that they were fighting for states' rights and not for slavery. These are both patently false.
The southern states were the ones arguing for federal supremacy over states. They wanted the federal government to enforce slavery laws in free states. They argued that a slave owner should retain ownership of those slaves while traveling in free states, and that slaves who escaped to free states should be returned to their owners. Hardly a states rights position!
The war of 1812 was a disaster, economically, for the New England states which depended so heavily on trade. They spent three years getting up the nerve to send a delegation to Washington to bring up the subject of secession, but the war ended before they could do anything. The southern states were the most vocal in condemning secession as treason. How interesting that when their ox was being gored, they acted immediately, not even trying to negotiate with the federal government. So much for honor!
As for economics, which is the usual neo-confedrate blame for northern aggression, it was slavery which put the south at a disadvantage, in that it made labor so cheap that industrialization was too expensive. It really hurt the small farmers who had to do their own labor. I have never understood why poor whites, then or now, backed the slavery system which kept them in poverty. No self-employed man can compete with slaves. The expense of overseers doesn't come close to compensating for the cheap maintenance (crowded crappy housing, no elders to take care of) of slaves.
It was a war for the rich white southerners. Nobody else would have benefited from secession.
I wonder how long it will take for the community nature of the internet to sink thru the thick skulls of these dinosaurs and percolate into some grey cells.
The first trains were considered dangerous at any speed faster than a horse, on the grounds that man could not breathe at such high speeds.
The early automobiles had to be led by a man on foot waving a flag.
Why don't you explain to us mere mortals why that IS an ad hominem argument? Seems to me that TFA claims that he should have perpetual copyright; if that applied to Shakespeare, this author would have been in trouble. That's relevant and not a personal attack.
Ad hominem, in my understanding, would have been to claim the author has smelly feet or gave his fiancee a blood diamond, or some equally irrelevant argument.
The usual pro-confederacy arguments are that they were fighting for states' rights and not for slavery. These are both patently false.
The southern states were the ones arguing for federal supremacy over states. They wanted the federal government to enforce slavery laws in free states. They argued that a slave owner should retain ownership of those slaves while traveling in free states, and that slaves who escaped to free states should be returned to their owners. Hardly a states rights position!
The war of 1812 was a disaster, economically, for the New England states which depended so heavily on trade. They spent three years getting up the nerve to send a delegation to Washington to bring up the subject of secession, but the war ended before they could do anything. The southern states were the most vocal in condemning secession as treason. How interesting that when their ox was being gored, they acted immediately, not even trying to negotiate with the federal government. So much for honor!
As for economics, which is the usual neo-confedrate blame for northern aggression, it was slavery which put the south at a disadvantage, in that it made labor so cheap that industrialization was too expensive. It really hurt the small farmers who had to do their own labor. I have never understood why poor whites, then or now, backed the slavery system which kept them in poverty. No self-employed man can compete with slaves. The expense of overseers doesn't come close to compensating for the cheap maintenance (crowded crappy housing, no elders to take care of) of slaves.
It was a war for the rich white southerners. Nobody else would have benefited from secession.
I got an uncle a computer and the hardest part for him was the frustration of typing. He was used to a manual typewriter. For instance, when he typed email, he'd get alternating long and short lines because of word wrap. He was trained by 50 years usage to return the carriage when it got near end of line, and would invariably do that just after the last word had wrapped to the next line.
He was also not at all ready for the concept of proper shutdown. He'd just trip the power switch when he was done, not even wait for it to finish printing or sending email sometimes.
He did learn, but he had 50 years of habits to break, and that was tough. Other concepts like menus and the mouse were so different that they didn't collide with ingrained habits.
I find the most useful remnant of that skill is simply having a picture in my head of all the contortions it takes to get something done. I literally imagine bits flowing between programs and interrupts triggering other programs when I think of a web page loading. I know of far too many programmers who have no concept of what is involved in doing something and think that one line of code is just as fast (or slow) as another. The best they can do is understand that calls to their own subroutines do invoke all the subroutine's code, but they treat system calls (well, other than the obvious clunkers like file open) and library calls as incurring no time cost.
I'd love to program 8 bit micros again. You can memorize their instructions usefully. Even the 68k and 68k10 were just a bit too fancy for easy memorization, what with all the different addressing modes. Once you throw in pipelines and caches, it gets way too complicated for any but the simplest loops.
I wish! I understand Mel *exactly*. Squeezing the last bit of performance and efficiency is heaven. It is an almost useless skill nowadays, and I don't do it any more on that level, but I sure wish....
Generally known as n + 1 addressing, where n was how many operands had addresses in the instruction. Also used with drum memory, which was in the physical shape of a cylinder ion the one drum machine I used, but was mainly a head per track disk, so no seeking required. Some drums had multiple heads per track for some tracks to reduce latency further.
The optimization was great fun, my favorite part. You could make programs scream if you paid attention.
My understanding (almost all from Groklaw) is that if the accuser actually tries to impede the accused from fixing the problem, it counts against you, legally. Whether it goes so far as to invalidate your patents, or merely reduces damages owed, I don't remember. I think there is some legal aspect to how much you can collect in damages; you can't collect damages from before the announcement date, perhaps.
At any rate, it is obvious to just about everybody that this is just another blatant Microsoft ripoff; they saw SCO do it, now it's their turn. They have never had any technological innovations in the history of the company; everything has been a copy of someone else's idea. Why should their legal department be any different?
This is really funny -- sure, it worked once. But each satellite company has a monopoly on selling their own imagery, and once they realize how desperate the buyer is, they can jack the price up sky high. You want exclusive? Great, 100 x normal. For the first day. Then we will negotiate the second day at 1,000 x normal and see about the third day tomorrow. What, you are in a hurry? Well, sit down, have some tea, let us talk....
I'd bought an Ambra 486 which promised that when the Pentium overdrive came out, it would work. It didn't. Customer service basically told me tough titties. I wrote letters (snail mail!) to the CEO, president, chairman of the board, a couple of others, and the chairman's office called back immediately (in snail mail terms) calmed me down, got their Scotland division to call me and explain how they had screwed up, sent a floppy with a BIOS upgrade, bingo, problem solved. No free computer but it solved the problem.
(Someone will probably correct my spelling with some German characters that are not commonly used in the US even for foreign names. That's karma for you!)
The particular instance I had in mind was a subroutine which built up a 500 byte string from several dozen strcats.
You might want to pause a moment before writing next time. You might want to absorb the gist of what you have read rather than pick one small part and assume the writer is clueless. You might instead think of the writer actually having said something useful and consider that maybe you need to adjust your perceptions a bit rather than throw out gratuitous fatuous comments.
I know far too many programmers who haven't a clue what is going on under the hood, so to speak, and have zero comprehension of what operations take longer than others. For instance, consider a C programmer I know who thinks strcat is a good routine to use.
(For the ignorant, it takes two string pointers and copies the second one to the end of the first one; this requires zipping all the way from the start to the end of the first string to find where said end is. It then helpfully returns the pointer to the beginning of the first string, the very parameter you passed in. Never mind that the new end of the first string would be very handy for the next strcat to that same string.)
This programmer is generally good at what he does, but the idea that strcat is woefully inefficient is not obvious to him. Even after explaining it to him, yes he will avoid it, but he does not really understand why. He, and far too many other programmers, measure their program's "speed" in lines of code. Sure, they know that a subroutine call has to count those subroutine lines of codes as well, but they simply have no concept of the fact that some operations take longer than others, that there are better ways of doing simple things.
I think every beginning programmer should have to spend a semester on some funky old z80, for instance, all in assembler, debugging in machine language, before they can call themselves a good programmer. The idea is not to get them skilled in z80s, but to give them a basic idea of how computers work.
It's the equivalent of learning to drive a stick shift car without understand why there are gears at all. If you are ignorant of the very basics of internal combustion engines and can't understand the dangers of lugging or redlining an engine and the importance of using the right RPM, you will never be a good driver. It matters not whether you ever drive a stick in real life, it's just a matter of knowing how to handle your equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been bitten too many times by locked down software to want to get a Tivo. I love the concept, and I'd even feel good about supporting an innovative company, but not at the expense of putting up with DRM. Tivo as lost sales with me precisely because they lock things up, and if they switched to GP:v3 and unlocked things, they would gain sales.
Counselor is a job. Commander is a rank. Anonymous Coward is a loser. Get out of your basement and head on down to the recruiter and go learn of what you attempt to speak about.
You already had your last chance when you first clicked Submit. No second chances for you.
By your way of thinking, bank robbery or raiding Fort Knox would be an acceptable business plan, I take it.
The Nazis began building U-boats again in 1935, and they were largely a continuation of WWI designs from 1918 or 1920 at the latest. They were small and cramped. The Type VIIC was the most common U-boat, and they began building in 1940, IIRC. They were only around 700 tons. For an example of how cramped they were, they had two heads, one of which was almost entirely used for stowage of provisions, and the entire crew (44?) had to use the one other head. It was not a pressure head, and could only be dumped either when surfaced or possibly near the surface. At any depth beyond that, the crew used buckets and cans and whatever else would hold the sewage until it could be dumped overboard once surfaced.
There was no forced ventilation system; they relied upon open hatches. Once surfaced, it took a long time for the ends of the boat to get fresh air. Combine that with buckets of sewage and you do not have a happy crew.
These problems were typical of the rushed repeat designs carried over from WWI. There were some design considerations between the wars, typically such as making safer electrical wiring and going to hydraulic controls, but nothing close to a proper design bureau.
Yes, convoys were introduced right in the beginning, and yes there was a severe lack of escorts. The US, altho not involved for two years, had a typical problem. They had rushed thru massive building programs in 1917 when they entered WWI, most of which (the famous flush deck four pipers) were not built until the war was over. As small as they were, and as obsolete as they gradually became, Congress was in no mood to discard them for new designs in the tight economy of the Depression of the 1930s. Those were the 50 ships transferred to the British, and in spite of them being half the necessary size, and having puny 3" guns in most cases, the British were glad to accept them, even after the war had been going on for a year, simply because they were desperate for escorts.
The Wolf Pack of WW II was thought up by Donitz long after WW I. It was not effective at first because there were so few U-boats. I believe there were only something like a dozen U-boats at sea at any given time during the first few months of war, including those in transit. These first U-boats had good pickings because they dove deeper than the British had expected and because the British were as unprepared as the Germans were. There were very few escorts to protect the convoys, but there were every few U-boats to take advantage of that. If you look at the stats, you will find that sinkings per U-boat dropped alarmingly as time went by, averaging something like one sinking per boat per month, annd most boats were sunk without ever having sunk any ships.
Contrary to your belief, contact exploders were by far the most successful. Both the US and Germans gave up on the too-clever idea of magnetic exploders and went back to the tried and true contact exploders. The US problems were compounded by having both magnetic and contact exploder problems, and by the original testing being done in cooler Atlantic waters as opposed to operational use (and failure) in the warm south and central Pacific. There were quite a few well documented cases of ships coming into port with unexploded torpedoes embedded in their sides.
There is a general myth about the superiority of the German military because they had so much secret development between the wars. Their U-boats were awful designs, successful only at first and only because the British were equally unprepared. Their battleships were lousy bang for the buck, being just overbuilt WWI designs with poor armor placement and poor guns; they survived only from being vastly overbuilt, not from good design. Compare the Washington (35,000 tons, 9x16 inch; 27 knots) vs the Bismarck (42,000 tons, 8x15 inch, 30 knots). Their tanks at the beginning of the war were no better than anybody else's; it was their continuation of their new late WWI strategy and the French continuation of old WW I strateg
You wouldn't get the power and efficiency of a modern engine without the electronics which control it.
Hay is for horses, of courses.
I posted this a few days ago, may as well repost it ..
The usual pro-confederacy arguments are that they were fighting for states' rights and not for slavery. These are both patently false.
The southern states were the ones arguing for federal supremacy over states. They wanted the federal government to enforce slavery laws in free states. They argued that a slave owner should retain ownership of those slaves while traveling in free states, and that slaves who escaped to free states should be returned to their owners. Hardly a states rights position!
The war of 1812 was a disaster, economically, for the New England states which depended so heavily on trade. They spent three years getting up the nerve to send a delegation to Washington to bring up the subject of secession, but the war ended before they could do anything. The southern states were the most vocal in condemning secession as treason. How interesting that when their ox was being gored, they acted immediately, not even trying to negotiate with the federal government. So much for honor!
As for economics, which is the usual neo-confedrate blame for northern aggression, it was slavery which put the south at a disadvantage, in that it made labor so cheap that industrialization was too expensive. It really hurt the small farmers who had to do their own labor. I have never understood why poor whites, then or now, backed the slavery system which kept them in poverty. No self-employed man can compete with slaves. The expense of overseers doesn't come close to compensating for the cheap maintenance (crowded crappy housing, no elders to take care of) of slaves.
It was a war for the rich white southerners. Nobody else would have benefited from secession.
I wonder how long it will take for the community nature of the internet to sink thru the thick skulls of these dinosaurs and percolate into some grey cells.
The first trains were considered dangerous at any speed faster than a horse, on the grounds that man could not breathe at such high speeds.
The early automobiles had to be led by a man on foot waving a flag.
How long before corporate dinos seem as quaint?
Why don't you explain to us mere mortals why that IS an ad hominem argument? Seems to me that TFA claims that he should have perpetual copyright; if that applied to Shakespeare, this author would have been in trouble. That's relevant and not a personal attack.
Ad hominem, in my understanding, would have been to claim the author has smelly feet or gave his fiancee a blood diamond, or some equally irrelevant argument.
The usual pro-confederacy arguments are that they were fighting for states' rights and not for slavery. These are both patently false.
The southern states were the ones arguing for federal supremacy over states. They wanted the federal government to enforce slavery laws in free states. They argued that a slave owner should retain ownership of those slaves while traveling in free states, and that slaves who escaped to free states should be returned to their owners. Hardly a states rights position!
The war of 1812 was a disaster, economically, for the New England states which depended so heavily on trade. They spent three years getting up the nerve to send a delegation to Washington to bring up the subject of secession, but the war ended before they could do anything. The southern states were the most vocal in condemning secession as treason. How interesting that when their ox was being gored, they acted immediately, not even trying to negotiate with the federal government. So much for honor!
As for economics, which is the usual neo-confedrate blame for northern aggression, it was slavery which put the south at a disadvantage, in that it made labor so cheap that industrialization was too expensive. It really hurt the small farmers who had to do their own labor. I have never understood why poor whites, then or now, backed the slavery system which kept them in poverty. No self-employed man can compete with slaves. The expense of overseers doesn't come close to compensating for the cheap maintenance (crowded crappy housing, no elders to take care of) of slaves.
It was a war for the rich white southerners. Nobody else would have benefited from secession.
I got an uncle a computer and the hardest part for him was the frustration of typing. He was used to a manual typewriter. For instance, when he typed email, he'd get alternating long and short lines because of word wrap. He was trained by 50 years usage to return the carriage when it got near end of line, and would invariably do that just after the last word had wrapped to the next line.
He was also not at all ready for the concept of proper shutdown. He'd just trip the power switch when he was done, not even wait for it to finish printing or sending email sometimes.
He did learn, but he had 50 years of habits to break, and that was tough. Other concepts like menus and the mouse were so different that they didn't collide with ingrained habits.
I find the most useful remnant of that skill is simply having a picture in my head of all the contortions it takes to get something done. I literally imagine bits flowing between programs and interrupts triggering other programs when I think of a web page loading. I know of far too many programmers who have no concept of what is involved in doing something and think that one line of code is just as fast (or slow) as another. The best they can do is understand that calls to their own subroutines do invoke all the subroutine's code, but they treat system calls (well, other than the obvious clunkers like file open) and library calls as incurring no time cost.
I'd love to program 8 bit micros again. You can memorize their instructions usefully. Even the 68k and 68k10 were just a bit too fancy for easy memorization, what with all the different addressing modes. Once you throw in pipelines and caches, it gets way too complicated for any but the simplest loops.
I wish! I understand Mel *exactly*. Squeezing the last bit of performance and efficiency is heaven. It is an almost useless skill nowadays, and I don't do it any more on that level, but I sure wish ....
Generally known as n + 1 addressing, where n was how many operands had addresses in the instruction. Also used with drum memory, which was in the physical shape of a cylinder ion the one drum machine I used, but was mainly a head per track disk, so no seeking required. Some drums had multiple heads per track for some tracks to reduce latency further.
The optimization was great fun, my favorite part. You could make programs scream if you paid attention.
My understanding (almost all from Groklaw) is that if the accuser actually tries to impede the accused from fixing the problem, it counts against you, legally. Whether it goes so far as to invalidate your patents, or merely reduces damages owed, I don't remember. I think there is some legal aspect to how much you can collect in damages; you can't collect damages from before the announcement date, perhaps.
At any rate, it is obvious to just about everybody that this is just another blatant Microsoft ripoff; they saw SCO do it, now it's their turn. They have never had any technological innovations in the history of the company; everything has been a copy of someone else's idea. Why should their legal department be any different?
P.S. ATM Machine.
Isn't that the factory that makes AT Machines?
Ju don't say!
Guess Daddypants didn't read his email.
This is really funny -- sure, it worked once. But each satellite company has a monopoly on selling their own imagery, and once they realize how desperate the buyer is, they can jack the price up sky high. You want exclusive? Great, 100 x normal. For the first day. Then we will negotiate the second day at 1,000 x normal and see about the third day tomorrow. What, you are in a hurry? Well, sit down, have some tea, let us talk ....
I'd bought an Ambra 486 which promised that when the Pentium overdrive came out, it would work. It didn't. Customer service basically told me tough titties. I wrote letters (snail mail!) to the CEO, president, chairman of the board, a couple of others, and the chairman's office called back immediately (in snail mail terms) calmed me down, got their Scotland division to call me and explain how they had screwed up, sent a floppy with a BIOS upgrade, bingo, problem solved. No free computer but it solved the problem.
They should ban kids from carryon luggage and make parents check them.
Only to Mr. Freud.
That's Doctor Freud to you.
(Someone will probably correct my spelling with some German characters that are not commonly used in the US even for foreign names. That's karma for you!)
The particular instance I had in mind was a subroutine which built up a 500 byte string from several dozen strcats.
You might want to pause a moment before writing next time. You might want to absorb the gist of what you have read rather than pick one small part and assume the writer is clueless. You might instead think of the writer actually having said something useful and consider that maybe you need to adjust your perceptions a bit rather than throw out gratuitous fatuous comments.
I know far too many programmers who haven't a clue what is going on under the hood, so to speak, and have zero comprehension of what operations take longer than others. For instance, consider a C programmer I know who thinks strcat is a good routine to use.
(For the ignorant, it takes two string pointers and copies the second one to the end of the first one; this requires zipping all the way from the start to the end of the first string to find where said end is. It then helpfully returns the pointer to the beginning of the first string, the very parameter you passed in. Never mind that the new end of the first string would be very handy for the next strcat to that same string.)
This programmer is generally good at what he does, but the idea that strcat is woefully inefficient is not obvious to him. Even after explaining it to him, yes he will avoid it, but he does not really understand why. He, and far too many other programmers, measure their program's "speed" in lines of code. Sure, they know that a subroutine call has to count those subroutine lines of codes as well, but they simply have no concept of the fact that some operations take longer than others, that there are better ways of doing simple things.
I think every beginning programmer should have to spend a semester on some funky old z80, for instance, all in assembler, debugging in machine language, before they can call themselves a good programmer. The idea is not to get them skilled in z80s, but to give them a basic idea of how computers work.
It's the equivalent of learning to drive a stick shift car without understand why there are gears at all. If you are ignorant of the very basics of internal combustion engines and can't understand the dangers of lugging or redlining an engine and the importance of using the right RPM, you will never be a good driver. It matters not whether you ever drive a stick in real life, it's just a matter of knowing how to handle your equipment.