Ruby is a nice little language. There are a few oddities and the C Ruby interpreter, as Matz admitted, is not very efficient.
Rails, which is what everyone thinks of when they hear Ruby, on the other hand -- well, I'll stay far away from it thanks.
Count me among those developers who never thought that the way to build robust and flexible applications is to first define some database tables, then write a little CRUD code to generate screens. Maybe back in 1989, when SQL databases were new and there were a lot of dumb data entry tasks to automate, and even then, I'm not so sure.
Doing that would allow her to 'sign' the document without having to make a physical mark on a paper copy, yes. She'd still be expected to fax the signed copy back. Either she'd have to print out the 'signed' document and find a fax machine, or if she happened to have a phone line and modem (do laptops even have modems any more?) and some kind of fax software, print to fax.
For whatever reason, business still has a need to have proof that an actual person used a pen to apply ink to a piece of paper for certain kinds of authorization.
True Story: I was on vacation once with my family and my sister, who doesn't really ever vacation, she just works from the road, had some purchase orders to sign. She's a manager and while there's this huge long bureaucratic process involved in purchase orders, most of which is done through email or some kind of internal webapp, the final step requires her signature.
Of course, the solution to that when she's on the road is that they email her a copy of the document -- probably a Word file but maybe a PDF, I didn't ask -- which she must print out, physically sign, and then fax the signed document back to the office.
You might think my sister works at some backwards podunk company that sells buggy whips to icemen. You'd be wrong.
Thanks for the link. While it's true it's not a true full-featured spellchecker, it does have a list of just over 500 common misspellings and their correct equivalents, so I'd argue it *is* a primitive spellchecker.
In any case, it's definitely NOT a predictive text auto-correction tool, and there's no danger of the results showing up on DYAC.
Say what you will about the Long March, it's of the same vintage as Proton, which is one of the most successful heavy boosters ever and is still in use for large payloads including the biggest geostationary communications satellites. The Proton also happens to be dinitrogen tetroxide/UDMH fueled -- and will only be replaced once the Angara is ready, sometime in 2014, for commercial missions.
As for the spacecraft being from the age of the iPad, that's only correct in a chronological sense. The Shenzhou owes more of its ancestry to the Soyuz capsule. It's already been launched successfully three times, including one mission with a spacewalk, making China the fastest from first manned flight to first EVA in history.
The LM-2F will also carry China's Tiangong 1 space station in the next few weeks, and crews flying up to it next year.
In short, right now China is the only country in the world with manned spaceflight capability.
Don't confuse what a spell checker does when auto-correcting with what something like T9 or smart phone predictive text does. The latter is the cause of the cell phone headaches.
While a spellchecker will check a string of characters against a dictionary and attempt to correct misspellings (like "misspell" with only 1 s or 1 l), predictive text auto-correct is both more clever and more stupid.
Predictive text makes certain assumptions about the keyboard arrangement and tries to fit typos to possible words that could have been intended had the user not been smashing 3 tiny buttons at once on a cell phone or screen keyboard. While a spellchecker would recognize "danm" as a typo for "damn" with just transposed letters, it would never try to correct it to "calm" on the basis that the letter c is close to the letter d and n and m are nearby or some nonsense as that.
A plain old spellchecker, like the one under discussion here, makes no attempt to guess what word was meant and assume a typo is a result of accidentally pressing keys near the intended ones. It just looks at what words could have been intended based on close matches with the dictionary.
By the way, auto-correct will frequently fail to guess a replacement when the misspelling involves letters that are not nearby on the keyboard.
Note that if the station is left unmanned, it will be the end of an 11-year run of humans continuously in space, starting with the October, 2000 arrival of the Expedition 1 crew at ISS.
By the way, the Chinese are still flying their man-rated Long March.
I used to work for one of the world's leading sporting goods companies. We had contractors onsite with the same network/desktop configuration and access as full time employees. At least one of these outsourced but in-house contractors was stupid enough to fall for pretty much any phishing/fake anti-virus/whatever scheme you can come up with. I have no doubt that any company in the US (what does that mean any more, anyway?) could be compromised given enough persistence and relentless effort to find THAT GUY.
Spam isn't so much about getting the recipient to buy things any more, it's about getting the recipient to give up a credit card number, bank account password, or something similar that can then be used to either directly rip off the individual or in an attack to compromise a higher value target.
The spammers don't need to convince users to buy pills or whatever, they just need them to be gullible enough to give up enough information to get ripped off.
Speaking of misleading and vague wording.. from the article, as quoted in the summary: "We would have done if our public agreement was in place"
I reread the article twice, and either the author a) is not a native English speaker/writer or b) is a sad commentary on the state of education in his country.
Check the cost of safely putting a kilogram of payload into a sun-diving trajectory. Check the density of uranium and plutonium, and the total volume of waste just sitting there waiting to be dealt with, forgetting for the time being the stuff that's still to come. Get back to to us with your findings and comparison with the cost of other radioactive waste disposal methods. Show your work.
What happens in the worst submarine patents is that company files the initial patent, then repeatedly updates and amends it before its granted. Those updates and amendments track industry practices. After a few years, the patent is granted, but the date of original filing still applies.
It hasn't been as readily possible to do this since 2000, but something like it still happens.
I believe we are in vehement agreement here. While safety and affordability might have been the supposed top level requirements publicly, within management and contractors, the real requirements had more to do with making jobs in key states like Utah.
In your comment you mention 'engineering management' and 'manager'. I stand by my admittedly compromised position that some very smart and capable engineers came up with some ingenious things. The fact that the silica thermal tiles were a very poor alternative to a problem that had no solution (the superalloy skin) and that management directed they be employed regardless doesn't diminish the fact that the stuff is an amazing material that is useful in a variety of situations -- none of which involved the orbiter underbelly. Management decided they should be employed in a hostile environment (side-mounted orbiter with debris from the ET insulation impacting), but engineers didn't solve for that problem.
There's plenty of evidence that management at NASA may have had political considerations and the profits of contractors in mind ahead of good engineering, I won't deny that. I also don't want to detract from the honest work of folks who dedicated their efforts to a cause only to have the results subverted.
I have to confess to mixed feelings about this. Given the engineering problems they were tasked to solve, I credit the guys working on the shuttle program with some terrific work. Unfortunately, they were given plates of shit to engineer with.
What I'm saying is that on the one hand, STS is an engineering marvel for things like the thermal tiles and the cross-range glider landing of the orbiter, the re-usability and throttle-ability of the SSME, especially for their weight and isp, and the SRBs... ok, well, nevermind about the SRBs.
On the other hand, all those capabilities have almost nothing to do with getting people or cargo into space and safely home efficiently at low cost. The tiles, for instance, were used in response to a requirement for a reusable winged spaceplane, which itself was driven by other requirements for the Air Force. The shuttle engines are great if you need them to work in a vacuum, but are really pretty lousy for engines running at sea level that can't be restarted.
So, in short, congratulations to the engineers over the years in the shuttle program for solving some huge problems, but apologies for making you work on crap that was tangential to real goal.
Considering that the top rated GP comment uses "loose" for "lose" and the parent uses "your" for "you're", I'm inclined to believe we have lost whatever intellectual edge we might have had.
Leveling in the starter zones is so rapid that there's really no need to have BoA items, and you can't get through them until you finish the quests for the phase anyway, so you'd be spinning your wheels doing quests you've out-leveled. I seem to recall there wasn't a mailbox available at level 1, but sometime before leaving the starter zone there was an inn with a mailbox. You can learn your tradeskills in the starter zone, too, but it's VERY easy to out-level the gathering skills if you don't make an effort herb/skin/mine etc.
They did for the two new races: worgen and goblin characters can't get out of the starting area -- it's "phased" -- without doing the quests up to the end of the starting phase.
You do have access to a mailbox and zone chat, as well as guilds and such if you have friends, but no auction house or trade channel.
That still leaves all the other races that were around before that last expansion just a short run to a capitol city, but Blizzard did move the AoC direction a bit.
Just as I said, some hiring manager would find him "motivated, task-focused, and results-oriented". Good luck with the results: half-working, user-unfriendly with major gaps between what the product funders wanted and what the team members like that produce.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby is a nice little language. There are a few oddities and the C Ruby interpreter, as Matz admitted, is not very efficient.
Rails, which is what everyone thinks of when they hear Ruby, on the other hand -- well, I'll stay far away from it thanks.
Count me among those developers who never thought that the way to build robust and flexible applications is to first define some database tables, then write a little CRUD code to generate screens. Maybe back in 1989, when SQL databases were new and there were a lot of dumb data entry tasks to automate, and even then, I'm not so sure.
You do know that, except for low-level system code and the vm itself, most of Android is written in Java?
Doing that would allow her to 'sign' the document without having to make a physical mark on a paper copy, yes. She'd still be expected to fax the signed copy back. Either she'd have to print out the 'signed' document and find a fax machine, or if she happened to have a phone line and modem (do laptops even have modems any more?) and some kind of fax software, print to fax.
For whatever reason, business still has a need to have proof that an actual person used a pen to apply ink to a piece of paper for certain kinds of authorization.
True Story: I was on vacation once with my family and my sister, who doesn't really ever vacation, she just works from the road, had some purchase orders to sign. She's a manager and while there's this huge long bureaucratic process involved in purchase orders, most of which is done through email or some kind of internal webapp, the final step requires her signature.
Of course, the solution to that when she's on the road is that they email her a copy of the document -- probably a Word file but maybe a PDF, I didn't ask -- which she must print out, physically sign, and then fax the signed document back to the office.
You might think my sister works at some backwards podunk company that sells buggy whips to icemen. You'd be wrong.
My sister works at Cisco.
*try to
Thanks for the link. While it's true it's not a true full-featured spellchecker, it does have a list of just over 500 common misspellings and their correct equivalents, so I'd argue it *is* a primitive spellchecker.
In any case, it's definitely NOT a predictive text auto-correction tool, and there's no danger of the results showing up on DYAC.
Say what you will about the Long March, it's of the same vintage as Proton, which is one of the most successful heavy boosters ever and is still in use for large payloads including the biggest geostationary communications satellites. The Proton also happens to be dinitrogen tetroxide /UDMH fueled -- and will only be replaced once the Angara is ready, sometime in 2014, for commercial missions.
As for the spacecraft being from the age of the iPad, that's only correct in a chronological sense. The Shenzhou owes more of its ancestry to the Soyuz capsule. It's already been launched successfully three times, including one mission with a spacewalk, making China the fastest from first manned flight to first EVA in history.
The LM-2F will also carry China's Tiangong 1 space station in the next few weeks, and crews flying up to it next year.
In short, right now China is the only country in the world with manned spaceflight capability.
Don't confuse what a spell checker does when auto-correcting with what something like T9 or smart phone predictive text does. The latter is the cause of the cell phone headaches.
While a spellchecker will check a string of characters against a dictionary and attempt to correct misspellings (like "misspell" with only 1 s or 1 l), predictive text auto-correct is both more clever and more stupid.
Predictive text makes certain assumptions about the keyboard arrangement and tries to fit typos to possible words that could have been intended had the user not been smashing 3 tiny buttons at once on a cell phone or screen keyboard. While a spellchecker would recognize "danm" as a typo for "damn" with just transposed letters, it would never try to correct it to "calm" on the basis that the letter c is close to the letter d and n and m are nearby or some nonsense as that.
A plain old spellchecker, like the one under discussion here, makes no attempt to guess what word was meant and assume a typo is a result of accidentally pressing keys near the intended ones. It just looks at what words could have been intended based on close matches with the dictionary.
By the way, auto-correct will frequently fail to guess a replacement when the misspelling involves letters that are not nearby on the keyboard.
In Soviet Russia, ISS abandons YOU!!
Note that if the station is left unmanned, it will be the end of an 11-year run of humans continuously in space, starting with the October, 2000 arrival of the Expedition 1 crew at ISS.
By the way, the Chinese are still flying their man-rated Long March.
I used to work for one of the world's leading sporting goods companies. We had contractors onsite with the same network/desktop configuration and access as full time employees. At least one of these outsourced but in-house contractors was stupid enough to fall for pretty much any phishing/fake anti-virus/whatever scheme you can come up with. I have no doubt that any company in the US (what does that mean any more, anyway?) could be compromised given enough persistence and relentless effort to find THAT GUY.
Spam isn't so much about getting the recipient to buy things any more, it's about getting the recipient to give up a credit card number, bank account password, or something similar that can then be used to either directly rip off the individual or in an attack to compromise a higher value target.
The spammers don't need to convince users to buy pills or whatever, they just need them to be gullible enough to give up enough information to get ripped off.
Speaking of misleading and vague wording.. from the article, as quoted in the summary: "We would have done if our public agreement was in place"
I reread the article twice, and either the author a) is not a native English speaker/writer or b) is a sad commentary on the state of education in his country.
Check the cost of safely putting a kilogram of payload into a sun-diving trajectory. Check the density of uranium and plutonium, and the total volume of waste just sitting there waiting to be dealt with, forgetting for the time being the stuff that's still to come. Get back to to us with your findings and comparison with the cost of other radioactive waste disposal methods. Show your work.
So.. you didn't read article either? Amazon has more than associates in California.
Amazon has a physical presence in California. Did you read the article? Oh wait, this is /., of course you didn't.
Continuations from 1994? Submarine patenting at its worst!
Yes, it is submarining in the subtle sense.
What happens in the worst submarine patents is that company files the initial patent, then repeatedly updates and amends it before its granted. Those updates and amendments track industry practices. After a few years, the patent is granted, but the date of original filing still applies.
It hasn't been as readily possible to do this since 2000, but something like it still happens.
Oh the lovely VNS. My friend has one of those. She's paranoid about MRI machines.
I believe we are in vehement agreement here. While safety and affordability might have been the supposed top level requirements publicly, within management and contractors, the real requirements had more to do with making jobs in key states like Utah.
In your comment you mention 'engineering management' and 'manager'. I stand by my admittedly compromised position that some very smart and capable engineers came up with some ingenious things. The fact that the silica thermal tiles were a very poor alternative to a problem that had no solution (the superalloy skin) and that management directed they be employed regardless doesn't diminish the fact that the stuff is an amazing material that is useful in a variety of situations -- none of which involved the orbiter underbelly. Management decided they should be employed in a hostile environment (side-mounted orbiter with debris from the ET insulation impacting), but engineers didn't solve for that problem.
There's plenty of evidence that management at NASA may have had political considerations and the profits of contractors in mind ahead of good engineering, I won't deny that. I also don't want to detract from the honest work of folks who dedicated their efforts to a cause only to have the results subverted.
I have to confess to mixed feelings about this. Given the engineering problems they were tasked to solve, I credit the guys working on the shuttle program with some terrific work. Unfortunately, they were given plates of shit to engineer with.
What I'm saying is that on the one hand, STS is an engineering marvel for things like the thermal tiles and the cross-range glider landing of the orbiter, the re-usability and throttle-ability of the SSME, especially for their weight and isp, and the SRBs... ok, well, nevermind about the SRBs.
On the other hand, all those capabilities have almost nothing to do with getting people or cargo into space and safely home efficiently at low cost. The tiles, for instance, were used in response to a requirement for a reusable winged spaceplane, which itself was driven by other requirements for the Air Force. The shuttle engines are great if you need them to work in a vacuum, but are really pretty lousy for engines running at sea level that can't be restarted.
So, in short, congratulations to the engineers over the years in the shuttle program for solving some huge problems, but apologies for making you work on crap that was tangential to real goal.
And people ask if the US is losing its edge...
Considering that the top rated GP comment uses "loose" for "lose" and the parent uses "your" for "you're", I'm inclined to believe we have lost whatever intellectual edge we might have had.
Leveling in the starter zones is so rapid that there's really no need to have BoA items, and you can't get through them until you finish the quests for the phase anyway, so you'd be spinning your wheels doing quests you've out-leveled. I seem to recall there wasn't a mailbox available at level 1, but sometime before leaving the starter zone there was an inn with a mailbox. You can learn your tradeskills in the starter zone, too, but it's VERY easy to out-level the gathering skills if you don't make an effort herb/skin/mine etc.
They did for the two new races: worgen and goblin characters can't get out of the starting area -- it's "phased" -- without doing the quests up to the end of the starting phase.
You do have access to a mailbox and zone chat, as well as guilds and such if you have friends, but no auction house or trade channel.
That still leaves all the other races that were around before that last expansion just a short run to a capitol city, but Blizzard did move the AoC direction a bit.
Just as I said, some hiring manager would find him "motivated, task-focused, and results-oriented". Good luck with the results: half-working, user-unfriendly with major gaps between what the product funders wanted and what the team members like that produce.