Drove an automatic shift for the first time in years recently. Really weird experience. Car always downshifted or upshifted a few milliseconds before or after I would have (and a _lot_ of milliseconds in a couple of corners!). Didn't know what to do with my free hand (ya, ya ya!) [or my spare foot]. Felt like I was only partly in control - didn't like it.
Back to my 5-on-the-floor that keeps me awake and involved.
It is such a pity that scientists doing research very often do not publish their negative results. They design an experiment in order to gain knowledge about a hypothesis, in the expectation that their results will support their hypothesis. All too often, after a few months of negative results, they give up and move onto something else, leaving the work unpublished.
Negative results are often as interesting as positive results, in fact, often more so! And that info needs to get out there, before some other poor schmuck comes up with a similar experiment and gets the same results. Rinse and repeat.
A lot of our work ends in blind-alleys and it is just as important to know about these (if only to revisit them and get a different result)! Maybe under different experimental conditions the expected WILL happen (and maybe not).
Yeah, except when HAL decides that the input from a defective angle-of-attack sensor is real, that you are trying to nose-up into a stall and trims the elevator nose-down, nose-down, nose-down, nose-down and you end up diving into the ground at 7,688 fpm {Flight JT 610 recently}.
So much for, "...helping, guiding, nudging and smoothing your inputs..." Doubt whether the defunct pilots & passengers would agree.
Does any sensible person actually care whether it is 2436x1125 or 2438x1120? (apart from some nerd in his mom's basement counting pixels (1,2,3,4,5,6, etc.)
Jeez, the are more important things in this world than a few pixels more or less. I mean, it's not like you're gonna notice... Really, some folks ought to get out more.
Sustained fusion that releases significantly more useable energy than it takes to get and keep going on the surface of this planet ain't gonna happen. Even with room-temperature superconductors (which we almost certainly WILL see).
The oil, coal and gas that supply our baseline load will eventually run out. Solar, wind and wave will never be enough for the world's expanding population.
Fission is the only answer and it can be made as safe as we want it to be. All the fusion wastes since 1945 wouldn't even _begin_ to fill 1 cubic kilometer.
The sooner we realize this and get started the better. Wasting precious chemical feedstocks like coal and oil just to boil water is dumb.
"Nuclear power can displace large amounts of coal and natural gas very quickly and needs no new technology. Any claims of problems on deploying nuclear power is either a lie, mere politics, or far more easily solved compared to global warming."
Abandoning nuclear is the stupidest thing ever. Modern reactors can be made effectively totally safe. Most of the high-level waste is gone after a few years and the volume of low-level waste is far less than the mountains of (also toxic) waste from other processes. 1 cubic kilometre would hold it all.
Most of my son's pals work fast-food joint in the vacations. He got a job wrapping packets in a high-class fromagerie. And every vacation his pals went back to the fast-food joints and he went back to the fromagerie.
What did they gain? A little money and how to flip a burger. What did he gain? A little money and an encyclopedic knowledge of French cheeses. Except by now he earns a lot more than they do and has a Maitre Fromagier qualification to go with the Masters in Physics that he is funding himself.
The moral of the story is clear. Fast-food work is a little bit of money and no gain. Get a real skill (welder, machinist, fromagier) but don't expect it to come easy.
I wish you guys would stop talking about the "rich" and the "minimum-wage" as thought it was some sort of binary thing.
You need everybody with _some_ money to spend, you do _not_ need multi-multi-billionaires. You need _some_ millionaires, more who are _"pretty well-off"_, even more who are _"reasonably well-off"_ and as many as you can get of people who manage OK and sometimes have a bit over for something extra.
The fabulously rich just tie up money that mostly does nothing useful to society, the "minimum-wagers+" are the _core_ of your economy.
Few years back I got a piece of quite expensive voice-to-type software. After about two years of training and learning it can take dictation faster than I can type. Most of the time it gets it right, but I still have to hand correct at times.
If you add up the money that it cost me and the cost of the hours of training and learning, you'd get back about one year of the time I wasted teaching and learning the furshlugginer thing.
You have x tons of some stuff that is dangerous. So you bury it/burn it/hide it or whatever. Cost mucho $$$$
Or you build a reactor (mucho $$$$) Generate XXX PetaWatts of electricity - mucho mucho $$$$! Then you have to bury/burn/hide what's left over Cost mucho $$$$
Same result, except that you've gained XXX PetaWatts of electricity...
Only reason is use it is to find out what is happening in my son's life (I'm too old and stupid to talk to, although I'm good enough to subsidize his Masters) Not that he seems to use it all that much. Where those 5673 friends came from I have no idea... [I have lots of acquaintances vague and otherwise, but only half-a-dozen friends.]
All credibility goes out the door when we reveal our desperation... and relying on catchy, made-up phrases is desperate indeed.
Anyhow, "gender identity" has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation; whether you're gay, straight, bi or asexual, when your brain starts telling you that you're in the wrong body (whether you "think" you're supposed to be in the body of the other sex, another animal or what), that's called schizophrenia. and just because stupid and/or unethical surgeons are willing to take your money in return for cutting off your bits doesn't make it valid.
The truth hurts.
So Lynn Conway is schizophrenic? Call me when you have more than a teaspoon worth of her brain! Two people where I work are trans and smarter, nicer, saner people you won't meet.
Cisnormative Mac (who does carefully screened trans surgery);-)
Never ghosted, but it depends what you do. I went for one job years ago because I specifically wanted experience in field X. I enquired specifically about this at the interview and they promised me oodles of experience in field X. Couple'a weeks later I realised that I was never gonna get any experience in field X because they outsourced all field X stuff. Interviewed for a different job that really had lots of field X work and explained my situation, which didn't faze 'em. Went back to the original business and gave them the mandatory six weeks notice. The CEO went ballistic and promised that he would make sure I never get another job in my profession. "Just wait until I tell them!, he raged. "I just did, and they're totally OK with it", says I.
But it was a chilly six-weeks, I can tell you.....
Yep, I agree with you there, particularly for backups.
My ex-wife and son are technophobes who couldn't keep a Windows system up for a week without borking it. So I bought them Mac laptops and a fat Time Machine - no trouble since because effectively nothing to set up. Switch on, OSX finds the Time Machine and starts backing up.
I have one too, though I disabled the router and just use it as an expensive switch - but Time Machine just chugs on. Naturally I have other NASes around that I back up Windows and Linux to, but Time Machine is so simple - "it just works" and yes, I _have_ done successful restores from it.
And not many people have the chance to get to write interesting code. A lot of coding is wearisome, repetitive drudge work that will be discarded in a few weeks or months.
Getting to write interesting code means that you will have put in years of learning the ins and outs and tricks and traps of modern coding - mastering this is a mostly solitary experience that demands a special mind-set.
I learned and enjoyed coding (a lot of DBase4, Pascal and assembler) 30 years ago when life was much simpler and it was only a part of my work.
Couldn't do it now (though I fool around with Python for fun) and earn my living in other ways.
"It's scary to think what would have happened if Hitler had waited a few more years before starting the war."
Not really, for a LOT of reasons apart from the A-bomb that I won't go into.
As for the A-bomb, the Third Reich was extraordinarily disorganised, to a large extent because of Hitler's attitude of "divide and rule" towards both his generals and administration. He enjoyed setting ministries to squabble among themselves and never trusted the higher echelons of the Army or his scientists That anything ever got done was more in spite of him than because of him, and a tribute to the German nation.
Scientifically, Germany had "blown it's brains out" by devaluing non-military science and compelling a large number of it's top scientists to flee the country (the discoverers of fission, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch left Germany in 1938/9).
Eventually a research program was approved and funded, but it was split up among nine major institutes with no significant coordination. The project to develop the atom bomb was shelved in autumn 1942 and the only serious nuclear pile at Haigerloch never achieved anything near criticality. By 1943, Allied bombing had gravely damaged German production capacity and fuel shortages were becoming a worry.
By contrast, the American Manhattan Project was a massive, single-minded feat of production and coordination that employed >130,000 people and cost about $2 billion (say $23 billion in 2007 dollars) for an unguaranteed result.
Despite the phenomenal development of the V2/A4 rocket (which impressed Hitler hugely despite its negligible impact on the War), after 1938 Germany simply did did not have either the huge sums of money or the scientists to get anywhere near an A-bomb.
One can speculate that with a 1933 Chancellor as determined as, but less erratic, more sanguine and less anti-Semitic than Hitler, Germany could have developed a deliverable atomic bomb, perhaps by 1947. But then, a wiser Hitler would have avoided the War altogether (Germany was already booming by 1933) and German domination of Europe come 50 years earlier!
If the patent trolls have retreated under their bridges and judges and juries are more awake about patent abuse and IP extortion then I think we all owe a great dept of thanks to pj and Groklaw - http://www.groklaw.net/
Way back in 2003, Darl McBride thought that his company SCO (pretending to be the defunct Santa Cruz Operation) decided on a scan to monetize Linux, through some disputed Novell IP.
pj, a paralegal, aided by a growing cohort of assistants, tracked down and followed every slimy twist and turn of the multiple cases brought by SCO against Novell, IBM and several others. They dug up so much forgotten information, case-law and witnesses that even the lawyers admitted to using Groklaw as a source.
Eventually it was decided that Novell did in fact own the IP in question, and "millions of lines of:copied code" turned out to be a couple of headers of no consequence.
Finally Darl's dreams of wealth beyond belief collapsed and SCO went into bankruptcy.
The whole saga, and SCO's ultimate ignominious collapse, was a big wake-up call for patent/IP trolls and Groklaw played no small part in it.
Groklaw stopped in 2013 because their messenger anonymizer was forced to close, but their archives are still online.
Amen. Never got WINE to run anything much reliably despite hours wasted farting about with it. Got bored and bought Parallels to run XP on the Mac (which it does very well) - since I don't use Win7 anymore I might try that. But I'm too old to have the time to spend frigging around with perpetually-alpha software.
I'm not a gamer (apart from the Myst/Riven etc., universe), so apart from Paint Shop Pro, I don't have much reason to.
Linux now has good equivalents for almost anything I use on Windows and if I need it Windows runs pretty well in a VM.
I have a variety of boxen running all sorts of OSes - maybe I should chuck 'em all and just run everything in VMs on a bare-metal hypervisor on one box.
If you don't want this shit then just turn the phone OFF!
Not so long ago if I wanted to call yo Mama I had to find a phone and put my dime in. 99.999% of calls can wait. And she can't call me back to take out the garbage!
I wanna call someone I take out the phone, turn it on and call 'em. I see I've got missed calls - if I wanna call 'em back I do - later.
Well, I installed it on my 1703 build and there I was at the prompt: Username? Mac Password? This_day_we_are_gathered_together Repeat Password: This_day_we_are_gathered_together (rumble-rumble-rumble) Login: q!z (or something) - [I'd typed Mac]
Evidently at login time bash decided that I was from Outer Mongolia or somewhere and gave me the appropriate keyboard. with totally strange key-mappings.
Needless to say I couldn't log in at all, either as Administrator or Mac . . .
Now that's what I call security!
Hats off to Microsoft as I return gratefully to Linux
Slashdot Mirror
Drove an automatic shift for the first time in years recently. Really weird experience. Car always downshifted or upshifted a few milliseconds before or after I would have (and a _lot_ of milliseconds in a couple of corners!). Didn't know what to do with my free hand (ya, ya ya!) [or my spare foot]. Felt like I was only partly in control - didn't like it.
Back to my 5-on-the-floor that keeps me awake and involved.
Mac
Good question
My HOSTS files are pretty large.
Helps me avoid all sorts of trash and malware.
Mac
It is such a pity that scientists doing research very often do not publish their negative results.
They design an experiment in order to gain knowledge about a hypothesis, in the expectation that their results will support their hypothesis.
All too often, after a few months of negative results, they give up and move onto something else, leaving the work unpublished.
Negative results are often as interesting as positive results, in fact, often more so!
And that info needs to get out there, before some other poor schmuck comes up with a similar experiment and gets the same results.
Rinse and repeat.
A lot of our work ends in blind-alleys and it is just as important to know about these (if only to revisit them and get a different result)!
Maybe under different experimental conditions the expected WILL happen (and maybe not).
Mac
I forwarded the article to a couple of scientist friends - they though it was hilarious.
Then I forwarded it to a few Eng.Lit./Biz.Sci acquaintances - none of then got the wry joke and one was absolutely furious.
Americans are very literal minded and usually have difficulties with English jokes.
Mac
Yeah, except when HAL decides that the input from a defective angle-of-attack sensor is real, that you are trying to nose-up into a stall and trims the elevator nose-down, nose-down, nose-down, nose-down and you end up diving into the ground at 7,688 fpm {Flight JT 610 recently}.
So much for, "...helping, guiding, nudging and smoothing your inputs..."
Doubt whether the defunct pilots & passengers would agree.
Mac
Does any sensible person actually care whether it is 2436x1125 or 2438x1120?
(apart from some nerd in his mom's basement counting pixels (1,2,3,4,5,6, etc.)
Jeez, the are more important things in this world than a few pixels more or less.
I mean, it's not like you're gonna notice... Really, some folks ought to get out more.
Mac
China won't have fusion and neither will we.
Sustained fusion that releases significantly more useable energy than it
takes to get and keep going on the surface of this planet ain't gonna happen.
Even with room-temperature superconductors (which we almost certainly WILL see).
The oil, coal and gas that supply our baseline load will eventually run out.
Solar, wind and wave will never be enough for the world's expanding population.
Fission is the only answer and it can be made as safe as we want it to be.
All the fusion wastes since 1945 wouldn't even _begin_ to fill 1 cubic kilometer.
The sooner we realize this and get started the better.
Wasting precious chemical feedstocks like coal and oil just to boil water is dumb.
Mac
"Nuclear power can displace large amounts of coal and natural gas very quickly and needs no new technology. Any claims of problems on deploying nuclear power is either a lie, mere politics, or far more easily solved compared to global warming."
Abandoning nuclear is the stupidest thing ever. Modern reactors can be made effectively totally safe.
Most of the high-level waste is gone after a few years and the volume of low-level waste is far less than the mountains of (also toxic) waste from other processes. 1 cubic kilometre would hold it all.
Most of my son's pals work fast-food joint in the vacations. He got a job wrapping packets in a high-class fromagerie. And every vacation his pals went back to the fast-food joints and he went back to the fromagerie.
What did they gain? A little money and how to flip a burger. What did he gain? A little money and an encyclopedic knowledge of French cheeses. Except by now he earns a lot more than they do and has a Maitre Fromagier qualification to go with the Masters in Physics that he is funding himself.
The moral of the story is clear. Fast-food work is a little bit of money and no gain.
Get a real skill (welder, machinist, fromagier) but don't expect it to come easy.
Mac
I wish you guys would stop talking about the "rich" and the "minimum-wage" as thought it was some sort of binary thing.
You need everybody with _some_ money to spend, you do _not_ need multi-multi-billionaires. You need _some_ millionaires, more who are _"pretty well-off"_, even more who are _"reasonably well-off"_ and as many as you can get of people who manage OK and sometimes have a bit over for something extra.
The fabulously rich just tie up money that mostly does nothing useful to society, the "minimum-wagers+" are the _core_ of your economy.
Mac
Give Trump another term and we will be.
Mac
Few years back I got a piece of quite expensive voice-to-type software.
After about two years of training and learning it can take dictation faster than I can type.
Most of the time it gets it right, but I still have to hand correct at times.
If you add up the money that it cost me and the cost of the hours of training and learning, you'd get back about one year of the time I wasted teaching and learning the furshlugginer thing.
So, no.
Mac
Cool, I'm an imbecile.
You have x tons of some stuff that is dangerous.
So you bury it/burn it/hide it or whatever.
Cost mucho $$$$
Or you build a reactor (mucho $$$$)
Generate XXX PetaWatts of electricity - mucho mucho $$$$!
Then you have to bury/burn/hide what's left over
Cost mucho $$$$
Same result, except that you've gained XXX PetaWatts of electricity...
Do I have to draw you a picture??
Mac
Yet another reason to get off Facebucket.
Only reason is use it is to find out what is happening in my son's life (I'm too old and stupid to talk to, although I'm good enough to subsidize his Masters)
Not that he seems to use it all that much. Where those 5673 friends came from I have no idea...
[I have lots of acquaintances vague and otherwise, but only half-a-dozen friends.]
Oh for the old BBS...
Mac
"We didn't need unconditional surrender from Japan."
We sure did! Look where the World War 1 November Armistice got us...
By 1923 Act 2 of the Great European War was already rehearsing.
If the Allies had insisted on unconditional surrender there'd have been no WW2
Lots of other interesting things, but no WW2.
Mac
cisgender
All credibility goes out the door when we reveal our desperation... and relying on catchy, made-up phrases is desperate indeed.
Anyhow, "gender identity" has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation; whether you're gay, straight, bi or asexual, when your brain starts telling you that you're in the wrong body (whether you "think" you're supposed to be in the body of the other sex, another animal or what), that's called schizophrenia. and just because stupid and/or unethical surgeons are willing to take your money in return for cutting off your bits doesn't make it valid.
The truth hurts.
So Lynn Conway is schizophrenic? Call me when you have more than a teaspoon worth of her brain!
Two people where I work are trans and smarter, nicer, saner people you won't meet.
Cisnormative Mac (who does carefully screened trans surgery) ;-)
Never ghosted, but it depends what you do. I went for one job years ago because I specifically wanted experience in field X.
I enquired specifically about this at the interview and they promised me oodles of experience in field X.
Couple'a weeks later I realised that I was never gonna get any experience in field X because they outsourced all field X stuff.
Interviewed for a different job that really had lots of field X work and explained my situation, which didn't faze 'em.
Went back to the original business and gave them the mandatory six weeks notice.
The CEO went ballistic and promised that he would make sure I never get another job in my profession.
"Just wait until I tell them!, he raged.
"I just did, and they're totally OK with it", says I.
But it was a chilly six-weeks, I can tell you.....
Mac
Yep, I agree with you there, particularly for backups.
My ex-wife and son are technophobes who couldn't keep a Windows system up for a week without borking it. So I bought them Mac laptops and a fat Time Machine - no trouble since because effectively nothing to set up. Switch on, OSX finds the Time Machine and starts backing up.
I have one too, though I disabled the router and just use it as an expensive switch - but Time Machine just chugs on.
Naturally I have other NASes around that I back up Windows and Linux to, but Time Machine is so simple - "it just works" and yes, I _have_ done successful restores from it.
A particularly stupid move on Apple's part.
Mac
Yep, spot on.
And not many people have the chance to get to write interesting code. A lot of coding is wearisome, repetitive drudge work that will be discarded in a few weeks or months.
Getting to write interesting code means that you will have put in years of learning the ins and outs and tricks and traps of modern coding - mastering this is a mostly solitary experience that demands a special mind-set.
I learned and enjoyed coding (a lot of DBase4, Pascal and assembler) 30 years ago when life was much simpler and it was only a part of my work.
Couldn't do it now (though I fool around with Python for fun) and earn my living in other ways.
Mac
"It's scary to think what would have happened if Hitler had waited a few more years before starting the war."
Not really, for a LOT of reasons apart from the A-bomb that I won't go into.
As for the A-bomb, the Third Reich was extraordinarily disorganised, to a large extent because of Hitler's attitude of "divide and rule" towards both his generals and administration. He enjoyed setting ministries to squabble among themselves and never trusted the higher echelons of the Army or his scientists That anything ever got done was more in spite of him than because of him, and a tribute to the German nation.
Scientifically, Germany had "blown it's brains out" by devaluing non-military science and compelling a large number of it's top scientists to flee the country (the discoverers of fission, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch left Germany in 1938/9).
Eventually a research program was approved and funded, but it was split up among nine major institutes with no significant coordination. The project to develop the atom bomb was shelved in autumn 1942 and the only serious nuclear pile at Haigerloch never achieved anything near criticality. By 1943, Allied bombing had gravely damaged German production capacity and fuel shortages were becoming a worry.
By contrast, the American Manhattan Project was a massive, single-minded feat of production and coordination that employed >130,000 people and cost about $2 billion (say $23 billion in 2007 dollars) for an unguaranteed result.
Despite the phenomenal development of the V2/A4 rocket (which impressed Hitler hugely despite its negligible impact on the War), after 1938 Germany simply did did not have either the huge sums of money or the scientists to get anywhere near an A-bomb.
One can speculate that with a 1933 Chancellor as determined as, but less erratic, more sanguine and less anti-Semitic than Hitler, Germany could have developed a deliverable atomic bomb, perhaps by 1947. But then, a wiser Hitler would have avoided the War altogether (Germany was already booming by 1933) and German domination of Europe come 50 years earlier!
Mac
If the patent trolls have retreated under their bridges and judges and juries are more awake about patent abuse and IP extortion then I think we all owe a great dept of thanks to pj and Groklaw - http://www.groklaw.net/
Way back in 2003, Darl McBride thought that his company SCO (pretending to be the defunct Santa Cruz Operation) decided on a scan to monetize Linux, through some disputed Novell IP.
pj, a paralegal, aided by a growing cohort of assistants, tracked down and followed every slimy twist and turn of the multiple cases brought by SCO against Novell, IBM and several others. They dug up so much forgotten information, case-law and witnesses that even the lawyers admitted to using Groklaw as a source.
Eventually it was decided that Novell did in fact own the IP in question, and "millions of lines of :copied code" turned out to be a couple of headers of no consequence.
Finally Darl's dreams of wealth beyond belief collapsed and SCO went into bankruptcy.
The whole saga, and SCO's ultimate ignominious collapse, was a big wake-up call for patent/IP trolls and Groklaw played no small part in it.
Groklaw stopped in 2013 because their messenger anonymizer was forced to close, but their archives are still online.
We owe a big dept of thanks to pj and Groklaw
Mac
Amen. Never got WINE to run anything much reliably despite hours wasted farting about with it. Got bored and bought Parallels to run XP on the Mac (which it does very well) - since I don't use Win7 anymore I might try that. But I'm too old to have the time to spend frigging around with perpetually-alpha software.
I'm not a gamer (apart from the Myst/Riven etc., universe), so apart from Paint Shop Pro, I don't have much reason to.
Linux now has good equivalents for almost anything I use on Windows and if I need it Windows runs pretty well in a VM.
I have a variety of boxen running all sorts of OSes - maybe I should chuck 'em all and just run everything in VMs on a bare-metal hypervisor on one box.
Mac
You folks are insane.
If you don't want this shit then just turn the phone OFF!
Not so long ago if I wanted to call yo Mama I had to find a phone and put my dime in. 99.999% of calls can wait. And she can't call me back to take out the garbage!
I wanna call someone I take out the phone, turn it on and call 'em.
I see I've got missed calls - if I wanna call 'em back I do - later.
Take back your life and TURN IT OFF.
So peaceful.
Mac
Well, I installed it on my 1703 build and there I was at the prompt:
Username? Mac
Password? This_day_we_are_gathered_together
Repeat Password: This_day_we_are_gathered_together
(rumble-rumble-rumble)
Login: q!z (or something) - [I'd typed Mac]
Evidently at login time bash decided that I was from Outer Mongolia or somewhere and gave me the appropriate keyboard. with totally strange key-mappings.
Needless to say I couldn't log in at all, either as Administrator or Mac . . .
Now that's what I call security!
Hats off to Microsoft as I return gratefully to Linux
Mac