Back when I was in the 'front line' teaching before a class, ABET, SACS and other Certs were pushing for competency-based education and assessment, where you would grade the 'victim' on what they could demostrably do with tangible results. From what I'm reading either that pathway went bust or Rometty is full of it and looking for yet another profiteering scam.
The steady CO/CO2 increase plus the mysterious plume of ozone damaging CFCs wafting out of China, exact source yet undetermined, will ensure more damaging climate change in the short and medium terms. But to claudicate now will ensure ruin for our future generations.
Back in the heady days of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space race, as a non-English-native speaker, I was fascinated how the lexicon smartly evolved to include succinct, precise and short nomeclature of every part, procedure or metodology of the new evolving technology. Lexical engineering at its best, if you will. In that spirit, maybe it is the time and the place to do the same with these new and growing computer actions. But beware of going overboard and overburdening the language with a clog of senseless gobbledygook unfanthomable by most.
Language is supposed to aid in communicating, not segment the population into elites.
Someone with hard facts please fill in. Won't supercharging ANY battery result in a reduction in durability and/or premature failure of the pack vs. sedate trickle charging? Or have they magically managed to longevity a constant irrespective of how the charging is carried out?
In the long gone '60s, Sony's researchers found out how to simulate 3D as we know it nowadays. A comprehensive study on how it worked and any side effects was ordered. The results were disturbingly negative and social responsibility prevailed over profit & greed. The technology was buried and disappeared. 40 years later someone rediscovered the tech or simply came across the old files. It was the same old dangerous shit. But times, they are a'changing, and the old responsibility was long gone. Everyone jumped on the 3D bandwagon, public health be damned. But it failed in the marketplace as the old Sony researchers had predicted: it was bad for you and the effect wasn't worth the risk.
I guess if true 3D laser holography doesn't evolve to an accesible level, in 20-30 years we'll see this shit rise again like an immortal coackroach. A few links for your enlightment:
Of course, if you didn't like COBOL, there was always Fortran to fall back on. An engineer's wet dream, total nightmare and mystery for the rest. Or there was Assembly Language for the narcissistic masochists: "this inscrutably undecypherable code is mine, mine, mine, even if it kills me with a terminal ulcer".
iOS 9.3 or so and on suitably new hardware (iPhone 6 or newer, equivalent on the rest of the zoo) came with Night Mode that filters out blue wavelength emmision on the screen within the specified nightly interval. Start time, end time and the amount of filtering adjustable.
Of course, that did not prevent scads of iGadget users perennially on autopilot to start moaning & bitching about how their fancy-shmancy screens had gone yellow, the night after they had willy-nilly upgraded their iOS version without READING THE MANUAL FIRST.
An HP-25c in high school. The need to make the most with 50 instructions really made you code carefully. Then off to Engineering in college, where Fortran was inevitable. Short while later, Pascal came along, in an IBM 370 mainframe, of all places, till the Apple IIs came out. Always had the illusion of learning VM/370 assembly language, never got around to it, but did go to 6502, 6800 and 68000. Thanks to Engineering, managed to avoid Cobol like the plague. Later years would bring Scheme, Prolog, Smalltalk and even a dabbling in Ada. Not to mention Rexx and its inheritors, the scripting languages of the Bourne, C, Korn and now BASH shells. Which led to C and the rest of that menagerie. The Swift-y bird is winking at me...
I guess this further emphasizes the great merit in filming The Revenant, that cost greatly cause Gonzalez Iñarritu and Lubezki insisted in using no artificial lighting.
In the industrial world where liability exists and is rigorously enforced, engineers who build software and hardware systems are respectable individuals with strict and comprehensive training, theoretical and practical, very worthy of the title and our gratitude in creating and advancing much of the infrastructure that makes our life easier (and in some cases, possible). A former student of mine works in GE's aircraft engine division (which makes the Dreamliner's engines, amongst others): if the effort he puts out guaranteeing that the software that makes such an engine run achieves a better than 99.999% reliability can't be called advanced engineering, then nothing can or ever will.
Microsoft's infamous greediness in the consumer marketplace, OTOH, led the way many years ago to a cheapening in the public perception in what we are entitled to expect from something we pay for. Doesn't do what you wanted it to, or fails when least expected? Well, did you not read the EULA?? It says that's a what it is and you accept it as such. And if you don't like it, well... the software isn't even yours. We just let you use it for a fee, but we decide who can or cannot play with our ball. And since all thisway of doing business has never been challenged in court and concluding with a jurisprudence-establishing jury verdict (all such cases 99.99% of the time end in settlements with no acceptance of guilt or responsibility), things will not change.
Unless it is a fast breeder or similar that can "burn" plutonium, by the time they get around to getting the fuel, there won't be much uranium left on sale, or suppliers willing to sell it.
If water demand weren't bad enough, the profitable quest to squeeze the last possible drop of oil/gas from the ground via hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wrecks the whole underground structure that configure the acquifer, not to mention making it totally unfit to drink or use due to contamination. So now the natural underground currents that replentished the groundwater supplies are gone and whatever is left is ruined. Bravo for Capitalism, hope that cheap gas you got in return tastes good, cause it's the only liquid you're gonna get.
BTW, this Russian effort has to be admired for its persistence. They've been patiently going at it when money and weather permits on Antartic summers since 20 years ago or more.
Ok, first we had Mad Cow Disease, which proves fatal to humans if you get it. For those too young to remember, it was caused by "enriching" cow feed with ground up sheep offal in order to recicle the waste, increase the protein content of the feed and increase the profit to the farmer. This caused the bugs to get into the cows brains and turn them to mush. Called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the cow flavor, Kreutzfeld-Jakobs syndrome in human flavor, basically turns your brains into a bloody sponge full of holes, then you die inevitably, be it cow or human.
Wait for the upcoming Mad Fish Scare. Just remember every time your MacFish stick or burger tastes like shit.
Why is it that USA space tech prefers water splashdowns instead of dry land like the Russians and Chinese?
"Softer landings" doesn't quite cut it as a reason, for at the speed of the impact, water is just as hard as terra firma. Then there's the risk of crew drowning and/or craft loss thru sinking. That doesn't occur in dry land.
An item yet unmentioned at the time I post this, is SSD lifetime. The are finite, you know, and probably a lot more finite than a well-protected HDD. The manufacturer states the number of write operations the storage cells can take on average before going kaput, and its up to the controller & OS to "age" them all equally to ensure maximum longevity (thanks, TRIM). This and speed are the main determinants of the cost of the devices and the differentiator between user and server-grade SSDs.
Nowadays with shady outfits jumping onto the SSD bandwagon, we'll see really crappy devices made from rejected storage chips hitting the markets, which will fail prematurely and give the technology a bad rep.
I'm surprised that Mexico's voting system has not been mentioned at all, even though it has received full accreditation by the UN and has been consulted on or copied by many other nations. Just went thru a complete election cycle involving President, Congress and Senate at the Federal level, concurrent with many State Governor, Major. Council and Assembly elections (a total of 629 Federal and 1,461 State and Municipal level posts to elect). This system was further tested and validated by the fact that the sore-loser second place presidential candidate challenged the entire process, from the vote counting all the way to the laws that govern it; all challenges were found to be inconsequential to the result or even total hogwash. Given that there is a registered voter population of 79.5 million, of which 50.1 million voted and the final result was validated by a federal constitutional court, the system as a whole does merit taking into account.
The process began in the planning stage on 7 Oct 2011, proceeded thru the campaigns up to 1 Jul 2012 when voting took place, votes were tallied, totals computed and the process formally ended with the Federal Electoral Tribunal concluding all challenges, declaring the election valid and naming the President-Elect on 5 Sep 2012. More info: Spanish language overview of the 2012 process, http://www.ife.org.mx/portal/site/ifev2/Proceso_Electoral_Federal__2011-2012/ or an English language FAQ, http://www.ife.org.mx/portal/site/ifev2/Internacional_English/
In essence, the system uses paper ballots, direct one-vote-per-voter, simple majority victory, manual tally at the voting station level, computerized processing there forward. Election took place on 1 Jul 2012, 8:00 to 18:00, exit polls available after 19:00, preliminary results at around 4:00 the next day, final valid and legal results on 5 Sep 2012.
Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable. No, thank you. FF joins Chrome in the sandboxed "use only if indispensable" bin.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when I was in the 'front line' teaching before a class, ABET, SACS and other Certs were pushing for competency-based education and assessment, where you would grade the 'victim' on what they could demostrably do with tangible results. From what I'm reading either that pathway went bust or Rometty is full of it and looking for yet another profiteering scam.
The steady CO/CO2 increase plus the mysterious plume of ozone damaging CFCs wafting out of China, exact source yet undetermined, will ensure more damaging climate change in the short and medium terms. But to claudicate now will ensure ruin for our future generations.
Back in the heady days of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space race, as a non-English-native speaker, I was fascinated how the lexicon smartly evolved to include succinct, precise and short nomeclature of every part, procedure or metodology of the new evolving technology. Lexical engineering at its best, if you will. In that spirit, maybe it is the time and the place to do the same with these new and growing computer actions. But beware of going overboard and overburdening the language with a clog of senseless gobbledygook unfanthomable by most.
Language is supposed to aid in communicating, not segment the population into elites.
Sounds like an arsonist's wet dream.
Sad consequence of the Get It Up / Get It Out / Get It Sold NOW mentality, with no foresight about security.
Someone with hard facts please fill in. Won't supercharging ANY battery result in a reduction in durability and/or premature failure of the pack vs. sedate trickle charging? Or have they magically managed to longevity a constant irrespective of how the charging is carried out?
In the long gone '60s, Sony's researchers found out how to simulate 3D as we know it nowadays. A comprehensive study on how it worked and any side effects was ordered. The results were disturbingly negative and social responsibility prevailed over profit & greed. The technology was buried and disappeared. 40 years later someone rediscovered the tech or simply came across the old files. It was the same old dangerous shit. But times, they are a'changing, and the old responsibility was long gone. Everyone jumped on the 3D bandwagon, public health be damned. But it failed in the marketplace as the old Sony researchers had predicted: it was bad for you and the effect wasn't worth the risk.
I guess if true 3D laser holography doesn't evolve to an accesible level, in 20-30 years we'll see this shit rise again like an immortal coackroach. A few links for your enlightment:
http://www.audioholics.com/edi...
http://www.strabismus.org/all_...
http://www.techrepublic.com/bl...
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/08...
http://www.livescience.com/496...
Of course, if you didn't like COBOL, there was always Fortran to fall back on. An engineer's wet dream, total nightmare and mystery for the rest. Or there was Assembly Language for the narcissistic masochists: "this inscrutably undecypherable code is mine, mine, mine, even if it kills me with a terminal ulcer".
Then, of course, the maker might get perverted into adding subversions. So we can go to G90.3.5
And maybe even take a hint from Apple's phones: G80.7+
iOS 9.3 or so and on suitably new hardware (iPhone 6 or newer, equivalent on the rest of the zoo) came with Night Mode that filters out blue wavelength emmision on the screen within the specified nightly interval. Start time, end time and the amount of filtering adjustable.
Of course, that did not prevent scads of iGadget users perennially on autopilot to start moaning & bitching about how their fancy-shmancy screens had gone yellow, the night after they had willy-nilly upgraded their iOS version without READING THE MANUAL FIRST.
An HP-25c in high school. The need to make the most with 50 instructions really made you code carefully. Then off to Engineering in college, where Fortran was inevitable. Short while later, Pascal came along, in an IBM 370 mainframe, of all places, till the Apple IIs came out. Always had the illusion of learning VM/370 assembly language, never got around to it, but did go to 6502, 6800 and 68000. Thanks to Engineering, managed to avoid Cobol like the plague. Later years would bring Scheme, Prolog, Smalltalk and even a dabbling in Ada. Not to mention Rexx and its inheritors, the scripting languages of the Bourne, C, Korn and now BASH shells. Which led to C and the rest of that menagerie. The Swift-y bird is winking at me...
I guess this further emphasizes the great merit in filming The Revenant, that cost greatly cause Gonzalez Iñarritu and Lubezki insisted in using no artificial lighting.
In the industrial world where liability exists and is rigorously enforced, engineers who build software and hardware systems are respectable individuals with strict and comprehensive training, theoretical and practical, very worthy of the title and our gratitude in creating and advancing much of the infrastructure that makes our life easier (and in some cases, possible). A former student of mine works in GE's aircraft engine division (which makes the Dreamliner's engines, amongst others): if the effort he puts out guaranteeing that the software that makes such an engine run achieves a better than 99.999% reliability can't be called advanced engineering, then nothing can or ever will.
Microsoft's infamous greediness in the consumer marketplace, OTOH, led the way many years ago to a cheapening in the public perception in what we are entitled to expect from something we pay for. Doesn't do what you wanted it to, or fails when least expected? Well, did you not read the EULA?? It says that's a what it is and you accept it as such. And if you don't like it, well... the software isn't even yours. We just let you use it for a fee, but we decide who can or cannot play with our ball. And since all thisway of doing business has never been challenged in court and concluding with a jurisprudence-establishing jury verdict (all such cases 99.99% of the time end in settlements with no acceptance of guilt or responsibility), things will not change.
iOS preferred.
If you have a link, please. Diving into the App Store is a vast time-consuming exercise.
On a related topic, where in the hell do they come up with these wackyfunny names for the releases???
Someone obviously has vast amounts of free time and a giant encyclopedia collection.
Bang on it with a crescent wrench....
Solved the problem in Armageddon, didn't it?
Unless it is a fast breeder or similar that can "burn" plutonium, by the time they get around to getting the fuel, there won't be much uranium left on sale, or suppliers willing to sell it.
If water demand weren't bad enough, the profitable quest to squeeze the last possible drop of oil/gas from the ground via hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wrecks the whole underground structure that configure the acquifer, not to mention making it totally unfit to drink or use due to contamination. So now the natural underground currents that replentished the groundwater supplies are gone and whatever is left is ruined. Bravo for Capitalism, hope that cheap gas you got in return tastes good, cause it's the only liquid you're gonna get.
BTW, this Russian effort has to be admired for its persistence. They've been patiently going at it when money and weather permits on Antartic summers since 20 years ago or more.
Hadn't the Russians done this already, on their side of Antartica?
Or is this a different subglacial lake?
Won't they have to fumigate the place and get rid of the pesky rock critters first, to keep them from gnawing on the cables as shown in Apollo 18
Ok, first we had Mad Cow Disease, which proves fatal to humans if you get it. For those too young to remember, it was caused by "enriching" cow feed with ground up sheep offal in order to recicle the waste, increase the protein content of the feed and increase the profit to the farmer. This caused the bugs to get into the cows brains and turn them to mush. Called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the cow flavor, Kreutzfeld-Jakobs syndrome in human flavor, basically turns your brains into a bloody sponge full of holes, then you die inevitably, be it cow or human.
Wait for the upcoming Mad Fish Scare. Just remember every time your MacFish stick or burger tastes like shit.
Why is it that USA space tech prefers water splashdowns instead of dry land like the Russians and Chinese?
"Softer landings" doesn't quite cut it as a reason, for at the speed of the impact, water is just as hard as terra firma. Then there's the risk of crew drowning and/or craft loss thru sinking. That doesn't occur in dry land.
An item yet unmentioned at the time I post this, is SSD lifetime. The are finite, you know, and probably a lot more finite than a well-protected HDD. The manufacturer states the number of write operations the storage cells can take on average before going kaput, and its up to the controller & OS to "age" them all equally to ensure maximum longevity (thanks, TRIM). This and speed are the main determinants of the cost of the devices and the differentiator between user and server-grade SSDs.
Nowadays with shady outfits jumping onto the SSD bandwagon, we'll see really crappy devices made from rejected storage chips hitting the markets, which will fail prematurely and give the technology a bad rep.
I'm surprised that Mexico's voting system has not been mentioned at all, even though it has received full accreditation by the UN and has been consulted on or copied by many other nations. Just went thru a complete election cycle involving President, Congress and Senate at the Federal level, concurrent with many State Governor, Major. Council and Assembly elections (a total of 629 Federal and 1,461 State and Municipal level posts to elect). This system was further tested and validated by the fact that the sore-loser second place presidential candidate challenged the entire process, from the vote counting all the way to the laws that govern it; all challenges were found to be inconsequential to the result or even total hogwash. Given that there is a registered voter population of 79.5 million, of which 50.1 million voted and the final result was validated by a federal constitutional court, the system as a whole does merit taking into account.
The process began in the planning stage on 7 Oct 2011, proceeded thru the campaigns up to 1 Jul 2012 when voting took place, votes were tallied, totals computed and the process formally ended with the Federal Electoral Tribunal concluding all challenges, declaring the election valid and naming the President-Elect on 5 Sep 2012. More info: Spanish language overview of the 2012 process, http://www.ife.org.mx/portal/site/ifev2/Proceso_Electoral_Federal__2011-2012/ or an English language FAQ, http://www.ife.org.mx/portal/site/ifev2/Internacional_English/
In essence, the system uses paper ballots, direct one-vote-per-voter, simple majority victory, manual tally at the voting station level, computerized processing there forward. Election took place on 1 Jul 2012, 8:00 to 18:00, exit polls available after 19:00, preliminary results at around 4:00 the next day, final valid and legal results on 5 Sep 2012.
Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable. No, thank you. FF joins Chrome in the sandboxed "use only if indispensable" bin.