...and another thing:
Until I see some horror movie where a programmer has to sacrifice a Black Goat to his SCSI chain, they aren't portraying anything realistically enough. And yes, I know that's not really software programming, but sometimes software engineers have to deal with the infernal machine they are coding on.
I'll second that. I worked for NCR for several years in the 90's and let me tell you...it's not for nothing that they are the most "Dilbertized" company around.
"What?!? We're not profitable AGAIN? Ok, here's what we do: 1. Forced early retirement for most who know anything about the ancient stuff out there that's still in use and not documented. 2. Lay off almost all temps and/or freeze all hiring. 3. Get twice as many contracts by promising half the response time as before."
Result? Quadruple the workload on individuals still working there. I kid you not, one afternoon I had 70 service calls thrown in my lap to fester because there were only 4 people working for field service that weekend in the whole state of Maryland. And most of them had contractual obligations of less than 4 hour response times. Insanity.
The only reason I mention this is to underscore what an increasingly desperate and unfocused company NCR is. It was once great, and some of their products are pretty good, but bad choices and dubious management have destroyed them.
Morgan Freeman owns the rights to this book, and has been keen to do it for a number of years. He's the one who approached Fincher about doing it. And scuttlebutt is that Moebius is doing the conceptual art.
I continually get calls from people who want the information we send out in those e-mails (no, we don't hide our phone number)
At typical phone call: "Uhhh, I'm looking for information about a house I saw on the Internet." What?!? What house? Where is it? What website? And of course they can't answer, so I can't help them. If the telephone & verbal communication is so difficult, what makes you think they have your ability to understand this topic? It's a sad fact, but there are so many people out there on the web who haven't any clue whatsoever.
Actually, I'm the sysadmin for the above mentioned site. (Among others that I won't mention, being that I'm not looking to insert a shameless plug.) The affiliate ID is just for my own kicks, to see how many people go from my sig url to this particular site of ours. Sheesh, man, tone down the paranoia and vitriol a bit! By the way, I don't personally get any money from someone clicking the aforementioned link, in fact, no-one from/. has ever bought our services by going through that link. I'm not marketing to you through my personal url here on Slashdot, so chill, ok?
Re:This is depressing...
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'll second that. Folks, let's face the facts: there are tons of people out there who have no clue what they signed up for, and then buy automated spam reporting software. Sites where someone legitamately signed up are then painted with a VERY broad brush as spammers by idiots who then assign everything in their e-mail box as spam.
I've had people sign up to get info from a site i run, and upon receiving the first e-mail that they explicitly requested, write back in all caps "HOW DID YOU GET MY ADDRESS??? STOP SENDING ME THIS!!!"
Couple that effect with vigilante spamblock operations (whose haughty tone assumes EVERYONE reported to them is evil) and you have people being slimed who are doing legitimate business on the web.
Yes, I agree people who forge headers or don't properly cull lists are negligent. They are buffoons who should be blocked. But hey, what are you going to do, block yahoo.com?
USB vs. Firewire
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've used several USB video input devices for several different Macs, and sad to say, I won't even consider buying one of these gadgets for myself until they use Firewire. They just return substandard results, with frequent drop-outs. Sorry.
It would appear that Hotline is not one of the protocols this Packeteer device is designed to work with. Plus Hotline can be configure from the server end to use pretty much any port.
What I would like to see would be the ability for the camera to add metadata to the pictures via input from the Bluetooth connection. For example, getting the current Lon/Lat from a Bluetooth enabled GPS and embedding it in the picture's metadata ("Where the heck did we take THIS picture?"). I could then do some interesting GIS applications, such as a photoalbum on a map using Mapserver (a great Open Source GIS program)
Ok, when you dump salt (NaCl) into water, it instantly dissolves into the respective ions, Na+ and Cl-. Cl- ions are not what are used for sterilizing swimming pools; Sodium hypochlorite is used for this, that splits into Na+ and a Hypochlorite- ion. Hypochlorite is very aggressive & will reduce (give an electron to) practically anything.
What makes me suspicious of the Emerald device is the following line:
"The catholyte is a powerful alkaline solution used for treating industrial effluent like the ones from Electro-plating, photographic, and/or textile plants. Catholyte has powerful properties for flocculation, coagulation, bionutrient transfer, cleaning purposes, and neutralizing the toxicity of heavy metals."
Ok, if the catholyte is a powerful alkaline solution, it then follows that the anolyte is a powerful acid solution. Can't make one without the other. And powerful acid solutions aren't exactly benign.
55 Cancri is located 41 million light-years from the Earth, in the constellation of Cancer. The star, believed to be around five billion years old, is visible to the naked eye, astronomers said.
HA! I don't think so. That's about 20 times the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. Nice how the people they have writing these things up have a good grasp on the fundamentals of the subject matter.
It seems the Aerowinx software he's planning to use is based on empirical data from thousands of 747 flights. Perhaps he should consider X-Plane instead. It derives it's aerodynamics from first principles, and is quite accurate in simulating things that haven't been actually done. You can even get FAA certification from using X-Plane. It's already got the software hooks to drive a motion platform. Plus you can hack the hell out of it. There's a large community of users with interesting mods.
Good grief, was it not less than two days ago that Microsoft claimed they could never release the APIs for Windows out of fear for the damage it would do to National Security? I would like to think that the cryptanalysts at the Dept of Defense would be fully versed in the fallacy of Security through Obscurity, and would make their voices heard.
Being that Mr Lucas filmed the entire movie in a digital format, the preview showing (which this would be a copy of) almost certainly was in a digital projection theater. Perhaps the projectionist merely copied the files and downconverted them to VCD?:-)
Seriously, I wonder how big the digital projection files for this would be. Would they fit onto an iPod?
This is really stupendous news. A hologram is, for all intents and purposes, just a pattern of light and dark bands on a piece of film. Since they've been able to create these patterns on demand at the molecular level (which is necessary because of the size of the visible wavelengths of light), you essentially get a computer generated hologram. Coupled with the switching speeds they are speaking of (billionths of a second) you could easily make fully immersive displays from this. (holodeck anyone? Reminds me of the walls of the houses in Fahrenheit 451). Only problem is, the processing power needed for such things is enourmous. They'll have to first use this technology in the back-end processors to get the necessary oomph to be able to produce killer apps like immersive tv and such. It'll be an interesting chicken-and-egg problem for them.
No to speak of what kind of camera could make such full motion 360 holograms? I didn't see mention that the crystals also could act as sensors....such a thing would be needed unless you want ALL your programming to be computer-generated images. (now there's an idea...)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to know what schools have sent him a prospectus on attending. Who are the bottom feeders?
...and another thing:
Until I see some horror movie where a programmer has to sacrifice a Black Goat to his SCSI chain, they aren't portraying anything realistically enough. And yes, I know that's not really software programming, but sometimes software engineers have to deal with the infernal machine they are coding on.
The movie Pi seems the best representation of how we work at my company....at least the workspace organization.
I'll second that. I worked for NCR for several years in the 90's and let me tell you...it's not for nothing that they are the most "Dilbertized" company around.
"What?!? We're not profitable AGAIN? Ok, here's what we do:
1. Forced early retirement for most who know anything about the ancient stuff out there that's still in use and not documented.
2. Lay off almost all temps and/or freeze all hiring.
3. Get twice as many contracts by promising half the response time as before."
Result? Quadruple the workload on individuals still working there.
I kid you not, one afternoon I had 70 service calls thrown in my lap to fester because there were only 4 people working for field service that weekend in the whole state of Maryland. And most of them had contractual obligations of less than 4 hour response times. Insanity.
The only reason I mention this is to underscore what an increasingly desperate and unfocused company NCR is. It was once great, and some of their products are pretty good, but bad choices and dubious management have destroyed them.
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman owns the rights to this book, and has been keen to do it for a number of years. He's the one who approached Fincher about doing it. And scuttlebutt is that Moebius is doing the conceptual art.
Lots of info can be found here
I continually get calls from people who want the information we send out in those e-mails (no, we don't hide our phone number)
At typical phone call: "Uhhh, I'm looking for information about a house I saw on the Internet." What?!? What house? Where is it? What website? And of course they can't answer, so I can't help them. If the telephone & verbal communication is so difficult, what makes you think they have your ability to understand this topic? It's a sad fact, but there are so many people out there on the web who haven't any clue whatsoever.
That was exactly my point. The addresses are either faked, or generated by one-time account abuse.
Actually, I'm the sysadmin for the above mentioned site. (Among others that I won't mention, being that I'm not looking to insert a shameless plug.) The affiliate ID is just for my own kicks, to see how many people go from my sig url to this particular site of ours. Sheesh, man, tone down the paranoia and vitriol a bit! By the way, I don't personally get any money from someone clicking the aforementioned link, in fact, no-one from /. has ever bought our services by going through that link. I'm not marketing to you through my personal url here on Slashdot, so chill, ok?
I'll second that. Folks, let's face the facts: there are tons of people out there who have no clue what they signed up for, and then buy automated spam reporting software. Sites where someone legitamately signed up are then painted with a VERY broad brush as spammers by idiots who then assign everything in their e-mail box as spam.
I've had people sign up to get info from a site i run, and upon receiving the first e-mail that they explicitly requested, write back in all caps "HOW DID YOU GET MY ADDRESS??? STOP SENDING ME THIS!!!"
Couple that effect with vigilante spamblock operations (whose haughty tone assumes EVERYONE reported to them is evil) and you have people being slimed who are doing legitimate business on the web.
Yes, I agree people who forge headers or don't properly cull lists are negligent. They are buffoons who should be blocked. But hey, what are you going to do, block yahoo.com?
I've used several USB video input devices for several different Macs, and sad to say, I won't even consider buying one of these gadgets for myself until they use Firewire. They just return substandard results, with frequent drop-outs. Sorry.
This just in! Slashdot has made the Drudgereport! I wonder if the barrage of new traffic will be too much for the new servers to bear....
It would appear that Hotline is not one of the protocols this Packeteer device is designed to work with.
Plus Hotline can be configure from the server end to use pretty much any port.
What I would like to see would be the ability for the camera to add metadata to the pictures via input from the Bluetooth connection. For example, getting the current Lon/Lat from a Bluetooth enabled GPS and embedding it in the picture's metadata ("Where the heck did we take THIS picture?"). I could then do some interesting GIS applications, such as a photoalbum on a map using Mapserver (a great Open Source GIS program)
Ok, when you dump salt (NaCl) into water, it instantly dissolves into the respective ions, Na+ and Cl-. Cl- ions are not what are used for sterilizing swimming pools; Sodium hypochlorite is used for this, that splits into Na+ and a Hypochlorite- ion. Hypochlorite is very aggressive & will reduce (give an electron to) practically anything.
What makes me suspicious of the Emerald device is the following line:
"The catholyte is a powerful alkaline solution used for treating industrial effluent like the ones from Electro-plating, photographic, and/or textile plants. Catholyte has powerful properties for flocculation, coagulation, bionutrient transfer, cleaning purposes, and neutralizing the toxicity of heavy metals."
Ok, if the catholyte is a powerful alkaline solution, it then follows that the anolyte is a powerful acid solution. Can't make one without the other. And powerful acid solutions aren't exactly benign.
There are services that will enable you to change DNS records with world-wide propagation in under 5 minutes.
Take a look at UltraDNS for an example.
One of the silliest little programs I ever encountered was SimStapler from Freeverse software.
Staple away to your heart's content with no jams! Sorry folks, this one's for Pre-X Mac OS 9 and under.
_______
Quote from the Yahoo article about the same thing:
55 Cancri is located 41 million light-years from the Earth, in the constellation of Cancer. The star, believed to be around five billion years old, is visible to the naked eye, astronomers said.
HA! I don't think so. That's about 20 times the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. Nice how the people they have writing these things up have a good grasp on the fundamentals of the subject matter.
It makes you wonder just how many people they really need to run such a network.
It appears to be less than the number they thought.
It seems the Aerowinx software he's planning to use is based on empirical data from thousands of 747 flights.
Perhaps he should consider X-Plane instead. It derives it's aerodynamics from first principles, and is quite accurate in simulating things that haven't been actually done. You can even get FAA certification from using X-Plane. It's already got the software hooks to drive a motion platform.
Plus you can hack the hell out of it. There's a large community of users with interesting mods.
Good grief, was it not less than two days ago that Microsoft claimed they could never release the APIs for Windows out of fear for the damage it would do to National Security? I would like to think that the cryptanalysts at the Dept of Defense would be fully versed in the fallacy of Security through Obscurity, and would make their voices heard.
Being that Mr Lucas filmed the entire movie in a digital format, the preview showing (which this would be a copy of) almost certainly was in a digital projection theater. Perhaps the projectionist merely copied the files and downconverted them to VCD? :-)
Seriously, I wonder how big the digital projection files for this would be. Would they fit onto an iPod?
There was an article on /. a while back on the potential of cheaper Titanium, "Titanium As Cheap As Aluminum?"
I wonder if there's been any progress since then. The original story is still on The Economist' site.
This is really stupendous news. A hologram is, for all intents and purposes, just a pattern of light and dark bands on a piece of film. Since they've been able to create these patterns on demand at the molecular level (which is necessary because of the size of the visible wavelengths of light), you essentially get a computer generated hologram. Coupled with the switching speeds they are speaking of (billionths of a second) you could easily make fully immersive displays from this. (holodeck anyone? Reminds me of the walls of the houses in Fahrenheit 451).
Only problem is, the processing power needed for such things is enourmous. They'll have to first use this technology in the back-end processors to get the necessary oomph to be able to produce killer apps like immersive tv and such. It'll be an interesting chicken-and-egg problem for them.
No to speak of what kind of camera could make such full motion 360 holograms? I didn't see mention that the crystals also could act as sensors....such a thing would be needed unless you want ALL your programming to be computer-generated images. (now there's an idea...)
All Things Considered from National Public Radio had a piece on these songs last year. It's pretty funny, with a good amount of historical background.
I believe CommuniGate Pro, from Stalker Software does this.
It's a neat software package available for almost any operating system or flavor of *nix.