He was not flying a Citabria, but a Super Decathlon. The Decathlon is like a souped-up Citabria that can do "outside" manouevres -- things like inverted flight and outside loops. The Citabria doesn't like to fly upside down, but the Decathlon is perfectly at home either way up. (Ordinary engines don't run upside-down, you need some special features.) The Decathlon also has a symmetric wing, for that same outside stuff.
(Yes, I have a lot of time flying Citabrias and Decathlons. Acro, even. The Citabria is my favourite airplane to fly, just loads of low-pressure slow fun.)
Nonsense. Whatever the biggest mistake was that led to his now being missing, failure to file a flight plan was not it.
A VFR flight plan is is basically useless. If I'm going to flying over hostile territory (hostile here means if I have an engine failure there will not be a safe place to land and get fuel, maintenance, etc.) I'd rather tell my loved ones and friends rather than the FAA. I leave my route of flight with said loved one with instructions that if he doesn't hear from me by time X, call the FAA and give them my route.
BTW, Arizona is not flat -- surely you're heard of the Grand Canyon? In any case, getting on the ground safely is not the end of the adventure if you're 10 miles from civilization. In large chunks of the western states civilization is a lot farther than 10 miles.
For a change it's not just a link to a.tar.gz somewhere, but an actual article where he goes through what he did, and (more important) why he did things that way. Good reading even if you don't want an off-line Wikipedia.
Other than code obfuscation (which is getting less and less important), if you're just writing code why do you care if your language is interpreted or compiled?
If you have specific requirements like performance or packaging, state them as such.
If you implement your problem in various languages, I think you'll find that "compiled vs interpreted" is not a very useful distinction. The performance of the resulting application will depend completely on the quality of the compiler/interpreter, and not on whether it's a compiler or interpreter.
Sure, that's a reasonable reading, but "fractured" connotes many pieces, not two. As I read it, he divides companies into two groups: the ones who "get it" and are unconcerned, and the ones who made the deal with the devil and are not long for this world.
Now, when someone can show me some live footage of two stars crashing into each other...
You'll be waiting a while... collisions between stars are very rare, whereas collisions between galaxies are quite common. (When galaxies collide, the individual stars in those galaxies don't. Galaxies are mostly empty space.)
Spitzer observations also show that, unlike most known mergers, the galaxies involved in the quadruple collision are bereft of gas, the source material that fuels star birth. As a result, astronomers predict that relatively few new stars will be born in the new, combined galaxy.
Without the gravitational drag from the gas, what happens to be central black holes?
...what Microsoft is doing is trying to unsettle the marketplace. It isn't working and has not had the slightest impact on those companies that refuse to be drawn into that line of discussion with Microsoft.
Seems to me Shuttleworth is saying the exact opposite of what this Slashdot editor thinks.
I like ZFS (I use it on Solaris), but I think it'll be a while before we see it on Linux. I'm not a Linux kernel expert, but I remember reading there's something about the VFS layer that would make ZFS pretty hard to adapt. Besides, for cross-platform usage (USB disks, flash, etc.) the cool features of ZFS aren't required. All we need is a basic filesystem that has basic POSIX semantics and has reasonably large limits of things like fs size, file size, path names, etc.
Here's my scenario: I have OpenBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and OS X machines. (I don't do Windows, but I hear others do.) For backups I got a 350GB hard disk and a USB drive case. I'd like to format the disk so it can be mounted on all the systems so everything is backed up on that one disk. If there's an earthquake or fire, there's only one little box to grab. And obviously I'd like to be able to look at all my files from any platform. (All my machines are not on the same network, so forget NFS.)
Sorry sir, you can't do that.
(Jesus Christ, they're all open source systems, enough with the "mine is bigger than yours" posturing! Screw journalling, just basic POSIX semantics would be good enough. Maybe standardize on basic UFS.)
Staring at a white background while you read is like staring at a light bulb (don't believe me? Try turning off the lights next time you use a word processor).
This comparison is meaningless without considering the ambient light level. If you're outside in bright sunlight, you might not even be able to tell if a light bulb is on or off so staring at it would only be very boring. Why should I turn the lights out while using a computer? I don't turn the lights out to watch TV or to read or for any non-sleeping activity.
Furthermore, visible light cannot harm your vision. (Isn't Feynman's "Surely You're Joking" required reading for all geeks?)
You must still be a teenager or maybe your 20s if you think that reading text on a black background is easier. (Just wait till you hit 30 and you too will cringe at the thought of the 6-pt dark blue type on a black background that all these K00L sites use. And it only goes downhill from there.)
What's the state of the art in DNA from recently extinct animals (like saber-tooth tigers and mammoths)? Are these animals firmly placed in current cladistic taxonomy? Are there still cool things to be learned from their DNA?
Exactly. All that mumbo-jumbo says is the disk comes with a program that decodes the movie (and does some secret-sauce memory footprint checking). All it takes is for a BD+-Jon to disassemble the program and figure out how to run the decoding bits without running their super-duper secret-sauce bits. And it's not like each disk has a different secret-sauce program -- they have to pay someone to write them, so there can only be a small number of them.
Re:Bad programmers need more than 80 columns
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
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· Score: 1, Troll
... it's natural that you want to use only one line, because it should be read as a single operation, and you want to put one operation per line.
Why must everything be on one line? We don't expect sentences to fit in one line. Notwithstanding the crapitude that is C++, why not break up the operands in a manner that makes the meaning clearer?
You need to read past the greater crapitude that is slashcode. Pretend the 2nd and 3rd lines there line up under "left_operands.begin...".
Bad programmers need more than 80 columns
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Programs need to be readable by humans.
If you're playing, do whatever pleases you. But if you're writing stuff that others will have to read and maintain, you need to write clear and readable code. Break it up, for god's sake! No ridiculously long lines, and no code indented 42 levels deep. Learn to use functions and variables.
There's a reason newspapers and magazines have multiple columns of text instead of making the text run from the left side of the paper to the right.
Any fool can learn to put together a transmitter that steps all over any authorized user, on any frequency -- it's not that hard. There are things called physical laws, and no amount of FCC regulations can override those.
This is just more Republican hysteria -- screw any notions of prior restraint, the People (who are the enemy of the State) must be stopped before they do something that might possibly affect a campaign contributor's business!!!
Unethical, sure; but how is this stealing? It may be copyright infringement, but we don't even know that.
On the scale of ethical violations, this ranks somewhere around unauthorized eating of a grape in a supermarket (stealing!!!) and picking your nose in public.
Obviously the situation is more nuanced than can be discussed in a couple of minutes, but the way I think about it is: if you refuse to let me be anonymous, then I have no choice but to use an obvious pseudonym. Like Radio Shack used to be: they ask for my name and address even though I paid with cash, and I refuse to give it to them. They insist, with some crap like "the computer won't accept it without a name and address"; I say B. Simpson, of 1600 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield (or some other obvious pseudonym). The same with web browsing: I want to be anonymous but they won't let me, so I use one of the many registration maker sites. A person of normal intelligence will know it's not my real name, especially since I first requested anonymity.
On Slashdot (and other sites) an ordinary web search on my nickname will find my real name. Because if I need to post something anonymously, I can.
(Dealing with a drunk on the bus is different; that's more like dealing with a child. Do what it takes so no one gets hurt.)
I agree with you that these kinds of laws are crap since somehow businesses always get away with all kinds of shit while college kids and regular people are fined and thrown in jail for nothing. Every law diminishes us; there's a real cost to every law, which must be carefully weighed against the claimed benefit.
However:
If I can write a fake name on a letter and mail it, why can't I do the same with my phone?
Do you feel the same way about email?
I feel very strongly that in any interaction, you can either be truthful about your identity or you can be anonymous. There is no middle ground; you are not allowed to lie about who you are.
(Proxy relations, where person X is authorised to speak for person Y, aren't the same: if I get a letter from a lawyer, I know very clearly it's not X, but Y speaking for X. But the CLID field is not the place for that.)
The article seemed to put forward the view that water was the fuel and the alloy acted as a catalyst. While this is indeed CHEMICALLY what is happening...
You are being too charitable: it is absolutely not the case that the Al/Ga alloy is a catalyst. A catalyst is left unchanged by the reaction it catalyses. The Pt/Pd in your car's catalytic converter is indeed left unchanged when the hydrocarbons in the exhaust are oxidized. The Al in the alloy is not left unchanged -- it's oxidized to Al2O3. Since we conventionally call the thing oxidized "the fuel", the Al in the alloy is the fuel. The water could be considered the oxidizer.
I suppose you could call the Ga part of the alloy "the catalyst" but even that's not strictly correct -- if we didn't live in an oxygen atmosphere the Al wouldn't form the barrier oxide layer, and the Ga wouldn't be required.
And of course we still need energy to convert the Al2O3 back to Al and complete the cycle. The cost of Ga doesn't have much to do with anything, since it's left unchanged. The only cost keeping this off the shelves is that this is infrastructure, and switching to anything will be expensive. We still need all the other components of the system -- the new vehicles, fuel stations, maintenance, fuel manufacture and transport, etc.
The feature here is that a solid fuel is much easier to deal with than gaseous hydrogen. Transporting hydrogen, especially to consumers like you and me, is a pain in the ass.
If a service promised me that I'd never lose my file after I'd purchased it, I'd be their customer for life.
I believe emusic does that. At least, it did a couple of years ago, and it's all DRM-free MP3s. It's not unlimited downloads any more (those were the good old days) but it's probably the least customer-unfriendly of the services.
However, the idea of giving constitutional protections to everyone who makes it inside our borders, even those planning to do us harm, seems like a more serious threat than any amount of illegal wiretapping.
This is a very dangerous line of reasoning. The founding fathers appreciated that humanity transcends nation-states, which is why the Bill of Rights specifically says "person" when it means "person" and "citizen" when it means "citizen".
The right to live is more fundamental than the rignt to vote.
Slashdot Mirror
He was not flying a Citabria, but a Super Decathlon. The Decathlon is like a souped-up Citabria that can do "outside" manouevres -- things like inverted flight and outside loops. The Citabria doesn't like to fly upside down, but the Decathlon is perfectly at home either way up. (Ordinary engines don't run upside-down, you need some special features.) The Decathlon also has a symmetric wing, for that same outside stuff.
(Yes, I have a lot of time flying Citabrias and Decathlons. Acro, even. The Citabria is my favourite airplane to fly, just loads of low-pressure slow fun.)
Nonsense. Whatever the biggest mistake was that led to his now being missing, failure to file a flight plan was not it.
A VFR flight plan is is basically useless. If I'm going to flying over hostile territory (hostile here means if I have an engine failure there will not be a safe place to land and get fuel, maintenance, etc.) I'd rather tell my loved ones and friends rather than the FAA. I leave my route of flight with said loved one with instructions that if he doesn't hear from me by time X, call the FAA and give them my route.
BTW, Arizona is not flat -- surely you're heard of the Grand Canyon? In any case, getting on the ground safely is not the end of the adventure if you're 10 miles from civilization. In large chunks of the western states civilization is a lot farther than 10 miles.
For a change it's not just a link to a .tar.gz somewhere, but an actual article where he goes through what he did, and (more important) why he did things that way. Good reading even if you don't want an off-line Wikipedia.
Other than code obfuscation (which is getting less and less important), if you're just writing code why do you care if your language is interpreted or compiled?
If you have specific requirements like performance or packaging, state them as such.
If you implement your problem in various languages, I think you'll find that "compiled vs interpreted" is not a very useful distinction. The performance of the resulting application will depend completely on the quality of the compiler/interpreter, and not on whether it's a compiler or interpreter.
Sure, that's a reasonable reading, but "fractured" connotes many pieces, not two. As I read it, he divides companies into two groups: the ones who "get it" and are unconcerned, and the ones who made the deal with the devil and are not long for this world.
I like ZFS (I use it on Solaris), but I think it'll be a while before we see it on Linux. I'm not a Linux kernel expert, but I remember reading there's something about the VFS layer that would make ZFS pretty hard to adapt. Besides, for cross-platform usage (USB disks, flash, etc.) the cool features of ZFS aren't required. All we need is a basic filesystem that has basic POSIX semantics and has reasonably large limits of things like fs size, file size, path names, etc.
You're thinking firmly inside the box.
Here's my scenario: I have OpenBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and OS X machines. (I don't do Windows, but I hear others do.) For backups I got a 350GB hard disk and a USB drive case. I'd like to format the disk so it can be mounted on all the systems so everything is backed up on that one disk. If there's an earthquake or fire, there's only one little box to grab. And obviously I'd like to be able to look at all my files from any platform. (All my machines are not on the same network, so forget NFS.)
Sorry sir, you can't do that.
(Jesus Christ, they're all open source systems, enough with the "mine is bigger than yours" posturing! Screw journalling, just basic POSIX semantics would be good enough. Maybe standardize on basic UFS.)
This comparison is meaningless without considering the ambient light level. If you're outside in bright sunlight, you might not even be able to tell if a light bulb is on or off so staring at it would only be very boring. Why should I turn the lights out while using a computer? I don't turn the lights out to watch TV or to read or for any non-sleeping activity.
Furthermore, visible light cannot harm your vision. (Isn't Feynman's "Surely You're Joking" required reading for all geeks?)
You must still be a teenager or maybe your 20s if you think that reading text on a black background is easier. (Just wait till you hit 30 and you too will cringe at the thought of the 6-pt dark blue type on a black background that all these K00L sites use. And it only goes downhill from there.)
Crap! That's not the passive voice, it's an implicit subject. Sorry, everyone!
Linus says, "I think it *is* ok to control peoples hardware. I do it myself."
Ah, the problems with the passive voice. (That's why your writing teacher told you to avoid it.) OK for whom to control people's hardware?
It's only OK to control hardware owned by you. It's not OK for Tivo (or the **AA) to control my hardware.
What's the state of the art in DNA from recently extinct animals (like saber-tooth tigers and mammoths)? Are these animals firmly placed in current cladistic taxonomy? Are there still cool things to be learned from their DNA?
Exactly. All that mumbo-jumbo says is the disk comes with a program that decodes the movie (and does some secret-sauce memory footprint checking). All it takes is for a BD+-Jon to disassemble the program and figure out how to run the decoding bits without running their super-duper secret-sauce bits. And it's not like each disk has a different secret-sauce program -- they have to pay someone to write them, so there can only be a small number of them.
Why must everything be on one line? We don't expect sentences to fit in one line. Notwithstanding the crapitude that is C++, why not break up the operands in a manner that makes the meaning clearer?
You need to read past the greater crapitude that is slashcode. Pretend the 2nd and 3rd lines there line up under "left_operands.begin...".
Programs need to be readable by humans.
If you're playing, do whatever pleases you. But if you're writing stuff that others will have to read and maintain, you need to write clear and readable code. Break it up, for god's sake! No ridiculously long lines, and no code indented 42 levels deep. Learn to use functions and variables.
There's a reason newspapers and magazines have multiple columns of text instead of making the text run from the left side of the paper to the right.
Any fool can learn to put together a transmitter that steps all over any authorized user, on any frequency -- it's not that hard. There are things called physical laws, and no amount of FCC regulations can override those.
This is just more Republican hysteria -- screw any notions of prior restraint, the People (who are the enemy of the State) must be stopped before they do something that might possibly affect a campaign contributor's business!!!
Unethical, sure; but how is this stealing? It may be copyright infringement, but we don't even know that.
On the scale of ethical violations, this ranks somewhere around unauthorized eating of a grape in a supermarket (stealing!!!) and picking your nose in public.
All good questions.
Obviously the situation is more nuanced than can be discussed in a couple of minutes, but the way I think about it is: if you refuse to let me be anonymous, then I have no choice but to use an obvious pseudonym. Like Radio Shack used to be: they ask for my name and address even though I paid with cash, and I refuse to give it to them. They insist, with some crap like "the computer won't accept it without a name and address"; I say B. Simpson, of 1600 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield (or some other obvious pseudonym). The same with web browsing: I want to be anonymous but they won't let me, so I use one of the many registration maker sites. A person of normal intelligence will know it's not my real name, especially since I first requested anonymity.
On Slashdot (and other sites) an ordinary web search on my nickname will find my real name. Because if I need to post something anonymously, I can.
(Dealing with a drunk on the bus is different; that's more like dealing with a child. Do what it takes so no one gets hurt.)
I agree with you that these kinds of laws are crap since somehow businesses always get away with all kinds of shit while college kids and regular people are fined and thrown in jail for nothing. Every law diminishes us; there's a real cost to every law, which must be carefully weighed against the claimed benefit.
However:
Do you feel the same way about email?
I feel very strongly that in any interaction, you can either be truthful about your identity or you can be anonymous. There is no middle ground; you are not allowed to lie about who you are.
(Proxy relations, where person X is authorised to speak for person Y, aren't the same: if I get a letter from a lawyer, I know very clearly it's not X, but Y speaking for X. But the CLID field is not the place for that.)
"We know there are canals on Mars; and if there are canals, there's water."
Now just wait for the next phases of his prediction: "If there's water, there's oxygen; and there's oxygen, we can breathe."
Mars, here we come!
You are being too charitable: it is absolutely not the case that the Al/Ga alloy is a catalyst. A catalyst is left unchanged by the reaction it catalyses. The Pt/Pd in your car's catalytic converter is indeed left unchanged when the hydrocarbons in the exhaust are oxidized. The Al in the alloy is not left unchanged -- it's oxidized to Al2O3. Since we conventionally call the thing oxidized "the fuel", the Al in the alloy is the fuel. The water could be considered the oxidizer.
I suppose you could call the Ga part of the alloy "the catalyst" but even that's not strictly correct -- if we didn't live in an oxygen atmosphere the Al wouldn't form the barrier oxide layer, and the Ga wouldn't be required.
And of course we still need energy to convert the Al2O3 back to Al and complete the cycle. The cost of Ga doesn't have much to do with anything, since it's left unchanged. The only cost keeping this off the shelves is that this is infrastructure, and switching to anything will be expensive. We still need all the other components of the system -- the new vehicles, fuel stations, maintenance, fuel manufacture and transport, etc.
The feature here is that a solid fuel is much easier to deal with than gaseous hydrogen. Transporting hydrogen, especially to consumers like you and me, is a pain in the ass.
This is a very dangerous line of reasoning. The founding fathers appreciated that humanity transcends nation-states, which is why the Bill of Rights specifically says "person" when it means "person" and "citizen" when it means "citizen".
The right to live is more fundamental than the rignt to vote.