Yeah. A lot of people seem to have some misconceptions about falling, though. It seems Douglas Adams thought that two bodies should fall at the same speed, otherwise Arthur would not have had to resort to extreme measures (of deciding to fall faster heh heh) to overcome the speed differential. Quite often when I tell my non-skydiving friends people put weights on to fall faster, they get confused. What they learned in school is that really shouldn't work. They never factor wind resistance into the equation. I can fall as "slowly" as 125 miles an hour (I can slow down a bit more but it takes a lot of work on my part) or as quickly as 165. Either extreme takes a bit of work. Two people without any training might not be able to control their falls, but that's a completely different problem!
There's a passage in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books where Arthur decides to fall faster than his girlfriend despite what they teach you about Galileo in school. Turns out you can actually do that. I have a terminal velocity range of about 125 mph to 165 mph depending on how I orient myself, and instructors will put weights on to fall faster. The first time I heard this I was like "But... But... Galileo!" One does not tend to expect that to work with wind resistance, but it does! If you make a skydiver heavier, he'll fall faster.
Of course, this trick wouldn't work on the moon. I seem to recall that one of the things the Church asked Galileo was why, if objects fell at the same speed, does a feather fall more slowly than a hammer. I also seem to recall hearing that they finally proved Galileo correct by conducting that experiment on the moon during one of the moon landings. But then, if you're skydiving on the moon you'll probably have other problems before your fall rate becomes an issue.
Hmm. Last time someone released a "For Workgroups" OS, IBM released OS/2 for Workgroups a month or two later and then killed the OS not too long after that. If we see an "AIX For Workgroups" anytime soon, the AIX team should start getting nervous.
Using government resources to stalk a potential, current or ex SO? That's nice and slimy. Not that I wouldn't expect that sort of behavior of a member of Congress, but I was kind of hoping we'd hold the guys who actually do things to a slightly higher standard. I'm always happy to find that no matter how overly-cynical I thought I was, it never was enough. At this point I think cynicism, not hydrogen, must be the most common element in the universe. Thanks guys. That makes me... mmm.... happy really isn't the word. I'm sure the Germans have a word for it. Whatever it is, it makes me that.
Oh yeah, and my tax dollars at work. Huzzah!
Steve Jobs Still A Better CEO
on
Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If they dig Steve Jobs up and put him in charge now, he'd do a better job than Ballmer ever did!
At best they'll say something along the lines of "Sorry we violated your constitutional rights. Our bad." No one will go to jail. No one will be fired. No one will even be spoken to sharply or slapped on the wrist. Actually I'd be surprised if they even acknowledge it.
But EVERYONE could photograph EVERYONE's license plate, and probably even link them up with various social networks. If I were looking to organize a mass protest for this, getting a large enough portion of the population to put road-facing cameras on their property and post the location of the mayor and city council at all times in real time would be a pretty good "It's not so much fun when it's happening to YOU" example.
Hey! The pyramids were CUTTING EDGE technology for the time! You know how much money it would cost to build a pyramid today? 5 BILLION DOLLARS!
I heard a story on NPR a year or two ago about some cryonics institute, they didn't even last 30 years before they ran out of money. Maybe they should have had 5 BILLION DOLLARS! They certainly lasted "just a few" thousand years less than a pyramid, and didn't even leave a well-preserved mummy behind for future archaeologists! The relatives were presumably bent out of shape because they'd made a bet on this and lost (Or maybe because they'd have preferred to inherit the $20000, I wasn't clear on that point.) Unless I actually see them resurrect a frozen dead guy, I'm giving them less credibility someone peddling a pyramid.
No I don't. The quest for immortality has been around for thousands of years. Kings build pyramids for it. Alchemists sought after it. Exploration of the New World was often fueled by the quest for the fountain of youth. In the end all those people died. As will I, and as will you. Accepting your mortality is part of growing up. Shedding your fear of death enables you to really live! You can spend your entire life in fear of that moment and scheming for ways to avoid it, or you can embrace it and laugh in Death's face when he finally gets you. Either way you're going to end up in the same place in the end. Yes, even if you freeze yourself (And I can make that statement with near-absolute certainty that it is correct, much as I can state with near absolute certainty that any reader of this post will never win a lottery jackpot.)
Those things were dead when I was a little boy, 30 years ago. I seem to recall running across two or three rotting corpses of drive-in theaters in my travels and have never seen one that didn't look like something that had been through a zombie apocalypse. Drive in theaters were a prop for sitcoms of my parent's generation.
You know what I never heard growing up? "Hey! Let's all go to the drive-in theater!" I think mom may have mentioned going to one with her family a couple of times when she was a little girl, and she was a little girl back when we still had military bases in Libya. Saying drive-in theaters are dying is like saying faith in the flat earth is dying. If they were ever healthy, it was over half a century ago. There may be a handful of people trying to keep the games the pilgrims played alive, or writing yn fhe olde ftyle wyth ys for "i"s and fs for "s"s, but that doesn't mean those things are still alive!
Therefore the headline "The Death of the American Drive-In" comes about 50 years too late. It's not "news" anymore, and it hasn't been for as long as I've been alive.
Have the patient collect his receipts and tell the insurance company "Ok I've been billed 12 grand! Now stop!" Boom! Problem solved! You're welcome!
What? Too simple for you? I guaran-fucking-tee you that if you put this mechanism in place, the insurance companies would suddenly discover that they can, in fact, figure out how much you've been billed over the time period in question. "Oooh! THAT billing info! We just need to look in this computer for THAT!"
Have they tried "sucking less?" I hear that's a pretty good game plan! Try sucking less as a human being, as a CEO and as a company and maybe you won't bleed customers like that scene from The Shining!
I looked at a lot of E-Mail clients back in the day and didn't like any of them. My favorites, though, were a couple of ones implemented in Emacs. vm and gnus have folders and freaking amazing threading support. Killing an entire E-Mail thread from any message in the thread is great. Their filtering is a bit esoteric to set up but you can auto-filter stuff too. And they have support(ish) for Mime and PGP plugins. The only downside is they seemed to get all bent out of shape every few months and eat all my E-Mail. Minor detail there heh. Backup regularly. I got more spam than actual mail running my own E-Mail server, though. I suppose if I only accepted unencrypted messages from known senders that would have helped. It'd be nice if there was actually an E-Mail server you could configure to do that without having to be a fourth-level E-Mail server blackbelt. Client side filtering still wastes your bandwidth on spam.
It's not even that the language is inherently slow. Its programmers just don't put much thought into storage or optimization. Just shove everything into a map and call it good. Or install a framework that shoves everything into a map for them. I've run across several cases where the programmer seemed to be trying to implement the least-optimum solution to his problem, and the company will just throw gigabytes of RAM at the VM without question because nobody seems to know any better. C, you HAD to roll your own, or stuff everything into a massive char* array and bludgeon it into submission. Everyone's so afraid of pointers in C because most people just did that instead of building proper structs and code to manage their memory access.
Now that we've been caught. You know how it is, you try to covertly monitor all human communications and some goat-fucker has to go and spill the beans! This is why we can't have nice things! What was I saying again? Hey is this mic on?
I went to work at a C project a few years back. It was a monolithic app with a bunch of custom file parsers built in for something vaguely resembling a home-grown ETL system. It was transitioning from a very small (1-2 developers) to a small (5-6 developers) project. A lot of the code was... bad. I spent a week bounding all their string copies, which eliminated a number of their crashes. Then I ran some tests with libefence, which isolated most of the rest of the sigsegvs pretty quickly. We still had the occasional data file cause a crash, so I ended up implementing a launcher for it which would read the batch directory and fork a new process with a single file at a time. It'd monitor the exit value of the process and if it was nonzero or died with a signal, it'd move the file out of the way so processing could continue on the rest of them. Thing about those C projects, if you know how to use your tools, the language isn't any worse to deal with than any other one. And if you actually take the time to fix your segfaults, they tend to stay fixed.
These days I like to work in C++. My usual MO is to write a class and unit tests for that class at the same time. If a problem arises in that class later, I can add a new test for it while I'm fixing it. With the C++11 standard, cppunit and a few boost libraries, C++ development really isn't any more difficult than Java development. If you write your own libraries with an eye toward building useful objects that you could use again later on, your development velocity should speed up over time (in either language.)
I've seen some horrific java projects too. Sure, your NullPointerException won't exit the program... IF you catch it. Or catch any exceptions. A lot of java projects I've seen don't. You go look at the logs and find an application has been crapping exceptions into the logs for the last 5 years and no one's ever bothered to investigate or fix them. You can still leak resources and memory in Java, as well. I see that a lot too. Adding any MQ server seems to pretty much guarantee it. I've also run across some very nasty gotchas in the language that typically wouldn't be a problem if you're not trying to use brute force and ignorance on a problem. Moral of this story is, just because you're using Java doesn't mean you can hire chimpanzees to write your code for you. Code written by bad programmers will suck no matter what the language, code written by good programmers will be great. That was as true in 1960 as it is now.
You still need to know what your JSON string will look like at some point in order to use it. It's always (for at least as long as I've been programming, a bit over 2 decades) been a problem that programmers don't fully know or understand their requirements, so they try to keep their code as generic as possible. The problem with that is that at some point you're going to have to do actual work with that code, so you end going through a labyrinth of libraries, none of which want to take the responsibility to actually do anything. All because they thought they might want to use that library for something else at some point. When design patterns guys/agile guys talk about "you aren't going to need it," this is what they're talking about. Code things you need right now and let the future sort itself out.
I was just talking to a guy today who's in the process of writing an entire fucking rest framework in C++ for an embedded system because his clients think they might want a fucking pony at some point in the future. Sure, they could just get some concrete requirements for what they need right now and design a system that will be smaller, faster and better than what he's building. Doesn't seem like anyone stopped to think about that.
Just post your GPG messages on public forums! The recipients can pick up all messages on a variety of forums and try to decrypt them. Anything that actually decrypts is for them! Bonus: No telling who they're to if you do that. With a little work it could be anywhere from pretty hard to pretty much impossible to tell who they're from either!
Avast ye buccaneers! They've cut ourrr access! Batten down the hatches and farrrrr up the bittorrent! We be settin' sail for the commercial-free waters of internet piracy, global warmin' be damned! Yarrr!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and I hear IBM's planning to introduce their "Crushinator" maid robot at it! Two tons of hot robot maid! Ooh yeah!
Yeah. A lot of people seem to have some misconceptions about falling, though. It seems Douglas Adams thought that two bodies should fall at the same speed, otherwise Arthur would not have had to resort to extreme measures (of deciding to fall faster heh heh) to overcome the speed differential. Quite often when I tell my non-skydiving friends people put weights on to fall faster, they get confused. What they learned in school is that really shouldn't work. They never factor wind resistance into the equation. I can fall as "slowly" as 125 miles an hour (I can slow down a bit more but it takes a lot of work on my part) or as quickly as 165. Either extreme takes a bit of work. Two people without any training might not be able to control their falls, but that's a completely different problem!
There's a passage in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books where Arthur decides to fall faster than his girlfriend despite what they teach you about Galileo in school. Turns out you can actually do that. I have a terminal velocity range of about 125 mph to 165 mph depending on how I orient myself, and instructors will put weights on to fall faster. The first time I heard this I was like "But... But... Galileo!" One does not tend to expect that to work with wind resistance, but it does! If you make a skydiver heavier, he'll fall faster. Of course, this trick wouldn't work on the moon. I seem to recall that one of the things the Church asked Galileo was why, if objects fell at the same speed, does a feather fall more slowly than a hammer. I also seem to recall hearing that they finally proved Galileo correct by conducting that experiment on the moon during one of the moon landings. But then, if you're skydiving on the moon you'll probably have other problems before your fall rate becomes an issue.
Hmm. Last time someone released a "For Workgroups" OS, IBM released OS/2 for Workgroups a month or two later and then killed the OS not too long after that. If we see an "AIX For Workgroups" anytime soon, the AIX team should start getting nervous.
Oh yeah, and my tax dollars at work. Huzzah!
If they dig Steve Jobs up and put him in charge now, he'd do a better job than Ballmer ever did!
At best they'll say something along the lines of "Sorry we violated your constitutional rights. Our bad." No one will go to jail. No one will be fired. No one will even be spoken to sharply or slapped on the wrist. Actually I'd be surprised if they even acknowledge it.
But EVERYONE could photograph EVERYONE's license plate, and probably even link them up with various social networks. If I were looking to organize a mass protest for this, getting a large enough portion of the population to put road-facing cameras on their property and post the location of the mayor and city council at all times in real time would be a pretty good "It's not so much fun when it's happening to YOU" example.
I heard a story on NPR a year or two ago about some cryonics institute, they didn't even last 30 years before they ran out of money. Maybe they should have had 5 BILLION DOLLARS! They certainly lasted "just a few" thousand years less than a pyramid, and didn't even leave a well-preserved mummy behind for future archaeologists! The relatives were presumably bent out of shape because they'd made a bet on this and lost (Or maybe because they'd have preferred to inherit the $20000, I wasn't clear on that point.) Unless I actually see them resurrect a frozen dead guy, I'm giving them less credibility someone peddling a pyramid.
If we keep oppressing the UK this way they might dump all the tea into the Boston harbor or something.
No I don't. The quest for immortality has been around for thousands of years. Kings build pyramids for it. Alchemists sought after it. Exploration of the New World was often fueled by the quest for the fountain of youth. In the end all those people died. As will I, and as will you. Accepting your mortality is part of growing up. Shedding your fear of death enables you to really live! You can spend your entire life in fear of that moment and scheming for ways to avoid it, or you can embrace it and laugh in Death's face when he finally gets you. Either way you're going to end up in the same place in the end. Yes, even if you freeze yourself (And I can make that statement with near-absolute certainty that it is correct, much as I can state with near absolute certainty that any reader of this post will never win a lottery jackpot.)
He must be a huge asshole. And a horrible human being. Why isn't he already working for Fox?
Therefore the headline "The Death of the American Drive-In" comes about 50 years too late. It's not "news" anymore, and it hasn't been for as long as I've been alive.
What? Too simple for you? I guaran-fucking-tee you that if you put this mechanism in place, the insurance companies would suddenly discover that they can, in fact, figure out how much you've been billed over the time period in question. "Oooh! THAT billing info! We just need to look in this computer for THAT!"
Sorry about that. Our bad. We now return you to your regularly scheduled frisking.
Have they tried "sucking less?" I hear that's a pretty good game plan! Try sucking less as a human being, as a CEO and as a company and maybe you won't bleed customers like that scene from The Shining!
2) Discard device in trash can.
3) Profit?
I looked at a lot of E-Mail clients back in the day and didn't like any of them. My favorites, though, were a couple of ones implemented in Emacs. vm and gnus have folders and freaking amazing threading support. Killing an entire E-Mail thread from any message in the thread is great. Their filtering is a bit esoteric to set up but you can auto-filter stuff too. And they have support(ish) for Mime and PGP plugins. The only downside is they seemed to get all bent out of shape every few months and eat all my E-Mail. Minor detail there heh. Backup regularly. I got more spam than actual mail running my own E-Mail server, though. I suppose if I only accepted unencrypted messages from known senders that would have helped. It'd be nice if there was actually an E-Mail server you could configure to do that without having to be a fourth-level E-Mail server blackbelt. Client side filtering still wastes your bandwidth on spam.
It's not even that the language is inherently slow. Its programmers just don't put much thought into storage or optimization. Just shove everything into a map and call it good. Or install a framework that shoves everything into a map for them. I've run across several cases where the programmer seemed to be trying to implement the least-optimum solution to his problem, and the company will just throw gigabytes of RAM at the VM without question because nobody seems to know any better. C, you HAD to roll your own, or stuff everything into a massive char* array and bludgeon it into submission. Everyone's so afraid of pointers in C because most people just did that instead of building proper structs and code to manage their memory access.
Now that we've been caught. You know how it is, you try to covertly monitor all human communications and some goat-fucker has to go and spill the beans! This is why we can't have nice things! What was I saying again? Hey is this mic on?
These days I like to work in C++. My usual MO is to write a class and unit tests for that class at the same time. If a problem arises in that class later, I can add a new test for it while I'm fixing it. With the C++11 standard, cppunit and a few boost libraries, C++ development really isn't any more difficult than Java development. If you write your own libraries with an eye toward building useful objects that you could use again later on, your development velocity should speed up over time (in either language.)
I've seen some horrific java projects too. Sure, your NullPointerException won't exit the program... IF you catch it. Or catch any exceptions. A lot of java projects I've seen don't. You go look at the logs and find an application has been crapping exceptions into the logs for the last 5 years and no one's ever bothered to investigate or fix them. You can still leak resources and memory in Java, as well. I see that a lot too. Adding any MQ server seems to pretty much guarantee it. I've also run across some very nasty gotchas in the language that typically wouldn't be a problem if you're not trying to use brute force and ignorance on a problem. Moral of this story is, just because you're using Java doesn't mean you can hire chimpanzees to write your code for you. Code written by bad programmers will suck no matter what the language, code written by good programmers will be great. That was as true in 1960 as it is now.
I was just talking to a guy today who's in the process of writing an entire fucking rest framework in C++ for an embedded system because his clients think they might want a fucking pony at some point in the future. Sure, they could just get some concrete requirements for what they need right now and design a system that will be smaller, faster and better than what he's building. Doesn't seem like anyone stopped to think about that.
Just post your GPG messages on public forums! The recipients can pick up all messages on a variety of forums and try to decrypt them. Anything that actually decrypts is for them! Bonus: No telling who they're to if you do that. With a little work it could be anywhere from pretty hard to pretty much impossible to tell who they're from either!
Well... That's going to make the jobs in accounting MUCH more interesting!
Avast ye buccaneers! They've cut ourrr access! Batten down the hatches and farrrrr up the bittorrent! We be settin' sail for the commercial-free waters of internet piracy, global warmin' be damned! Yarrr!