Dude, you're like three years out of college at best. I know, I know, don't rub it in. Put me in the ground already, right? I feel like my bones are half dust, I'm long in the tooth, I'm on my last leg, almost completely worthless, put me out to pasture, stick a fork in me!
Three years! In (Moore's) computer years that's like 18 generations, prior to the great depression of dotcoms or even the Civil (browser) War.
It's amazing that some employer is kind enough to provide this old geriatric coder a job. I try to stay out of the way of the new blood and stave off death for a few more years but my old concepts of "EJBs" and "Java Server Faces" is just embarrassing to them.
A new recruit came in the other day, I told him not to feel bad and we'd make him 1337 soon enough. He just chuckled and patted me on the head and said, "There there, old timer, we'll get you some streaming Matlock off the server while we clean up your mess."
I miss my friends that have already moved on from this life to the next, those that are managers already. I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friends.
So please, when you see an ancient dinosaur like me lumbering around trying to figure out what the f*ck ruby is and why I have to put it on rails and then wonder how that was any different than what I used to be doing, please be kind. Have patience, my mind isn't as nimble as it once was. Three years of Jack Daniels and coding ravages a man and leaves him a dusty shell.
Just promise me you'll never forget me when I'm put in the basement next to a pile of boxes next month. Please come visit, please!
killer site design.... Yes, crummy.com certainly is crummy. But you must admit that it is still up after going live on the front page of Slashdot. Can your image laden, flash driven, AJAX-ified, web 2.0 site claim that?
It's also licensed under the creative commons and has not one ad. Can your site say that?
Sometimes, a bulleted list of black text on a white background is a godsend to these old eyes and more than gets the jobs done.
I'm sure I'm hardly alone in having contributions (mostly in small ways, but sometimes very considerably) to over 100 projects over the years. I also don't think you're alone in finding that metrics fail to measure good programmers. My boss constantly asks me for lines of code count from developers. No matter how many times I express this to him, this is not a measure of success or of how good a coder you are.
I tried to think of metrics to relay up the chain (a special thank you to the stat-scm goal in maven) but I come up with some pretty lame ones:
Code to comment ratio is desired at 1:1 (at least in the commercial world)
A class/method/function/procedure/module desired size should be defined and rated
# of Unit tests
As you can see these are the ones that I found could be automatically gathered. And even these have exceptions. Anything else I think of either takes too much time to gather or is subjective. This is tough, I would like to default to peer review but oftentimes I find teammates voicing their personal hatred for an individual or taking into account personal qualities when ranking a developer. Real Life Example: Teammate A is from MIT and teammate B thinks everyone from MIT is a god. Unfortunately Teammate A hasn't done anything but criticize everyone's code without any constructive comments to make it better.
I submitted this story hoping it would open dialog on measuring coding abilities in a semi-automated way.
I have not seen the video but I find it quite humorous when some organization's materials for training/brainwashing are leaked and it makes headlines. I.E. Scientology, RIAA, etc. What would even be funnier if the RIAA took the same position the Church of Scientology did and tried to repress this video.
Repression of information is the first sign of a flawed ideology. As we've seen in many court cases in which they've shut down systems, the RIAA is against any kind of information sharing via P2P software and therefore has a flawed ideology.
I'm a software developer. I would like to think of myself as an engineer but to me that's a higher title that belongs to people who actually engineer original ideas.
The problem with the shuttle disaster (both of them, really) is external pressures that are not in anyway at all scientific. The pressure from your manager at Morton Thiokol to perform better, faster and cheaper. The pressure from the government to beat those damned ruskies into space at all costs.
So this is really a case of engineering ethics, when do you push back? As a software developer, I never push back. Me: "There's a bug that happens once every 1,000 uses of this web survey but it would take me a week to pin it down and fix it." My Boss: "Screw it--the user will blame that on the intarweb, just keep moving forward." But could I consciously say the same thing about a shuttle with people's lives at stake? No, I could not.
So when an engineer at Morton Thiokol said that they hadn't tested the O-Ring at that weather temperature that fateful day and that information was either not relayed or lost all the way up to the people at NASA who were about to launch--it wasn't a failure of engineering, it was a failure of ethics. External forces had mutated engineering into a liability, not an asset.
And there's a whole slough of them I studied in college:
* Space Shuttle Columbia disaster (2003)
* Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (1986)
* Chernobyl disaster (1986)
* Bhopal disaster (1984)
* Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse (1981)
* Love Canal (1980), Lois Gibbs
* Three Mile Island accident (1979)
* Citigroup Center (1978), William LeMessurier
* Ford Pinto safety problems (1970s)
* Minamata disease (1908-1973)
* Chevrolet Corvair safety problems (1960s), Ralph Nader, and Unsafe at Any Speed
* Boston molasses disaster (1919)
* Quebec Bridge collapse (1907), Theodore Cooper
* Johnstown Flood (1889), South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club
* Tay Bridge Disaster (1879), Thomas Bouch, William Henry Barlow, and William Yolland
* Ashtabula River Railroad Disaster (1876), Amasa Stone So I agree with Feynman's comments in relationship to engineering and the further comments to software development. But I don't find them to be a fault in the nature of engineering, just a fault in our ethics. What does capitalism and competitiveness drive us to do? Cut corners, often.
Now, a lot of sites have this crazy idea of embedded video that streams from a site or source that's dedicated to streaming video. You know like YouTube, Blip.tv or any of the.tv sites really. Does Microsoft utilize any of those freely available options? Oh no, of course not! YouTube is Google! Even if we don't have a competing solution we must not use theirs!
So what happens when you click "view"? Well, it creates a popup window that opens up Windows Media Player! Good luck viewing a.asx file all you non-Windows users.
The least Microsoft could do is create their own streaming video server but, alas, we must revert to our archaic mentality, reject all that is sensible and invade my privacy and comfort zone by automatically opening a program that is tied to the kernel (and at least historically had admin rights when I didn't) sitting in kernel land on my computer.
Assistant: Mr. Ballmer! Research indicates that Richard Stallman is 50% more cuddly than you! Ballmer: Damnit... must be his hair. Well, we'll see about that! Put the action figures I've hand crafted here immediately into production! Release plush dolls of clippy! Find me puppies to carry around with me at press conferences and when their cute factor falls below 40%, have them killed and replaced!
Torture isn't a reliable means to obtain information. I know...I have a great idea... Lets make them crazy. Yeah, that's funny--although I would mod it insightful. Although perhaps you should read Mikhail Bulgakov's works that were satires of how the Soviet Union tortured him indirectly. From the Wikipedia entry on his most famous work:
A memorable and much-quoted line in The Master and Margarita is: "manuscripts don't burn" (Russian: ). The Master is a writer who is plagued by both his own mental problems and the oppression of Stalin's regime in 1930s Moscow. He burns his treasured manuscript in an effort to hide it from the Soviet authorities and cleanse his own mind from the troubles the work has brought him. There is an autobiographical element reflected in the Master's character here, as Bulgakov in fact burned an early copy of The Master and Margarita for much the same reasons.
I offer a lower priced eldavojohn branded E-Meter for scientologists looking to test themselves with the judgmental grand inquisitor present. It comes complete with car battery and nipple clamps!
And yet, the scientologists claim that this E-Meter is useless by itself, you need someone trained to interpret it. How convenient and yet they restrict its sale. If it's useless to the untrained, why do they stop sales of it?
Having developed for years in Linux using various dev tools, I have to say that Microsoft's Visual Studio development environment is amazing compared to most open source tools I've had experience with. Wow. This comes as a shock to me. Especially since the person delivering this message to me has the/. name of cplusplus.
Help me out here, I have a Pentium III 877Mhz processor machine with about a half gig of DDR ram that I purchased in 2000. It still runs fine. For some reason when I install Visual Studio on the Win XP partition, it does not work so well. As in, it is barely usable for small applications and hangs indefinitely for large projects I have. Yet when I write a C++ application in the Linux partition using a number of various open source editors that utilize GCC, it works quite well. I don't mean just VI or Emacs, I mean several things including Gnome and KDE graphical editors (like Glade & KDevelop).
So tell me, what am I doing wrong? Several people have instructed me to buy a new computer but for some reason I do not think that I should have to buy a new computer every time a new version of Visual Studio comes out.
It's a good move. I "received" free software from Microsoft through the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance that was ok and I liked to tinker with it. Plus free XP for college wasn't bad. And, of course, this has the obvious benefit of me being well versed in Visual Studio when I start my career--both for me and Microsoft.
But I don't quite agree with Gates here.
Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools... True. This is a well-known fact. Engineers are, by nature, curious animals that enjoy tinkering with things to figure out how they work.
... because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. False. This is an opinion. It may be true for some cases but it is ignorance to say that any aspect of coding has a magic bullet. Even XML has it's trade offs. To say this only expresses ignorance or a poor attempt at brainwashing/marketing.
So this is all around good. I like it even though it's not open source, I think it will overall help Microsoft but may also clarify student's understandings of when to use what tools. I think the next step is for Microsoft to make another license that says you can use it for personal use but once you use it to make money (commercial) you need a commercial license. I don't find anything wrong with that business model. One step further and it could be released under a pseudo MSPL license and another step in the distant future might also entail an even more open state for their development tools. Who knows? All I know is that although this isn't perfect, it's a move in the right direction.
What would really be juicy for me to hear is what Ballmer's take is on this move. I think Gates is generally moving in the right direction but I get this sense that Steve Ballmer is pure evil. Is he seething over this move which to him might just look like lost revenue? Is he even pretending to see this the same way Gates does or is he still in the blind rage "I will f*cking kill ____" mode? I think there are rough times ahead when Gates leaves the scene altogether and I think we will see Ballmer say some pretty stupid things directly contradicting Gates' "just another tool for their belt" view on this.
Since SGI hasn't turned a profit in forever and usually loses about $100M a year... False. Their net income for 2006 was -$146.19 Million while their net income for 2007 was $222.61 Million. You may have been correct but at least in 2007 it looked like they have turned things around.
"It seems that that Linux Networx, the pioneering Linux supercomputing company, has gone belly up." What causes you to think that? Have they filed for bankruptcy? Is there some indication they were failing?
According to most definitions of 'belly up':
1. (idiomatic) Dead or defunct, often used with go, went, or turn. (see go belly-up)
After several financial failures, the organization went belly up. I'm pretty sure that since SGI has slowly become a niche provider for creating solutions for a few specific customers, they see Linux Networx as another good partner in another niche market. SGI isn't at the greatness they once were but it looks like they're holding their own in what they are doing.
The primary purpose of the unlicensed broadcast station was to advertise the gambling, liquor, and other dubious pleasure activities... Fine, I don't need the FCC! I'm going to start my own radio station... with blackjack... and hookers. In fact, forget the radio station!
When I was younger, I also arc wielded to fix various metal things around farms. I too noticed this sweet, metallic smell.
When I was a teenager I read a lot of short stories. Especially all the sci-fi & horror ones like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick or Stephen King. I don't recall which one it was but a character had a train set that had a short in it on the tracks. The arcing electricity would give off this same smell. I learned through this short story that this is an incidental way to produce ozone (O3), a greenhouse gas. And that the smell is in fact a low amount of ozone. Perhaps you've detected it at the dentists office or while operating an engine? From the Wikipedia entry:
Ozone may be formed from O2 by electrical discharges and by action of high energy electromagnetic radiation. Certain electrical equipment generate significant levels of ozone. This is especially true of devices using high voltages, such as ionic air purifiers, laser printers, photocopiers, and arc welders. Electric motors using brushes can generate ozone from repeated sparking inside the unit. Large motors that use brushes, such as those used by elevators or hydraulic pumps, will generate more ozone than smaller motors. I hope he doesn't write himself off as crazy if he did detect ozone. Or at least investigate where it could have come from. If there's tiny molecules of ozone floating around in orbit of the earth, I'm certain that would be scientifically interesting. Perhaps he should test the properties of these materials when exposed to ozone, do they attract the molecules? Or perhaps he should put the materials in a vacuum here on earth for a bit and then pull them out and see if he detects the same smell?
The human nose can be an extremely strong tool for some individuals, perhaps this is more than just psychosomatic? It would drive me crazy to never investigate this if I were in his shoes. It may seem trivial but sometimes a peculiar notion is what drives scientists make a novel discovery... or waste lots and lots of time.
The video that they forced off of YouTube can, thanks to Gawker, be found here.
As a non-scientologist, this is scary. Possibly the most scary part of it is the editing. I have no problem with people having convictions but when he talks about "fightin' the fight" and "people needing them" and "people depending on them"... I get a little frightened that people around me think like that. You may be able to argue that it's little different than Christianity or Islam but what I really fear are the people who are part of Sea Org or offshore from the states and may have given up their rights as a civilian & American to have some sort of special standing in this group.
Whatever the case, I will not ever affiliate myself with a Scientologist and after reading Have You Lived Before This Life, I will do everything in my power to convince those that I know and love to avoid Scientology.
The thing that concerns me about Scientology is that after reading some books by Hubbard about it, I have found very little criticism of it. A book & some articles with the most notable one being Time Magazine. It seems like such an easy target. It takes seconds to find books criticizing Catholics or Muslims... why are there so few publications attacking Scientology? There is definitely something scary about a very powerful organization and if they have people dumping money into them, I do not doubt they are capable of silencing anyone (unfortunately, even Slashdot).
He's head of an internet based organization entitled "Save the Children."
I found it odd that the whole article goes on talking about how pedophiles use the internet to get photos and contact other pedophiles. But he never once talks about how it has empowered his organization to receive tips, track these people, pose as children to catch them, pose as other pedophiles to gain evidence, etc.
So odd how we were only selectively told the bad things the internet allows the criminals to do. And yet in the article, they remind us that they are not criticizing the internet.
Perhaps I would have taken this man more seriously had he looked at it with a neutral and objective point of view.
What happens when you induce a fluctuating magnetic field through a metal? That's right, hysteresis drag. So, he's basically built a magnetic brake. Then he shorts out his coils, and what happens? Sure enough, it accelerates; he's shorted out his brake! Well, I think he's inducing magnets through a magnetic field--not a metal. And this doesn't act as a break but instead speeds it up. The interesting concept here is that he's using a property known as Lenz's Law that creates something called back EMF through those coils of wire that used to have energy running through them. If you watch all four parts, it seems that once the generator reaches a certain speed, it does not slow down when he cuts power to the system. Instead the two coils are still generating electricity from the magnets flying by them due to Lenz's law. Which is then fed into the generator which then spins the magnets which then cause a current in the coils which then... etc.
Nothing to see here, move along. Although not a physicist, I do not agree with that statement. From what I've seen, from what the MIT scientists have seen, this merits further investigation. I have many questions: Does this scale up? How strong are his magnets? Do the magnets depolarize over time? If he speeds it up really fast, does it pass an equilibrium point and start to accelerate with the feedback energy? Can he produce energy from the closed system and charge a batter?
Wow, I'm almost cautiously excited. Call me stupid but I want to know more.
Well, I've noticed that when it's an educational institution, then it's not a troll. Filed by a lawyer in Marshall, Texas means troll for sure though. These rules are weird. I guess it all depends on your point of view.
Although, you should note that a couple decades ago, universities were not well funded so some senators passed a bill that would allow them to keep patents. Why not, they do the research? Today, universities are still building those portfolios. So the joke is kind of on the companies. If they were smart, they should have been dumping millions into universities in the form of donations to keep patents in the corporate sector.
You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free. But I think a lot of people would call me some sort of communist for that and that I'd be stagnating the economy or some such theory that I can't comprehend. Regardless, I'd be willing to buy shares in certain universities if I could. Imagine what those portfolios are going to start to bring in in revenue!
So I asked my youngest son, who is an astrophysicist and techie, and he set me straight. He said:
"No, dad, these people aren't like you. They have souls unlike lawyers but they lack lives.
A lawyer will have many dates while a geek or nerd will have none. You might wow a girl by bringing her home to your mansion and serving her fine wine & caviar, a Slashdotter will call upstairs to his mother for more rice krispy treats and kool aid.
You know your bounds on expertise and the law is your opinion. The Slashdotter knows no bounds on his expertise and his opinion is the law.
So you see, dad, if you try and communicate with these beings, you best not make a mistake or confuse Shatner with Nimoy or you'll face the most demeaning comments the internet has ever seen.
But my pop-culture saturated brain always translates that username as, "Single Female Lawyer," and I worry about visitors from Omicron Persei 7. The first time I read it, I actually thought it was a pun on The Hyperchicken which would always start his sentences with "Now, your honor, I'm may be just a simple hyperchicken from a backwoods asteroid..." from the same pop culture show you speak of.
Luckily, once I read his posts, I was quite impressed and informed but also saddened by the way he was treated when he was first interviewed on Slashdot. But lucky for us, he keeps contributing massively and acts as a bridge between us and that strange foreign legal world where logic will get you killed.
Furthermore, I hope I get a follow up story where NewYorkCountryLawyer gets mad and pushes back. Of all the people assaulted by the RIAA, he's the most likely to be able to comprehensively do something about that. Hats off to you, Ty & Ray!
Just, please, NYCL, for the love of God whatever you do do not install P2P client software on your computer at this point!:-)
Hotmail Doesn't Work With Linux Firefox 2.0 That's a bit misleading. I used Hotmail on my Linux box last night. It was the regular web interface & worked fine.
So there must be some new enhancements that maybe only subscribers get to use? Or perhaps these are more office tools that don't work in Firefox. Ok, well, before I go on, I wish someone somewhere would have pointed out that the Google apps are both free and work in Firefox. So that's sounding more and more like an easy choice/solution for Mitch Meyran's problems.
I would posit, however, that since Google's apps are probably for the most part built using GWT I'd bet that Microsoft's equivalent will be based on Silverlight. I have no idea since I have not used this but I do know that Firefox's Silverlight plugin is in beta. What does surprise me is that my company allows me to use Outlook Web Interface which 1) works in Linux & 2) works in Firefox 2.0. Most surprisingly it's quite slick!
So if I may state my opinion, you're probably suffering from Microsoft's attempt to assert its dominance by forcing you to use Explorer in Windows. So if they are forcing you into this ultimatum, you can either respond by bending to their will and falling into their Monopolistic strong arm practices or you can look for another solution that meets your needs. It would be an easy choice for me but you're the consumer with the money, it's your choice.
Oh yeah! Thanks for pointing it out. Obama is muslim. So US needs to be involved. Well, from his website:
It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn't fall out in church. The questions I had didn't magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth. You seem to be confused. Obama is not a Muslim. Did you mean Osama Bin Laden?
Good luck with that. For the love of Cloacina, I don't believe in 'luck'! You oppressive religious zealot! Stop trying to press your religious beliefs on me! Get off my back already! Sounds like you need to take some of your own advice.
These pictures aren't so bad! Here he is betting his followers that he can slide all the way down a railing without falling off. Here is his senior picture. Here he is preparing to be tossed into the air on a blanket. Here he is on fire (about to be Super Saiyan 2). Here he is full blown Super Saiyan 3 complete with human headed horse. Here he is at an Ozzy Ozborne concert (far right). Last but not least, here's what you'd have to print to be murdered in Europe.
All of that on Wikipedia? How does Jimmy Wales sleep at night?!
Oh, I am so going to end up trapped in my grave being tormented by djinns until the end of time. After that, Shaitan be kickin' me old school. Hope he likes classic rock and indie bands!
The notes left on the petition site come from all over the world. "It's totally unacceptable to print the Prophet's picture," Saadia Bukhari from Pakistan wrote in a message. "It shows insensitivity towards Muslim feelings and should be removed immediately." Perhaps you should instead choose simply not to use the site? If you believe that to be true, you should be condemning images of him everywhere at once, not just on Wikipedia. Why aren't you petitioning against all of these sites? Why are you picking on Wikipedia?
Slashdot Mirror
Three years! In (Moore's) computer years that's like 18 generations, prior to the great depression of dotcoms or even the Civil (browser) War.
It's amazing that some employer is kind enough to provide this old geriatric coder a job. I try to stay out of the way of the new blood and stave off death for a few more years but my old concepts of "EJBs" and "Java Server Faces" is just embarrassing to them.
A new recruit came in the other day, I told him not to feel bad and we'd make him 1337 soon enough. He just chuckled and patted me on the head and said, "There there, old timer, we'll get you some streaming Matlock off the server while we clean up your mess."
I miss my friends that have already moved on from this life to the next, those that are managers already. I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friends.
So please, when you see an ancient dinosaur like me lumbering around trying to figure out what the f*ck ruby is and why I have to put it on rails and then wonder how that was any different than what I used to be doing, please be kind. Have patience, my mind isn't as nimble as it once was. Three years of Jack Daniels and coding ravages a man and leaves him a dusty shell.
Just promise me you'll never forget me when I'm put in the basement next to a pile of boxes next month. Please come visit, please!
It's also licensed under the creative commons and has not one ad. Can your site say that?
Sometimes, a bulleted list of black text on a white background is a godsend to these old eyes and more than gets the jobs done.
I tried to think of metrics to relay up the chain (a special thank you to the stat-scm goal in maven) but I come up with some pretty lame ones:
- Code to comment ratio is desired at 1:1 (at least in the commercial world)
- A class/method/function/procedure/module desired size should be defined and rated
- # of Unit tests
As you can see these are the ones that I found could be automatically gathered. And even these have exceptions. Anything else I think of either takes too much time to gather or is subjective. This is tough, I would like to default to peer review but oftentimes I find teammates voicing their personal hatred for an individual or taking into account personal qualities when ranking a developer. Real Life Example: Teammate A is from MIT and teammate B thinks everyone from MIT is a god. Unfortunately Teammate A hasn't done anything but criticize everyone's code without any constructive comments to make it better.I submitted this story hoping it would open dialog on measuring coding abilities in a semi-automated way.
This is the one with Tom Cruise, right?
I have not seen the video but I find it quite humorous when some organization's materials for training/brainwashing are leaked and it makes headlines. I.E. Scientology, RIAA, etc. What would even be funnier if the RIAA took the same position the Church of Scientology did and tried to repress this video.
Repression of information is the first sign of a flawed ideology. As we've seen in many court cases in which they've shut down systems, the RIAA is against any kind of information sharing via P2P software and therefore has a flawed ideology.
The problem with the shuttle disaster (both of them, really) is external pressures that are not in anyway at all scientific. The pressure from your manager at Morton Thiokol to perform better, faster and cheaper. The pressure from the government to beat those damned ruskies into space at all costs.
So this is really a case of engineering ethics, when do you push back? As a software developer, I never push back. Me: "There's a bug that happens once every 1,000 uses of this web survey but it would take me a week to pin it down and fix it." My Boss: "Screw it--the user will blame that on the intarweb, just keep moving forward." But could I consciously say the same thing about a shuttle with people's lives at stake? No, I could not.
So when an engineer at Morton Thiokol said that they hadn't tested the O-Ring at that weather temperature that fateful day and that information was either not relayed or lost all the way up to the people at NASA who were about to launch--it wasn't a failure of engineering, it was a failure of ethics. External forces had mutated engineering into a liability, not an asset.
And there's a whole slough of them I studied in college: * Space Shuttle Columbia disaster (2003)
* Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (1986)
* Chernobyl disaster (1986)
* Bhopal disaster (1984)
* Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse (1981)
* Love Canal (1980), Lois Gibbs
* Three Mile Island accident (1979)
* Citigroup Center (1978), William LeMessurier
* Ford Pinto safety problems (1970s)
* Minamata disease (1908-1973)
* Chevrolet Corvair safety problems (1960s), Ralph Nader, and Unsafe at Any Speed
* Boston molasses disaster (1919)
* Quebec Bridge collapse (1907), Theodore Cooper
* Johnstown Flood (1889), South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club
* Tay Bridge Disaster (1879), Thomas Bouch, William Henry Barlow, and William Yolland
* Ashtabula River Railroad Disaster (1876), Amasa Stone So I agree with Feynman's comments in relationship to engineering and the further comments to software development. But I don't find them to be a fault in the nature of engineering, just a fault in our ethics. What does capitalism and competitiveness drive us to do? Cut corners, often.
The best part is when you click "Watch Them in Action!" and it takes you to a page.
.tv sites really. Does Microsoft utilize any of those freely available options? Oh no, of course not! YouTube is Google! Even if we don't have a competing solution we must not use theirs!
.asx file all you non-Windows users.
... must be his hair. Well, we'll see about that! Put the action figures I've hand crafted here immediately into production! Release plush dolls of clippy! Find me puppies to carry around with me at press conferences and when their cute factor falls below 40%, have them killed and replaced!
Now, a lot of sites have this crazy idea of embedded video that streams from a site or source that's dedicated to streaming video. You know like YouTube, Blip.tv or any of the
So what happens when you click "view"? Well, it creates a popup window that opens up Windows Media Player! Good luck viewing a
The least Microsoft could do is create their own streaming video server but, alas, we must revert to our archaic mentality, reject all that is sensible and invade my privacy and comfort zone by automatically opening a program that is tied to the kernel (and at least historically had admin rights when I didn't) sitting in kernel land on my computer.
Assistant: Mr. Ballmer! Research indicates that Richard Stallman is 50% more cuddly than you!
Ballmer: Damnit
I offer a lower priced eldavojohn branded E-Meter for scientologists looking to test themselves with the judgmental grand inquisitor present. It comes complete with car battery and nipple clamps!
And yet, the scientologists claim that this E-Meter is useless by itself, you need someone trained to interpret it. How convenient and yet they restrict its sale. If it's useless to the untrained, why do they stop sales of it?
Help me out here, I have a Pentium III 877Mhz processor machine with about a half gig of DDR ram that I purchased in 2000. It still runs fine. For some reason when I install Visual Studio on the Win XP partition, it does not work so well. As in, it is barely usable for small applications and hangs indefinitely for large projects I have. Yet when I write a C++ application in the Linux partition using a number of various open source editors that utilize GCC, it works quite well. I don't mean just VI or Emacs, I mean several things including Gnome and KDE graphical editors (like Glade & KDevelop).
So tell me, what am I doing wrong? Several people have instructed me to buy a new computer but for some reason I do not think that I should have to buy a new computer every time a new version of Visual Studio comes out.
But I don't quite agree with Gates here. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools
... because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. False. This is an opinion. It may be true for some cases but it is ignorance to say that any aspect of coding has a magic bullet. Even XML has it's trade offs. To say this only expresses ignorance or a poor attempt at brainwashing/marketing.So this is all around good. I like it even though it's not open source, I think it will overall help Microsoft but may also clarify student's understandings of when to use what tools. I think the next step is for Microsoft to make another license that says you can use it for personal use but once you use it to make money (commercial) you need a commercial license. I don't find anything wrong with that business model. One step further and it could be released under a pseudo MSPL license and another step in the distant future might also entail an even more open state for their development tools. Who knows? All I know is that although this isn't perfect, it's a move in the right direction.
What would really be juicy for me to hear is what Ballmer's take is on this move. I think Gates is generally moving in the right direction but I get this sense that Steve Ballmer is pure evil. Is he seething over this move which to him might just look like lost revenue? Is he even pretending to see this the same way Gates does or is he still in the blind rage "I will f*cking kill ____" mode? I think there are rough times ahead when Gates leaves the scene altogether and I think we will see Ballmer say some pretty stupid things directly contradicting Gates' "just another tool for their belt" view on this.
Steven Hirsch: "Won't somebody please think of my profit margins ... *cough* I mean ... children?!"
According to most definitions of 'belly up': 1. (idiomatic) Dead or defunct, often used with go, went, or turn. (see go belly-up)
After several financial failures, the organization went belly up. I'm pretty sure that since SGI has slowly become a niche provider for creating solutions for a few specific customers, they see Linux Networx as another good partner in another niche market. SGI isn't at the greatness they once were but it looks like they're holding their own in what they are doing.
When I was a teenager I read a lot of short stories. Especially all the sci-fi & horror ones like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick or Stephen King. I don't recall which one it was but a character had a train set that had a short in it on the tracks. The arcing electricity would give off this same smell. I learned through this short story that this is an incidental way to produce ozone (O3), a greenhouse gas. And that the smell is in fact a low amount of ozone. Perhaps you've detected it at the dentists office or while operating an engine? From the Wikipedia entry: Ozone may be formed from O2 by electrical discharges and by action of high energy electromagnetic radiation. Certain electrical equipment generate significant levels of ozone. This is especially true of devices using high voltages, such as ionic air purifiers, laser printers, photocopiers, and arc welders. Electric motors using brushes can generate ozone from repeated sparking inside the unit. Large motors that use brushes, such as those used by elevators or hydraulic pumps, will generate more ozone than smaller motors. I hope he doesn't write himself off as crazy if he did detect ozone. Or at least investigate where it could have come from. If there's tiny molecules of ozone floating around in orbit of the earth, I'm certain that would be scientifically interesting. Perhaps he should test the properties of these materials when exposed to ozone, do they attract the molecules? Or perhaps he should put the materials in a vacuum here on earth for a bit and then pull them out and see if he detects the same smell?
The human nose can be an extremely strong tool for some individuals, perhaps this is more than just psychosomatic? It would drive me crazy to never investigate this if I were in his shoes. It may seem trivial but sometimes a peculiar notion is what drives scientists make a novel discovery
The video that they forced off of YouTube can, thanks to Gawker, be found here.
... I get a little frightened that people around me think like that. You may be able to argue that it's little different than Christianity or Islam but what I really fear are the people who are part of Sea Org or offshore from the states and may have given up their rights as a civilian & American to have some sort of special standing in this group.
... why are there so few publications attacking Scientology? There is definitely something scary about a very powerful organization and if they have people dumping money into them, I do not doubt they are capable of silencing anyone (unfortunately, even Slashdot).
As a non-scientologist, this is scary. Possibly the most scary part of it is the editing. I have no problem with people having convictions but when he talks about "fightin' the fight" and "people needing them" and "people depending on them"
Whatever the case, I will not ever affiliate myself with a Scientologist and after reading Have You Lived Before This Life, I will do everything in my power to convince those that I know and love to avoid Scientology.
The thing that concerns me about Scientology is that after reading some books by Hubbard about it, I have found very little criticism of it. A book & some articles with the most notable one being Time Magazine. It seems like such an easy target. It takes seconds to find books criticizing Catholics or Muslims
He's head of an internet based organization entitled "Save the Children."
I found it odd that the whole article goes on talking about how pedophiles use the internet to get photos and contact other pedophiles. But he never once talks about how it has empowered his organization to receive tips, track these people, pose as children to catch them, pose as other pedophiles to gain evidence, etc.
So odd how we were only selectively told the bad things the internet allows the criminals to do. And yet in the article, they remind us that they are not criticizing the internet.
Perhaps I would have taken this man more seriously had he looked at it with a neutral and objective point of view.
Wow, I'm almost cautiously excited. Call me stupid but I want to know more.
Well, I've noticed that when it's an educational institution, then it's not a troll. Filed by a lawyer in Marshall, Texas means troll for sure though. These rules are weird. I guess it all depends on your point of view.
Although, you should note that a couple decades ago, universities were not well funded so some senators passed a bill that would allow them to keep patents. Why not, they do the research? Today, universities are still building those portfolios. So the joke is kind of on the companies. If they were smart, they should have been dumping millions into universities in the form of donations to keep patents in the corporate sector.
You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free. But I think a lot of people would call me some sort of communist for that and that I'd be stagnating the economy or some such theory that I can't comprehend. Regardless, I'd be willing to buy shares in certain universities if I could. Imagine what those portfolios are going to start to bring in in revenue!
A lawyer will have many dates while a geek or nerd will have none. You might wow a girl by bringing her home to your mansion and serving her fine wine & caviar, a Slashdotter will call upstairs to his mother for more rice krispy treats and kool aid.
You know your bounds on expertise and the law is your opinion. The Slashdotter knows no bounds on his expertise and his opinion is the law.
So you see, dad, if you try and communicate with these beings, you best not make a mistake or confuse Shatner with Nimoy or you'll face the most demeaning comments the internet has ever seen.
Luckily, once I read his posts, I was quite impressed and informed but also saddened by the way he was treated when he was first interviewed on Slashdot. But lucky for us, he keeps contributing massively and acts as a bridge between us and that strange foreign legal world where logic will get you killed.
Furthermore, I hope I get a follow up story where NewYorkCountryLawyer gets mad and pushes back. Of all the people assaulted by the RIAA, he's the most likely to be able to comprehensively do something about that. Hats off to you, Ty & Ray!
Just, please, NYCL, for the love of God whatever you do do not install P2P client software on your computer at this point!
So there must be some new enhancements that maybe only subscribers get to use? Or perhaps these are more office tools that don't work in Firefox. Ok, well, before I go on, I wish someone somewhere would have pointed out that the Google apps are both free and work in Firefox. So that's sounding more and more like an easy choice/solution for Mitch Meyran's problems.
I would posit, however, that since Google's apps are probably for the most part built using GWT I'd bet that Microsoft's equivalent will be based on Silverlight. I have no idea since I have not used this but I do know that Firefox's Silverlight plugin is in beta. What does surprise me is that my company allows me to use Outlook Web Interface which 1) works in Linux & 2) works in Firefox 2.0. Most surprisingly it's quite slick!
So if I may state my opinion, you're probably suffering from Microsoft's attempt to assert its dominance by forcing you to use Explorer in Windows. So if they are forcing you into this ultimatum, you can either respond by bending to their will and falling into their Monopolistic strong arm practices or you can look for another solution that meets your needs. It would be an easy choice for me but you're the consumer with the money, it's your choice.
All of that on Wikipedia? How does Jimmy Wales sleep at night?!
Oh, I am so going to end up trapped in my grave being tormented by djinns until the end of time. After that, Shaitan be kickin' me old school. Hope he likes classic rock and indie bands! The notes left on the petition site come from all over the world. "It's totally unacceptable to print the Prophet's picture," Saadia Bukhari from Pakistan wrote in a message. "It shows insensitivity towards Muslim feelings and should be removed immediately." Perhaps you should instead choose simply not to use the site? If you believe that to be true, you should be condemning images of him everywhere at once, not just on Wikipedia. Why aren't you petitioning against all of these sites? Why are you picking on Wikipedia?