Which character of "3G" did AT&T not understand when they agreed to offer a product by that name?
Meanwhile, this AT&T network bog-down caused me -- and I'm assuming others as well -- to switch from other carriers to T-Mobile because of their Fave Five plan that allows unlimited calling to a specified five numbers. One can be "in-network" on AT&T without suffering the AT&T network on both ends of the connection.
A "hotshot" programmer will aggressively abstract. A mediocre programmer -- one who keeps his nose to the grindstone and is ever mindful of deadlines -- is more likely to "inline" constants (i.e. not abstract them at all) or even repetitive blocks of code. When ccde and constants are "inline", code is much easier to read because you're not constantly looking up in other files what the abstractions are.
Supposedly, both abstraction and locality aid maintenance.
The truly master programmer balances abstraction with locality. And takes into account who will be maintaining and the expected lifespand of the code. If the code is to be retired in two years, why bother abstracting? The general rule of thumb is that abstracted code has to be utilized six times in order to make the investment worthwhile.
When it comes to abstraction, the master programmer abides by the words of the Federation President, "Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing."
WorldNetDaily.com does its own investigative reporting and is always trying to get press credentials to events. Sometimes they get them, and sometimes they don't since they are not "traditional media".
We Are Change is an entire nationwide network of aggressive news gatherers.
One of Alex Jones' early exploits was to crash the Bohemian Grove and report on it.
Many of the armchair bloggers such as myself (when I ran underreported.com from 2002-2004) simply read government websites and scientific literature and report on it. Journalism seems to have this code of ethics that says you have to get a quote from a human being before you can report on it. That's nonsense -- all this stuff is out there on thomas.loc.gov and everywhere else and the traditional media ignores it -- and when they do report on it they don't even bother to link to it.
So much action gets recorded on cell phone videos now. Important stuff gets bid out to the traditional media because they're willing to pay more. After they die, the popular bloggers will take it, or it'll just end up on YouTube and bloggers will link to it there.
Today, we have home theater instead of cinema. Maybe someday when home computing power increases enough we'll have home-based web indexing, and we won't have to put up with censorship.
I will always know "euflooria" term as a winner in the monthly neologism contest run by Washington, DC columnist Bob Levey. It refers to the sensation of being on the Beltway in free-flowing traffic when the other side is at a standstill in a traffic jam.
The most important societal change that the cell phone has brought is freedom of travel for women. As a result, the rape whistle has been obsoleted. You can hypothesize all you want about reaction times for the whistle vs. the phone, but empirically speaking, the rape whistle popular in the 1990's is nowhere to be seen in the new millenium.
Google is a CIA front operation. Google's search was nothing special in the beginning, and only years later caught up to some of the technologies used by its competitors of the era, such as Hotbot. In my post I excluded Google from consideration as a "black ops" company.
Apple is the exception that proves the rule. And Apple's innovations are limited to providing sexy interfaces to technologies that had been established by multiple competitors 2-3 years prior to Apple's entries: MP3 player and smartphone.
Was it reasonable to blame Kirk for the firing upon of Gorkon's ship?
The level of innovation present in Word 2.0, Excel 4.0, and Visual Studio 4.0 is not something you "buy". In the.NET era, Microsoft went around the world hiring academics for "Microsoft Research". Dream teams aren't made by hiring a collection of best-in-field individuals -- pro-bowl and all-star games are proof of that. They're made by a combination of luck, timing, and a lack of bureaucracy. Management has little control.
Please, the only "tech" influence Bill Gates had on Microsoft was clinging to Basic for far too long. Imagine how much further ahead we'd be now if the 1990's Microsoft RAD IDE were C++ instead of Basic, and Microsoft Office Scripting were Lua or Perl instead of VBA?
The decade was lost for the entire tech sector, not just Microsoft. 9/11 triggered a recession that caused most companies to pull back and take on only low-risk maintenance-type projects -- nothing cutting edge. All the good software developers and cutting edge work were relegated to black ops, which we don't hear about, except in bits and pieces like Total Information Awareness and Google's Singularity sub-campus on the NASA Ames campus (which is known for its AI work).
Oh, there was a bit of an economic lift in the middle of the decade -- the housing boom triggered by Greenspan's one-percent interest rates. So, some software development work went into the mortgage industry. That's as useful, as exciting, and as enduring as granite countertops (which were just a waystation between Corian and compressed quartz). Then the Great Recession hit in 2007 -- back to no innovation at all (as least outside of cleared work).
What do we have to show for it on the desktop? Window bars that are blurry and hard to read. Faaaan-tastic.
Where the heck is end-user database/web development? It's like Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes are living time capsules of their 1995 versions. Where is a unified naming system that treats e-mail messages, files, web URLs, and database records homogeneously? Where are agents? Why do I have to manually save every check images from my online banking? Why aren't these automatically downloaded to my computer by a software agent?
The Bush I administration tricked Saddam into thinking the U.S. would not respond to an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Accordingly, 100,000 people paid with their lives.
It's been five years since I this piece was written at Mises, and five years since I posted a link to it from Slashdot, but it's still relevant and needs repeating:
IEEE Spectrum properly refers to the attack on the Syrian hardware as a "back door". The New York Times not only failed to use the Hacker's Dictionary, it failed to use the terminology from IEEE Spectrum, which it even hyperlinked to.
The answer is contained in footnote 16 of the Wikipedia entry for Europe:
The map [showing Russia in Europe] shows one of the most commonly accepted delineations of the geographical boundaries of Europe, as used by National Geographic and Encyclopedia Britannica. Whether countries are considered in Europe or Asia can vary in sources, for example in the classification of the CIA World Factbook or that of the BBC.
In a nutshell: geographically, Russia is in Europe as it is west of the Urals. Politically, it is in Asia.
It reminds me of how Europeans consider Mexico to be in South America. That makes even less sense given the existence of NAFTA.
P.S. a present-day time traveler going back to 1988 might be surprised to read this New York Times article that extols:
The hottest young English pop star of the moment is Rick Astley, a 21-year-old singer from a suburb of Manchester, whose debut single, ''Never Gonna Give You Up'' (RCA), has sold a million copies in Britain and reached No. 1 ranking in almost every other European country. The song is now rapidly climbing the United States pop charts and is the country's best-selling 12-inch single.
The record's most striking quality is Mr. Astley's voice - a rich, throbbing baritone that suggests Tom Jones crossed with Luther Vandross. It is definitely not the kind of voice one expects to hear on a contemporary dance record. Since ''Never Gonna Give You Up,'' Mr. Astley has gone on to score two more major English hits, ''Whenever You Need Somebody'' (the title song of his debut album) and a revival of ''When I Fall in Love,'' which re-creates note for note the classic Gordon Jenkins arrangement for Nat (King) Cole's 1957 recording.
Mr. Astley is the latest discovery of the successful producing and songwriting team of Stock-Aitken-Waterman, which also produces the group Bananarama. The team has popularized a streamlined homogenized pop-disco sound with an unruffled high-gloss surface that stands in marked contrast to the more angular, rhythmically inventive dance-funk of Prince and his disciples.
''I'm influenced by a lot of black American artists,'' Mr. Astley said in a recent telephone interview. ''Luther Vandross is one of my favorites, and I like James Ingram and Jeffrey Osborne.''
At least for now, Mr. Astley is content to have his voice packaged by Stock-Aiken-Waterman.
''I like dance music,'' he said. ''I'm happy doing what I'm doing and want to get more deeply into it.'' Glass and Ginsberg
Astley's videos were a big thing at the time, coming just two years into MTV's decline that was precipitated by Viacom's purchase of it and MTV still had some of its original appeal of showing a) videos that were b) popular.
Great, so now drivers, having this knowledge of crumple zones, will take more risks.
One member of the pedestrian advocacy community refers to these innovations as "safe crashing". They make drivers safer, but also encourage more risky driving, putting unprotected pedestrians at disproportionate risk.
Copyright law isn't killing culture -- it's promoting culture -- just that it's the culture of Big Brother where memories are supposed to "questioned" as stated by CNN on their front page last month:
In recent years, scientists have demonstrated that human memories are surprisingly dishonest. The act of recalling an event (say, your eighth birthday party) changes the structure of that memory in the brain. Details are tweaked; the narrative is altered.
The more you think about it, the less accurate your recollection becomes, and the less reliable it is as a basis for making any kind of conclusion. (So maybe you shouldn't hire a clown for your kid's party after all.)
Check out the AT&T future-predicting "You Will" television ads from 1993/1994. They not only fail to predict the Internet at that late date ("buy theater tickets from an ATM"), more critically, they completely fail to predict the game-changing effect of the cell phone. The cell phone is even more of a liberator of women than the (non-big-wheel) bicycle was in 1890. The YouTube video What If Movies Had Cell Phones demonstrates how the lack of a cell phone was a critical plot device in the pre-cell-phone days, and by implication how the cell phone has restructured society.
Also, a lot of technological advances, as always, are war- and government-centered and shrouded in secrecy. Although predicted in 1948, more than the stipulated 50 years ago, Big Brother has become a reality in the NSA office of the San Francisco AT&T building. GPS, Tomahawks, and Predators make destruction of arbitrarily-specified buildings and infrastructure available at the touch of a button. The cat ia out of the bag now regarding the Google sub-campus of the NASA Ames campus, which is known for its Artificial Intelligence research -- they have now named it the Singularity University -- who knows how much progress they've made thus far and whether intermediate results are helping in the Big Brother effort. It's not common knowledge yet, but the five-century tradition of subjugating the world through a surface navy has ended. Surface ships, including and especially aircraft carriers, are obsolete, being vulnerable to hypersonic surface-skimming missiles. The stipulated 50 years ago, battleships were still a hot thing.
This IEEE Spectrum piece is so bad that it not only doesn't recognize these recent and often secret game-changing innovations, it failed to mention the past innovation with the greatest societal impact: the S-Bend toilet drainpipe, which allowed indoor toilets without constantly emanating odors.
The software industry had its foray into copy protection, and learned its lesson hard.
Tenenbaum committed his acts before Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store went online. He got caught in the vortex of the learning curve that the RIAA is currently going through that the BSA has already finished.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Profile page, go to the "Friends" box on the left-hand side and click on the pencil. "Show friend list to everyone" is a checkbox.
Meanwhile, this AT&T network bog-down caused me -- and I'm assuming others as well -- to switch from other carriers to T-Mobile because of their Fave Five plan that allows unlimited calling to a specified five numbers. One can be "in-network" on AT&T without suffering the AT&T network on both ends of the connection.
I was surprised last week in Target to seem some cheap phonographs stacked next to the Christmas ornaments. I think that means the fad is over.
A "hotshot" programmer will aggressively abstract. A mediocre programmer -- one who keeps his nose to the grindstone and is ever mindful of deadlines -- is more likely to "inline" constants (i.e. not abstract them at all) or even repetitive blocks of code. When ccde and constants are "inline", code is much easier to read because you're not constantly looking up in other files what the abstractions are.
Supposedly, both abstraction and locality aid maintenance.
The truly master programmer balances abstraction with locality. And takes into account who will be maintaining and the expected lifespand of the code. If the code is to be retired in two years, why bother abstracting? The general rule of thumb is that abstracted code has to be utilized six times in order to make the investment worthwhile.
When it comes to abstraction, the master programmer abides by the words of the Federation President, "Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing."
Today, we have home theater instead of cinema. Maybe someday when home computing power increases enough we'll have home-based web indexing, and we won't have to put up with censorship.
Just trying to be prepared for when Tiananmen happens in the U.S.
I will always know "euflooria" term as a winner in the monthly neologism contest run by Washington, DC columnist Bob Levey. It refers to the sensation of being on the Beltway in free-flowing traffic when the other side is at a standstill in a traffic jam.
Sushi Den in Denver flies fresh fish in daily from Japan.
The most important societal change that the cell phone has brought is freedom of travel for women. As a result, the rape whistle has been obsoleted. You can hypothesize all you want about reaction times for the whistle vs. the phone, but empirically speaking, the rape whistle popular in the 1990's is nowhere to be seen in the new millenium.
Apple is the exception that proves the rule. And Apple's innovations are limited to providing sexy interfaces to technologies that had been established by multiple competitors 2-3 years prior to Apple's entries: MP3 player and smartphone.
The level of innovation present in Word 2.0, Excel 4.0, and Visual Studio 4.0 is not something you "buy". In the .NET era, Microsoft went around the world hiring academics for "Microsoft Research". Dream teams aren't made by hiring a collection of best-in-field individuals -- pro-bowl and all-star games are proof of that. They're made by a combination of luck, timing, and a lack of bureaucracy. Management has little control.
Please, the only "tech" influence Bill Gates had on Microsoft was clinging to Basic for far too long. Imagine how much further ahead we'd be now if the 1990's Microsoft RAD IDE were C++ instead of Basic, and Microsoft Office Scripting were Lua or Perl instead of VBA?
Oh, there was a bit of an economic lift in the middle of the decade -- the housing boom triggered by Greenspan's one-percent interest rates. So, some software development work went into the mortgage industry. That's as useful, as exciting, and as enduring as granite countertops (which were just a waystation between Corian and compressed quartz). Then the Great Recession hit in 2007 -- back to no innovation at all (as least outside of cleared work).
What do we have to show for it on the desktop? Window bars that are blurry and hard to read. Faaaan-tastic.
Where the heck is end-user database/web development? It's like Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes are living time capsules of their 1995 versions. Where is a unified naming system that treats e-mail messages, files, web URLs, and database records homogeneously? Where are agents? Why do I have to manually save every check images from my online banking? Why aren't these automatically downloaded to my computer by a software agent?
Always blaming or crediting the CEO and never the techs, like Martha Stewart's husband.
The Bush I administration tricked Saddam into thinking the U.S. would not respond to an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Accordingly, 100,000 people paid with their lives.
FDR's Thought Police: Still Alive, Still Censoring.
IEEE Spectrum properly refers to the attack on the Syrian hardware as a "back door". The New York Times not only failed to use the Hacker's Dictionary, it failed to use the terminology from IEEE Spectrum, which it even hyperlinked to.
"Trust the vote"? Only if the people voting are regular readers of dailypaul.com
In a nutshell: geographically, Russia is in Europe as it is west of the Urals. Politically, it is in Asia.
It reminds me of how Europeans consider Mexico to be in South America. That makes even less sense given the existence of NAFTA.
Is that related to RickRolling?
P.S. a present-day time traveler going back to 1988 might be surprised to read this New York Times article that extols:
Astley's videos were a big thing at the time, coming just two years into MTV's decline that was precipitated by Viacom's purchase of it and MTV still had some of its original appeal of showing a) videos that were b) popular.
One member of the pedestrian advocacy community refers to these innovations as "safe crashing". They make drivers safer, but also encourage more risky driving, putting unprotected pedestrians at disproportionate risk.
10 ways to be a better thinker
Also, a lot of technological advances, as always, are war- and government-centered and shrouded in secrecy. Although predicted in 1948, more than the stipulated 50 years ago, Big Brother has become a reality in the NSA office of the San Francisco AT&T building. GPS, Tomahawks, and Predators make destruction of arbitrarily-specified buildings and infrastructure available at the touch of a button. The cat ia out of the bag now regarding the Google sub-campus of the NASA Ames campus, which is known for its Artificial Intelligence research -- they have now named it the Singularity University -- who knows how much progress they've made thus far and whether intermediate results are helping in the Big Brother effort. It's not common knowledge yet, but the five-century tradition of subjugating the world through a surface navy has ended. Surface ships, including and especially aircraft carriers, are obsolete, being vulnerable to hypersonic surface-skimming missiles. The stipulated 50 years ago, battleships were still a hot thing.
This IEEE Spectrum piece is so bad that it not only doesn't recognize these recent and often secret game-changing innovations, it failed to mention the past innovation with the greatest societal impact: the S-Bend toilet drainpipe, which allowed indoor toilets without constantly emanating odors.
Tenenbaum committed his acts before Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store went online. He got caught in the vortex of the learning curve that the RIAA is currently going through that the BSA has already finished.
Under which category -- human factors, weather, or mechanical problems -- would "double bird stike" fall?