We know how much space all our valid stuff should be taking.
Not really. We know how much space our supposedly-valid stuff is taking right now, but that doesn't tell us whether any of that space contains code injected by some unknown malware.
Q: How do you get users to read error messages?
A: How do you write error messages that are worth reading?
(+5, agree completely)
Attention tortured support techs at $evil_vendor: You know why I don't read the error messages in your app? Because the "Could not save calibration file because an unknown frobnitz DB error occurred. (Ok/Cancel)" looks almost exactly like the "Are you sure you want to save the new calibration file to the frobnitz server? (Ok/Cancel)" and "Are you really really sure you want to save the new calibration file to the frobnitz server? Data will be overwritten! (Ok/Cancel)" messages that pop up every five minutes during normal use. Clicking "Ok" to those messages becomes a reflex after using your app for a week. Now, by the time I notice something didn't work the totally uninformative error text is already gone.
That....is disturbing, if that is their view. Maybe next they need to have a war on science again?
The old war on science ended? I still see a lot of allegedly educated, literate people (in this very thread, even!) acting as though Al Gore being a fat self-important jerk somehow changes the absorption spectra of CO2...
The truth behind the story is more disturbing. Obama didn't "choose" not to send American astronauts back to the moon, he just recognizes that we no longer have the ability.
Having a DX9 GPU got you the Windows aero effects, so there was at least a visible benefit to using the lowest end DX9 GPU over a (probably faster) DX8 part at the same price.
"A bit of a trick question. For the first 40 miles it will get infinite mpg, because no gas will be burned. When the generator starts, the car will get an equivalent of up to 50 mpg thereafter. "
Memo to GM management: That's not a trick question, and I don't want to hear the "equivalent" or "up to" in a fuel mileage discussion. Any car can get "up to" 50 MPG given a good driver and sufficiently favorable conditions. Unplug the battery and put it through a friggin EPA combined test cycle. Post the results.
There's a rather large difference between "written in C# (using gtk#)" and "written in C# (using lots of flashy GDI+ features that Mono perpetually gets wrong)".
Back to high school with you as well! Significant digits only applies of you're measuring continuous quantities. RAM capacity is discrete, so "2 GB" can be expanded to "2.000000000 GB" if you want to do the math to that level of pedantry.
"That's right, most people don't know how to use the internet. They often Google for a domain in preference to just using the domain name."
Or maybe they do. Typing a domain name you can't spell or only know part of into Google might take you to a page full of results that make you feel a bit stupid. Typing it into the address bar might take you to a page full of malware or a phishing scam or a redirect to goatse...
Forget the sound, the real freakout comes when one discovers that having the throttle stuck wide open means there's no manifold vacuum, and on most cars that means there's no power brake boost.
"HOLY CRAP NOW THE GAS AND BRAKE ARE BOTH STUCK, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"
55 gallons is the standard size for modern oil drums, but a "barrel" of oil is 42 gallons. (It's he average volume of repurposed wine and whiskey barrels they pumped oil into in 19th century Pennsylvania, and the need to maintain backward compatibility in the oil industry means we still use that instead of a sensible unit)
"Since you know absolutely nothing about aircraft, let me enlighten you."
LOL. I'll spot you "I know nothing about the current market for general aviation aircraft".
"$600,000 for a new 4 seater with all options. That's still a MAJOR distance from 1.5M"
True, but neither are affordable to people who aren't willing to devote their lives to working a day job to pay for their aviation habit.
"my old plane had higher tech and far more reliable electronics in it than your new car."
The GPS you've duct-taped to the panel doesn't count. That airframe is a fracking half-century old, and you paid more for it than than most would pay for a nice house.
"My first plane, a Piper Comanche cost me less than $220,000 and it was in incredible shape"
Either that's a typo ($220k instead of $22k?) or you just proved his point: a 40+ year old "flying car" costs 10x more than a new "non-flying car". It probably has breaker points ignition and burns leaded gas, too...
To sum up that debate: On the internet "who" is generally used by a writer making an honest attempt to communicate. "Whom" is used mostly by people who didn't like the first writer's point of view but cannot articulate a real rebuttal, in an attempt to steer further discussion into futile grammar pedantry.
Microcontroller? about a buck
Open source clock firmware? free
1970s era TTL clock chips? good luck finding those (and the displays they're designed to drive) on eBay...
You can do a lot with hardware alone, it's just not usually an efficient use of time, board space, power, or money anymore.
Since we don't have a "+1, awesome rant!" mod, somebody give this AC an "insightful".
/or as all you kids with your iphones that play hippity-hop music and your tattoos of 4chan memes would say: "OMG EPIC WIN!" //Now, off the lawn please.
Point out that electromagnetism is "only a theory", get Rush and Bill O'RLY to talk up ionospheric HF propagation being "a bunch of liberal mumbo-jumbo", and sprinkle the internet with scary chain emails about how radio was "cooked up by some European egghead". In a year or two, congress will be terrified to legislate against broadband over power lines because their constituents are gibbering incomprehensibly at them about illegal Mexican radio immigration, how we need to teach the controversy about "Intelligent Electrons" and the creeping socialist death panels that are coming to euthanize their satellite dish!
The problem was people figured out that "It will change the way cities are built" means "it is incompatible with cities as they are built now".
Ride something heavy and motorized on the sidewalk, and you're a menace to pedestrians. Ride something limited to 12MPH on the street, and you're going to get run over by a truck. Ride in the bike lane (if there even is a bike lane) and you'll look like a lazy lardass and probably get a ticket for using a motorized vehicle where they're not allowed.
I don't see anything wrong with the current model of having each program "phone home" and check for updates when you run it.
I do. If something like Adobe Reader only checks for updates when you use it, and you rarely use pdf documents, it will sometimes fall a few versions behind. Then when you encounter a web site that embeds some pdf-exploit-of-the-week, your system gets pwnt while Reader is still waiting to hear back from the update server.
Most vendors' cure for that: to install yet another goddamn advertising-laden, disk-thrashing, login-delaying updater with yet another tray icon that wants attention all the time, is sub-optimal to say the least.
"Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less. "
...and what, pray tell, is going to drive developing the technology to do *that* when the only things going up are light, cheap rovers and satellites? Real life isn't like "Civilization", where some offscreen God delivers complete blueprints for engineering marvels as soon as you reach some arbitrary stage of the game. The only thing that would come close to $100/lb to LEO is a space elevator amortized over a century or two of constant use. That would require decades of materials research and engineering with a budget that would make NASA's new manned rocket program look like peanuts, before we could even start arguing about whether to fund building the thing.
"As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."
You already do. Every ticket-selling web site I've seen lists aircraft type for each flight. Don't like that particular type? Don't buy a ticket.
Then you have another opportunity when they wheel the plane up to the gate. Don't like the look of the plane? Don't board.
Too lazy to learn which Airbus models are full fly-by-wire and want someone to remind you every time you're about to get on an evil French airplane with socialist flight computers instead of one navigated by the pure awesomeness of American rugged individualism? Die in a plane crash. Please.
Slashdot Mirror
"I never visit the seedier side of the internet. I'm behind a firewall."
That's OK, he seedier side of the internet will visit you via cross-site scripting attacks and ad networks running malicious ads on reputable sites.
We know how much space all our valid stuff should be taking.
Not really. We know how much space our supposedly-valid stuff is taking right now, but that doesn't tell us whether any of that space contains code injected by some unknown malware.
Q: How do you get users to read error messages?
A: How do you write error messages that are worth reading?
(+5, agree completely)
Attention tortured support techs at $evil_vendor: You know why I don't read the error messages in your app? Because the "Could not save calibration file because an unknown frobnitz DB error occurred. (Ok/Cancel)" looks almost exactly like the "Are you sure you want to save the new calibration file to the frobnitz server? (Ok/Cancel)" and "Are you really really sure you want to save the new calibration file to the frobnitz server? Data will be overwritten! (Ok/Cancel)" messages that pop up every five minutes during normal use. Clicking "Ok" to those messages becomes a reflex after using your app for a week. Now, by the time I notice something didn't work the totally uninformative error text is already gone.
That....is disturbing, if that is their view. Maybe next they need to have a war on science again?
The old war on science ended? I still see a lot of allegedly educated, literate people (in this very thread, even!) acting as though Al Gore being a fat self-important jerk somehow changes the absorption spectra of CO2...
The truth behind the story is more disturbing. Obama didn't "choose" not to send American astronauts back to the moon, he just recognizes that we no longer have the ability.
Having a DX9 GPU got you the Windows aero effects, so there was at least a visible benefit to using the lowest end DX9 GPU over a (probably faster) DX8 part at the same price.
"A bit of a trick question. For the first 40 miles it will get infinite mpg, because no gas will be burned. When the generator starts, the car will get an equivalent of up to 50 mpg thereafter. "
Memo to GM management: That's not a trick question, and I don't want to hear the "equivalent" or "up to" in a fuel mileage discussion. Any car can get "up to" 50 MPG given a good driver and sufficiently favorable conditions. Unplug the battery and put it through a friggin EPA combined test cycle. Post the results.
Strictly speaking, you are correct. Everything breaks down into discrete units at some scale.
For practical purposes (i.e. any purpose other than internet forum pedantry), bits of RAM is a counted quantity and mass is a measured one.
There's a rather large difference between "written in C# (using gtk#)" and "written in C# (using lots of flashy GDI+ features that Mono perpetually gets wrong)".
Back to high school with you as well! Significant digits only applies of you're measuring continuous quantities. RAM capacity is discrete, so "2 GB" can be expanded to "2.000000000 GB" if you want to do the math to that level of pedantry.
"That's right, most people don't know how to use the internet. They often Google for a domain in preference to just using the domain name."
Or maybe they do. Typing a domain name you can't spell or only know part of into Google might take you to a page full of results that make you feel a bit stupid. Typing it into the address bar might take you to a page full of malware or a phishing scam or a redirect to goatse...
Forget the sound, the real freakout comes when one discovers that having the throttle stuck wide open means there's no manifold vacuum, and on most cars that means there's no power brake boost. "HOLY CRAP NOW THE GAS AND BRAKE ARE BOTH STUCK, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"
"Federal copyright agents also seized a 320GB microflash card containing illegal music with an estimated street value of 11.3 trillion dollars."
55 gallons is the standard size for modern oil drums, but a "barrel" of oil is 42 gallons. (It's he average volume of repurposed wine and whiskey barrels they pumped oil into in 19th century Pennsylvania, and the need to maintain backward compatibility in the oil industry means we still use that instead of a sensible unit)
"Since you know absolutely nothing about aircraft, let me enlighten you."
LOL. I'll spot you "I know nothing about the current market for general aviation aircraft".
"$600,000 for a new 4 seater with all options. That's still a MAJOR distance from 1.5M"
True, but neither are affordable to people who aren't willing to devote their lives to working a day job to pay for their aviation habit.
"my old plane had higher tech and far more reliable electronics in it than your new car."
The GPS you've duct-taped to the panel doesn't count. That airframe is a fracking half-century old, and you paid more for it than than most would pay for a nice house.
"My first plane, a Piper Comanche cost me less than $220,000 and it was in incredible shape" Either that's a typo ($220k instead of $22k?) or you just proved his point: a 40+ year old "flying car" costs 10x more than a new "non-flying car". It probably has breaker points ignition and burns leaded gas, too...
To sum up that debate: On the internet "who" is generally used by a writer making an honest attempt to communicate. "Whom" is used mostly by people who didn't like the first writer's point of view but cannot articulate a real rebuttal, in an attempt to steer further discussion into futile grammar pedantry.
Microcontroller? about a buck
Open source clock firmware? free
1970s era TTL clock chips? good luck finding those (and the displays they're designed to drive) on eBay...
You can do a lot with hardware alone, it's just not usually an efficient use of time, board space, power, or money anymore.
Since we don't have a "+1, awesome rant!" mod, somebody give this AC an "insightful".
/or as all you kids with your iphones that play hippity-hop music and your tattoos of 4chan memes would say: "OMG EPIC WIN!"
//Now, off the lawn please.
Yeah, but that's probably true. Hams tend to skew old, grumpy and suspicious of the government.
Samir, this is America. You can debate anything.
Point out that electromagnetism is "only a theory", get Rush and Bill O'RLY to talk up ionospheric HF propagation being "a bunch of liberal mumbo-jumbo", and sprinkle the internet with scary chain emails about how radio was "cooked up by some European egghead". In a year or two, congress will be terrified to legislate against broadband over power lines because their constituents are gibbering incomprehensibly at them about illegal Mexican radio immigration, how we need to teach the controversy about "Intelligent Electrons" and the creeping socialist death panels that are coming to euthanize their satellite dish!
The problem was people figured out that "It will change the way cities are built" means "it is incompatible with cities as they are built now". Ride something heavy and motorized on the sidewalk, and you're a menace to pedestrians. Ride something limited to 12MPH on the street, and you're going to get run over by a truck. Ride in the bike lane (if there even is a bike lane) and you'll look like a lazy lardass and probably get a ticket for using a motorized vehicle where they're not allowed.
I don't see anything wrong with the current model of having each program "phone home" and check for updates when you run it.
I do. If something like Adobe Reader only checks for updates when you use it, and you rarely use pdf documents, it will sometimes fall a few versions behind. Then when you encounter a web site that embeds some pdf-exploit-of-the-week, your system gets pwnt while Reader is still waiting to hear back from the update server.
Most vendors' cure for that: to install yet another goddamn advertising-laden, disk-thrashing, login-delaying updater with yet another tray icon that wants attention all the time, is sub-optimal to say the least.
"Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less. "
...and what, pray tell, is going to drive developing the technology to do *that* when the only things going up are light, cheap rovers and satellites? Real life isn't like "Civilization", where some offscreen God delivers complete blueprints for engineering marvels as soon as you reach some arbitrary stage of the game. The only thing that would come close to $100/lb to LEO is a space elevator amortized over a century or two of constant use. That would require decades of materials research and engineering with a budget that would make NASA's new manned rocket program look like peanuts, before we could even start arguing about whether to fund building the thing.
They could start by searching Google.
"Results 1 - 10 of about 276,000 for Sell EVE ISK. (0.22 seconds)"
Doesn't sound like a difficult market for a scammer to tap into...
"As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."
You already do. Every ticket-selling web site I've seen lists aircraft type for each flight. Don't like that particular type? Don't buy a ticket.
Then you have another opportunity when they wheel the plane up to the gate. Don't like the look of the plane? Don't board.
Too lazy to learn which Airbus models are full fly-by-wire and want someone to remind you every time you're about to get on an evil French airplane with socialist flight computers instead of one navigated by the pure awesomeness of American rugged individualism? Die in a plane crash. Please.