So your investing in the oil companies? Are you opening a competing oil company? Are you just sitting on your ass complaining that someone else is making more money than you?
If there is a large margin, then find a way to get a peice of it: - sell alternative energy devices and vehicles - get into the oil business (either work for the big guys, or start your own) - sell telecommuting equipment and services - invest in the oil companies
Oh, you think it is too risky to take any of those steps? Then the margin is not worth the risk; they must deserve the returns. If the returns outweight the risk, then you and your neighbor ought to jump in there and grab some of it.
There are lots of ways to get in on the winnings, instead of just complaining about someone else winning. Your participation will result in a better world for all of us (I assume you will spend any of you profits saving the whales or planting trees).
I guess where I come from, Jimmy knows I'll kick his ass one way or another.
Really. I live in a small town. Everyone knows everything about everyone, even if it isn't something that you will read in the paper; who is doing and selling drugs, where you can place a bet, who the corrupt and or inept folks in government are, who Jimmy's real daddy is. I've lived in larger cities; I like leaving my door unlocked. I trust my neighbors. (yes, I trust that the corrupt will bend to the highest bidder.)
How will anyone that Jimmy tells about your animal porn adiction treat you differently? Will it matter? It is just a rumor, so when you run for mayor, the papers will not carry the story. Who cares that Jimmy knows?
There is always mutually assured destruction as a strong deterent with your neighbors. What deterent do you have with the owner of the animal-porn website based in Russia who made $2000 last year?
What I can't address is when that unknown person finds out about your animal porn thing, because you trusted you neighbors. For instance, I do take securing my net connections seriously, but I didn't have a house key for the first 4 years I lived in this house.
Why not have them recharge from use. Anybody have some estimates of power required by mice and keyboard v power lost while typing? Would it feel like an old manual typewriter?
Here in the midwest USA, we are much more efficient about recycling. We are storing it in large piles until the day that we have the technology to more efficiently recycle it. By then there will be a scarcity of many of the materials and we'll be able to sell it to you with a nice margin.
Seriously, don't you think the aluminum and steel content of a landfill is pretty high?
Instead of "giving some steelworkers a pile of rebar on either side of the river and telling them to build towards the center and figure the details out later.", how about if we give the architect/engineer a crane and a whole bunch of prefab peices.
$120/hr programmers do the design work, they just also do the weilding. Now I do agree that it is insane to put a dozen inexperienced programmers on a job without specs and expect anything but pile of popsicle sticks when you are done.
We have bad phones lines that connect at around 14.4 kb/s. It is my understanding that unless you connect at least at 26 kb/s AOL hangs up, so AOL doesn't even server our rural community. The "urban" areas of the county have Verizon DSL and Insight cable.
This situation is driving most rural net users to use small wifi providers. Farmers and telecommuters can afford that, but most just wait until they get to work to check their email.
The local government is investigating a county wide wireless system, but Verizon is challenging that in the legislature. Verizon's alternative is the "Verizon Broadband Access", which tests out at about 128 kb/s at $60/month.
Lucikly I was curious enough to take the existing plans and attempt to slowly modify them to figure out what each and every part did.
And, I was curious enough to take the existing plans and attempt to slowly modify them until I burned up all the components.
There is no undo key in hardware design. I had the most success in programming in 5th grade. I wrote a lunar lander and a variety of drawing programs. The neatest thing was just getting the parents to say "wow!".
My daughter, age 5, doesn't know how a mouse works yet. I don't think it is slowing her down too much.
Learning to traverse the net is much more important than any other PC skill. Whating the youngin's just out of school, I amazed at how slow I have become, and I'm only 12 years out of college.
If you complete the contest, you will in all likelihood get some great job or contract offers that will compensate you for the effort.
The contests really just drive small company and academic research. If a big company enters and wins, they look silly for beating the little guys with lots of money. If they loose, they look even worse.
The little companies win just by entering. They get exposure and are driven to make relationships with the big companies.
In the aero and defense industries, I think these competitions will kick start the valley business model, where big company R&D is done by buying smaller companies. I feel like science research is stagnating, but this model might get it going again. The organized competition lends credibility and exposure to the process.
I've seen R&D (not pure science, but new product development) being done in big companies. It ain't pretty and it ain't efficient.
Another example of why apt-get is a PITA. Install your own X system, then try to install X app from debian. It requires their install of X. There is a way to fake it, but after hours of trying, I failed. Now I just install their version of X, then install my copy over theirs.
Basic is so far removed from the hardware that it is difficult to explain. I've found C easier to teach than more abstract languages. Try explaining how a GUI button works in the context of "a computer is just bits right?"
On the other hand it is soooo hard to show accomplishment anymore. When I was a youngster, printing my name 8 billion times on the screen was fun.
10 print "Joe was here. "; 20 goto 10
Now, the student expects to integrate video before the end of class.
I realize that you could teach the students an IO package (Java Swing, MFC, GTK, etc.), but then we are back to the point where the student isn't really learning what is going on, only the magic of the IO package.
For instance, 20 years ago, my grandmother took two college courses in Pascal, but it didn't really help her use a computer. At the end of the classes, she understood Pascal (actually top grade in the class), but not computers or programming. Her comfort level hadn't changed.
I think assembler may be more exciting than BASIC. I was very excited to learn VAX assembly after only having programmed a TS1000 and a C64. I was able to guess at how the whole computer worked, because I understood the building blocks.
It becomes close impossible to maintain when you look at it only once every 6 months. I've worked on a couple of these projects.
Not having a compiled language is a real pain when you do maintance because it is harder to trace throught the code or know when you broke it. (yah, you don't write comprehensive tests either!)
My research shows I could start a small ISP and run it profitably in our ares for a time, but then experience shows that the phone companies will show up and run me out of business.
I can compete at their current rates, but can not compete at the rates they will offer.
Someone has to lose money to get reasonable services and rates to my area. No private invester will do that.
Seriously, if Wi-fi is important enough to enough people then it will get built.
[I'm in rural Indiana and have faced the same issues.]
Then the phone company will run them out of business. The standard operating procedure of phone companies in small markets is to not provide services until forced to by emerging competition, then crush them. What private investor would invest in such an environment. Private companies wont help the small markets, because they can't; the entrenched phone company will run them out of business.
We also know from experience that the phone company wont invest in the small town until it is forced to through competition or regulation (and I don't blame them, there is no profit motive).
Access to high speed communications is essential to economic development. We know that our lack of access has hurting home sales. We know that our expensive access has caused technology companies to move to larger markets. We know we have some of the highest unemployment in the country and in our history.
Xdmx works. It will build a single X server across multiple X servers (even different machines) and effeciently pass the opengl through. There may be a more efficent method, but at least one method works.
I wrote a reporting system using XSL:FO. I had to later port it to LaTeX because XSL:FO is too immature. Due to design XSL:FO transformers eat memory for multiple page tables. TeX is designed very efficiently (it had to be back when originally written). The TeX based system is soooo much faster and more reliable!
My understanding is that there is a preset number of "processes" for CICS. I think we have 4. So for CGI, you would start up 4 processes, get them through initialization, then let them loop on data (incoming requests). If one crashes, restart it.
To be efficient, all dynamic allocation of anything should be an exception, not SOP, including creating processes. That is why Unix appears slow for batch work; it lends itself to lots of dynamic allocation. Of course, most problems are too complex for that and are best addresses with dynamic allocation, hence the popularity of C/C++, VB, and Java.
Upon graduation, you need to know the fundimentals of CS. Part of what you need to know is the terminology. A singly linked list is not an advanced topic, neither is hastable, balanced binary tree, stack, heap, queue or anyother CS201 data structure.
Yet, I've had to describe what a hashtable is and how to use it to multiple professional programers in a couple different companies.
Data structes are the tools of CS. If a building contractor showed up the first day to work and couldn't hand me a framing hammer, I'd let him go too.
Earth has gravity, therefore accelerates DOWN. Earth accelerates down?
You are confusing force and acceleration. Acceleration is change in rate of change of position over time. If f(t) is position for a time, t, then f'(t) is velocity, and acceleration is f''(t). A motionless plumb bob is not accelerating. A plumb bob is inanimate, so doesn't "attempt" anything either.
Back to science.
In the middle of space, with an equal gravitaional force from all directions, in a ship accelerating at 1G, two plumb bobs hanging side by side will hang parallel.
Someplace else, with a single prevalent gravitational force, two plumb bobs hanging side by side will NOT hang parallel.
THEREFORE ACCELERATION IS NOT THE SAME AS GRAVITY!
I'm going to go ahead and applogize a bit. I didn't notice that I misspelled 'two' in my original post. It makes it a bit difficult to understand.
My experiment is hanging TWO plumb bobs side by side in a space ship and in my living room. In my living room, the bobs wont be parallel, but on the ship they will be.
Bullshit. You didn't invalidate my experiment. I want to use two plumb bobs and the results disprove your assertion. There is an obvious measurable difference in the behaviour of the pairs plumb bobs under acceleration versus a pair of plumb bobs in gravity. Why is my experiment not valid?
Do we really mean that for point masses, gravity and acceleration are equivalent? WHOAH! For point masses, collisions don't occur (no volume), light doesn't reflect (no surface area), there is no friction and a whole bunch of other weird crap. Who cares?
(The plumb bob was not perpendicular to the floor of my home, but I think I've got a tire going down.:)
Oh, since my plumb bobs are unpowered, they don't attempt to accelerate toward anything.
Slashdot Mirror
So your investing in the oil companies? Are you opening a competing oil company? Are you just sitting on your ass complaining that someone else is making more money than you?
If there is a large margin, then find a way to get a peice of it:
- sell alternative energy devices and vehicles
- get into the oil business (either work for the big guys, or start your own)
- sell telecommuting equipment and services
- invest in the oil companies
Oh, you think it is too risky to take any of those steps? Then the margin is not worth the risk; they must deserve the returns. If the returns outweight the risk, then you and your neighbor ought to jump in there and grab some of it.
There are lots of ways to get in on the winnings, instead of just complaining about someone else winning. Your participation will result in a better world for all of us (I assume you will spend any of you profits saving the whales or planting trees).
Joe
I guess where I come from, Jimmy knows I'll kick his ass one way or another.
Really. I live in a small town. Everyone knows everything about everyone, even if it isn't something that you will read in the paper; who is doing and selling drugs, where you can place a bet, who the corrupt and or inept folks in government are, who Jimmy's real daddy is. I've lived in larger cities; I like leaving my door unlocked. I trust my neighbors. (yes, I trust that the corrupt will bend to the highest bidder.)
How will anyone that Jimmy tells about your animal porn adiction treat you differently? Will it matter? It is just a rumor, so when you run for mayor, the papers will not carry the story. Who cares that Jimmy knows?
There is always mutually assured destruction as a strong deterent with your neighbors. What deterent do you have with the owner of the animal-porn website based in Russia who made $2000 last year?
What I can't address is when that unknown person finds out about your animal porn thing, because you trusted you neighbors. For instance, I do take securing my net connections seriously, but I didn't have a house key for the first 4 years I lived in this house.
Joe
So you trust anonymous ISP employees and unknown website owners, but you don't trust your neighbors?
I'd move. (Really. What the hell is this world coming to?)
Joe
Why not have them recharge from use. Anybody have some estimates of power required by mice and keyboard v power lost while typing? Would it feel like an old manual typewriter?
Here in the midwest USA, we are much more efficient about recycling. We are storing it in large piles until the day that we have the technology to more efficiently recycle it. By then there will be a scarcity of many of the materials and we'll be able to sell it to you with a nice margin.
Seriously, don't you think the aluminum and steel content of a landfill is pretty high?
Joe
Instead of "giving some steelworkers a pile of rebar on either side of the river and telling them to build towards the center and figure the details out later.", how about if we give the architect/engineer a crane and a whole bunch of prefab peices.
$120/hr programmers do the design work, they just also do the weilding. Now I do agree that it is insane to put a dozen inexperienced programmers on a job without specs and expect anything but pile of popsicle sticks when you are done.
We have bad phones lines that connect at around 14.4 kb/s. It is my understanding that unless you connect at least at 26 kb/s AOL hangs up, so AOL doesn't even server our rural community. The "urban" areas of the county have Verizon DSL and Insight cable.
This situation is driving most rural net users to use small wifi providers. Farmers and telecommuters can afford that, but most just wait until they get to work to check their email.
The local government is investigating a county wide wireless system, but Verizon is challenging that in the legislature. Verizon's alternative is the "Verizon Broadband Access", which tests out at about 128 kb/s at $60/month.
arg.
Joe
Lucikly I was curious enough to take the existing plans and attempt to slowly modify them to figure out what each and every part did.
And, I was curious enough to take the existing plans and attempt to slowly modify them until I burned up all the components.
There is no undo key in hardware design. I had the most success in programming in 5th grade. I wrote a lunar lander and a variety of drawing programs. The neatest thing was just getting the parents to say "wow!".
My daughter, age 5, doesn't know how a mouse works yet. I don't think it is slowing her down too much.
Learning to traverse the net is much more important than any other PC skill. Whating the youngin's just out of school, I amazed at how slow I have become, and I'm only 12 years out of college.
Joe
If you complete the contest, you will in all likelihood get some great job or contract offers that will compensate you for the effort.
The contests really just drive small company and academic research. If a big company enters and wins, they look silly for beating the little guys with lots of money. If they loose, they look even worse.
The little companies win just by entering. They get exposure and are driven to make relationships with the big companies.
In the aero and defense industries, I think these competitions will kick start the valley business model, where big company R&D is done by buying smaller companies. I feel like science research is stagnating, but this model might get it going again. The organized competition lends credibility and exposure to the process.
I've seen R&D (not pure science, but new product development) being done in big companies. It ain't pretty and it ain't efficient.
Joe
Another example of why apt-get is a PITA. Install your own X system, then try to install X app from debian. It requires their install of X. There is a way to fake it, but after hours of trying, I failed. Now I just install their version of X, then install my copy over theirs.
Joe
As long as I have run unix like environments, I've installed apps as a user.
Installing most programs does not involve installing system files.
tomcat
java
gimp
openoffice
xpdf
emacs
The only app I'm currently running that _requires_ installing system files is VMWare, which requires a kernel module.
No, I'm pretty sure Libia does also.
Basic is so far removed from the hardware that it is difficult to explain. I've found C easier to teach than more abstract languages. Try explaining how a GUI button works in the context of "a computer is just bits right?"
On the other hand it is soooo hard to show accomplishment anymore. When I was a youngster, printing my name 8 billion times on the screen was fun.
10 print "Joe was here. ";
20 goto 10
Now, the student expects to integrate video before the end of class.
I realize that you could teach the students an IO package (Java Swing, MFC, GTK, etc.), but then we are back to the point where the student isn't really learning what is going on, only the magic of the IO package.
For instance, 20 years ago, my grandmother took two college courses in Pascal, but it didn't really help her use a computer. At the end of the classes, she understood Pascal (actually top grade in the class), but not computers or programming. Her comfort level hadn't changed.
I think assembler may be more exciting than BASIC. I was very excited to learn VAX assembly after only having programmed a TS1000 and a C64. I was able to guess at how the whole computer worked, because I understood the building blocks.
All that said, I'm a lousy teacher.
Joe
Your email doesn't work.
Can you give some examples or pointers to "lockless techniques"?
It becomes close impossible to maintain when you look at it only once every 6 months. I've worked on a couple of these projects.
Not having a compiled language is a real pain when you do maintance because it is harder to trace throught the code or know when you broke it. (yah, you don't write comprehensive tests either!)
Joe
My research shows I could start a small ISP and run it profitably in our ares for a time, but then experience shows that the phone companies will show up and run me out of business.
I can compete at their current rates, but can not compete at the rates they will offer.
Someone has to lose money to get reasonable services and rates to my area. No private invester will do that.
Joe
[I'm in rural Indiana and have faced the same issues.]
Then the phone company will run them out of business. The standard operating procedure of phone companies in small markets is to not provide services until forced to by emerging competition, then crush them. What private investor would invest in such an environment. Private companies wont help the small markets, because they can't; the entrenched phone company will run them out of business.
We also know from experience that the phone company wont invest in the small town until it is forced to through competition or regulation (and I don't blame them, there is no profit motive).
Access to high speed communications is essential to economic development. We know that our lack of access has hurting home sales. We know that our expensive access has caused technology companies to move to larger markets. We know we have some of the highest unemployment in the country and in our history.
What should we do?
Joe
Xdmx works. It will build a single X server across multiple X servers (even different machines) and effeciently pass the opengl through. There may be a more efficent method, but at least one method works.
Joe
I wrote a reporting system using XSL:FO. I had to later port it to LaTeX because XSL:FO is too immature. Due to design XSL:FO transformers eat memory for multiple page tables. TeX is designed very efficiently (it had to be back when originally written). The TeX based system is soooo much faster and more reliable!
Joe
100 lashes with a carrot and a stick!
/ 20 04/12/19/a_few_good_books/
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles
"Carrot and stick" is about 73 years older than "carrot on a stick".
Just for the record, I have never criticised another post for grammatic or spelling errors without making similar errors in my criticism.
Joe
I don't think fork is what you want.
My understanding is that there is a preset number of "processes" for CICS. I think we have 4. So for CGI, you would start up 4 processes, get them through initialization, then let them loop on data (incoming requests). If one crashes, restart it.
To be efficient, all dynamic allocation of anything should be an exception, not SOP, including creating processes. That is why Unix appears slow for batch work; it lends itself to lots of dynamic allocation. Of course, most problems are too complex for that and are best addresses with dynamic allocation, hence the popularity of C/C++, VB, and Java.
Upon graduation, you need to know the fundimentals of CS. Part of what you need to know is the terminology. A singly linked list is not an advanced topic, neither is hastable, balanced binary tree, stack, heap, queue or anyother CS201 data structure.
Yet, I've had to describe what a hashtable is and how to use it to multiple professional programers in a couple different companies.
Data structes are the tools of CS. If a building contractor showed up the first day to work and couldn't hand me a framing hammer, I'd let him go too.
Joe
Earth has gravity, therefore accelerates DOWN.
Earth accelerates down?
You are confusing force and acceleration. Acceleration is change in rate of change of position over time. If f(t) is position for a time, t, then f'(t) is velocity, and acceleration is f''(t). A motionless plumb bob is not accelerating. A plumb bob is inanimate, so doesn't "attempt" anything either.
Back to science.
In the middle of space, with an equal gravitaional force from all directions, in a ship accelerating at 1G, two plumb bobs hanging side by side will hang parallel.
Someplace else, with a single prevalent gravitational force, two plumb bobs hanging side by side will NOT hang parallel.
THEREFORE ACCELERATION IS NOT THE SAME AS GRAVITY!
Joe
I'm going to go ahead and applogize a bit. I didn't notice that I misspelled 'two' in my original post. It makes it a bit difficult to understand.
My experiment is hanging TWO plumb bobs side by side in a space ship and in my living room. In my living room, the bobs wont be parallel, but on the ship they will be.
Joe
Bullshit. You didn't invalidate my experiment. I want to use two plumb bobs and the results disprove your assertion. There is an obvious measurable difference in the behaviour of the pairs plumb bobs under acceleration versus a pair of plumb bobs in gravity. Why is my experiment not valid?
:)
Do we really mean that for point masses, gravity and acceleration are equivalent? WHOAH! For point masses, collisions don't occur (no volume), light doesn't reflect (no surface area), there is no friction and a whole bunch of other weird crap. Who cares?
(The plumb bob was not perpendicular to the floor of my home, but I think I've got a tire going down.
Oh, since my plumb bobs are unpowered, they don't attempt to accelerate toward anything.
Joe