The problem is they only have to accuse you of terrorism and that can be six weeks of your life gone. Of course they wouldn't abuse this. After all, they never accused an old man who yelled 'rubbish' at Jack Straw of terrorism. Or the people who broke into Parliament to flour bomb the PM.
The fact is our government right now is fairly benign and even they abuse these sorts of powers. A future government may try to hold on to power by exactly these rules. Just arrest enough opposition voters and hold them for 6 weeks - might be enough to make the rest of the populace think twice about who to vote for.
By UK standards, the Corolla is a big car. I've just swapped my sports car which was getting 27 mpg (~24 US mpg), with a small Citroen C2 which is getting 60 mpg.
The C2 isn't sold in the US, but it's the same size inside and out as the Toyota Yaris, which is sold there. Apparently it is also slightly more efficient - real world ~62 mpg. Before you start arguing it's too small/impractical - have you got 2 cars in your household? If yes, do they both need to be big cars?
We've also got a big practical 4 door hatchback, which means I can get a smaller more efficient car for driving to work - no need to worry if it can fit four people / the weekly shopping. I'm 6 ft tall and 19 stones, and there's plenty of space in the C2 - for two people it's just as big as the Ford Mondeo I used to have.
Unfortunately I've also got an uninsured sports card stuck in the garage since due to petrol prices now over £5 / $10 / gallon no one will buy it!
A flywheel can store a lot of energy, but it's held as kinetic energy, and it's pretty surprising just how much. I kept rechecking this because it's even higher than I expected.
The Chevy Volt will supposedly have a 16kWh battery. That's 57,600,000 Joules. Apparently good for 40 miles.
Stored in a flywheel, that's the same kinetic energy as a one ton car driving at over 500 mph. I think I'd want to avoid crashing with one of those in the back!
Your post is mirroring a general feeling in many areas of academia that specialisms are becoming ever narrower.
There are very few 'physicists' making significant contributions. To make a contribution to quantum physics, you increasingly have to be a full-time quantum physicist. And to make a contribution to loop quantum gravity you have to spend many years getting into that sub-field.
As you say, the knowledge in many areas is now so deep that it is just not possible to keep up with more than one very small area. I think the explosion in the popularity of Google is because it is a solution to this existing problem - i.e. it is the effect, not the cause.
I was just assuming while the nuclear defenses were down, the unprotected civilians were being catapulted to safety. Or certain death for the ones not wearing parachutes.
I'm not sure it should be part of the language specification, but I do agree it would be nice to see a standard library for Javascript that dealt with stuff like this.
I spent one day this week working with drag and drop in Javascript. I used the tool-man libraries for the basic code. I found it surprisingly easy to use. Any element can be made draggable with a single function call passing its ID, and you can register dragstart and dragend events. When I looked at the tool-man code I realised just how much I don't know about Javascript. As the GP talks about, I'm one of the guys who use it as a hacky tool to add bling. I've never learnt the language properly - I'd never seen proper classes and factories in Javascript before.
Within a day I had a functional drag-and-drop diary screen that supported moving, creating and deleting appointments. But I spent an hour looking for a free library. It would have been brilliant to just look through something like the Java API docs or MSDN for the standard library function to do it.
His argument was against your assertion that 'everybody thinks javascript just doesn't cut it for current web apps'.
This plainly isn't true as lots of people are actually very impressed by the javascript language, and just a bit frustrated that IE6 / IE7 / IE on Safari work so differently to everything else. For internal work I just ignore IE, and target Firefox only.
A better option than Javascript would be great, but Ruby hardly looks like the best option. A much better use of time for Microsoft would be making their Javscript engine for IE more standards compliant.
I reckon they've actually done a really good job here. With modern equipment, I think that technically they could just fix the foundations and set it back to vertical. But if it's not leaning then it's not much of a tourist attraction anymore.
Stabilising an ancient tower in a still leaning position is pretty impressive.
I'm not sure a union is really what tech workers need or even want. There's too much variety in the jobs people do and how competent they are at them, even with the same job title. Teaching is a similar situation where the typical behaviour of unions seems like a bad idea, and that view seems to be borne out in practice.
It would be more a professional body similar to those that govern the medical and law professions. They might have the resources to organise a strike but I think would pretty much always decide it wasn't a good idea.
Huh?!? Almost every light in the everyday rooms in my house is now a CFL of some kind (except decorative halogen stuff). Decent versions get to full brightness almost immediately and last a very long time. My old house had 50 year old wiring and blew over a dozen incandescents in the dining room ceiling light (which took 5 40W bulbs) over 18 months. We switched to CFLs and that fitting did blow one bulb, but that's the only bulb I've replaced in 5 years of using them.
If you live in the UK, the B&Q own brand value 20W bulbs are the best I have found yet if you want a bright ceiling light - ideal for halls / kitchens, maybe not so much living rooms. I got a pack of 4 for under £10. They are straight up to proper brightness the moment you flick the switch and are properly 100W incandescent brightness.
I've also got some extra-small 5W CFL bulbs in wall lights in the living/dining room, and these do still suffer from the slow (~1 minute) startup time that some people associate with CFLs. But it's good to know I can run all the nice decorative wall lights downstairs on 35W instead of 280W.
As a precursor, maybe there should be an intentional attempt to slashdot their servers first! Although right now it appears to be running fine despite the link posted in the article.
There's enough accidental slashdotting of sites, surely if we really tried even the firefox website might struggle:)
Network to network VPNs are pretty common and extremely convenient and easy to administer. Many people will have used them frequently without ever knowing.
At work, if I type in 10.244.x.x (e.g. local LAN address) a Cisco VPN box automatically networks me up to another office.
If you work in a company with multiple offices, there is probably a regular need for the offices to communicate electronically (e.g. access to admin systems / shared documents etc.) and there is probably no budget for a fixed line connection. Having to constantly manually connect to a VPN each time would be a huge pain in the ass.
I thought the root servers were mainly dealing with the kind of typos more like www.google or www.google.con - forgetting or mistyping that top level address. The.com name block and all the others are assigned out to other companies, and it's those others who would see www.goggle.com
How great it would be to have a top level domain of.con...
This is exactly why it is so stressful. If you work hard and do things properly, you can make a very positive impact on someone's life.
Working in IT is stressful in a different way, but if one week I'm tired and can't be bothered to do a great job, perhaps a big company will lose a bit of money. As long as I don't get fired that doesn't bother me too much. But if you're a teacher and don't bother to do one week's lesson properly it can affect the kid's exam results and futures.
And to support the GPs position, my mother has long complained that much professional judgement has been removed from teachers. They aren't allowed to kick out disruptive children who don't want to learn. They aren't allowed to punish children for misbehaviour, and education suffers as a result.
Dunno bout that. My mother warned me never to become a teacher - that is properly stressful because you're really affecting peoples lives, and the pay isn't good. My father warned me IT was boring and to do something else more interesting. My wife's parents warned her being a nurse was very hard work for not enough money and being in the police was too dangerous.
Even so I went into IT, and my wife's sister is training to be a nurse. I think the main drive to follow in your parents footsteps comes from the children not the parents.
Absolutely - there's no shortage of water in the world. The logistics side can be expensive to build and run, but the rich will never go thirsty. Some places use desalinated sea water. That is an essentially unlimited resource, but currently takes up a great deal of energy and therefore money to provide.
I've got a wife who likes books and somehow manages to read 2-3 a week. I've been trying to convince her to try an e-ink reader for a while, but not getting anywhere - mainly because of the difficulty of getting and using e-books.
I've just bought new bookcases, which fit almost perfectly floor to ceiling across one whole wall of the study. Now most of the books fit in single-deep fashion, but it's already starting to pile up with extras. There are still four sizeable boxes of older books under the stairs. Unfortunately books tend to take up too much space for an avid reader.
E-Ink screens actually look pretty good. It should be technically easy to sort out a simple electronic book format that would be portable between devices. Just plain PDF would do it, but it might be worth using a limited feature set to enable cheaper and importantly very low powered devices to use it in a responsive manner.
Unfortunately publishers are pissing about just like the music companies with DRM and incompatible proprietary formats. Just make it easy and sensibly priced and I'm sure there's a huge market.
With this new system things are getting pretty ridiculous. Enough countries have shown that they now have the ability to launch a GPS style system that no one is going to be able to disable all the available systems and there will be no military advantage on either side.
I'm hoping for someone to just open up the systems properly so we can get away from the waste of money this is becoming.
Kind of scary isn't it that China is spending billions building something which is only useful if they fight a major war with the US.
Also, stop the scare mongering. By your logic the US's ability to jam the civilian GPS signal and keep the military one is only useful if they want to fight a major war with China.
Partly I think it's just that if you're the sort of person who is going to have success as an entrepreneur, it's all about drive, vision and creativity. Those don't tend to increase that much with experience.
Kind of like what they say about Mathematicians - if you've not made a big contribution by your 30s, you probably never will.
On the other hand engineering work is very much improved by experience, and many of the best engineers I know are in their 40s or older.
So the newsworthy startups are often started by college kids. But the majority of startups have a decent if not earth shattering premise, backed up by business and engineering skills built up with experience and run by older people.
Lots of new mainframe level systems still use tapes. Many customers prefer tape drives for backup of any sensitive data - it means that you don't have to put the systems on the open internet to get offsite backups done. While tapes aren't the most robust medium for constant access, it's a very good format to write to and throw into a store room for backups.
Remember also hardware-wise, tape is still a pretty interesting format. LTO currently uses 800GB tapes with 1.6 and 3.2 TB versions planned. The 120MB/sec transfer rate is much quicker than network backups. It's also much quicker than backups to CDs/DVDs and even matches the speed of top-end hard discs.
I'd hope it's not an Access file, but my guess is that it quite possibly is a database dump from something like SQL Server / Oracle / Informix.
For most apps of any size, having a 'separate' GUI is no bad thing. It encourages you to simplify the back end processing and keep if efficient and easy to understand, with a limited number of hooks for a GUI to hook into.
The stuff I write at work has multiple user interfaces possible. Little has to change to swap our Windows only C++ / Visual Studio GUI to a multi-platform web based GUI.
2.35:1 was primarily invented because it was hard to make CRTs at that aspect ratio, and thus easier to make the viewing experience at home less competitive with the experience at cinemas. 1.85:1 is a much nicer aspect ratio to watch.
It would be nicer if they just made TVs 1.85:1, but I'm quite happy with 16:10 for PC displays.
I'd think a lot of people would agree with him though. I've also got a 17" desktop replacement laptop. Most of the time I take it to a desk somewhere and plug it in. It's ideal for 95% of the work I use it for.
I don't want to compromise that 95% to be able to watch a DVD on a plane. But most laptops do occasionally need to be used as true mobile devices - I do want to be able to watch a DVD on a plane occasionally. At the moment, the best I can do is an episode of Lost:)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is they only have to accuse you of terrorism and that can be six weeks of your life gone. Of course they wouldn't abuse this. After all, they never accused an old man who yelled 'rubbish' at Jack Straw of terrorism. Or the people who broke into Parliament to flour bomb the PM.
The fact is our government right now is fairly benign and even they abuse these sorts of powers. A future government may try to hold on to power by exactly these rules. Just arrest enough opposition voters and hold them for 6 weeks - might be enough to make the rest of the populace think twice about who to vote for.
By UK standards, the Corolla is a big car. I've just swapped my sports car which was getting 27 mpg (~24 US mpg), with a small Citroen C2 which is getting 60 mpg.
The C2 isn't sold in the US, but it's the same size inside and out as the Toyota Yaris, which is sold there. Apparently it is also slightly more efficient - real world ~62 mpg. Before you start arguing it's too small/impractical - have you got 2 cars in your household? If yes, do they both need to be big cars?
We've also got a big practical 4 door hatchback, which means I can get a smaller more efficient car for driving to work - no need to worry if it can fit four people / the weekly shopping. I'm 6 ft tall and 19 stones, and there's plenty of space in the C2 - for two people it's just as big as the Ford Mondeo I used to have.
Unfortunately I've also got an uninsured sports card stuck in the garage since due to petrol prices now over £5 / $10 / gallon no one will buy it!
A flywheel can store a lot of energy, but it's held as kinetic energy, and it's pretty surprising just how much. I kept rechecking this because it's even higher than I expected.
The Chevy Volt will supposedly have a 16kWh battery. That's 57,600,000 Joules. Apparently good for 40 miles.
Stored in a flywheel, that's the same kinetic energy as a one ton car driving at over 500 mph. I think I'd want to avoid crashing with one of those in the back!
Your post is mirroring a general feeling in many areas of academia that specialisms are becoming ever narrower.
There are very few 'physicists' making significant contributions. To make a contribution to quantum physics, you increasingly have to be a full-time quantum physicist. And to make a contribution to loop quantum gravity you have to spend many years getting into that sub-field.
As you say, the knowledge in many areas is now so deep that it is just not possible to keep up with more than one very small area. I think the explosion in the popularity of Google is because it is a solution to this existing problem - i.e. it is the effect, not the cause.
I was just assuming while the nuclear defenses were down, the unprotected civilians were being catapulted to safety. Or certain death for the ones not wearing parachutes.
I'm not sure it should be part of the language specification, but I do agree it would be nice to see a standard library for Javascript that dealt with stuff like this.
I spent one day this week working with drag and drop in Javascript. I used the tool-man libraries for the basic code. I found it surprisingly easy to use. Any element can be made draggable with a single function call passing its ID, and you can register dragstart and dragend events. When I looked at the tool-man code I realised just how much I don't know about Javascript. As the GP talks about, I'm one of the guys who use it as a hacky tool to add bling. I've never learnt the language properly - I'd never seen proper classes and factories in Javascript before.
Within a day I had a functional drag-and-drop diary screen that supported moving, creating and deleting appointments. But I spent an hour looking for a free library. It would have been brilliant to just look through something like the Java API docs or MSDN for the standard library function to do it.
Probably shouldn't feed the troll, but ...
His argument was against your assertion that 'everybody thinks javascript just doesn't cut it for current web apps'.
This plainly isn't true as lots of people are actually very impressed by the javascript language, and just a bit frustrated that IE6 / IE7 / IE on Safari work so differently to everything else. For internal work I just ignore IE, and target Firefox only.
Even Joel has praise for javascript - take a look at his 'Can Your Programming Language Do This?' article at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html
A better option than Javascript would be great, but Ruby hardly looks like the best option. A much better use of time for Microsoft would be making their Javscript engine for IE more standards compliant.
I reckon they've actually done a really good job here. With modern equipment, I think that technically they could just fix the foundations and set it back to vertical. But if it's not leaning then it's not much of a tourist attraction anymore.
Stabilising an ancient tower in a still leaning position is pretty impressive.
I'm not sure a union is really what tech workers need or even want. There's too much variety in the jobs people do and how competent they are at them, even with the same job title. Teaching is a similar situation where the typical behaviour of unions seems like a bad idea, and that view seems to be borne out in practice.
It would be more a professional body similar to those that govern the medical and law professions. They might have the resources to organise a strike but I think would pretty much always decide it wasn't a good idea.
Huh?!? Almost every light in the everyday rooms in my house is now a CFL of some kind (except decorative halogen stuff). Decent versions get to full brightness almost immediately and last a very long time. My old house had 50 year old wiring and blew over a dozen incandescents in the dining room ceiling light (which took 5 40W bulbs) over 18 months. We switched to CFLs and that fitting did blow one bulb, but that's the only bulb I've replaced in 5 years of using them.
If you live in the UK, the B&Q own brand value 20W bulbs are the best I have found yet if you want a bright ceiling light - ideal for halls / kitchens, maybe not so much living rooms. I got a pack of 4 for under £10. They are straight up to proper brightness the moment you flick the switch and are properly 100W incandescent brightness.
I've also got some extra-small 5W CFL bulbs in wall lights in the living/dining room, and these do still suffer from the slow (~1 minute) startup time that some people associate with CFLs. But it's good to know I can run all the nice decorative wall lights downstairs on 35W instead of 280W.
As a precursor, maybe there should be an intentional attempt to slashdot their servers first! Although right now it appears to be running fine despite the link posted in the article.
:)
There's enough accidental slashdotting of sites, surely if we really tried even the firefox website might struggle
Network to network VPNs are pretty common and extremely convenient and easy to administer. Many people will have used them frequently without ever knowing.
At work, if I type in 10.244.x.x (e.g. local LAN address) a Cisco VPN box automatically networks me up to another office.
If you work in a company with multiple offices, there is probably a regular need for the offices to communicate electronically (e.g. access to admin systems / shared documents etc.) and there is probably no budget for a fixed line connection. Having to constantly manually connect to a VPN each time would be a huge pain in the ass.
I thought the root servers were mainly dealing with the kind of typos more like www.google or www.google.con - forgetting or mistyping that top level address. The .com name block and all the others are assigned out to other companies, and it's those others who would see www.goggle.com
.con ...
How great it would be to have a top level domain of
This is exactly why it is so stressful. If you work hard and do things properly, you can make a very positive impact on someone's life.
Working in IT is stressful in a different way, but if one week I'm tired and can't be bothered to do a great job, perhaps a big company will lose a bit of money. As long as I don't get fired that doesn't bother me too much. But if you're a teacher and don't bother to do one week's lesson properly it can affect the kid's exam results and futures.
And to support the GPs position, my mother has long complained that much professional judgement has been removed from teachers. They aren't allowed to kick out disruptive children who don't want to learn. They aren't allowed to punish children for misbehaviour, and education suffers as a result.
Dunno bout that. My mother warned me never to become a teacher - that is properly stressful because you're really affecting peoples lives, and the pay isn't good. My father warned me IT was boring and to do something else more interesting. My wife's parents warned her being a nurse was very hard work for not enough money and being in the police was too dangerous.
Even so I went into IT, and my wife's sister is training to be a nurse. I think the main drive to follow in your parents footsteps comes from the children not the parents.
Absolutely - there's no shortage of water in the world. The logistics side can be expensive to build and run, but the rich will never go thirsty. Some places use desalinated sea water. That is an essentially unlimited resource, but currently takes up a great deal of energy and therefore money to provide.
I've got a wife who likes books and somehow manages to read 2-3 a week. I've been trying to convince her to try an e-ink reader for a while, but not getting anywhere - mainly because of the difficulty of getting and using e-books.
I've just bought new bookcases, which fit almost perfectly floor to ceiling across one whole wall of the study. Now most of the books fit in single-deep fashion, but it's already starting to pile up with extras. There are still four sizeable boxes of older books under the stairs. Unfortunately books tend to take up too much space for an avid reader.
E-Ink screens actually look pretty good. It should be technically easy to sort out a simple electronic book format that would be portable between devices. Just plain PDF would do it, but it might be worth using a limited feature set to enable cheaper and importantly very low powered devices to use it in a responsive manner.
Unfortunately publishers are pissing about just like the music companies with DRM and incompatible proprietary formats. Just make it easy and sensibly priced and I'm sure there's a huge market.
With this new system things are getting pretty ridiculous. Enough countries have shown that they now have the ability to launch a GPS style system that no one is going to be able to disable all the available systems and there will be no military advantage on either side.
Kind of scary isn't it that China is spending billions building something which is only useful if they fight a major war with the US.I'm hoping for someone to just open up the systems properly so we can get away from the waste of money this is becoming.
Also, stop the scare mongering. By your logic the US's ability to jam the civilian GPS signal and keep the military one is only useful if they want to fight a major war with China.
You're missing the 20% 'why on earth is it shutting down now' times.
Partly I think it's just that if you're the sort of person who is going to have success as an entrepreneur, it's all about drive, vision and creativity. Those don't tend to increase that much with experience.
Kind of like what they say about Mathematicians - if you've not made a big contribution by your 30s, you probably never will.
On the other hand engineering work is very much improved by experience, and many of the best engineers I know are in their 40s or older.
So the newsworthy startups are often started by college kids. But the majority of startups have a decent if not earth shattering premise, backed up by business and engineering skills built up with experience and run by older people.
Lots of new mainframe level systems still use tapes. Many customers prefer tape drives for backup of any sensitive data - it means that you don't have to put the systems on the open internet to get offsite backups done. While tapes aren't the most robust medium for constant access, it's a very good format to write to and throw into a store room for backups.
Remember also hardware-wise, tape is still a pretty interesting format. LTO currently uses 800GB tapes with 1.6 and 3.2 TB versions planned. The 120MB/sec transfer rate is much quicker than network backups. It's also much quicker than backups to CDs/DVDs and even matches the speed of top-end hard discs.
I'd hope it's not an Access file, but my guess is that it quite possibly is a database dump from something like SQL Server / Oracle / Informix.
For most apps of any size, having a 'separate' GUI is no bad thing. It encourages you to simplify the back end processing and keep if efficient and easy to understand, with a limited number of hooks for a GUI to hook into.
The stuff I write at work has multiple user interfaces possible. Little has to change to swap our Windows only C++ / Visual Studio GUI to a multi-platform web based GUI.
2.35:1 was primarily invented because it was hard to make CRTs at that aspect ratio, and thus easier to make the viewing experience at home less competitive with the experience at cinemas. 1.85:1 is a much nicer aspect ratio to watch.
It would be nicer if they just made TVs 1.85:1, but I'm quite happy with 16:10 for PC displays.
I'd think a lot of people would agree with him though. I've also got a 17" desktop replacement laptop. Most of the time I take it to a desk somewhere and plug it in. It's ideal for 95% of the work I use it for.
I don't want to compromise that 95% to be able to watch a DVD on a plane. But most laptops do occasionally need to be used as true mobile devices - I do want to be able to watch a DVD on a plane occasionally. At the moment, the best I can do is an episode of Lost :)