Just look at the User Info. He's clearly a sufferer from Bipolar Compulsive Troll Disorder; one moment it's a rational comment, the next it's a Looney Tune. Please don't feed him any more karma.
who actually thinks that the UK is gonna invade a country and take it down.
Maybe not the UK, but the US wouldn't hesitate to do it. In recent years the USA has embargoed one country (Cuba), mined the harbours of another (Nicaragua), toppled the democratically elected government of Chile (and sizable chunks of Africa), invaded a few others (Grenada and Panama) and supported internal terrorism in far too many to name (including the far-right in Italy). Where UK connivance is needed (airfields to support the bombing of Libya), they roll right over.
Post-USSR, the USA is now the world's largest sponsor of state terrorism. And just like Khruschev's claims of supporting peace, whilst building nukes like crazy, the USA has the audacity to describe states like Yemen as being a harbour for terrorism, when they're the worst criminal of all.
Uncle Sam certainly likes his role as the world's policeman. Unfortunately he's less Dixon of Dock Green and more an overweight Southern-States redneck cop turning over yet more poor-coloured-trash folks because he wants to steal their donuts.
I'd ask though, what about the borderline ? I know plenty of women, excellent geeks, who still have a problem with accepting that they're damn good at geekery, and that it's OK to be so. Maybe we're now at a situation where no woman who wants to be a geek can be prevented from it, but there are still plenty out there who "decide" that they don;t want to be, because there are so many social pressures that say geeks are still fat, smelly guys with no social life.
Over the weekend I met a friend's kids; 13 & 16. They'd also been to the HP Labs (where I work) company picnic the day before. Now these are two intelligent kids who could do almost anything in the future they put their minds to, in the next year they have to choose courses etc. that will influence this, yet mention HP (the finest and most well-socialised bunch of geeks around) and they suffered a total gross-out. OK, so some of it was just teenage "everything sucks" angst, but they really did feel that working here at Nerdvana would be their personal idea of Hell. Geek-wise this site is as good as it gets, yet we're absolutely horrifying to a generation of girls.
How can geeks improve their perceived profile ?
A big march through London every Summer, T shirts with "Geek Pride" and a big triangle of aluminium checker plate ?
The site at http://www.principality-sealand.net/ is a bunch of evil Spanish passport scamsters (alhough it's generally a more informative site on the history).
Nitinol is cute, but very limited. It needs a huge power to generate a small force - most is wasted in heat.
Mondotronics have a cute project book and kit for Nitinol, which is a splendid birthday present for any geek larvae you might know. Milford Instruments sell it in the UK.
If you want a more workable muscle for small robots, look at the Air Muscle from Shadow Robots. These are interesting because they generate a pull action from air pressure, yet in a small package.
Why not ? Using a Thermos is a well established and perfectly safe lab procedure (I've sloshed more LN2 around over the years than you've guzzled under-age Bud round the back of the 7-11). "Real" lab ones just have push-fit stoppers though, not screw-on.
Boo are selling their whole customer base (both of them), but it's formatted as a 20 minute long Flash animation that opens five browser windows for each customer.
Imagine an asbestos mill that goes bust. One day their pile of raw asbestos is an asset that's an essential part of their business process, the next it's a liability that requires expensive disposal.
If they can be taken over by another asbestos mill, then the raw material turns back into being an asset, because they're another business entity that can make valuable and legitimate usage of this stuff. The material is still being utilised under the terms of the original conditions that applied to it (don't breathe the dust / don't mis-use the data).
Of course, you could instead sell asbestos fibres instead as a cheap and non-fattening filler for cookie dough -- you might even get a really good price for it, as food is a more profitable business than asbestos these days. Fortunately we have laws against this, that recognise that an asset may have attached conditions to it that prevent its simply sale to whoever offers the best possible price (Sadly some countries don't enforce this, and we do find situations like the Spanish cooking oil poisoning disaster).
There's a difference though between the TSB situation and Toysmart. For TSB, the bank was absorbed into another, it didn't fold, and so your personal details were still being used for the original purpose, although by a different organisation. IANAL, but one hopes that any original provacy constraints would still be observed (although being a UK bank, they'd do whatever they liked anyway, and they already had your consent for it).
With a situation like Toysmart or Boo though, this is a "fire sale" scenario. The company is not continuing to trade, so anything that isn't bolted down is being sold off. The customer information (probably including that oh-so-tasty demographic of how many product-hungry kids you have) is on offer to anyone who wants it. There's no reason why it should continue to be used for anything resembling the original purpose -- imagine how many organisations like to know lead information on families with kids, and how many products they'd like to pitch.
This sounds awfully like a very bad article, written on the basis of a half-heard and barely understood talk. Given who Simson Garfinkel is, I think he does know what he's talking about, but that article reads as if it was written by an intern from the paper's "religion and dog shows" desk.
As an example, Log files, for example, are created on Web servers whenever users click on the "search" button.
RedHat, PHP and mySQL is a great way to teach eCommerce '99-style.
If you want to be really up on the game, look towards XML and Java Servlet / SOAP architectures too. Single box PHP sites are fine for getting the "Bob's Doughnuts" catalogue site on-line, but the industry is screaming for ways to build bigger sites; secure connections to back-office servers, maybe even servers in other server rooms (or continents). Think about scalable multi-server soolutions, and choose protocols that work in this environment.
This year's Next Big Thing is mobile; using protocols like WAP & WML. These are a very good scenario for using content generation in XML and redirection to different presentations by using XSL transforms.
I'd second the Enhydra recommendation. I don't like XMLC, but many of the other bits (the esp. Servlet engine and good XML support) are just where you want to be. Works with WAP too (unlike many).
Anyone who uses Flash should be sent down instantly 8-)
We have treaties and treaties on why we can't test these devices "for real". Given the desire to upgrade them without "upgrading" them in a way that affects counts or treaties, there's currently a lot of interest in how to re-use existing designs and components in ways that give functionally new weapons, without being listed as such. Converting air-burst devices to near-surface burst devices turns town-killers into bunker-killers, but it doesn't have to appear as building new weapons or changing the type of existing ones.
How true is this ? If you're a disk-only server, or even a SQL box, then you need disk bandwidth, memory, disk space and network bandwidth in roughly that order. OTOH, if you're bothering to put extra processor boards into your server at all, you're presumably needing to crunch serious numbers. How much of a margin is there between needing an essential FPU and not needing extra processors at all ?
I'm getting into packaging media for streaming servers. A bucketload of G4s in a box sounds like a fine idea to me.
The long, sorry history of ActiveCOM+ is one of interesting ideas in component-based architectures being scuppered by the painful process of implementing them. Anyone else try big 3 tier systems in 16 bit VC++ ? Ouch !
Every year or two, the technology gets simplified, the tools get an infinitesimal amount easier to drive, and marketing invents a new brand for it. Eventually it reaches the point where the average retrained COBOL'bert can make something vaguely useful, and the market then buys into it.
VC++ is still painful to work with; MFC is pants and COM work is a gazillion times more awkward than it ought to be (especially compared to VB or VJ). M$oft developers need a better tool for making moderately complex server-side COM components. I used to hope this was J++, but even if it's going to be some bizarre Redmondolalia, then it's better than MFC.
Give M$oft their due - OO (Yes, I optimistically wrote Eiffel class libraries too) didn't take off and componentware did. In no small part, this was because VBX put workable, useful, components onto many, many people's desktops long before penguins had even started drinking coffee. Even today, the Java mindset (especially implementing interfaces, rather than inheritance) is still much more like the COM / VB approach than the old Smalltalk-era one of the huge divergent tree of ygdrassil.
new sites will never become popular, since they aren't linked to by the highly-rated ones.
We already have a dose of that with the Bow Tie theory of the web.
I wonder what effect Google/Yahoo will have on Spamdexing "industry" ? Rather than stuffing <meta> tags, will the lexicographic whores turn to setting up "stooge pages" with loads of links to their favoured targets.
A large auto-generated farm of stooges could carry a lot of "relevant" text on a particular subject, and links to the target pages. It's almost impossible for Google to detect wordlist drivel from real sites (that's nigh-on a Turing Test). As storage space is cheap, and bandwidth needed would be minimal, the spamdexers could afford a large collection of these.
wanna bet that Microsoft deep-sixes J++ and discontinues its VM now that it has this, "suggesting" that new developers move to C#?
I don't know how close C# is to "Project C00L", but towards the end of last year, when the "Selling off J++" story was planted, this is exactly the strategy M$oft were suggesting to their J++ / Windows-only developer community (Many of us don't _want_ to write anything other than a Windows.exe). If they couldn't play Java according to their own rules, they'd take their marbles and go home in a sulk. Not only that, but they'd smash up the board so that no-one else could play their game either.
In my case it back-fired. I'm now writing Servlets with Sun tools, and I've never been happier to be rid of Redmond's spawn. I won't even be bothering to evaluate Cb.
I know just what you mean about the HTML. This whole geek-chic schtick, and the blaring HTML headlines, does nothing for having the project taken seriously by those with a functionaly dress sense. They make Kevin Warwick look restrained by comparison.
...and that "Bunuel does Clockwork Orange" image is just gross.
As I've not seen this link posted yet, take a look at Delft University of Technology and their UbiCom project. Very high bandwidth, high on-board processing power, and some neat usage of vision to do accurate position finding. It's an Augmented Reality system, so that instead of just catching data, or displaying it, it's able to accurately overlay real-world imagery with a projected virtual overlay. Their video of playing Pacman inside an empty room, with an entirely virtual maze and ghosts is wonderful.
They've also developed the LART, a chipset for embedded Linux that sadly sounds funnier than it really is. Maybe it's funnier if you read the BOFH.
I think ESR misses everything these days. His thinking seems to have crystallised a couple of years ago and never moves forward, no matter what changes out in the rest of the world.
Re:Call me when they can fix the screen size too.
on
Power Up That iMac
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I meant "it" meaning the instance of "my hypothetical iMac", not the class of "all iMacs". I'm well aware that they could do it, but as it's just too damn small for me, the question is academic.
Does YellowDog run on iMacs ? - or is it just G4s ?
I'm curious as to what sort of apps you write, if you haven't yet found C to be painful ?
In recent years, most of us are writing desktop apps for windowing systems. These need to respond to mouseclicks, messages from other windows, system or network events, all sorts of things. Now this is still hard in an OO environment, but it's an absolute nightmare in C ! Anyone remember first edition Petzold, and the horrors of the Windows message loop ? Nasty, nasty days, and we had the program bugs and hangs to prove it.
Writing good GUI event handlers is still hard, but with an OO environment it only needs to be done once, by the environment author, then just subclassed by the application author.
Those of us not writing GUI apps are probably mainly writing back-end objects. I dont know where you'd begin, trying to serve one of potentially 50 different method calls, all from C.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at the User Info. He's clearly a sufferer from Bipolar Compulsive Troll Disorder; one moment it's a rational comment, the next it's a Looney Tune. Please don't feed him any more karma.
Post natal gene therapy doesn't work
Cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy are two of the hot favourites for post natal gene therapy.
who actually thinks that the UK is gonna invade a country and take it down.
Maybe not the UK, but the US wouldn't hesitate to do it. In recent years the USA has embargoed one country (Cuba), mined the harbours of another (Nicaragua), toppled the democratically elected government of Chile (and sizable chunks of Africa), invaded a few others (Grenada and Panama) and supported internal terrorism in far too many to name (including the far-right in Italy). Where UK connivance is needed (airfields to support the bombing of Libya), they roll right over.
Post-USSR, the USA is now the world's largest sponsor of state terrorism. And just like Khruschev's claims of supporting peace, whilst building nukes like crazy, the USA has the audacity to describe states like Yemen as being a harbour for terrorism, when they're the worst criminal of all.
Uncle Sam certainly likes his role as the world's policeman. Unfortunately he's less Dixon of Dock Green and more an overweight Southern-States redneck cop turning over yet more poor-coloured-trash folks because he wants to steal their donuts.
Women don't like technical fields, so what?
You make some very good points.
I'd ask though, what about the borderline ? I know plenty of women, excellent geeks, who still have a problem with accepting that they're damn good at geekery, and that it's OK to be so. Maybe we're now at a situation where no woman who wants to be a geek can be prevented from it, but there are still plenty out there who "decide" that they don;t want to be, because there are so many social pressures that say geeks are still fat, smelly guys with no social life.
Over the weekend I met a friend's kids; 13 & 16. They'd also been to the HP Labs (where I work) company picnic the day before. Now these are two intelligent kids who could do almost anything in the future they put their minds to, in the next year they have to choose courses etc. that will influence this, yet mention HP (the finest and most well-socialised bunch of geeks around) and they suffered a total gross-out. OK, so some of it was just teenage "everything sucks" angst, but they really did feel that working here at Nerdvana would be their personal idea of Hell. Geek-wise this site is as good as it gets, yet we're absolutely horrifying to a generation of girls.
How can geeks improve their perceived profile ?
A big march through London every Summer, T shirts with "Geek Pride" and a big triangle of aluminium checker plate ?
You have the web sites the wrong way around.
The real Sealand site is at: http://www.fruitsofthesea.demon.co.uk/sealand/
The site at http://www.principality-sealand.net/ is a bunch of evil Spanish passport scamsters (alhough it's generally a more informative site on the history).
Nitinol is cute, but very limited. It needs a huge power to generate a small force - most is wasted in heat.
Mondotronics have a cute project book and kit for Nitinol, which is a splendid birthday present for any geek larvae you might know. Milford Instruments sell it in the UK.
If you want a more workable muscle for small robots, look at the Air Muscle from Shadow Robots. These are interesting because they generate a pull action from air pressure, yet in a small package.
Well, don't use a thermos
Why not ? Using a Thermos is a well established and perfectly safe lab procedure (I've sloshed more LN2 around over the years than you've guzzled under-age Bud round the back of the 7-11). "Real" lab ones just have push-fit stoppers though, not screw-on.
Boo are selling their whole customer base (both of them), but it's formatted as a 20 minute long Flash animation that opens five browser windows for each customer.
What's chemical waste ? Asset or liability ?
Imagine an asbestos mill that goes bust. One day their pile of raw asbestos is an asset that's an essential part of their business process, the next it's a liability that requires expensive disposal.
If they can be taken over by another asbestos mill, then the raw material turns back into being an asset, because they're another business entity that can make valuable and legitimate usage of this stuff. The material is still being utilised under the terms of the original conditions that applied to it (don't breathe the dust / don't mis-use the data).
Of course, you could instead sell asbestos fibres instead as a cheap and non-fattening filler for cookie dough -- you might even get a really good price for it, as food is a more profitable business than asbestos these days. Fortunately we have laws against this, that recognise that an asset may have attached conditions to it that prevent its simply sale to whoever offers the best possible price (Sadly some countries don't enforce this, and we do find situations like the Spanish cooking oil poisoning disaster).
There's a difference though between the TSB situation and Toysmart. For TSB, the bank was absorbed into another, it didn't fold, and so your personal details were still being used for the original purpose, although by a different organisation. IANAL, but one hopes that any original provacy constraints would still be observed (although being a UK bank, they'd do whatever they liked anyway, and they already had your consent for it).
With a situation like Toysmart or Boo though, this is a "fire sale" scenario. The company is not continuing to trade, so anything that isn't bolted down is being sold off. The customer information (probably including that oh-so-tasty demographic of how many product-hungry kids you have) is on offer to anyone who wants it. There's no reason why it should continue to be used for anything resembling the original purpose -- imagine how many organisations like to know lead information on families with kids, and how many products they'd like to pitch.
Secondly, if you store liquid nitrogen in a Thermos flask, DON'T SCREW THE LID ON
This sounds awfully like a very bad article, written on the basis of a half-heard and barely understood talk. Given who Simson Garfinkel is, I think he does know what he's talking about, but that article reads as if it was written by an intern from the paper's "religion and dog shows" desk.
As an example, Log files, for example, are created on Web servers whenever users click on the "search" button.
RedHat, PHP and mySQL is a great way to teach eCommerce '99-style.
If you want to be really up on the game, look towards XML and Java Servlet / SOAP architectures too. Single box PHP sites are fine for getting the "Bob's Doughnuts" catalogue site on-line, but the industry is screaming for ways to build bigger sites; secure connections to back-office servers, maybe even servers in other server rooms (or continents). Think about scalable multi-server soolutions, and choose protocols that work in this environment.
This year's Next Big Thing is mobile; using protocols like WAP & WML. These are a very good scenario for using content generation in XML and redirection to different presentations by using XSL transforms.
I'd second the Enhydra recommendation. I don't like XMLC, but many of the other bits (the esp. Servlet engine and good XML support) are just where you want to be. Works with WAP too (unlike many).
Anyone who uses Flash should be sent down instantly 8-)
How come almost every time there is a post about supersomputers, they are being used for nuclear bomb explosion simulations?
As usual, there's a good article over at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on why there's so much government desire for bomb simulation.
We have treaties and treaties on why we can't test these devices "for real". Given the desire to upgrade them without "upgrading" them in a way that affects counts or treaties, there's currently a lot of interest in how to re-use existing designs and components in ways that give functionally new weapons, without being listed as such. Converting air-burst devices to near-surface burst devices turns town-killers into bunker-killers, but it doesn't have to appear as building new weapons or changing the type of existing ones.
the low FPU based needs of a server,
How true is this ? If you're a disk-only server, or even a SQL box, then you need disk bandwidth, memory, disk space and network bandwidth in roughly that order. OTOH, if you're bothering to put extra processor boards into your server at all, you're presumably needing to crunch serious numbers. How much of a margin is there between needing an essential FPU and not needing extra processors at all ?
I'm getting into packaging media for streaming servers. A bucketload of G4s in a box sounds like a fine idea to me.
The long, sorry history of ActiveCOM+ is one of interesting ideas in component-based architectures being scuppered by the painful process of implementing them. Anyone else try big 3 tier systems in 16 bit VC++ ? Ouch !
Every year or two, the technology gets simplified, the tools get an infinitesimal amount easier to drive, and marketing invents a new brand for it. Eventually it reaches the point where the average retrained COBOL'bert can make something vaguely useful, and the market then buys into it.
VC++ is still painful to work with; MFC is pants and COM work is a gazillion times more awkward than it ought to be (especially compared to VB or VJ). M$oft developers need a better tool for making moderately complex server-side COM components. I used to hope this was J++, but even if it's going to be some bizarre Redmondolalia, then it's better than MFC.
Give M$oft their due - OO (Yes, I optimistically wrote Eiffel class libraries too) didn't take off and componentware did. In no small part, this was because VBX put workable, useful, components onto many, many people's desktops long before penguins had even started drinking coffee. Even today, the Java mindset (especially implementing interfaces, rather than inheritance) is still much more like the COM / VB approach than the old Smalltalk-era one of the huge divergent tree of ygdrassil.
new sites will never become popular, since they aren't linked to by the highly-rated ones.
We already have a dose of that with the Bow Tie theory of the web.
I wonder what effect Google/Yahoo will have on Spamdexing "industry" ? Rather than stuffing <meta> tags, will the lexicographic whores turn to setting up "stooge pages" with loads of links to their favoured targets.
A large auto-generated farm of stooges could carry a lot of "relevant" text on a particular subject, and links to the target pages. It's almost impossible for Google to detect wordlist drivel from real sites (that's nigh-on a Turing Test). As storage space is cheap, and bandwidth needed would be minimal, the spamdexers could afford a large collection of these.
wanna bet that Microsoft deep-sixes J++ and discontinues its VM now that it has this, "suggesting" that new developers move to C#?
I don't know how close C# is to "Project C00L", but towards the end of last year, when the "Selling off J++" story was planted, this is exactly the strategy M$oft were suggesting to their J++ / Windows-only developer community (Many of us don't _want_ to write anything other than a Windows .exe). If they couldn't play Java according to their own rules, they'd take their marbles and go home in a sulk. Not only that, but they'd smash up the board so that no-one else could play their game either.
In my case it back-fired. I'm now writing Servlets with Sun tools, and I've never been happier to be rid of Redmond's spawn. I won't even be bothering to evaluate Cb.
However, unlike Java, C# compiles to machine code, not byte code. Therefore C# programs do not take the performance hit that Java programs do.
[...]
Who can tell me what is wrong with this picture ?
Aint-it-Cool for wearables ?
I know just what you mean about the HTML. This whole geek-chic schtick, and the blaring HTML headlines, does nothing for having the project taken seriously by those with a functionaly dress sense. They make Kevin Warwick look restrained by comparison.
...and that "Bunuel does Clockwork Orange" image is just gross.
As I've not seen this link posted yet, take a look at Delft University of Technology and their UbiCom project. Very high bandwidth, high on-board processing power, and some neat usage of vision to do accurate position finding. It's an Augmented Reality system, so that instead of just catching data, or displaying it, it's able to accurately overlay real-world imagery with a projected virtual overlay. Their video of playing Pacman inside an empty room, with an entirely virtual maze and ghosts is wonderful.
They've also developed the LART, a chipset for embedded Linux that sadly sounds funnier than it really is. Maybe it's funnier if you read the BOFH.
Go to jetex.org and scroll down about 2/3rd of the (long) page.
The "Speed Racer" mark applied to a car, in 1952 (I'm having a trademark paranoia week)
I think ESR did miss Lessig's points
I think ESR misses everything these days. His thinking seems to have crystallised a couple of years ago and never moves forward, no matter what changes out in the rest of the world.
Sorry, I meant "it" meaning the instance of "my hypothetical iMac", not the class of "all iMacs". I'm well aware that they could do it, but as it's just too damn small for me, the question is academic.
Does YellowDog run on iMacs ? - or is it just G4s ?
There are problems with C++, certainly, but I hate to think of any problem where the solution is LISP !
I'd rather write Smalltalk than LISP, and that's saying some...
I'm curious as to what sort of apps you write, if you haven't yet found C to be painful ?
In recent years, most of us are writing desktop apps for windowing systems. These need to respond to mouseclicks, messages from other windows, system or network events, all sorts of things. Now this is still hard in an OO environment, but it's an absolute nightmare in C ! Anyone remember first edition Petzold, and the horrors of the Windows message loop ? Nasty, nasty days, and we had the program bugs and hangs to prove it.
Writing good GUI event handlers is still hard, but with an OO environment it only needs to be done once, by the environment author, then just subclassed by the application author.
Those of us not writing GUI apps are probably mainly writing back-end objects. I dont know where you'd begin, trying to serve one of potentially 50 different method calls, all from C.