Comment The usual suspects (Score 1) 280
Lessee now...
Linux (CentOS, Slackware), Solaris, Windows XP, OS X (Lion), Android (Gingerbread), iOS
...laura
Lessee now...
Linux (CentOS, Slackware), Solaris, Windows XP, OS X (Lion), Android (Gingerbread), iOS
...laura
The
...laura
I think that's the point.
...laura
Creative people are curious, and anybody who is any good has toys to play with and side projects on the go. A good manager will encourage a bit of goofing off...sorry, personal research. Good people do so anyway, and if it's on company time, the company may be able to make some money out of it.
Not every side project will be a winner, but if you don't try, you will never know. One of mine got a security guard fired. Another became a
key test tool. Another looked like a good way for the company to make lots of money until our marketing person screwed it up.
...laura
Sorry, but I can't accept this being progress toward a proof.
Consider Fermat's Last Theorem. Proving it for any particular exponent is doable. Mathematicians had proved it for various sets of exponents (Sophie Germain, Wieferich, etc.). But the proof for all exponents was based on completely different mathematics (Elliptic curves/modular forms, Taniyama-Shimura, Wiles) and didn't look like anything that had come before.
...laura
I don't get the point of a hybrid airplane in the first place.
Hybrid cars work well in stop-and-go city traffic (almost all the taxis here are hybrids, as are all the new transit buses), but drone along on their engines on the highway like any other car.
An airplane engine runs at constant speed, constant load, usually a fairly high percentage of its maximum output (65 to 75%). I see no advantage here.
Am I missing something?
...laura, PA28 and C152 pilot
I live in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and not only will we have a good view (egress is just after sunset), the weather prospects are decent. My mylar filter is ready to go on my Takahashi, so is my Coronado PST, bought on the way to the airport to observe the 2006 eclipse in Turkey.
In 2004 I looked at creative places I might go to see the transit, and one candidate was Inuvik, thanks to the midnight sun. Until I looked at the weather prospects there, and concluded it wasn't going to happen. I got skunked by the 2010 eclipse from Mangaia in the Cook Islands, nice sunny weather the entire time, except at the time of the eclipse. Nice place, otherwise.
...laura
The same thing has occurred to me a number of times. "If they're that freaked about what I may or may not be carrying, I might as well take my clothes off and show them."
No, I haven't done it.
...laura
The nonsense about electric cars is no different. It's just attempts by the lobbying department of interested automobile makers (the ones who aren't adapting to the 21st century) using bribed republicans and regulatory capture to try to create artificial barriers to adoption against their competition.
A very long time ago steam was the proven technology, electric cars were considered quiet and civilized, and gas engine cars were the noisy, dangerous, smelly upstarts. The gas engine car manufacturers engaged in a major FUD campaign against electric cars. They were dangerous! They were so quiet you couldn't hear them coming...
We have an active electric vehicle club here in Vancouver. The loudest noise their best conversions make is the whirr of the tires, sometimes with a slight groan from their power controllers. They have a 1912 Detroit electric car, and it's almost completely silent.
Our bus system has one of the larger fleets of electric trolley buses in the western world. They too are very quiet, but people get used to looking for them before crossing the street.
...laura
Indeed.
If the merchants were on the ball they would have real people wandering around their stores helping customers. Then they wouldn't need technology to bombard us with ads. If a sales person points out a special to me, or brings another product to my attention, I won't mind.
I did a lot of work a few years ago with assisted GPS, that used both GPS and the cellphone network to determine location. I did one test where I was driving around a parkade in downtown Seattle. The assisted cellphone fixes were spot on. The GPS fixes were - literally - all over the map. The I drove along the nastiest urban canyon I could find (under the monorail), and out the I-90 bridge/tunnel, with all the big underpasses and things that confused every other GPS.
Our stuff basically worked, but our marketing person still managed to bankrupt the company. That was another matter. It was fun while it lasted.
...laura
Back in the days of magnetic drums it was common for instructions to specify the address of the next instruction, to handle drum rotation latency. Were their assemblers that smart, or did programmers do instruction scheduling by hand?
...laura
If you want me as a customer, you will implement à la carte service.
If you don't, I will continue to use streaming video and iTunes.
This is non-negotiable.
...laura
Live, of course.
I use an iPod Shuffle for my workout tunes.
...laura
Pen and paper. Nothing else even comes close.
What problem are you attempting to solve?
...laura
Shrug. We've already ditched $1 and $2 bills in favour of coins, and ditched 25 cent bills entirely. We've survived.
...laura
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
