Posts by Stevie 7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Using electric motors as brakes isn't revolutionary, it's been done for decades on diesel locomotives for one, but attempting to use the electricity will reduce the braking effect considerably. Presumably the mass of the vehicle is such that this isn't important.
I'm surprised that the blurb doesn't point out that such braking is, thanks to the laws of Physics, anti-lock off the shelf.
No, I think you'll find you backed a develoment project that should it pan out may result in you being "rewarded" with a white model - assuming they are able to make it in more than one color.
The places where one can drive a tractor-trailer rig through your expectations with this capital raising model are many.
"Holes". Gotta love electical engineers. They invent anon-existant charge carrier to explain stuff instead of just using perfectly good electrons to do the job.
They use imaginary numbers to explain stuff like alternators too. How can you trust people like that?
Square root of minus one indeed.
I'm pretty sure the OS already released maps of both Mars and The Moon, back in the late 70s/early 80s, because I have a copy of each somewhere in my basement of crap. I may be confusing them with McNally products; I haven't actually had mine in my hands for over three decades.
I love OS maps. I used to grab a 1:50 000 map of anywhere I worked or holidayed during my UK consulting career, just because. I used the older 1 inch to 1 mile ones too. They taught us how to read them in Geography class, and I used them in my outward bound stuff as a young teenager. For a while you could get both because there was a commitment to mapping the entire British Isles at 1 inch to 1 mile and they weren't done when the move to metric began.
I miss them. They don't have such things in the US. The nearest you can get for the detail as far as I know are military maps or forestry maps. I seriously doubt that anyone under the age of fifty could read one absent military training anyway.
And how many stories are there of people who are proud of their lack of need for a checkbutton who have majorly buggered everyone by confidently not paying attention before hitting xmit? I know of two myself, with a third at one remove without even firing up Mr Brain's long term storage search.
There's nothing wrong with a safety catch. Realizing that is why we have sudo (widely misunderstood to be a role base access tool) and now routinely disable root login on Linux machines.
People who sneer about the check button are apt to be in mid lecture when they screw up too. I just remembered the classic example in our office who fucked a vstab to a fare-thee-well while espousing sardonically that old checkbutton mantra, then got in the way so the fix took four times longer than it should have. So that's three I know myself.
Oh yeah, and what about the man page on "ln" which eschews the usual unix idiom and waffles so effectively that no-one can figure out which comes first: the file name or the link name. man pages are a cowpat in the field of technical documentation.
Then there are the Java-enabled tech things like the certificate management doodad on Solaris that don't have man pages, they use a different online manual. Then there's perldoc of course.
Years ago I took it in the neck for owning a Windows 95 computer instead of a G3. When my brother-in-law's G3 went nails-up I offered to fix it. Every single thing that had been put about by mactards about this piece of tat was false.
Superior design == power supply (had same number of fuses as my PC one did - nil - but cost eight times as much to replace when surge killed it) made from depleted uranium suspended by two (of four possible) screws over most delicate component - the motherboard. The monitor (also made from transuranics) was perched on a dead artistic but engineeringly dubious ribbon of lucite. Brother-in-law's stand shattered when I looked at it wrong. I'm not joking about that. I was five feet from it and thinking "at last I can get rid of this *&^%ing albatross" when it broke.
CMOS battery of bizarre design that cost three times more than PC lithium cell but lasted less time in the field.
And the HELP function was the best (which is what made me remember this in a discussion of man pages). Windows had a single unified help system. The G3 had three different ones. Oh yeah, *much* better.
The OS would crash for bizarre reasons too (OS 9, now admitted to be POS but in those days being sung up as perpetual motion on toast), including hoovering the mouse over an icon "too long".
Don't argue with man page evangelists: they are living in a bubble. Hey, you can see how great they are by simply comparing how many times person A uses them as opposed to going straight to google.
Yes, let us indoctrinate a generation of yoof in the same skills 90% of the computer world already has: blithering obliviousness and nil ability to empathize with another and hence communicate effectively with them.
Soon the whole world will know C insert modifier of the day but will need joke icon or an irony tag to tell them when others are leg-pulling. Eventually, all non-coders will be dead and no-one will be able to crack jokes that aren't about coding slips, so it will all work out in the end.
What happens when we finally get proper AI and let them do the boring coding? What will these poor buggers do then? It'll be like when the dotcom bubble burst and all those Javascript web "programmers" suddenly found themselves in a sane IT environment that needed more than client-side enblingination skills. Our place was like an episode of The Walking Dead for about two weeks as Web Coder contracts began to expire. All that shuffling, moaning, dead-eyed yoof.
Oh the humanities.
I also smell the odious whiff of a rotting baby, the one tossed out with the bathwater.
The snotty young things here where I patrol the trenches are often horrified to learn that the systems they write are accessing data sourced from a humongous CODASYL database on an honest-to-cray mainframe that is maintained by a suite of COBOL programs.
When they are done sneering I point out that the database schema only ever needs recompiling when we hit the hardware limit for file sizes and have to re-distribute the data involved, contains more data than they'd like to keep in their Oracle databases because archiving is culturally an badde thynge, and that the program suites have been ticking along putting bread on the table in front of their kids for donkey's years on account of the people in charge not being fad-hags when it comes to computer languages. The system eats a fraction of the IT budget, leaving it to be burned away by the half-arsed stuff the youg things write that can't survive an audit cycle without a major rewrite (yeah, testing).
Oh the money lost to Java, C++, C#, Etc etc etc.
"When it announced the name change, Adobe stated that "over a third of all content created in Flash Professional uses HTML5," implying that up to two-thirds still uses Flash. This is still fully supported."
That would be "implying just under two thirds" to them wot can actually do arithmetic.
I assume that the first paragraph of the new game blurb will read something like "WARNING: The new owners of this game have been convicted of being lying, venal, scum-sucking git-faces who have betrayed the trust of each and every one of their customers. Would-be purchasers of this game should be aware that neither of the said owners were required to serve any prison time for their crime, and so can reasonably be expected to continue their criminal behaviour and to involve you in it at the sharp end."
I can't see anyone being taken in under those circumstances.
Yesyesyesyesyes, evil American GPS blahblahblah.
But consider: Do you really want your car's positional information supplied in hogsheads per square newton or its speed quoted in millilitres?
I urge all European navigators to reject this so-called "Galileo" thingumy and use goodole-yankee feet'n'inches GPS.
I feel your pain. I sometimes try and order stuff from small UK businesses whose shopping carts demand a UK-style ZIP or nothing and Azathoth help you with the (mandatory) phone number.
The only way to continue a transaction at such a site is to put the real address in the "special instructions" box - assuming Nigel the Programmer remembered to put one in the form and fill out the rest with anything that will pass the idiot regex Nigel wrote to "protect" each field.
Prediction: Long day at work, late home, feel like strafing some people in Grand Theft Doom of Duty, plug in wrong cable, engulfed in flames, amps up the arms and across the old ticker, end of story.
Wear rubber gloves and thick soled boots, and carry a fire extinguisher at all times.
Trying to answer the question "Is Deckard an android?" is pointless, as the Director-approved answer ("yes, of course") leaves us with a vanilla boring story, completely wasting the wonderful hints that Rutger Hauer in particular gave us to go on.
Consider: If Deckard is an android, he and Rebecca are just two machines making the beast with two backs. If not, he has all sorts of issues, not the least that he is a child molester (Rachel is six years old).
And the machines he is "retiring" are children, as can be seen occasionally when the actors let it bleed through. The scene when Roy Batty berates Leon is a case in point, when the conversation and facial expressions suddenly take a turn into the childlike, and the Deckard vs Batty sequences are full of occasional kid-level mischevious looks on the part of Batty. And of course, there's the wonderful performance between Pris and Batty in J.F. Sebastian's apartment.
But if Deckard is a machine too, he lacks the empathy for that to have any personal import and there's no point of inner turmoil.
I could go on, but all you have to do is watch and the actors show you a much richer set of possibilities than the internet Android-Or-Not combatants.
This system design predates Challenger by some decades, and its deployment and use didn't end well for anyone involved. As I recall, all the passengers did survive the modular cabin deployment after an unspecified catastrophic airframe failure, but then they devolved alarmingly quickly into a bunch of primitives, partaking of bestial tribal rituals and canibalism.
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