Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said, “Where did
you get such a great bike?”
The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my
own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike
to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, “Take what you want.”
“The second engineer nodded approvingly, “Good choice; the clothes probably
wouldn’t have fit.”
What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?
Mechanical Engineers build weapons; Civil Engineers build targets.
I’d never heard of this one before
Rule 34 is an Internet adage in the “Rules of the Internet” list of protocols and conventions which asserts that if something exists, there is porn of it. The humorous concept is commonly illustrated through fanart and fanfictions in which fictional TV and cartoon characters engage in sexual behavior, in similar vein to the Ruined Childhoodmeme.
Apparently the internet does have rules!
1) Do not talk about rules 2-33
34) There is porn of it. No exceptions.
35) The exception to rule #34 is the citation of rule #34.
36) Anonymous does not forgive.
37) There are no girls on the internet.
38) A cat is fine too
39) One cat leads to another.
40) Another cat leads to zippocat.
41) Everything is someone’s sexual fetish.
42) It is delicious cake. You must eat it.
43) It is a delicious trap. You must hit it.
44) /b/ sucks today.
45) Cock goes in here.
46) They will not bring back Snacks.
47) You will never have sex.
48) ???
49) Profit.
50. You can not divide by zero.
“The only difference between genius and insanity is that all the voices get along.”
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera
41,726 backers$2,289,517 pledged of $900,000 goal27 days to go
He was also the Father of the User Interface. He was the first to take human factors into consideration in the design or products.
No, that goes back at least to the Gilbreths. Frank Gilbreth created time and motion study for industrial work. His wife, Lillian Gilbreth [wikipedia.org] was more on the product side. She is responsible, among other things, for kitchens with long continuous counter space with cooking surfaces and sinks at the same level.
The first “intelligent user interface” is hard to pinpoint. Railroad interlocking control boards were close. They prevented the operator from doing anything that would cause a collision (that’s why they’re called interlockings) but didn’t help set up routes. The General Railway Signal NX system [nycsubway.org] in 1936 was probably the first automatic intelligent user interface. Routes were set up by pressing a button to indicate where a train was going to enter the controlled area. Lights on a track model board would then light up indicating all the places it could exit. The operator would select one, push one exit button, and all the switches and signals for the route would be set accordingly. The control system took into account all trains present, and all routes already set up, so only safe routes could be set. The operator could even set track or switches out of service and the system would route trains around the area of trouble.
Her Wikipedia page is impressive, including this interesting nugget
Gilbreth was instrumental in the development of the modern kitchen, creating the “work triangle” and linear kitchen layouts that are often used today.
Ugh.
I just saw this today, thank you RedBox. Though I’m not so sure I should be thanking you.
OK, if it was an original movie not based on 50 years of Marvel’s iconic superhero…it almost had me.
If it was something cooked up in the bowels of Sony as some new original production, I was kinda buying it. Grounded in near reality, with a touch of fiction for spice.
Until the end. The cranes is when I lost it. The cranes – that quickly, with the mounting chaos, not just in time, but near instant?
And then it goes downhill quickly.
The bullet wound. OK, a very bright kid, but maybe not the most common sense, and a few things on his mind, but he finally thought of bandaging the wound? OK, I buy that. But not bleeding out in the cross city trek to that point?
I get it. The lizard regenerates. Really well. But the liquid nitrogen thing? Really? Even super regeneration requires energy. Not tired in the slightest? OK, maybe Lizard was still running on adrenaline and wouldn’t show the effects yet. So bullet wounds. Shot off frozen body parts. That assumes liquid nitrogen wouldn’t do other, not quite so easily repaired things.
And the mice that clues in Peter the Lizard may be dangerous? Was that Fred in the lab eating Wilma? Grisly, but sure, that fit the story. And Peter didn’t raise an alarm? Did he just calmly walk out and down the hall, leaving the office building full of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting people, with this obviously carnivorous and dangerous super-sized reptilian-rodent to roam freely?
And I love Denis Leary, but if he’s going to do drama, he needs to buff up his acting skills. Though maybe, given the rest of the film, the director told him to dumb down his talent. So as not to show up the rest of the movie.
The actors weren’t bad. It was the script that really sucked rocks. They had a pretty good and somewhat novel take on the story. Until then 3rd act, when they threw out whatever writing skills they had and tried to force it. Too much. Too big. Too sappy.
Compare this with Sam Raimi’s 2002 masterpiece1. Uncle Ben’s death. Confronting the mugger. The bridge. Osborn’s death (William Dafoe’s whole performance was one of his best). The graveyard scene at the end. Hell, even the webslinging-porn end scenes. The Sony 2012 greedfest would have been a decent, 3-out-of-4-stars production on its own merits. Not equal to Raimi’s Spider-Man, but would have been worthy in its own right. And then, the 3rd act. The difference between talent at the height of its game, a deftly written, acted, shot, edited and scored production that knowingly tugs all the right emotional responses — and not.
The difference between an artist — and a hack.
I saw the Total Recall remake and while not as good as the 1990 Arnold movie it wasn’t a total loss. Colin Farrell was good, and Kate Beckinsale was even better (it’s always fun to be the villain, and she was consistently a more interesting and enjoyable character than Farrell. He was good, but not as consistently great across the whole film. Perhaps the script was to blame, but in the end product, her performance was more entertaining to watch). I am sooooo very glad I didn’t pay to see Total Recall in the theater, and I even debated fast forwarding through parts and wondering if I really wanted to spend the rest of the 2 hours watching the rest, but it was consistently so-so punctuated with moments of entertainment. And as a whole, it smoked The Amazing Spider-Man’s 3rd act.
Given the obvious unresolved elements about Peter’s parents (and the end-scene for those who had any doubts), Sony obviously wants to make a sequel. Of course, given the loot haul from the previous films. One can only pray they hire the folks who write acts 1 and 2, and studiously ignore whoever was involved in act 3.
One can hope.
1There is only one Spider-Man movie. Just as there were only 3 Star Wars movies, 2 Superman movies (all hail Zod and 2 Highlander movies (the less said about Highlander 2: The Sickening, the better. I won’t even link it – you know how to use the intertubes. Just remember, I warned you). Not that Spider-Man 2 and 3 were terrible, per se. But not only failing to meet their potential (especially the 3rd), they pale in every way in comparison to the 1st. And even the worst excesses of the 3rd were Mozart compared to this remake’s 3rd act.
It’ s a Star Trek parody of PSY – GANGNAM STYLE.
It’s good to know, on your ‘best’ day, there are people in the world far nerdier than you’re ever likely to be.
Bless their creative little hearts.
The bidding was proceeding furiously and strong, when the head auctioneer suddenly announced: ‘a gentleman in this room has lost his wallet containing ten thousand pounds. If returned, he will pay a reward of 2000 pounds.’
There was a moment’s silence in the auction house, from the back of the room came a shout ‘two thousand five hundred’.
My latest dabbling => APPDATA.EXE
Disclosure: At the time of this writing I do work for Microsoft, but this has been a personal effort from my own app development and during my own time (late nights and weekends). This is built solely using public APIs and information. No secret sauce or special knowledge involved, just good old inspiration and perspiration.
After several long nights and weekends writing some Windows store apps, I was sufficiently inspired and aggravated to make it easier to examine and modify my application’s data. The ApplicationData API is quite nice to use, but tooling is rather sparse today. Taking a page from REG.EXE for syntactical inspiration, APPDATA.EXE was born.
The program is self-contained, ‘unzip and go’ style (no ‘install’ needed), and contains extensive help. Run with no parameters for basic syntax:
AppData v0.9.2.0 - Access a package's ApplicationData - Copyright (C) 2012 Howard Kapustein
USAGE: AppData <command> <packagefamilyname> [options...]
Commands:
CLEAR | GET | SET | DELETE | IMPORT | EXPORT |
PATH | QUOTA | SIGNALDATACHANGED | VERSION
Return Code:
0 = Successful
1 = Failed
For help on a specific command:
AppData <command> --help
Examples:
AppData CLEAR --help
AppData GET --help
AppData SET --help
AppData DELETE --help
AppData IMPORT --help
AppData EXPORT --help
AppData PATH --help
AppData QUOTA --help
AppData SIGNALDATACHANGED --help
AppData VERSION --help
There’s more I plan to do, but several friends were eager to get their hands on the current functionality to facilitate their own development. What’s there now is stable and quite functional, so hello world
Source code is not currently available. A couple of folks have already asked so rest assured, it’s on the roadmap. Just not yet. Watch this space…
More details on the dedicated APPDATA.EXE page.
Enjoy.
There’s a famous quote:
Don’t get me wrong: Emacs is a great operating system – it lacks a good editor, though.
–Thomer M. Gil
or the commonly stated form:
Emacs is a great operating system, now if only it had a good text editor.
Apparently that day has come:
Of course, since you can now run vi in emacs [emacswiki.org] then emacs is not just an operating system but can also be used as an editor.
Slashdot has their usual quick synopsis and links to the official announcement and feature list.
Still wading through the feature list, but PEP 393: Flexible String Representation andPEP 412: Key-Sharing Dictionary promise nice perf gains for most folks w/zero effort. PEP 397: Python Launcher for Windows and PEP 3151: Reworking the OS and IO exception hierarchy also caught my eye, as well as smaller changes like file descriptor support (fwalk(), etc) and additions like shutil.disk_usage(), sqlite3,Connection’s set_trace_callllback() and stat.filemode(). The actual list of changes is pretty huge, but worth the read. Lots of tasty nuggets in there.
Amusingly, I noticed this towards the end:
Deprecated
Unsupported Operating Systems
OS/2 and VMS are no longer supported due to the lack of a maintainer.
I’ve hehard this for a while, and the discussions about the shortfall and need to possibly end Saturday delivery service. It turns out the reason isn’t the obvious:
Ignoring the fact that the USPS is only broke because Congress is trying to kill it by forcing them to pre-pay 75 years worth of pensions. Without the pre-paid 75 years worth of pensions, USPS is running at better margins than the publicly owned couriers.
Yes, but not for any of the reasons you cite. In the Bush years, the Republicans passed a law forcing the USPS to fully fund retirement benefits 75 years in advance. As in, they have to save money now for workers that haven’t even been born yet.
No other entity, public or private, has to deal with those requirements. If it was FedEx singled out for this instead of the USPS, it would be FedEx facing “insolvency”.
The CEOs of Budweiser, Coors, and Guinness get together for lunch.
When the waitress comes to take their drink orders, the CEO of Budweiser orders a Bud.
The CEO of Coors follows suit and orders a Coors.
The CEO of Guinness looks at the waitress and orders one Coors and one Budweiser. The other two are astonished!
They ask why he ordered two drinks, and says “Oh, I never have beer this early in the day.”
Best explanation I’ve found:
John Gruber at Daring Fireball makes the best case I’ve seen [daringfireball.net] for explaining the timing; that their contract would expire mid-way through the iOS6 cycle and Apple would be forced to re-negotiate “with their backs against the wall”. Or in other words, the contract would not have lasted until iOS7 comes out, so it made more sense to push out a major change like this in iOS6 instead of cramming it into a point release like 6.1 or 6.2 (can you imagine the outcry if THAT happened? At least people expect x.0 releases to have some teething problems… point releases are expected to refine, polish, and bugfix)
They tried to renegotiate with Google. Apple wanted a few new things like turn-by-turn, and Google was asking for some stuff in exchange, like increased branding, that Apple wasn’t willing to do. Unfortunately, I can’t remember where the article I read this was. Anyhow, even if the timing for the contract renewal had worked out, they may not have been able to come to terms on the missing features. Things like turn-by-turn weren’t needed (or rather weren’t expected) in a smartphone mapping app in 2007, but by 2012 they were expected, and their absence in iOS was notable.
This video explains how 2-party encryption works, in simple (non-technical) terms. Very cool.
My latest dabbling => Hasher.WF
Data sources include text, files and random bytes. Drag’n'drop of files and text is supported too!
The results can be saved to a file in various formats: text, CSV, XML and JSON.
There’s a few more things I’d like to do (in no particular order):
There’s a few other things I have in mind, which I’d rather not mention just yet…
Full source code is available, for the interested. Part of my motivation was to have an excuse to use Mercurial. I’ve used Git, and wanted to see how it compared. And then I looked into online hosting and found bitbucket, and color me impressed - functional, very friendly for the not-so-expert and free. I’ve done enough by now to know bitbucket for Mercurial users is at least roughly equivalent to github for Git users. Though bitbucket actually feels more polished and easier for less advanced users to be equally productive (much like Mercurial Good stuff.
More details on the dedicated Hasher.WF page.
Enjoy.
