http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscosity#Properties_and_behavior

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminar_flow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orifice_plate#Uses

Math makes my brain hurt --Barbie

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12924807


USG fail.

USG try to overthrow.

USG fail.

USG bring democracy to you, with bombs.

Democracy is at bomb-tip.

Democracy must be what we chose, or you terrorist. Hamas.
Democracy can be wrong. Hamas. Democracy. USG.

Here's what the opposition needs to know: the citizens have zero
control over foreign policy which is dictated by elites.

So, 911 us, it won't make a difference.

Go after the elite kindergardents, Breslan style, maybe we'll talk.

Do it, faggot.

4chan

US 4 Al Q inadvertently
dumbass
blowback
feedback

Larry Agran ---secret muslim? does he really have a valid birth cert?
Is he the socialist that his employment and philosophy indicate?
Is he really running for president again?
Does he really think he can run a power company?
How far does megalomania go?

Or is he just trying to plook Beth Krom?
How ugly is his taste?

Or that speedfreak methamphetamine friend, Christina Shea?
How much friction can he take?


Burn that tube.

Gold is now 7x the price-density of cannabis.

I used to buy it at 1x the price.

Sweet.

No woman, no cry

Can't cry in refugee centers, japanese

more stress

Hillary Clinton Favorable Near Her All-Time High

Clintons, Rices, they are all bloodthirsty interventionist vampires.

shoot them all.

He said it did not matter what sort of government succeeded Arab autocrats, as these were unlikely to be as repressive. Imagining that only a Taliban-style regime would benefit al-Qaeda was "a too short term way" of looking at events.
"We do not know yet what the outcome would be (in any given country), and we do not have to. The outcome doesn't have to be an Islamic government for us to consider what is occurring to be a step in the right direction," he said.
"In Libya, no matter how bad the situation gets and no matter how pro-Western or oppressive the next government proves to be, we do not see it possible for the world to produce another lunatic of the same calibre of the Colonel (Gaddafi).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8415885/Libya-Arab-revolts-a-boost-for-al-Qaeda-says-terrorist-leader.html

Arab revolts a boost for al-Qaeda says Caliphate freedom fighter

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/30/feds-praise-pot-goes-smoke/

But the updated page deletes this praise for marijuana’s ability to combat cancer.

Nuke DC

Wife and kid getting passports. Wrote check to Dept of State.
I commented about warmonger Hillary.

The polite asian (this *is* irvine) federal worker didn't comment, just kept smiling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kcuqIqmIU&feature=related

Robert Fripp instills confidence in the folks he works with.
He trains them too, technically, and aesthetically, but
I've just figured out that an equally important role of his
in contributing to culture is encouraging worthwhile artists.
Levin, Belew, Bruford. Many others. And through them,
Chapman Stick promotion, and their drummers too (who I am
too drunk to remember, ---no wait, youtube to the rescue
Pat Mastelotto
is awesome)

Fripp is a drug. A performance enhancing drug.

Deal with it, Bob.

it remains consistant
i wish you were here to see it

My emacs callous has decreased. Its something you get on the distal
pinkie joint on your left hand, from pressing escape all the time.

No, I'm not an escapist, that's how windowing and control worked before mice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQQX9vkpW4&feature=more_related

Only 6000 sticks around. Around 600 pro players. One of three instruments
invented in the US. And Emmett Chapman is a genius and artist.

Inspiring.

Fripp School. Levin, Belew.

Instrument of the gods.

Patterns.

Intervals.

Expressive.

Modular.

What civilization was made for.

✈ 11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgcc5V9Hu3g&feature=relmfu

Bowie really was a freak, but he is talented.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/26/the-kelly-family-ain.html

Major Variola (ret)

I need the Tom Waits version of this, pronto.

scifijazznik in reply to Major Variola (ret)

Best laugh I've had in a week. Thank you.

I can hear it so clearly in my head. It's the only possible way to make this tune better.

http://jpfo.org/

Zionist != jew != hebraic

Pick any.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde

Give a man to fish, feed him a day; teach him to fish, feed him for life.

-Proverb

Teach a man to shoot, free him for a day; teach him chemistry,

free him for life.

-My mom studied CBW when gestating me :-)

Give a man anonymity, he might speak the truth; teach him the

methods of anonymity, and he might help others do so.

Julian Assange (imagined; actually, "courage is contagious" can be attributed to Him)

Morihei Ueshiba was born in Tanabe,Wakayama Prefecture, Japan on December 14, 1883.^{[1] [2]}

The only son of Yoroku and Yuki Ueshiba's five children, Morihei was raised in a somewhat privileged setting. His father was a rich landowner who also traded in lumber and fishing and was politically active. Ueshiba was a rather weak, sickly child and bookish in his inclinations. At a young age his father encouraged him to take up sumo wrestling and swimming and entertained him with stories of his great-grandfather Kichiemon who was considered a very strong samurai in his era. The need for such strength was further emphasized when the young Ueshiba witnessed his father being attacked by followers of a competing politician.^[3]

.........

If you speed up Aikido, it seemed to me, you'd kill your partner. In training and testing, they never

ever do it realtime.

The James Clerk Maxwell of jointlocks, mechanics, and human behavior, for self defense.

Very nice, and I love those eyebrows; I have spent 47 years getting mine, they are hungarian/russian, and I treasure them.

Also very much dig your underdog, physics, anatomy clue.

Very cool sir.

I have only watched your practictioners a bit, whilst my son was learning a little. Very beautiful; very lethal if sped up.

throats should be covered, as yours is.

Re: CDV Counter software

--- In CDV700CLUB@yahoogroups.com, "Les G0JNT" wrote:
>
> I cannot get this software to run when connected to my Leni Pro,...... the
start box is just greyed out.
> Can anybody tell me what i am doing wrong please.
> Regards
> Les
> G0JNT.

Nothing sir.

Hello, this is the author of said software. Don't expect
this kind of service generally :-) At least without
a sub$cription plan :-P


I tried CDVcounter .83 on my current Win7 machine, and even
with some "properties" or "run as root" tweaks I got a
bogus ID error of some kind.


I might look into this or I might look into a java port
or I might just keep looking for paid work and blabbing
burgundy-ish on this list as I parse news and
ignore the Counter. That's what *free* means. :-)



The source code for CDVcounter is
on sourceforge (a programmer's way of saying, leave
me alone, do it yourself! :-) so have at it.
That's the upside of "free"





It may actually be trivial. But you might have to
slash your way through M$ cruft. Massive jungle-like
M$ cruft. Which infects your clean programming mind
like a glioma.

If you're an embedded programmer there are currently
a coupla rad projects going on I think. I don't monitor
their status but they are led by supercompetent folks.

I have been recently doing embedded, and
recently worked in embedded linux and am teaching myself
how a device driver fits. I have worked above them scary
drivers, and below them, and now the magic is dissipating.

Dissipating magic is what life is about, for me.


You don't need e=mc2 etc to understand fission, you just
need to know about liquid drops and electrostatics.


Sometimes they pay me for it. If you can do something
and get paid for it, you can be as eccentric as you like.

The basic contract of civilization.

Instead of training developers on techniques of writing reliable code, you just absolve yourself of responsibility by paying them if they do. Now every developer has to figure it out on their own.

The Econ 101 manager assumes that everyone is motivated by money, and that the best way to get people to do what you want them to do is to give them financial rewards and punishments to create incentives.

For example, AOL might pay their call-center people for every customer they persuade not to cancel their subscription.

A software company might give bonuses to programmers who create the fewest bugs.

It works about as well as giving your chickens money to buy their own food.

One big problem is that it replaces intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is your own, natural desire to do things well. People usually start out with a lot of intrinsic motivation. They want to do a good job. They want to help people understand that it’s in their best interest to keep paying AOL $24 a month. They want to write less-buggy code.

But petty megalomaniac ceos think they can motivate to work extra hours via money.

And ignore their disruptive unproductive management styles, office setup, idiotic and misunderstood "agile" processes, and basically fail to deliver useful products in time.

Me, I'm about deliverables, ie, working code, not "team building" or similar business facades.

Good luck to you wordsmiths and confidence-men er consultants.

Joke: A poor Jew lived in the shtetl in 19^th century Russia. A Cossack comes up to him on horseback.

“What are you feeding that chicken?” asks the Cossack.

“Just some bread crumbs,” replies the Jew.

“How dare you feed a fine Russian chicken such lowly food!” says the Cossack, and hits the Jew with a stick.

The next day the Cossack comes back. “Now what are you feeding that chicken?” ask the Jew.

“Well, I give him three courses. There’s freshly cut grass, fine sturgeon caviar, and a small bowl of heavy cream sprinkled with imported French chocolate truffles for dessert.”

“Idiot!” says the Cossack, beating the Jew with a stick. “How dare you waste good food on a lowly chicken!”

On the third day, the Cossack again asks, “What are you feeding that chicken?”

“Nothing!” pleads the Jew. “I give him a kopeck and he buys whatever he wants.”

Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be a good thing. Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity.

lisp lipsservice

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

c 2004

The rationale behind this is that if you freeze, they’ll pick you off one at a time until you’re all dead, but if you charge, only some of you will die by running over mines, so for the greater good, that’s what you have to do.

The trouble is that no rational soldier would charge under such circumstances. Each individual soldier has an enormous incentive to cheat: freeze in place and let the other, more macho soldiers do the charging. It’s sort of like a Prisoners’ Dilemma.

In life or death situations, the military needs to make sure that they can shout orders and soldiers will obey them even if the orders are suicidal. That means soldiers need to be programmed to be obedient in a way which is not really all that important for, say, a software company.

In other words, the military uses Command and Control because it’s the only way to get 18 year olds to charge through a minefield, not because they think it’s the best management method for every situation.

In particular, in software development teams where good developers can work anywhere they want, playing soldier is going to get pretty tedious and you’re not really going to keep anyone on your team.

This was explained to me in NCO school. I was in the Israeli paratroopers in 1986. Probably the worst paratrooper they ever had, now that I think back.

There are several standing orders for soldiers. Number one: if you are in a mine field, freeze. Makes sense, right? It was drilled into you repeatedly during basic training. Every once in a while the instructor would shout out “Mine!” and everybody had to freeze just so you would get in the habit.

Standing order number two: when attacked, run towards your attackers while shooting. The shooting makes them take cover so they can’t fire at you. Running towards them causes you to get closer to them, which makes it easier to aim at them, which makes it easier to kill them. This standing order makes a lot of sense, too.

OK, now for the Interview Question. What do you do if you’re in a minefield, and people start shooting at you?

This is not such a hypothetical situation; it’s a really annoying way to get caught in an ambush.

The correct answer, it turns out, is that you ignore the minefield, and run towards the attackers while shooting.

Ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are different: programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in. They're half technology and half religion.[6]

Part C, part Java, part Verilog.

“Soldiers should fear their officers more than all the dangers to which they are exposed.... Good will can never induce the common soldier to stand up to such dangers; he will only do so through fear.”

One theme from that speech was based on the most important thing that I learned in Psych 110, the idea that when people are successful at controlling their environment they become happier, and when they can't control their environment, they get grumpy.

Management's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it's unrealistic. LikManagement's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it's unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

Microsoft does such a good job at creating this abstraction that Microsoft alumni have a notoriously hard time starting companies. They simply can't believe how much went on below decks and they have no idea how to reproduce it.e teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

Here are three common approaches you might take:

• The Command and Control Method
• The Econ 101 Method
• The Identity Method

You will certainly find other methods of management in the wild (there’s the exotic “Devil Wears Prada” Method, the Jihad Method, the Charismatic Cult Method, and the Lurch From One Method To Another Method) but over the next three days, I’m going to examine these three popular methods and explore their pros and cons.

there's the EE from 30 years back who underestimates software complexity and under fixed bids, H*nt

and then there's the psycho micromanager EE who coded for a few years for GE thirty years ago and thinks that by virtue of "agile process", a new religion, and spirals on his business cards, will be productive with an overly overtasked staff of compliant dependant engineers, in a poor environment. all he needs is a salesdroid who calls everyone 'bro' and distracts his productive staff as much as possible, D*pu and H*nry. Selling contracts with zero capacity and overtasked staff. Epic fail. Just because you've kept the same bizname for 8 years doesn't mean you've kept a staff or ability for that time. Don't sell fiction as fact. Don't sell cufflinks if your deliverables are code.

outsource!

(Here's something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?)

Zetera was done in by outsourcing to the quickest-bidder in India.

Their code was crap, unmaintainable, and destroyed their consumer biz,

and thus their "enterprize" biz. No VC, just lame patents, hardly a website left.

A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that's so comfortable you don't feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can't see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions which, in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll. It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier.

To the software developers on your team, this all needs to be abstracted away as typing svn commit on the command line.

That's why you have management.

It's for the kind of stuff that no company can avoid, but if you have your programmers worrying about it, well, management has failed, the same way as a 100 foot yacht has failed if the millionaire owner has to go down into the engine room and, um, build the engine.

You've got your typical company started by ex-software salesmen, where everything is Sales Sales Sales and we all exist to drive more sales. These companies can be identified in the wild because they build version 1.0 of the software (somehow) and then completely lose interest in developing new software. Their development team is starved or nonexistent because it never occurred to anyone to build version 2.0... all that management knows how to do is drive more sales.

Bessember Bros does business in Socal. They're a bunch of

independent garage-door workers, AFAIK.

They will quote you $295 for a garage-door-spring replacement, but when they

get here, will charge $350 instead. Supposedly these are higher-endurance springs

(a pair instead of one) but their quotes are crap, I feel mildly exploited.

The actual work is about an hour, and they probably use two springs because then

they don't have to stock multiple springs.

Caveat emptor.

I used to have to worry about extension cords and network cvables

Management, in a software company, is primarily responsible for creating abstractions for programmers. We build the yacht, we service the yacht, we are the yacht, but we don't steer the yacht. Everything we do comes down to providing a non-leaky abstraction for the programmers so that they can create great code and that code can get into the hands of customers who benefit from it.

Programmers need a Subversion repository. Getting a Subversion repository means you need a network, and a server, which has to be bought, installed, backed up, and provisioned with uninterruptible power, and that server generates a lot of heat, which means it need to be in a room with an extra air conditioner, and that air conditioner needs access to the outside of the building, which means installing an 80 pound fan unit on the wall outside the building, which makes the building owners nervous, so they need to bring their engineer around, to negotiate where the air conditioner unit will go (decision: on the outside wall, up here on the 18th floor, at the most inconvenient place possible), and the building gets their lawyers involved, because we're going to have to sign away our firstborn to be allowed to do this, and then the air conditioning installer guys show up with rigging gear that wouldn't be out of place in a Barbie play-set, which makes our construction foreman nervous, and he doesn't allow them to climb out of the 18th floor window in a Mattel harness made out of 1/2" pink plastic, I swear to God it could be Disco Barbie's belt, and somebody has to call the building agent again and see why the hell they suddenly realized, 12 weeks into a construction project, that another contract amendment is going to be needed for this goddamned air conditioner that they knew about before Christmas and they only just figured it out, and if your programmers even spend one minute thinking about this that's one minute too many.

The recruiters-who-use-grep, by the way, are ridiculed here, and for good reason. I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who can't pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people with five years of experience in Java, but try explaining that to the average HR drone.

othing about an all-Java CS degree really weeds out the students who lack the mental agility to deal with these concepts. As an employer, I've seen that the 100% Java schools have started churning out quite a few CS graduates who are simply not smart enough to work as programmers on anything more sophisticated than Yet Another Java Accounting Application, although they did manage to squeak through the newly-dumbed-down coursework. These students would never survive 6.001 at MIT, or CS 323 at Yale, and frankly, that is one reason why, as an employer, a CS degree from MIT or Yale carries more weight than a CS degree from Duke, which recently went All-Java, or U. Penn, which replaced Scheme and ML with Java in trying to teach the class that nearly killed me and my friends, CSE121. Not that I don't want to hire smart kids from Duke and Penn -- I do -- it's just a lot harder for me to figure out who they are. I used to be able to tell the smart kids because they could rip through a recursive algorithm in seconds, or implement linked-list manipulation functions using pointers as fast as they could write on the whiteboard. But with a JavaSchool Grad, I can't tell if they're struggling with these problems because they are undereducated or if they're struggling with these problems because they don't actually have that special part of the brain that they're going to need to do great programming work. Paul Graham calls them Blub Programmers.

But JavaSchools also fail to train the brains of kids to be adept, agile, and flexible enough to do good software design (and I don't mean OO "design", where you spend countless hours rewriting your code to rejiggle your object hierarchy, or you fret about faux "problems" like has-a vs. is-a). You need training to think of things at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously, and that kind of thinking is exactly what you need to design great software architecture.

You may be wondering if teaching object oriented programming (OOP) is a good weed-out substitute for pointers and recursion. The quick answer: no. Without debating OOP on the merits, it is just not hard enough to weed out mediocre programmers. OOP in school consists mostly of memorizing a bunch of vocabulary terms like "encapsulation" and "inheritance" and taking multiple-choicequizzicles on the difference between polymorphism and overloading. Not much harder than memorizing famous dates and names in a history class, OOP poses inadequate mental challenges to scare away first-year students. When you struggle with an OOP problem, your program still works, it's just sort of hard to maintain. Allegedly. But when you struggle with pointers, your program produces the lineSegmentation Fault and you have no idea what's going on, until you stop and take a deep breath and really try to force your mind to work at two different levels of abstraction simultaneously.

``I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.''

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

More Joel.... ok, I know he's been around...

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn't handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. I've seen all kinds of figures for drop-out rates in CS and they're usually between 40% and 70%. The universities tend to see this as a waste; I think it's just a necessary culling of the people who aren't going to be happy or successful in programming careers.

For a long time, if you wanted to put a Pascal string literal in your C code, you had to write:

char* str = "\006Hello!";

Yep, you had to count the bytes by hand, yourself, and hardcode it into the first byte of your string. Lazy programmers would do this, and have slow programs:

char* str = "*Hello!";
str[0] = strlen(str) - 1;

Notice in this case you've got a string that is null terminated (the compiler did that) as well as a Pascal string. I used to call thesefucked strings because it's easier than calling them null terminated pascal strings but this is a rated-G channel so you will have use the longer name.

No. This code uses the Shlemiel the painter's algorithm. Who is Shlemiel? He's the guy in this joke:

Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. "That's pretty good!" says his boss, "you're a fast worker!" and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. "Well, that's not nearly as good as yesterday, but you're still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable," and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. "Only 30!" shouts his boss. "That's unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What's going on?"

"I can't help it," says Shlemiel. "Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!"

Joel pulls no punches.

Amusingly, the history of the evolution of C++ over time can be described as a history of trying to plug the leaks in the string abstraction. Why they couldn't just add a native string class to the language itself eludes me at the moment.)

The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time." Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning.

A different article on insulting bonuses for working extra hours, or perceived

merit:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html

Natch, SE (my prev employer) had a "bonus" program for working 50-60 hours a week.

One employee handbook suggested working weekends to get our (otherwise unpaid)

SE Time which only counted at bonus time, if the company made money.

I've got a life; I sell my time. Don't think you're going to burn me out.

Joel is funny, too.

Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK.

Joel is a god.

Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheritance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain.

In fact, the real lesson from all this is that you should never let people work on more than one thing at once.

Completely the opposite of the con sulting org I was briefly working for.

And the Con part is meant explicitly. They will fail despite good people

because management doesn't.

Human Task Switches Considered Harmful

by Joel Spolsky

read it, or fail

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html

You might be able to get 10% more raw code out of peopletemporarily at the cost of having them burn out 100% in a year. Not a big gain, and it's a bit like eating your seed corn.

You might be able to get 20% more raw code out of people by begging everybody to work super hard, no matter how tired they get. Boom, debugging time doubles. An idiotic move that backfires in a splendidly karmic way.

Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

In my recent stint at a medical con biz, we were distracted by everyone's phone calls (frequent), watercooler chatter, the sales dude shmoozing, sales and CEO showing off the veal-farm to prospective clients and other tourists... I survived with headphones, but I think it pissed off the sales dude. He'll learn when his contracts can't be fullfilled.

Programmers are not interchangeable. It takes seven times longer for John to fix Rita's bug than for Rita to fix Rita's bug. And if you try to put your UI programmer on a WinSock problem, she'll stall and waste a week getting up to speed on WinSock programming. The bottom line is that Project is designed for building office buildings, not software.

) Never, ever let managers tell programmers to reduce an estimate. Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.

With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.

Bobeck!

The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- especiallyinterruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If a coworker asks you a question, causing a 1 minute interruption, but this knocks you out of the zone badly enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffeinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.

Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do new candidates write code during their interview? Do you do hallway usability testing? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

Craig Venter’s Genetic Typo

Mar. 14 2011 - 12:00 pm | 13,781 views | 1 recommendation | 9 comments

J. Craig Venter. Image via Wikipedia

In May 2010, geneticist J. Craig Venter and his team made news by creating the first “synthetic life form,” replacing the genetic code in a bacterium with DNA they’d composed on a computer.

But during a presentation delivered Monday morning at the South By Southwest convention in Austin, Texas, Venter talked about two ways the landmark innovation went wrong.

In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.

The synthetic DNA also included a quote from physicist Richard Feynman, “What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”

That prompted a note from Caltech, the school where Feyman taught for decades. They sent Venter a photo of the blackboard on which Feynman composed the quote –and it showed that he actually wrote, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

need manpads in afghanistan, yemen, pakistan, libya.

need contraceptive spraying in detroit

cccp lasted how many years after afghanistan?

libya adds what taggants to rdx/c4 ? Oh, none? So your sniff doggz are useless?

folks in glass empires, they shouldn't fly drones

Each of us a 1/20 acre or so. There are 6' cinderblock walls, 8" thick, between us.

The cat regards his as his superhighway.

Just now, he goes away from me (bouncing off a chair then a trashcan to the wall)

and goes near the neighbors house. Then it starts raining, and he thinks he's so clever

for being under their eaves.

Detroit population implodes. No more fed bucks for dem niggas. Da mayor, he be

complainin', but he jus' up sheet crick, I tells you wot.

I'se saying, just spray the place with aerial contraceptives and cleanse it out. Just infested

with parasites, dat city. Just raid dat mofo.

We's be settin up some citizen rifle trainin for when doze detroit niggas dink dey be comin

over ere. Don't shoot till you see the lootin in dere shifty eyes.

remember that fat niggah cook captahed by dem irakis? before dey felt up that

southern gal soldier. now dere putting them faggoos in the trenches, howz dat

workin out for ya, marine boy? and hows dat tripoli, marine fag? do it, faggot.

you can't even handle 4chan.org/b faggot. none of you southern white closeted niggahs.

dumb asses.

fagamerikans play "football" real men chase dead goats on horseback.

Running Win7 on Celeron 450 with 8 GB.

Running Virtual Box.

Running Ubuntu inside Virtual Box machine.

Now compiling a linux kernel there. After spending much time

"sudo apt-get install BLAH"

which is, actually, great, because the problem error messages usually tell you what to do.

SunOS 4.3 wasn't like that. It did have man pages though. Man -k rules.

When I boot my own compiled kernel I will be godlike. When I write a demo driver (insertable module) I will be a god.

.....

PS:

Scientists are more than Gods. Gods cannot be scientists: they Know the Answer, and could Manipulate the Answer if they wanted to. Right, they're gods? But Scientists don't know the answer or the rules, so they cannot be Gods; but Gods cannot be Scientists, as well.

Fsck your god, my science (and reciprocating saw for your horrid torture-crucifix abominations) kicks her butt.

What do Obamas kids and Condo Rice have in common?

The only black females to never had sex. For different reasons though.

...

My kid got a C+ in reading comprehension, which is hilarious since his vocab surpasses

that of your average KPFK or even NPR listener. I think he missed some work and got a zero, which is impossible generally to recover from.

....

Zero by the Smashing Pumpkins is a great great song.

Think I'll listen to it now.

Actually.

there are folks who lay cable.

there are folks who design cable ends.

there are folks who assemble the ends.

then there are parasitic smoothtalking carbon wastebags who

talk about it, and talk about regulations, but who contribute nothing

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2011/03/21/breaking-obamas-abu-ghraib-the-stuff-hits-the-fan/

If daddy's a darkee (but everyone else you know is a whito)

then you can get elected by the lowlifes, but you will still

be pwned Obama. Eventually, though, warmonger, they will

call for your Nobel, your presidency, and your pretend honor

and integrity.

Back to the woodpile.

Bolivian President Evo Morales has called for US President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize to be revoked following his decision to attack Libya.

'Two years ago we heard that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but is he defending peace in the world now, or isn't he instead fomenting violence?' Morales told reporters, days after Obama ordered the bombing of Libya military targets as part of an UN-approved effort to protect civilians

"Install democracy"

How evil is that? To think you can "install" freedom? To even equate democracy (mob rule) with freedom?

What do you expect from a Chicago socialist? Never had a productive job. He's pwned by the israelis because of an affair he had years ago, that they have recordings of. Total neocon fodder.

Change DC, by nuking it, or seceding. Otherwise, keep DC, the disease / degenerate capitol of the US.

Spray aerial contraceptives, or your empire fails.

"We heard from a man here in the U.S. who told us about his father having to leave his dog behind as he evacuated to a shelter," Stephen Terry said. He told us that his father tied his dog to an overturned truck. He attached a plastic bag to his collar containing money and a note. The note said 'Please take care of my dog.' It's devastating; people are leaving behind their pets because the shelters they are going to won't take in animals."

Will they never learn? The horror, the horror.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=13195616

A subsequent Army evaluation found that at various times in his years in Afghanistan Morlock had a post-concussive syndrome, had a dependence on cannabis, had abused opiates and sedatives, and had a personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2011/03/21/1768596/morlocks-mom-blames-the-war-army.html#ixzz1HMQ3gEUI

Morlock was a checker who would do whatever the coach asked, and suffered four concussions, according to his mother.

Right after his 2006 graduation, Morlock enlisted in the Army.

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2011/03/21/1768596/morlocks-mom-blames-the-war-army.html#ixzz1HMPVJDbJ

No doubt, he'd do what he was told even as a youth. And had brain damage.

And then went into Army. Nice.

His mother deserves to hang as well as he.

Smoker – it’s a good practice to use smoke when you inspect your bees. Smoke calms and disorients the bees, making them a lot easier to work with.

Works with people too.

http://www.beesource.com/how-to-start-beekeeping/first-equipment-and-supplies/

"Who The Hell Do You Think Your Are?" Farrakhan Blasts Obama For Calling For Qaddafi to Step Down

http://www.hapblog.com/2011/03/who-hell-do-you-think-your-are.html

"Who The Hell Do You Think Your Are?" Farrakhan Blasts Obama For Calling For Qaddafi to Step Down

In N.H., Giuliani Comes Out Swinging

Former presidential candidate says Hillary Clinton would've been better.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/In_N_H___Giuliani_comes_out_swinging-118288279.html

I say, tie the fascist wop and the commie nigger together with a blade, let em sort it out. then shoot the survivor.

I lived near there.

At least three people have been victims of unprovoked attacks by a gray squirrel on a street in Bennington, Vt., over the past few weeks, leaving many residents of the formerly placid southeastern Vermont town wondering if they might be next.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0316/Angry-squirrel-terrorizes-Vermont-town

"I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice and it's not a choice I make lightly," Obama said. "But we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy."

Hows that war on drugs workin out for you? And those imperial occupations? Police actions? Military advisors?

Folks in glass empires ought not fly drones.

Its not a video game on the receiving end.

USGovernment now at undeclared war with:

Libya

Iraq

Afghanistan

Yemen

Pakistan

and lets not forget the N. Koreans! Just to show its not all about oil or the Caliphate

Time to collapse: 10 years or less

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20110319/NEWS01/110319006/1001/news/Liberty-Dollar-fake-currency-creator-convicted-federal-court?odyssey=nav|head

Not "coining" as in scraping the edges; making actual silver disks.

He had $7,000,000 in precious metals. To make into currency.

Only congress can "coin money" and "regulate its value"

What utter socialism. The value of money is determined by its users, not the Emperor of DC.

Tasteless Xeni Jardin:

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/18/crying-tepco-chief-j.html#p0

---

I don't think making fun of that spokesperson was funny.

You know the stuff hit the turbines when a Jap spokesman cries.

You also mock Assange. And the garbage-indian.

Not good taste, IMHO.

Just a person tearing over seeing that Japanese head cry.

And yet Geoff Morrell continues to live.

One factor that might determine how serious the situation becomes is whether the uranium oxide pellets in the rods stay vertical even if the cladding burns off. This is possible because pellets sometimes become fused together while in the reactor. If the pellets stay standing up, then even with the water and zirconium gone, nuclear fission will not take place, Mr. Albrecht said.

¶But Tokyo Electric said this week that there was a chance of “recriticality” in the storage pools — that is, the uranium in the fuel rods could resume the fission that previously took place inside the reactor, spewing out radioactive byproducts.

¶Mr. Albrecht said this was very unlikely, but could happen if the stacks of pellets slumped over and became jumbled together on the floor of the storage pool.

¶Plant workers would then need to add water with lots ofboron because the boron absorbs neutrons and interrupts nuclear chain reactions.

¶If a lot of fission occurs, which may happen only in an extreme case, the uranium would melt through anything underneath it. If it encounters water as it descends, a steam explosion could then scatter the molten uranium.

Can I has Yucca Mountain now?

On the left, firetrucks.

On the right, spent fuel pools.

Which may have cracked.

A Tokyo police unit is set to use water spray vehicles to cool down the No. 4 reactor at the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The police say it will begin the ground operation to spray water from outside the reactor on Thursday morning.

They say it has responded to a request from the government.

The temperature is rising at the spent fuel storage pool in the building that houses the No. 4 reactor.

A series of fires occurred at the reactor on Tuesday and Wednesday, and risks are growing that fuel rods will melt and hydrogen will be generated.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_12.html

worship amy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LTPRJqt2z4&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2VSH9zF_uk&NR=1

amy is a goddess

that launched a thousand space shuttles

I once visited a dollar book store and got this huge book of

jewish / yiddish humor (tm). Isaac ended up reading it because it was

in the car and he had car time. I eventually read it similarly.

Its hilarious, though some opaque.

For extra credit wear phylacteries on airplanes. You get special escort,

first off the plane.

He knows I have no god or government, and his mom worships the former and

works for the latter. A complex stimulating environment is good for rats

and humans.

He has a vocabulary which exceeds at least 1 SD of american adults.

Probably 2.

Don't talk down to brain sponges.

Me, I had a lawyer for a dad :-)

but I still learned logic, nonetheless :-P

Is there a reason that Fripp & Gilmour, two of the finest brit guitarists

since hendix, cannot play together? And Clapton? Is there an ego problem?

Tuning issue?

Guys, please, before I expire.

Cat just caught a bird. Cat is 6-7 years old. Birds are spring birds.

Happy cat. I played with them a bit.

Happy cat.

Doin' his job.

A report on the Japanese crisis this week by Barclays Capital said, “Never, never, never allow the water level in a nuclear reactor to fall below the level of the fuel. This is the mantra pounded into the minds of nuclear power plant operators all over the world.” The report added, “It is hard to overemphasize the importance of the ‘keep the fuel covered’ training and design of these plants.” One of the report’s authors formerly provided such training at a U.S. commercial nuclear plant.

Fukushima has been venting white smoke. Clearly, new pope time.

US Urges Citizens to Get Away from Japan Nuclear Plant

VOA News March 16, 2011

Plutonium is highly carcinogenic in small quantities and its release into the environment would be considered

very dangerous.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-japan-reactor-damage-20110316,0,7701045.story

Yeah, even worse is the microcurie of Americium 241 (a plutonium byproduct) in your smoke detector.

Don't eat it. But as an alpha emitter, you're completely shielded by inches of air or a sheet of paper or your skin. Unless its dispersed in air and you breathe it, or you eat a compound of it.