gchpaco

Many of them do, although there is the notorious story of an Enzo that got literally torn in half on CA 1 and both people inside walked away.

Well considering they had a max speed of two miles an hour unloaded, you could probably jump off and get a beer before the crash happened.

When I thought about that malloc question, I starting asking myself "so I knew the old way was eventually libc calls sbrk and the kernel adds some more pages to the page table. But I can't remember if that's still considered the right thing to do; I've heard of people using mmap for malloc for some reason I can't remember." But that's probably sufficient for his purposes.

Are you kidding? My father works in aerospace for firms doing subcontracting on non-black projects and every time he talks about work it would be about some new ridiculous boondoggle. I remember some idiots conducting testing managed to pick up and drop a piece of flight hardware the size of a car about six inches, which probably cost about $100K to realign and repair. The ISS went through I think three or four--or maybe five?--ground up redesigns requiring everybody throw everything they had already done completely out the window and start over. Many of us on the sidelines watching marveled quietly that it ever flew at all.

Small teams with tight deadlines can do wonders. This is why Skunkworks stuck. But it's important to note that Kelly Johnson was behind a lot of the big successes there and he was an amazing man. Absent organizational genius, you can run into trouble. The JSF is pretty much the antithesis of "small teams with tight deadlines".

Attacking an AWACS is very much on the table, it's just hard. It's like being a battleship captain saying "well, if we sink the bloody carrier then the problem's solved, right?"--you're not wrong but you're vastly underestimating the difficulty. AWACS radar is so strong they can be (and should!) very very very far away from anything that could possibly reach out and touch them, and actually attacking an AWACS will draw so much attention and fire that the attack is probably doomed to failure unless the air force in question is enormously overextended (very possible). I suppose you could use it to divert attention while you did something else, but it'll be a costly diversion.

Now if you did get close to one, considering that the popular ones are visibly repurposed airliners they would probably go down pretty easy. But that's a little like saying "I can sink your aircraft carrier with my 16" gun" without the proviso that "... as long as you let me get way too close first".

Dip pens can be really touchy. I use a fountain pen a lot. Paper quality becomes extremely important; a ballpoint will skip over rough weaves in poorly made paper, but a pen with a nib will catch on them.

Why, then, would anybody use anything other than a ballpoint? For me the writing experience is smoother with a good nib pen on decent paper, and I hate cheap paper anyway. Even good ballpoints aren't great here; the only exception I've ever seen are these ceramic tipped ones: http://www.leevalley.com/US/gifts/page.aspx?p=70130&cat=4,53... As a result of poor-to-mediocre ability to write, my cursive degenerated terribly for years, becoming a terrible illiterate scrawl that even I couldn't read. After I started playing about with fountain pens, I discovered that it was actually a legitimate way of writing, and faster than printing everything everywhere.

Actually, modded Minecraft sees an enormous amount of activity, particularly of late it seems. It's started cannibalizing my DF time, of all things--vanilla Minecraft is dull by comparison.

DF sees a little of this with dfhack and all the mods on the forums.

These technologies come into their own when you are managing large fleets of servers; but by the same right, you need to offer a lot of sophistication to make large fleets of heterogeneous servers work. When you have five servers these seem baroque and overly complicated, but when you have five thousand servers...

Jurisdiction is funny on universities. UCSB (one I have personal experience with) has a special campus police branch that overlaps somewhat with the Isla Vista branch but are nominally distinct; I don't think the county's sheriff's department has any jurisdiction there.

Typically the smaller ones are also refrigerated whereas the 2L aren't, precisely because you're expected to grab the former when you're on your way from A to B and are busy.

I spent seven years doing a PhD in Computer Science. It was an unpleasant experience from about year three or four on and I would have gotten the masters' and left before finishing if I knew then what I know now, and probably a) not gone through a suicidally depressive period b) have done more interesting work c) traveled more since I could afford it and d) also been paid more.

The educational aspects of a PhD, at least in my program, were essentially equivalent to the educational aspects of getting a masters degree in the same subject area. The difference between them was after you finished the educational aspects you were now expected to produce between 3 to 6 papers a year corresponding roughly to the important conferences in your field and get most of them published. Speaking personally it takes me about three to four weeks to write a good research paper assuming I already have the results, so I worked out at one point that I had about two weeks to generate meaningful work to write about if I was to publish to that schedule. It is impossible to do anything more than the famous Least Publishable Increment of Work in that environment, and as a result most papers in Computer Science aren't especially compelling. A healthier field (say, chemistry, physics, mathematics) has you write perhaps one or two a year, with actual data.

The old saw is that when you finish your PhD you will either be sick to death of the subject and do something quite different, or still interested and spend most of your career on the same subject. It does seem to be quite binary in practice.

There's a notorious proof of Heron's formula (computing the area of a triangle from the lengths of the three sides without trig) that proceeds by proving three things that seem to have nothing to with one another or with the goal, and then through a flourish of algebra the result falls out. There are much more straightforward ways to prove the theorem that do not abuse the reader, and modern mathematics frowns on such indirectness unless it is totally necessary. Unfortunately it was the style to write gimmicky proofs like that for a while in IIRC the 18th and 19th centuries, and sometimes they persist.

There's an important difference between mild steel (which is basically pure iron) and wrought iron (which has slag inclusions); the slag inclusions in the latter actually make for significant rust resistance.

The evidence of systems like Relic RTSes (Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, etc) indicates that even when you make the system easier to use, micro skills just shift to something else. In DoW2, for example, the skills that in SC2 make controlling a bunch of marines and macroing even possible make for sophisticated flanks and clever lures that are IMHO far more interesting to watch. Very sophisticated grenade play, specialized suppression mechanics, and doing five different things at the same time with your units is actually expected at high levels of play, whereas I can count the number of times I've seen a major flanking maneuver in SC2 on the fingers of both hands.

From http://www.h5l.org/manual/HEAD/info/heimdal/Authorisation-da...:

  The Windows 2000 KDC also adds extra authorisation data in tickets. It is at this point unclear what triggers it to do this. The format of this data is only available under a “secret” license from Microsoft, which prohibits you implementing it.

This makes/made? it difficult to have a Windows domain authenticate against an existing KDC; you needed to set up an AD server and then set up cross-domain trust relationships, which means you must have a Windows server on your network in order to support Windows AD clients.

Code switching is actually when you wander between two or more languages in the scope of a single conversation (which is downright weird to listen to if you speak only one; girl I knew would wander between Russian and English conversing with her mother and I would try like the devil to follow when she started in Russian and eventually realize that it wasn't some weird English words). Based on my own (small) experience with it in English and French it's sometimes easier to find the word you're looking for in the other language; this only happens to me when I'm trying to speak English in public after I've been speaking French for a while tho. The grammar gets ... complicated.

Windows AD is Kerberos based with a gratuitous compatibility breaking change that I can't remember right now. We use Kerberos at work, and the FreeIPA project is Kerberos based. It doesn't really come into its own until you have many, many machines, probably at least fifty, but it isn't bad in the end. I have had many, many problems with FreeIPA but very few are due to it using Kerberos.

The conventional x86 way of doing it was to spill to "the stack" and I'm told that their chips actually specially optimize that nowadays. But it's all very weird, deep magic in a lot of ways.

For reasons like this I usually claim that 32-bit x86 chips have zero or at most one general purpose registers. Everything else is full of weird junk like this.

But she probably has a better reason for owning them.

I find that with large forts the "rolling resource shortage" problem is really obnoxious. Things like "oh, my idiots turned all the wood, the wood I needed for beds, into charcoal" get my goat. Actually solving the steel shortage problem is really difficult; ERP is not a bad comparison for that, which is made especially difficult because as your dorfs get better at tasks they get significantly faster. A master armorsmith can kill 100 bars of steel in very short order.

I will admit I have more sophisticated desires / needs, though.

It is actually really a blast, enough so to cause these sort of really frustrated "it's awesome but it's awful" threads. It is a weird combination of open world architecture combined with really stupid minions. What is in reality probably an AI mistake really feels like massive stupidity the twentieth time your mason seals himself on the wrong side of a floodgate. You spend hours getting things set up just so and then a megabeast comes and seals you in your fortress and your dwarves go mad and start murdering each other for lack of a sock. Or you decide what the world really needs is pressurized magma cannon and spend a couple of real life weeks and countless in-game years and dwarf lives getting the pump stack to work, only to find out the first time you try and use it that the pressure system doesn't work and what is supposed to be a raging torrent of molten rock is actually sort of a sprinkler system. Of molten rock. And you haven't devised a purge system yet, so your half working masterpiece is going to have to be taken apart very, very carefully by a bunch of idiots. (This is not hypothetical; it happened to a succession fort that went by "FailCannon")

Not for nothing is the community devoted to megaprojects. Not only are they cool they offer countless ways to introduce Fun into your boring, dreary existence. And sometimes they even work; the "minecart shotgun loaded with gold bars (because, why not?) complete with optional F.R.O.G.G.E.R. system is just a gorgeous thing to watch happen, and it's viscerally satisfying to watch some goblin take a gold bar going a good 30, 40 mph to the face.

Could just be regional idioms; I think I picked that phrase up from some British folks who made a habit of understatement. It isn't especially friendly to the reader, I'll admit (there, I did it again!).

Those charged with enforcing the rules are not infrequently in bed with those violating the rules; "regulatory capture".

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." I think Nasrudin?

Good god isn't it addictive enough?!

More realistically there are things you can do in DF like bathe the world in lava or crack the Maximum Fun Chamber that would be kind of obnoxious for your neighbors. A bit like playing Minecraft with IC2 and accidentally leveling half your neighbor's house because your nuclear reactor melted down. Just because you are even worse off does not make people any happier about it.

Steady state things, mostly, like "ensure that there is always 30 bars of pig iron" or "ensure that ten quarry bush leaves always are available"; if there are too many objects it will stop making them (particularly useful with things like pig iron, which is worthless except in its role in the steel making process, so you need to have some but not lots), and as it dips below the threshold it will start making them again. This is really useful to ensure that e.g. there are always barrels available when needed, but you don't blow your entire wood harvest on barrels or bins or what have you; it can also be used to ensure that your idiot brewer does not brew everything leaving nothing to eat.

If you play one if the mods with multi-stage metal refining, it is even more useful to ensure that the pipeline does not go dry on the one hand but you don't get a glut of pig iron or whatever either.

I assure you, the current player base is acutely aware of how bad the UI is. It's not even that it's opaque until learned, it is sometimes just downright impossible in vanilla DF to answer certain elementary questions like "how many dwarves are set to mine?" Workflow automation is really primitive, leading to either the "constantly assign dye thread jobs through the manager so the fools will do it" problem or the opposite "oops I left the mason alone for five minutes and now I have a hundred masterwork statues in a single 5x5 square" problem. Not for nothing does Dwarf Therapist exist, and I flat out will not play the game without dfhack's workflow and autobutcher plugins.

It's still genius. But it is definitely one of those "scribbles on the wall in crayon" type works of genius. As the innards of the program itself is better understood, I expect dfhack to supplant more and more of the original UI; it already has a dwarf therapist like mode, a much better job manager, and has started venturing into fundamentally reworking the UI. I recall a plugin not too long ago that allowed you to say things like "as soon as a bed is constructed, put it here".

Current hypothesis on the forums is that he uses some simplistic variant of A*; in extreme situations everything pathfinds to everything else once a tick in a totally serial program. The player base sometimes resorts to weird hacks and layouts to reduce the branching complexity of the path finding, but ultimately the more loose stone and objects you have to pathfind off and the more things you have pathfinding the worse everything gets. You don't even have to have a large number of dwarves for it to crop up; sheep are capable of bringing your machine to its knees if you don't ruthlessly cull them, or notoriously the catsplosion problem.