The Piccadilly was knocked down for the Marriott Marquis, which is really one hell of a hotel. I stayed there for a week; loved the rooms and the hotel and the location, but I absolutely hated the glass elevators. Practically had to huff a bag of laughing gas to get on the things.
It’s a problem with Marriotts in general. The large atrium with the glass ‘vators seems to be a trademark. I hate them. They don’t seem to take into account the acrophobes among us.
If you type in “HALP US BRAK WE R STUK IN SMALL TOWN,” it will respond: “Did you mean: HALP US BREAK WE R STUCK IN SMALL TOWN?”
Thomas James, on the difficulty of writing post-apocalyptic survival stories about people with no interest in survival.
OK, so I followed Pete’s advice, and tried an upgrade from Core 7 to Core 8 via yum (yes, I know that Core 9 will be out shortly, but I figure it would probably be a mistake to go directly from 7 to 9, based on previous experience). Everything went fine until the end, when it failed with this message:
–> Processing Conflict: glibc-common conflicts glibc < 2.7 Error: No Package Matching glibc.i686 So, now what? [Evening update] OK, I ended up having to completely blow away glibc. Unsurprisingly, it broke my installation, with no obvious way to fix it. But it allowed me (finally) to do an ftp upgrade via a rescue CD. I'm now running FC8.
Thomas James has a question that I’ve often wondered about as well:
I have to wonder, has every project I have ever worked on with LM (X-33, VentureStar, ET, CEV/Orion, among others) started from scratch with everything from numbering schemes to release processes to configuration management to data vaulting to drawing formats and standards to basic skill mix and team structures? You’d think that after so many decades that a lot of this stuff would have become routine by now — revised periodically as new technology becomes available, of course, but not built anew every time.
A counter argument to this — and one I used frequently when confronted with the All-Encompassing Michoud Excuse for Not Improving Processes: “That’s the way ET does it” — is that one ought to take advantage of the start of a new program to incorporate the lessons learned from other programs, thereby continuously improving the way business is done. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground between status quo and Year Zero when it comes to these things.
Every time we used to do a proposal at Rockwell/Boeing, and have to describe the systems engineering process, it seemed like we had to come with a new process flow description and graphic, as though we’d never done this before, instead of taking an existing one and tweaking it, and this applied all across the board–in risk mitigation and management, trade analyses, etc.
If I were running one of these multi-billion dollar corporations, I’d put someone in charge of boilerplate and legacy, so that there was a one-stop shop of best practices and material for use in both proposing and managing programs. Maybe they have one, and I was always unaware of it, but if that’s the case, that’s a big problem as well.
A skyscraper over half a mile high. Man, what a target for terrorists. And conveniently located, too.
A skyscraper over half a mile high. Man, what a target for terrorists. And conveniently located, too.
A skyscraper over half a mile high. Man, what a target for terrorists. And conveniently located, too.
Because my life was too care free, and being a glutton for punishment, I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 7 to 8.
Unfortunately, the latest distribution doesn’t fit on CDs any more, and I don’t have a DVD reader in the machine to be upgraded. So I decided to build a boot disk on a cd, and do it from the network. So I build the CD, for x86_64 (the machine is running on an Athlon 64), boot with it, and everything is going fine until it’s about ready to start checking for dependencies. It gives me a message (from memory): “You are about to upgrade to x86_64, but your previous installation is i386. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?”
I scratch my head. I’m pretty sure that the last install was a 64 bit one. Maybe they mean that it will fail if I don’t have a 64-bit processor, but I do, so I tell it to go ahead. It starts checking dependencies, and the bar starts to move slowly to the right. Until it’s a quarter of the way, at which point it quits moving. I go away and come back in an hour. Still no motion. I go away and come back after a couple hours. Still stuck. I go to bed. I get up in the morning. No more progress. It finally exits with an error.
I try it from a different FTP site. No joy.
OK, if it thinks that it’s an i386 installation, I’ll just update that, and worry about making it 64 bit later. Burn the disk. Boot.
This time, when I get to the same place, I get the following message: “You are about to upgrade to i386, but your previous installation is x86_64. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?”
Note the subtle difference from the previous error message.
OK, the installer is schizo. When I try to install i386, it thinks it’s replacing x86_64, and when I try to install x86_64, it thinks it’s replacing i386. I tell it to go ahead. I get the same result–it hangs during the dependency check, at exactly the same place.
Any Fedora gurus out there with any suggestions? (Pete Zaitcev, I’m looking at you…)
Men no longer have go through the drudgery of determining whether or not chix are hawt. We can now have the computers do it for us:
“The computer produced impressive results — its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.” This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it’s as though the computer “learned” implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.
I wonder what units it used to judge? Millihelens (that amount of female beauty required to launch a single ship)?
Of course, that was the easy part:
Kagian, who studied under the Adi Lautman multidisciplinary program for outstanding students at Tel Aviv University, says that a possible next step is to teach computers how to recognize “beauty” in men. This may be more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines “male beauty” among human subjects.
No kidding. I’ve sure never been able to figure it out. Maybe it can just check his bank balance.
Which brings up an interesting (and potentially politically incorrect) point. I think that women are clearly much better at determining whether other women are attractive to men than men are at figuring out whether or not other men are attractive to women (at least physically). I suspect that this is because physical attributes are (for evolutionary reasons, unfortunately) where women primarily compete, so they have to be more attuned to it. I also think that this is why women tend to be more receptive to same-sex relations than men, even nominally heterosexual women (hence the concept of the LUG–lesbian until graduation). In order to be a judge of feminine pulchritude, it helps a lot to appreciate it, and it’s a shorter step from there to wanting to experience it up closer and personal than it is for a guy. Particularly a guy like me, who finds men disgusting, and is eternally grateful that not all women do.