I probably should have been less curt with this posting, so I shall accept being branded as troll, this time. But, the question remains: how much useful knowledge are we going to recoup with this mission, in comparison to earlier missions? This particular voyage appears to be an effort by NASA to recover lost face from the failed Mars missions in the past few years. As I get older, I have started to have less faith in NASA's policies that exploration justifies itself.
In my home, there are three laptops that regularly wander in and out of the network, running FreeBSD / Windows 2000, Mac OS X and Mac OS X; I want them to have common access to my projects, and my mp3s. My central file server has an sshd, so I simply use rsync to keep them all in sync with one another. It is a bit wasteful, if all of my machines stayed on the network 24/7, but I and my wife do a lot of travelling.
My wife is an active wargamer, but she will only occasionally dabble in RPG's and video games; she doesn't feel exactly comfortable or pleased with games that depict women as physics-defying super-bimbos whose sole role is to be sex objects who prop up the heroes by standing under each arm. (Her words, exactly, when the article was mentioned)
Frankly, game marketing is so heavily oriented towards a sex-sells angle in the market right now, both for tabletop gaming and computer gaming, that she usually tosses a title aside in disgust after just looking at the box copy. Even many of the MMORPGs out there get snorts of disgust from her, often deservedly. An example: Anyone remember the bondage-girl-elf on the cover of Everquest: Ruins of Kunark, tied up by the mean old Lizardman?
Yeah, that really convinced my wife that women weren't sex objects in EQ; currently, she has been playing Shadowbane, which has done a fairly decent job of not being too ludicrous with the female models, and has kept the tasteless art to a minimum.
Invest in a safe. The only way to properly control access to a computer is to airgap it, lock it in a container, then post several rabid animals to guard the container. Even then, this is no guarantee, but the annoyance factor should be high enough to protect grandma's secret cookie recipe.
Around here, it's the hacker's best friend. It's open all night, packs a variety of questionable foodstuffs, caffiene and vitamins, and carries a decent selection of batteries and gadgets considering the time of night.
I usually visit it to pick up fresh cat litter, since I always forget at the supermarket.
> Don't underestimate what people are willing to do if they can save a buck...
Actually, considering that our happy, well equipped pirate has paid his $8.00, or what have you, he's not saving himself a buck by filming the movie. What he is doing is acquiring material, legally or no, that he can later trade with his peers for reputation. After this material has diffused through the hardcore scene, it will trickle back into the peer-to-peer file sharing circuit, where Ma and Pa Kettle can get it.
The only similarities between this social problems, and the act of copying magazine articles with a cellphone/camera is the involvement of a camera and the willingness of an industry to blame its failings on technology instead of human behavior.
Go visit your local Rite-Aid, if you don't have a CC. They allow you to purchase a card and furnish it with a balance that you can then use anywhere you can use a normal CC.
Reporters keep their jobs on the merit of their results, and are promoted if they bring intriguing stories to their publishers; law enforcement personnel keep their jobs for maintaining the status quo and keeping society's more difficult elements from disrupting civilization.
As much as spammers may annoy, exhaust resources and breach poorly monitored servers, they don't make enough noise, individually, to draw focussed attention from your average police officer. The questions of legal jurisdiction become very complicated whenever the internet is involved.
Since you seem to be enjoying berating another individual, I thought I would chime in with my own derisive two bits. I dislike the fact that PDF documents are very tightly constrained in their formatting, having a fixed width and height to each page, and requiring a particular font.
I perform much of my work on the road, with a 1024x768 display; carrying hardcopy is not an option, therefore I am forced to view many PDF documents with a viewer, and it is galling that I cannot display the document in a fashion that is most agreeable to my display. This is where simple HTML and even intelligently formatted ASCII text is head and shoulders above PDF.
PDF is a nice format for publishers who wish to share an electronic copy of a published, typset work, but it is terrible as a digital format in almost every other way. All of its much trumpeted advantages are also wasted on the visually impaired, since the effort needed to get PDF to work with screen readers or other text-to-speech solutions is ludicrous.
Anyone else remember B2 operating environments, and some of the silliness involving assigning dedicated colors to the borders of windows to announce the sensitivity level of the data contained within?
I can't wait for Microsoft to rediscover that feature.. B2 systems were great from an engineering point of view, but as far as usability went, it was so much complexity that users tended to try to defeat the security measures placed on them.
Oh.. I'm sure they have a decent chance of picking up a military unit, or maybe catching a key.. That'll work nicely until the military notices a unit missing on inventory, which can happen faster than a civilian would expect, or, at the very least, the periodic update for the key is pushed out.
You didn't really expect these guys to use the same key ad infinitum, did you?
Part of the Gov. Brennan's initiative was to set up a trust fund, the interest from which was intended to purchase new laptops and provide the necessary funds to keep this project going. Back when things were just starting out, local politicos thought long and hard about raiding this fund to cover the shortfall, but so far, we have managed to resist.
Considering the results so far, I'm very happy that we've managed to leave this project alone, despite complaints from some of our older residents who regard this as a waste.
In my local area, midcoast Maine, there is a dearth of offerings for consumer broadband. The local solution involves an ISP, Midcoast Internet Services, which employs line of sight breezecom hardware to build a network. It's not a very cheap solution, but since our area's phone system is a hodgepodge of small rural carriers and Verizon, it's almost impossible to get the telcos to provide decent broadband.
The only other option, which actually is a newcomer in the area, is Adelphia cable, which is only available in the more urban areas. Adelphia thinks of itself as a monopoly in Maine, so the quality of service is terrible, and the terms of service are worse.
This is an actual case of a smal ISP using WiFi to work their way around a system that protects these large, unfriendly corporations. And making quite a decent profit while doing so.
And the C++ STL is probably one of the last things a C++ programmer really understands, and it can be years before people truely appreciate the power of the STL. </quote>
I think you just identified the reason many casual programmers have trouble with C++; the barrier of entry for learning the STL is so high, they often just implement their own less efficient lists, hashes and other data collections, often without proper bounds checking and other necessities. The STL is certainly powerful, but it is rather thorny for someone coming from a saner OOP language to learn.
It doesn't help that many of the early C++ STL books were entirely too involved in fascination with the nature of the template system and spend less time discussing the actual usage of STL.
Any slashdotters who currently live in the Midcoast Maine area are welcome to contact me.. The position was filled, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind me handing them a resume for talented people.
The pay is not sufficient to justify relocation, however.
This past year, I swallowed my pride and joined a local ISP while I waited for my dream employer to come out of a hiring freeze. After about eight months with a really nice group of people but no real challenge or pay to match, the freeze ended and I switched companies, to the disappointment of the ISP.
I was very sad to go, and I felt more than a little guilty about the fact. Last week, my wife and I received some very persistant invitations to my former employer's Christmas party; my wife went, since I was out of town, and received a prorated Christmas Bonus and a lot of general good will from the owner of the company and the staff.
Usually when an employee leaves a company for a bigger position elsewhere, an undercurrent of nastiness follows: the company and its people resents the loss of the employee. This company, though, insists on keeping a very friendly relationship with me, including repeated open invitations to stop by and mooch coffee.
The bonus was pretty meager, compared to what I remember from the.com days, but the fact that it was offered at all, to an ex-employee, was probably the nicest thing I've ever seen a company do.
It actually comes down to the same concept of identity, personality and community on both your archetypical forum and mud. Users start with obscurity and anonymity, and either blaze their own path with new behavior and insights, spend their time toadying up to those who with charisma, or sit on the fence whining about how boring and silly it all is.
Lawd knows that's why I decided to read this one. I knew better, but I couldn't take the chance that it might actually be something new about MUDs that hasn't been warmed over and served up with Graphics for $9.95 a month.
1) How much time do you spend training your paperclip in Office?
How much time are you going to spend on training your spam filter? If you are unwilling to invest a little time and effort in developing a solid set of values that fit your personal pattern of behavior, then Bayesian filters are indeed a poor match for you.
2) What harm is a false positive?
If you are automatically deleting anything that is marked as a positive for spam, then you are playing roulette with your email. I would generally recommend diverting email classified as spam by your filter to a folder, especially one that is relatively new and has had very little experience with your patterns of use. Set an expiry on your spam folder, and check it from time to time to see if something fell through the cracks. Mozilla has a handy feature that allows you to simply conceal spam from view, which works adequately, although I dislike the potential performance hit in a large folder.
Considering how important your email is to you, you should certainly consider applying a little diligence to how you manage it.
Toboggan with Parabolic Rails
on
Ultimate Sleds?
·
· Score: 1
The traditional cheapo plastic toboggan is quite easy to control if they have parabolic rails.
The concept is fairly simple, when you look at it, but difficult to explain in text; on the underside of the sled are a pair of large plastic ridges which extend parallel from one another from the rear, then flare away from each other at the front. When your weight is over the rear half of the sled, you travel straight and fairly fast; when you place your weight forwards, the flared portion of the rails come into contact with the snow, and provide a reliable braking action unless you are on hard ice. Leaning to one side or the other only engages one rail, allowing nice, easy turns.
I was quite a menace as a kid with one of these sleds. They were fairly cheap, and easily found in the snowbelt.
Now, if you have someone handy who is gullible and disposable, you might want to shell out $200 for one of these!
And, as of 0.4, it is possible to have your window with just the URL.. No menu at all.. Of course, getting the menu/back/ is a bug of a different color.;)
As a laptop user, I love 0.4's ability to pack all the buttons, menu and url bar into a single row.
Before you congratulate us too much, remember that Camden, ME is a very upper-scale tourism town. Due to the recent inroads by MBNA, property valuations are very high compared to the number of school students in the Camden-Rockport area.
Yes, the laptop program is a nice idea. But from what parts I have encountered, it is a great demo in search of application. Jobs has been pushing it as way to push his digital video focus, which is not necessarily the most important thing for our children here. I'm glad you enjoyed the conference; just remember that there was a considerable amount of smoke and mirrors involved in the demos.
Slashdot Mirror
I probably should have been less curt with this posting, so I shall accept being branded as troll, this time. But, the question remains: how much useful knowledge are we going to recoup with this mission, in comparison to earlier missions? This particular voyage appears to be an effort by NASA to recover lost face from the failed Mars missions in the past few years. As I get older, I have started to have less faith in NASA's policies that exploration justifies itself.
.. wonder what this instrument will tell us about water on Mars. ..
Hm. It's ice, it's wet when it melts, and it's mostly concentrated in the poles. Was this trip really necessary?
In my home, there are three laptops that regularly wander in and out of the network, running FreeBSD / Windows 2000, Mac OS X and Mac OS X; I want them to have common access to my projects, and my mp3s. My central file server has an sshd, so I simply use rsync to keep them all in sync with one another. It is a bit wasteful, if all of my machines stayed on the network 24/7, but I and my wife do a lot of travelling.
My wife is an active wargamer, but she will only occasionally dabble in RPG's and video games; she doesn't feel exactly comfortable or pleased with games that depict women as physics-defying super-bimbos whose sole role is to be sex objects who prop up the heroes by standing under each arm. (Her words, exactly, when the article was mentioned)
Frankly, game marketing is so heavily oriented towards a sex-sells angle in the market right now, both for tabletop gaming and computer gaming, that she usually tosses a title aside in disgust after just looking at the box copy. Even many of the MMORPGs out there get snorts of disgust from her, often deservedly. An example: Anyone remember the bondage-girl-elf on the cover of Everquest: Ruins of Kunark, tied up by the mean old Lizardman?
Yeah, that really convinced my wife that women weren't sex objects in EQ; currently, she has been playing Shadowbane, which has done a fairly decent job of not being too ludicrous with the female models, and has kept the tasteless art to a minimum.
Invest in a safe. The only way to properly control access to a computer is to airgap it, lock it in a container, then post several rabid animals to guard the container. Even then, this is no guarantee, but the annoyance factor should be high enough to protect grandma's secret cookie recipe.
Around here, it's the hacker's best friend. It's open all night, packs a variety of questionable foodstuffs, caffiene and vitamins, and carries a decent selection of batteries and gadgets considering the time of night.
I usually visit it to pick up fresh cat litter, since I always forget at the supermarket.
> Don't underestimate what people are willing to do if they can save a buck...
Actually, considering that our happy, well equipped pirate has paid his $8.00, or what have you, he's not saving himself a buck by filming the movie. What he is doing is acquiring material, legally or no, that he can later trade with his peers for reputation. After this material has diffused through the hardcore scene, it will trickle back into the peer-to-peer file sharing circuit, where Ma and Pa Kettle can get it.
The only similarities between this social problems, and the act of copying magazine articles with a cellphone/camera is the involvement of a camera and the willingness of an industry to blame its failings on technology instead of human behavior.
Go visit your local Rite-Aid, if you don't have a CC. They allow you to purchase a card and furnish it with a balance that you can then use anywhere you can use a normal CC.
Reporters keep their jobs on the merit of their results, and are promoted if they bring intriguing stories to their publishers; law enforcement personnel keep their jobs for maintaining the status quo and keeping society's more difficult elements from disrupting civilization.
As much as spammers may annoy, exhaust resources and breach poorly monitored servers, they don't make enough noise, individually, to draw focussed attention from your average police officer. The questions of legal jurisdiction become very complicated whenever the internet is involved.
Since you seem to be enjoying berating another individual, I thought I would chime in with my own derisive two bits. I dislike the fact that PDF documents are very tightly constrained in their formatting, having a fixed width and height to each page, and requiring a particular font.
I perform much of my work on the road, with a 1024x768 display; carrying hardcopy is not an option, therefore I am forced to view many PDF documents with a viewer, and it is galling that I cannot display the document in a fashion that is most agreeable to my display. This is where simple HTML and even intelligently formatted ASCII text is head and shoulders above PDF.
PDF is a nice format for publishers who wish to share an electronic copy of a published, typset work, but it is terrible as a digital format in almost every other way. All of its much trumpeted advantages are also wasted on the visually impaired, since the effort needed to get PDF to work with screen readers or other text-to-speech solutions is ludicrous.
Anyone else remember B2 operating environments, and some of the silliness involving assigning dedicated colors to the borders of windows to announce the sensitivity level of the data contained within?
I can't wait for Microsoft to rediscover that feature.. B2 systems were great from an engineering point of view, but as far as usability went, it was so much complexity that users tended to try to defeat the security measures placed on them.
Oh.. I'm sure they have a decent chance of picking up a military unit, or maybe catching a key.. That'll work nicely until the military notices a unit missing on inventory, which can happen faster than a civilian would expect, or, at the very least, the periodic update for the key is pushed out.
You didn't really expect these guys to use the same key ad infinitum, did you?
Whups. Did I say Brennan? I meant King.. I really need to stop posting before that first cup of coffee..
Part of the Gov. Brennan's initiative was to set up a trust fund, the interest from which was intended to purchase new laptops and provide the necessary funds to keep this project going. Back when things were just starting out, local politicos thought long and hard about raiding this fund to cover the shortfall, but so far, we have managed to resist.
Considering the results so far, I'm very happy that we've managed to leave this project alone, despite complaints from some of our older residents who regard this as a waste.
In my local area, midcoast Maine, there is a dearth of offerings for consumer broadband. The local solution involves an ISP, Midcoast Internet Services, which employs line of sight breezecom hardware to build a network. It's not a very cheap solution, but since our area's phone system is a hodgepodge of small rural carriers and Verizon, it's almost impossible to get the telcos to provide decent broadband.
The only other option, which actually is a newcomer in the area, is Adelphia cable, which is only available in the more urban areas. Adelphia thinks of itself as a monopoly in Maine, so the quality of service is terrible, and the terms of service are worse.
This is an actual case of a smal ISP using WiFi to work their way around a system that protects these large, unfriendly corporations. And making quite a decent profit while doing so.
And the C++ STL is probably one of the last things a C++ programmer really understands, and it can be years before people truely appreciate the power of the STL.
</quote>
I think you just identified the reason many casual programmers have trouble with C++; the barrier of entry for learning the STL is so high, they often just implement their own less efficient lists, hashes and other data collections, often without proper bounds checking and other necessities. The STL is certainly powerful, but it is rather thorny for someone coming from a saner OOP language to learn.
It doesn't help that many of the early C++ STL books were entirely too involved in fascination with the nature of the template system and spend less time discussing the actual usage of STL.
Any slashdotters who currently live in the Midcoast Maine area are welcome to contact me.. The position was filled, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind me handing them a resume for talented people.
The pay is not sufficient to justify relocation, however.
This past year, I swallowed my pride and joined a local ISP while I waited for my dream employer to come out of a hiring freeze. After about eight months with a really nice group of people but no real challenge or pay to match, the freeze ended and I switched companies, to the disappointment of the ISP.
.com days, but the fact that it was offered at all, to an ex-employee, was probably the nicest thing I've ever seen a company do.
I was very sad to go, and I felt more than a little guilty about the fact. Last week, my wife and I received some very persistant invitations to my former employer's Christmas party; my wife went, since I was out of town, and received a prorated Christmas Bonus and a lot of general good will from the owner of the company and the staff.
Usually when an employee leaves a company for a bigger position elsewhere, an undercurrent of nastiness follows: the company and its people resents the loss of the employee. This company, though, insists on keeping a very friendly relationship with me, including repeated open invitations to stop by and mooch coffee.
The bonus was pretty meager, compared to what I remember from the
So, what we have proven today, is that while Pacifist does not imply Gay, Celibate does? ;)
It actually comes down to the same concept of identity, personality and community on both your archetypical forum and mud. Users start with obscurity and anonymity, and either blaze their own path with new behavior and insights, spend their time toadying up to those who with charisma, or sit on the fence whining about how boring and silly it all is.
Lawd knows that's why I decided to read this one. I knew better, but I couldn't take the chance that it might actually be something new about MUDs that hasn't been warmed over and served up with Graphics for $9.95 a month.
1) How much time do you spend training your paperclip in Office?
How much time are you going to spend on training your spam filter? If you are unwilling to invest a little time and effort in developing a solid set of values that fit your personal pattern of behavior, then Bayesian filters are indeed a poor match for you.
2) What harm is a false positive?
If you are automatically deleting anything that is marked as a positive for spam, then you are playing roulette with your email. I would generally recommend diverting email classified as spam by your filter to a folder, especially one that is relatively new and has had very little experience with your patterns of use. Set an expiry on your spam folder, and check it from time to time to see if something fell through the cracks. Mozilla has a handy feature that allows you to simply conceal spam from view, which works adequately, although I dislike the potential performance hit in a large folder.
Considering how important your email is to you, you should certainly consider applying a little diligence to how you manage it.
The concept is fairly simple, when you look at it, but difficult to explain in text; on the underside of the sled are a pair of large plastic ridges which extend parallel from one another from the rear, then flare away from each other at the front. When your weight is over the rear half of the sled, you travel straight and fairly fast; when you place your weight forwards, the flared portion of the rails come into contact with the snow, and provide a reliable braking action unless you are on hard ice. Leaning to one side or the other only engages one rail, allowing nice, easy turns.
I was quite a menace as a kid with one of these sleds. They were fairly cheap, and easily found in the snowbelt.
Now, if you have someone handy who is gullible and disposable, you might want to shell out $200 for one of these!
And, as of 0.4, it is possible to have your window with just the URL.. No menu at all.. Of course, getting the menu /back/ is a bug of a different color. ;)
As a laptop user, I love 0.4's ability to pack all the buttons, menu and url bar into a single row.
Before you congratulate us too much, remember that Camden, ME is a very upper-scale tourism town. Due to the recent inroads by MBNA, property valuations are very high compared to the number of school students in the Camden-Rockport area.
Yes, the laptop program is a nice idea. But from what parts I have encountered, it is a great demo in search of application. Jobs has been pushing it as way to push his digital video focus, which is not necessarily the most important thing for our children here. I'm glad you enjoyed the conference; just remember that there was a considerable amount of smoke and mirrors involved in the demos.