Yikes, there's a dire lack of punctuation in the above post. It was there when I wrote it in Word but went missing after I pasted and hit Submit. All my apostrophes, dashes and quotation marks are missing. I cringe when I read "were" instead of "we're"... . Sorry!
Ditto with the new mileage standards. Those concerned with fuel economy can, and do, purchase vehicles with 35+ MPG. Having an illegitimate national government (it's supposed to be a federal system!) interfere with free market choices never produces the desired results.
While I agree with you that free markets are the ideal resource allocators, these regulations are needed exactly because the current situation is not a free market one.
A truly free market supplies the equilibrium quantity of a good the quantity where the supply and demand curves meet. Producing this quantity is supposed to be the most efficient use of resources because these is the quantity at which societys costs of producing the good (reflected in the supply curve) balance out with the benefit accrued to the society from consuming this good (reflected in the demand curve)
It should be clear that free markets set the equilibrium quantity correctly only if all costs are reflected in the supply curve and all benefits in the demand curve.
It should also be clear that there are costs associated with (in your example, consumption of gasoline) that are not reflected in the cost of either the gas or the car. Car emissions are such an example theres a cost to the environment which is borne by everyone but not factored into the explicit cost of the activity. It could be argued that national dependence on foreign fuel is a risk borne by the society and once again not reflected in the cost of the activity.
For the free markets to properly select the quantities of gas and inefficient cars consumed, the two factors above would need to be properly reflected in their costs. Since they are not, it can be assumed that were currently consuming more than the equilibrium quantity of these things and therefore the government regulation actually works to push supply and consumption towards their true equilibrium levels.
In the long run, I agree that the free markets are more efficient than government regulation, which is why things like gasoline consumption need to reflect their proper cost to society. One way to do this would be to charge a tax such that the pollution and other costs of driving inefficient vehicles would be properly reflected in their cost of ownership. Another, even more free-market way would be offset trading. For example, someone who underpollutes (e.g. by living in a city and walking to work) would be able to sell pollution offsets to someone who wants to overpolute by driving an inefficient vehicle. That way you can do whatever you want as long as you pay for it properly. Thats a true free-market setup.
So unless youre really going to pay me (as someone who walks to work) offsets for driving whatever youre driving, youll have to live with the mileage standard.
I tried Opera again just recently and would have continued to use it but for the extremely annoying way it handles tabs. If only it did tabs like Firefox, or you could configure it to act that way, then I'd use it: specifically - so that when you close a tab, it jumps to the next one in the chain, rather than to the last one opened. Infuriating.
Actually I know what you're talking about - this used to drive me nuts but now I am used to it and I actually miss it when I use other browsers.
The reason I like this is - I often like to open a few background tabs for later reading. Then I encounter a link I want to read right now - so I open it in a tab and then go to that tab. Then when I close the tab, I end up on the document I was just reading, and I continue reading it. When I am done with it, I read the tabs opened previously.
This ends up being a pretty efficient model for me. If it trully doesn't work for you, someone did give you a link to disable it. But it's one of those things that are worth getting used to.
And Firefox has *extensions*. Which are really the only thing that make it better than Opera. Good thing FF3 is solving some of the bloat/memory leaks.
I am just curious, are there any particular extensions that make Firefox much better? I give FF a fair try every time a new significant version comes out so I'd be curious to know this.
Opera is excellent, especially in regards to its small footprint, standards support and speed. The big gotcha, though, is still its closed source nature
This is probably not going to be a popular statement here, but I wonder if Opera is so good specifically because it's being written by a professional team with specific goals. Speaking to this example in particular, one of the reasons Opera is fast is because it was specifically designed to be - the company goes after the mobile space and their business model depends on having a lean browser. Whereas the Firefox devs probably know that efficiency matters, but an individual developer may not really care about it as long as it runs fine on his machine.
Looks like they are finally getting their javascript act together. After being a sore point for so many years, a working javascript in Opera will be welcome.
I am just curious as to what you're talking about. I've been using Opera for a while now and have not noticed it having any JS issues.
But on older systems, the sieve like memory leaks made it inoperable within a short period of time. Hopefully this will allow those of us who run legacy hardware to have a modern relatively secure web browser.
Have you tried Opera? It's really quite good. I use it on my older Linux laptop (128MB ram) because it's the only modern browser that can show pages without thrashing the drive. I also use Opera on powerful machines - I think it's the best browser out there in terms of both the feature set and the quality of workmanship.
One of the problems with Wiki's math content is that too much of it is not acessible to someone who is looking up a concept out of the blue or landed on the article randomly. Heavy use of math notation is one of the reasons for this - it tempts authors to create what is technically a complete treatment of the topic but does not have sufficient plain-language content to be meaningful to non-experts.
I am by no means arguing for dumbing down of content, but it's important that at least the first few paragraphs avoid relying on heavy use of math notation in favor of giving a casual user an idea of (1) the gist of the math concept (2) why it's important and (3) some basic uses or a simple example.
The question of whether proofs should be allowed in Wiki depends on discipline of the average math author. Can they avoid the temptation of making the proof be the article? If they can, then there's nothing wrong with supplementing an already-good article with the proof. But if it's impossible to glean anything from the article other than by stepping through the proof - then the article is crap and the proof is what enabled the author to think he was done.
Perhaps there should be a separate sister site that housed proofs which are linked to from the main articles. I think that's probably the best idea - keeping the article meaningful to non-experts - and allowing those who care to "drill down".
So if no encoding is indicated, why does Notepad offer different encoding options if one clicks on the "save as" dropdown?
Well, there actually is a leading byte sequence that indicates the encoding of a file in many cases. For example, If I save a file as "Unicode" in notepad, its first 2 bytes are FE FF. The UNIX 'file' util reports "Unicode text, UTF-16, big-endian". A file saved as UTF-8 is started with EF BB BF and 'file says "Unicode text, UTF-8". So in fact, Notepad does save the prefixes. According to Wikipedia, these markers are optional.
I looked at the man page for 'file' on UNIX and saw that it interprets files based on 'magic number tests'... On my machine, the magic is in/usr/share/file/magic, and here's the relevant section.
The thing is, it seems as if these prefixes are optional. Their presence indicates the encoding, but its absence apparently doesn't mean the file is Plain ASCII.
To go back to our example: Create the TXT file in notepad containing "this app can break" the resulting file is 18 bytes in size open that file with notepad, notepad decides its Unicode. Hit control-s to resave the file the file is now 20 bytes, because it was explicitly saved by notepad as unicode and was prefixed with the 2 leading bytes.
I was under the impression that "guessing" was non-standard, and thus the correct thing to do would be not to guess.
I am curious - what editor do you use? Does your editor load UTF-8 and UTF-16 documents as the ASCII interpretation of their bytes, given that the encoding is not specified anywhere inside those files?
Hi zooblethorpe, I am glad that my explanation clarified things for you. I was trying my best!:) To answer your questions:
>> So then SciTE automatically saves as UTF-16? I certainly didn't specify >> anything but a filename at save time.
It's able to save/display both asian and latin chars, so it's using a Unicode encoding. Probably UTF-8. I talked about UTF-16 because the ambiguity here is between ASCII and UTF-16, but the same logic applies to UTF-8. In fact the byte sequence for U+6874 in UTF-8 doesn't match the ASCII bytes for "th" so there's no ambiguity there at all.
Ah, you cleared something up here (in the bolded portions) -- from what you're saying, Notepad would check the whole string for possible Unicode-ness, not just the first few bytes.
Yeah, that's the smart thing to do. The more text there is, the less is the probablity that it can be interpreted as both encodings at once. Kind-of like if you look at a short snippet of code, it may appear to be valid C++ and valid Java - but the more of the code you see, the more likely you're to encounter something that gives it away as one or the other. I hope that's a good analogy.
But even then, I'm puzzled about why, which leaves me still with questions about how smart Notepad is being. If a text file is marked as ASCII, what utility is there in trying by default to display it as anything else?
The entirety of the problem is that the file is not marked as ASCII. No encoding is indicated. If you think that.txt implies plain ASCII you'd be wrong - when you get a.TXT file from any source (including from non-Windows machines....) you have no idea if it's plain ASCII, the Windows Latin 1 encoding, UTF-8, UTF-16, or anything else. Trust me that you'd be pretty annoyed if your text editor didn't try to guess the encodings. The fact is, Notepad does a decent job of it - as I've never seen it render anything other than "this app can break" incorrectly. In fact, I'd bet that this example was discovered by someone with a good sense of encodings who wanted to see which way this ambiguity be resolved.
SciTE opened it and showed me "this app can break". So I tried explicitly entering the Unicode character found at 0x6874 for Japanese (for the record, ikada "raft", or bachi "pick / plectrum / drumstick") in place of the initial "th"; SciTE opened it and showed me that same Japanese character followed immediately by "is app can break".
That's what I would expect. You saved the file in one of the Unicode encodings so the bytes were not the same as the original example. If you saved it as UTF-16, the first two bytes (representing the 6874) would be the same as in the original, while each of the subsequent Latin letters would now be represented by two bytes rather than 1 byte of the original. For example, the 6874 would be followed by 0069, while in the original file the letter 'i' was represented by a single byte with value 69.
When I tried to do the same thing you did in Notepad, I got a popup at save-time prompting me to enter an encoding other than ASCII. Saving it at as any of the Unicode encodings allowed it to load up fine on subsequent loads (ie asian char followed by English text, same as yours). In fact, doing the original "this app can break" example and saving the file as anything other than plain text works fine - since the encoding becomes explicit.
Incidentally, if your analysis is correct as to why Notepad screws this up, it should then theoretically screw up when opening any text document beginning with "th". Can anyone confirm this? I no longer have Notepad on my machine.
That's wrong too. Most sentences which begin with "th" do not have a byte representation that can be confused for UTF-16. For example, no odd number of bytes can be considered to be UTF-16 since UTF-16 encodes each character as 2 or 4 bytes. It's a rare coincidence that all the byte pairs in "this app can break" look like valid UTF-16. The longer the (plain) text, the lower the probability that its byte representation looks like valid UTF-16. Of course since "this app can break" maps to valid UTF-16, any number of repetitions of it do too.
So sure, what you describe might be what Notepad does, but it's not smart.
There's actually no smart way to do this. Let's say I open a plain text editor that saves into pure ASCII and type up "this app can break". Save it as file1.txt. You open some text editor which knows how to encode to UTF-16 and enter characters 6874 7369 6120 7070 6320 6e61 6220 6572 6b61. Save with with UTF-16 encoding (Not "unicode" or UTF-8) as file2.txt.
file1.txt and file2.txt are IDENTICAL. If I open either one of them in notepad, I will see both of them as Asian chars. If I use some other editor that defaults to ASCII for this, both of the files will display as "this app can break". In each case, each editor is "correct" 50% of the time and wrong the other 50% of the time. The whole trouble is that the bytes representing the English sentence and the Japanese sequence are identical.
And it's somehow no surprise that its dumb behaviour hasn't been fixed by MS.
Actually they did fix it. Many posters in this thread say that this no longer occurs in Vista. I would bet this is because the default save format is now one of the Unicode representations so this sentence is no longer ambiguous.
...And it doesn't even handle text encodings correctly!
Try this: write "this app can break" (without quotes), or any other text with the same pattern of spaces, in an otherwise-blank file, save it, and then reopen it. It'll show up as unprintable characters because that's (apparently) the magic sequence to switch Notepad to Unicode mode.
This is one of those situations where it's very easy for a human to know what the correct thing to do is (after all you just saved it as Windows 1252) but very difficult for the computer to get it right 100% of the time. Text files have no headers to tell Notepad or any other app what the encoding it, so Notepad has to guess. In this case, the 18 bytes that represent "this app can break" in Windows 1252 (or ASCII for that matter) also represent a string of 9 Japanese characters encoded as UTF-16.
For example: t is 0x74 and h is 0x68, and 6874 happens to be the Unicode codepoint of the first character displayed (these would not be unprintable to you if Asian language support was installed on your machine) - and so on - the byte representation of every subsequent pair of letters matches up to a UTF-16 representation of a valid Japanese Unicode character.
Notepad probably calls IsTextUnicode to figure these things out.
To reiterate, if any app is presented with the 18 bytes above - it has no way to know if those bytes correspond to input in ASCII/Win1252 or UTF-16 representation of Japanese - any app must guess (or simply default to ASCII - which is what most apps do anyway because they are ignorant of internationalization.)
The only way to avoid such problems is to use file formats that make encoding choice explicit. Guessing works well most of the time (MSIE does a good job guessing the language of a webpage, if the meta information was not provided, for example) but it's clearly not perfect.
I heard the author interviewed on the radio once - he was a total bore and he seemed to have no real insight or depth to his statements. I didn't really get the sense that he was dumbing it down for the radio audience - rather he seems to have very flat and one dimensional in his thoughts. He didn't say anything that wasn't an obvious extension of current technology and trends - and nothing that hasn't been part of SciFi culture for decades. Perhaps the book is different/better but based on this interview, I have no reason to think so.
As many have pointed out, this is not really a Turing test because the judge is not aware that they might be talking to a machine. I figured out that this was an important component a few years ago;)
In 1999 or 2000, I took the Megahal codebase, linked it up to one of the Linux console AIM clients, trainined it on 2+ years of my own AIM logs that I had at the time, and let it sign onto my screen name when I was not in the dorm.
If anyone IMd me at those times, they always thought they were talking to some really distracted and likely intoxicated version of me. After all, the bot 'sounded' like me since it was trained on my own text - it emulated my diction and usage and topics. Yet at the same time it was spewing complete nonsense.
Of course once someone was told that they might end up chatting with the machine, that person could very easily tell the difference between me and the EdBot
"Google today announced its RC<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal
I was trying to figure out what the C stood for in RC and couldn't, so I clicked the attached story and sure enough, the project is actually called RE<C...
The first thing you should do is ask yourself whether googling for your Internet nickname would actually give the employer what they are looking for. You're applying to be a manager - what type of work did you do under your nickname that suggests managerial qualifications? Perhaps you're confusing establishing an online identity (which it sound like you did, using your nick) vs. identifying actual work relevant to the position.
That being said, I can think of a few situations where work done under a nick might be relevant to what you're trying to do - for example if you had managed an open source project under a pseudonym. In that case, you should certainly highlight that work but there are better ways to do so than putting your nick on your resume.
The easiest and best thing to do is to simply mention what you did right on your resume. If you managed an open source project, mention the project and your role on your resume. If you participated in some online management forums - to think of another example - why not just put that under the Interests area? That way you can tell the employer what you had done without making them look for it. This doesn't directly answer your question but it accomplishes the same goal.
The other thing you can do is make a professional website and mention it on your resume. The page can then link to whatever online activities you think are relevant to your goals. Mentioning a URL in the header of your resume would - I think - look more professional than mentioning a nick. It could also work even better in your favor - there could be employers out there who wouldn't bother to google your name but might follow the link you provide, and if your website reveals some strength then that's a good thing.
Finally, if you're going to be really passive aggressive and want to find ways to have the employer google your nick, you could always just place it into your email address. If you want to have them google for OpenSourceManagerDude, then try putting OpenSourceManagerDude@somedomain as your email address? This looks far less professional and is much less effective than the first two options, so I don't recommend it - just throwing it in for completeness' sake.
But again, the main thing you need to do is confirm in your mind that googling for your nickname would actually bring up the type of information that would tell an employer you're going to be a good manager. It's not clear to me how that could be.
This is a lie perpetuated by the credit card industry. You simply need credit cards with reasnoable limits, and you need to use them for about 6mo. to establish revolving debt.
After that they only hurt your credit score if their balance is nonzero at the exact moment the balance is reported 5-7 days prior to you checking your credit score.
That's absolutely untrue. The age of your oldest account of record is one of the biggest determinants of your credit score, all other things being equal. Someone who's had a responsible credit history for 20 years is a lesser credit risk than someone with the 6 months of history you mentioned. That means for example if you get a credit card at the beginning of your college education - even if you never use it - you'll be 4 years ahead in building your history compared to someone who gets a card when they graduate.
Perhaps you're arguing some other point but all I am saying is that having credit cards is an easy way to establish your history at an early point in your life - well in advance of needing mortgages or autoloans.
You're right in that having a larger balance at the time your score is checked if a factor since % of credit utilization is a factor of the score. So all things being equal, having more cards (and thus larger total available credit) while having very small balances (hopefully just whatever you're going to pay off at month's end) is beneficial. That being said, this is secondary to the average age of your credit. If you have a card that's 20 years old and you open another one today, even if this doubles your available credit, it hurts your score by reducing the average age of your accounts to 10 years.
However, they do make the banks wealthier. Every time you buy something on your credit card, a x% fee gets charged to the merchant, for the privilege of accepting a credit card. This costs the merchant, who in turn has to change his prices and charge you more
This may not be as straight-forward as you'd think. First, there's a cost associated with handling cash also - trips to the bank, risk of theft, etc, so at least some of the transaction fee is recouped in that way. In the case of entities like your cell phone company, I am almost positive that it's cheaper for them to process your automated credit card payment then to hire people to take your checks out of the mail and process them. In the case of web merchants, the business model is barely viable without credit cards to begin with.
Even if we limit the discussion to brick-and-mortar businesses that can easily accept cash, it's not clear that credit card transactions force them to raise their prices accross the board.
Let's consider two businesses. Business one is a Japanese noodle place on 6th Avenue that I go to for lunch sometimes. The place is always filled to capacity, and can handle no further business. Therefore it has remained a cash-only business.
Compare it to some other place which isn't utilizing its full capacity. Can they get better sales from credit cards? Sure, accepting credit cards will allow them to capture 3 demographics - those who love to charge everything to their cards, those without sufficient pocket cash at the moment, and those who go into credit card debt. If the business can sell more units of output to this larger demographic, its fixed costs (such as rent) will be averaged out accross more units sold. Thus, eventhough a percentage of the credit card purchases goes to banks, the business is clearly in better shape than it was before - all of its cash transactions are there, but now there are new transactions. Of course, some of the existing cash business will become credit card business and get hit with the fees, but it's possible that the bigger sales due to CC acceptance will more than make up for that.
Wrong. Using credit gets you into debt, maybe, but not me. Credit does not get you into debt; debt comes from not repaying your creditors.
People these days just can't accept personal responsibility for things; it's ridiculous.
You're correct, although I understand that some people can't resist the temptation to over-spend. From my point of view, use of credit cards can actually make people wealthier rather than poorer, in 4 ways:
* Rewards. It's easy to find a credit card that gives you some percentage of your spending back as cash or gasoline or airline miles. All other things being equal, this benefits the user - free money!
* Building of credit history. The longer you have credit card accounts in your credit profile (assuming you pay them off or at least pay on time) the better your credit score. This lets you borrow money at a lower rate when you realy have to - say a mortgage.
* Interest. When you buy an item with cash, you no longer have the cash. When you buy an item with a credit card, you get to keep that money until the bill is due - which could be a month or more in the future. You can put that money into a savings account meanwhile and earn interest.
* Barring scams and identity theft, credit is safer than cash. If you lose your credit card, you can replace it for free. Cash cannot be replaced in the same way. Also, credit cards provide a convenient way to dispute charges. Let's say you made a deposit for a service that was never provided. You may have a tough time chasing down the entity you made a deposit with, but you're a phone call and a fax away from your credit card refunding you the money and investigating (yes, in that order!)
Another great feature of credit cards is the monthly statement itemizing your expendetures. If you're into any type of cashflow analysis or budgeting, this could be valuable.
Of course these benefits only accrue to those with sufficient restraint to avoid abusing their cards. If you don't buy anything on the card that you'd not have bought with cash you have access to, you'll be ahead of the game.
I think you're asking an unreasonable question. The industry turnaround time is irrelevant to the particular business, software, and defect type that you're dealing with.
Like many other decisions, there is a simple balance between risk and reward here. The question is - what do you gain by doing the fix in 48 hours vs. what risk do you incur by foregoing the longer testing/QA cycle?
The answer to this question empowers you to deal with the customer more reasonably. If you're reasonably sure that this quick fix corrects the problem and does not add any new ones, and the problem is severe enough that it should not go untreated - why wait even 48 hours? Code it up and fix it.
On the other hand, if you can honestly say that the fix has major scope and brings a lot of risk/unknown with it, then you should make it clear to the customer that the possible reprocussions of rushing with this are greater than the problem you're trying to solve.
In general, bugs should be fixed as early as possible and as a programmer you should have a good sense of what's simple and safe and what's risky. You probably already know the answer to your own question, and the industry averages probably don't matter.
From my understanding, and the contention of the officer, the GPS logs average speed. Which means that during a short period of time, the defendant could have greatly exceeded the speed limit (and was clocked by the officer at that time), while the average speed was far lower than that. In which case, both the cop and the defendant are correct, and the cop is till valid in giving the ticket...
I agree in general but not necessarily in this case:
The debate is likely to come down to how often the GPS device calculated and reported ground speed. Petaluma police lieutenant John Edwards told the AP that since GPS is satellite-based, there's a delay involved, and that Malone may have sped up and slowed down in the window between measurements, which could be as long as 60 seconds.
The underlying AP story is more specific:
The device in Shaun's car, originally designed for trucking companies, rental car agencies and other businesses with fleets, sends a signal every 30 seconds that records his whereabouts and travel speed.
If everything works like it ought to and all the measurements are correct - then the kid's speed is averaged over 30-second quantum. While it's true that he could have been going above the limit for some of that time, it would also mean that he must have gone significantly under the limit for another part of that window in order for the averages to work out. Of course, if the cop measured the kid as speeding right in the beginning of the 30 second window, and the kid saw the cop right afterward and slammed on the brakes, that probably wouldn't really register on the GPS as speeding - but if the guy's a speeder - shouldn't his previous speed values also be over? Unless he's really timing the speeding and slowing down to fool the GPS, what are the chances that he wasn't speeding before or after being clocked, but only during that one moment?
As someone who has had to ramp up his math skills recently, I admire what you're doing and wanted to share my experience. The main thing that struck me is that you're looking to do an entire high-school equivalent math program, which to me seems like a daunting and boring approach.
Instead of looking for a curriculum, it sounds easier to find some relevant problems and work backwards. You mentioned that your lack of math is holding you back. Why not identify some specific cases of this, and learn enough math to overcome whatever issue made you feel this way? Doing this enough times will give you a solid background in math, I think.
In my own case, the reason I had to ramp up on math is that I was taking a pretty hardcore machine learning class during my masters. The course assumed a much deeper knowledge of linear algebra than I had. I literally had to do hours of research to understand many slides from the lectures which were really intended to be background and proofs, not the meat of the course. You can imagine that by the time the course ended (I got an A- which was a big deal for this class) I had a much stronger foundation in linear algebra and other math concepts than I did initially - even though I didn't set out to learn that stuff. Call it just-in-time learning. Now I am studying for the CFA (Level 1) and it also has some math, although nothing too hardcore. Still, the first volume contains a quantitative methods section which talks about statistics and the like. So again, even though my goal is to learn Finance, not math, I ended up refreshing a bit of math in the process.
Maybe this "just in time" learning isn't for everyone but it seems good to me in that it forces you to learn math that's the most relevant to your life, and it in a sense forces you to make sure you've learned it well, given that you'll be applying it immediately.
Also, MIT has some online courses that you should check out. I know you talked about highschool level stuff but why not be even more ambitious? For example, there's a series of video lectures with dr. Gilbert Strange about Linear Algebra. I don't think the course requires too much other background (and again, if he talks about a concept that you don't know, this is a great opportunity for additional just-in-time learning).
The main thing I am trying to say is that you should set a goal for yourself that's narrower than "learning everything". Define a concrete problem and solve it. For example, your problem could be as simple as watching all of the lectures mentioned above, or reading some calculus text. Instead of spending years learning everything everyone tells you that you need to know before you can do calc, just do the reading and then branch out into understanding pre-requisites as you encounter them in the text. I think this is a much more structured and motivating way to do it.
It should be understood that this device does not provide continuous tuning as you play [which, if you think about it, would probably be impossible to implement and annoying to the player].
This technology simply allows you to place the guitar into a 'tune mode' having selected a particular tuning scheme, strum all the strings at once, and let the automated tuning pegs tighten or loosen your strings to match that scheme. According to the Tronical website, it may have up to 8 seconds to go from one tuning to another.
This is pretty much equivalent to using an electronic tuner, plucking one string at a time, watching the needle on the tuner, turning the peggs, replucking the string to check if the needle is now centered, repeating if necessary, and then moving on to the next string. Some argue that any use of electronic tuners is 'cheating' but most people are fine with that. Anyone who's fine with electronic tuners should be fine with this - tuning based on watching the needle is as ucnreative and deterministic as tuning using this device, so no purity is lost.
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Yikes, there's a dire lack of punctuation in the above post. It was there when I wrote it in Word but went missing after I pasted and hit Submit. All my apostrophes, dashes and quotation marks are missing. I cringe when I read "were" instead of "we're"... . Sorry!
Ditto with the new mileage standards. Those concerned with fuel economy can, and do, purchase vehicles with 35+ MPG. Having an illegitimate national government (it's supposed to be a federal system!) interfere with free market choices never produces the desired results.
While I agree with you that free markets are the ideal resource allocators, these regulations are needed exactly because the current situation is not a free market one.
A truly free market supplies the equilibrium quantity of a good the quantity where the supply and demand curves meet. Producing this quantity is supposed to be the most efficient use of resources because these is the quantity at which societys costs of producing the good (reflected in the supply curve) balance out with the benefit accrued to the society from consuming this good (reflected in the demand curve)
It should be clear that free markets set the equilibrium quantity correctly only if all costs are reflected in the supply curve and all benefits in the demand curve.
It should also be clear that there are costs associated with (in your example, consumption of gasoline) that are not reflected in the cost of either the gas or the car. Car emissions are such an example theres a cost to the environment which is borne by everyone but not factored into the explicit cost of the activity. It could be argued that national dependence on foreign fuel is a risk borne by the society and once again not reflected in the cost of the activity.
For the free markets to properly select the quantities of gas and inefficient cars consumed, the two factors above would need to be properly reflected in their costs. Since they are not, it can be assumed that were currently consuming more than the equilibrium quantity of these things and therefore the government regulation actually works to push supply and consumption towards their true equilibrium levels.
In the long run, I agree that the free markets are more efficient than government regulation, which is why things like gasoline consumption need to reflect their proper cost to society. One way to do this would be to charge a tax such that the pollution and other costs of driving inefficient vehicles would be properly reflected in their cost of ownership. Another, even more free-market way would be offset trading. For example, someone who underpollutes (e.g. by living in a city and walking to work) would be able to sell pollution offsets to someone who wants to overpolute by driving an inefficient vehicle. That way you can do whatever you want as long as you pay for it properly. Thats a true free-market setup.
So unless youre really going to pay me (as someone who walks to work) offsets for driving whatever youre driving, youll have to live with the mileage standard.
I tried Opera again just recently and would have continued to use it but for the extremely annoying way it handles tabs. If only it did tabs like Firefox, or you could configure it to act that way, then I'd use it: specifically - so that when you close a tab, it jumps to the next one in the chain, rather than to the last one opened. Infuriating.
Actually I know what you're talking about - this used to drive me nuts but now I am used to it and I actually miss it when I use other browsers.
The reason I like this is - I often like to open a few background tabs for later reading. Then I encounter a link I want to read right now - so I open it in a tab and then go to that tab. Then when I close the tab, I end up on the document I was just reading, and I continue reading it. When I am done with it, I read the tabs opened previously.
This ends up being a pretty efficient model for me. If it trully doesn't work for you, someone did give you a link to disable it. But it's one of those things that are worth getting used to.
And Firefox has *extensions*. Which are really the only thing that make it better than Opera. Good thing FF3 is solving some of the bloat/memory leaks.
I am just curious, are there any particular extensions that make Firefox much better? I give FF a fair try every time a new significant version comes out so I'd be curious to know this.
Opera is excellent, especially in regards to its small footprint, standards support and speed. The big gotcha, though, is still its closed source nature
This is probably not going to be a popular statement here, but I wonder if Opera is so good specifically because it's being written by a professional team with specific goals. Speaking to this example in particular, one of the reasons Opera is fast is because it was specifically designed to be - the company goes after the mobile space and their business model depends on having a lean browser. Whereas the Firefox devs probably know that efficiency matters, but an individual developer may not really care about it as long as it runs fine on his machine.
Looks like they are finally getting their javascript act together. After being a sore point for so many years, a working javascript in Opera will be welcome. I am just curious as to what you're talking about. I've been using Opera for a while now and have not noticed it having any JS issues.
>> Which version of Opera are you using? I too have an old 128MB desktop and I'm looking >> into using Opera. The latest one ;)
But on older systems, the sieve like memory leaks made it inoperable within a short period of time. Hopefully this will allow those of us who run legacy hardware to have a modern relatively secure web browser.
Have you tried Opera? It's really quite good. I use it on my older Linux laptop (128MB ram) because it's the only modern browser that can show pages without thrashing the drive. I also use Opera on powerful machines - I think it's the best browser out there in terms of both the feature set and the quality of workmanship.
One of the problems with Wiki's math content is that too much of it is not acessible to someone who is looking up a concept out of the blue or landed on the article randomly. Heavy use of math notation is one of the reasons for this - it tempts authors to create what is technically a complete treatment of the topic but does not have sufficient plain-language content to be meaningful to non-experts.
I am by no means arguing for dumbing down of content, but it's important that at least the first few paragraphs avoid relying on heavy use of math notation in favor of giving a casual user an idea of (1) the gist of the math concept (2) why it's important and (3) some basic uses or a simple example.
The question of whether proofs should be allowed in Wiki depends on discipline of the average math author. Can they avoid the temptation of making the proof be the article? If they can, then there's nothing wrong with supplementing an already-good article with the proof. But if it's impossible to glean anything from the article other than by stepping through the proof - then the article is crap and the proof is what enabled the author to think he was done.
Perhaps there should be a separate sister site that housed proofs which are linked to from the main articles. I think that's probably the best idea - keeping the article meaningful to non-experts - and allowing those who care to "drill down".
-e
Hi zooblethorpe ...
/usr/share/file/magic, and here's the relevant section.
So if no encoding is indicated, why does Notepad offer different encoding options if one clicks on the "save as" dropdown?
Well, there actually is a leading byte sequence that indicates the encoding of a file in many cases. For example, If I save a file as "Unicode" in notepad, its first 2 bytes are FE FF. The UNIX 'file' util reports "Unicode text, UTF-16, big-endian". A file saved as UTF-8 is started with EF BB BF and 'file says "Unicode text, UTF-8". So in fact, Notepad does save the prefixes. According to Wikipedia, these markers are optional.
I looked at the man page for 'file' on UNIX and saw that it interprets files based on 'magic number tests'... On my machine, the magic is in
0 string \357\273\277 Unicode text, UTF-8
0 string \376\377 Unicode text, UTF-16, big-endian
0 string \377\376 Unicode text, UTF-16, little-endian
The thing is, it seems as if these prefixes are optional. Their presence indicates the encoding, but its absence apparently doesn't mean the file is Plain ASCII.
To go back to our example:
Create the TXT file in notepad containing "this app can break"
the resulting file is 18 bytes in size
open that file with notepad, notepad decides its Unicode.
Hit control-s to resave the file
the file is now 20 bytes, because it was explicitly saved by notepad as unicode and was prefixed with the 2 leading bytes.
I was under the impression that "guessing" was non-standard, and thus the correct thing to do would be not to guess. I am curious - what editor do you use? Does your editor load UTF-8 and UTF-16 documents as the ASCII interpretation of their bytes, given that the encoding is not specified anywhere inside those files?
Hi zooblethorpe, I am glad that my explanation clarified things for you. I was trying my best! :) To answer your questions:
.txt implies plain ASCII you'd be wrong - when you get a .TXT file from any source (including from non-Windows machines....) you have no idea if it's plain ASCII, the Windows Latin 1 encoding, UTF-8, UTF-16, or anything else. Trust me that you'd be pretty annoyed if your text editor didn't try to guess the encodings. The fact is, Notepad does a decent job of it - as I've never seen it render anything other than "this app can break" incorrectly. In fact, I'd bet that this example was discovered by someone with a good sense of encodings who wanted to see which way this ambiguity be resolved.
>> So then SciTE automatically saves as UTF-16? I certainly didn't specify
>> anything but a filename at save time.
It's able to save/display both asian and latin chars, so it's using a Unicode encoding. Probably UTF-8. I talked about UTF-16 because the ambiguity here is between ASCII and UTF-16, but the same logic applies to UTF-8. In fact the byte sequence for U+6874 in UTF-8 doesn't match the ASCII bytes for "th" so there's no ambiguity there at all.
Ah, you cleared something up here (in the bolded portions) -- from what you're saying, Notepad would check the whole string for possible Unicode-ness, not just the first few bytes.
Yeah, that's the smart thing to do. The more text there is, the less is the probablity that it can be interpreted as both encodings at once. Kind-of like if you look at a short snippet of code, it may appear to be valid C++ and valid Java - but the more of the code you see, the more likely you're to encounter something that gives it away as one or the other. I hope that's a good analogy.
But even then, I'm puzzled about why, which leaves me still with questions about how smart Notepad is being. If a text file is marked as ASCII, what utility is there in trying by default to display it as anything else?
The entirety of the problem is that the file is not marked as ASCII. No encoding is indicated. If you think that
SciTE opened it and showed me "this app can break". So I tried explicitly entering the Unicode character found at 0x6874 for Japanese (for the record, ikada "raft", or bachi "pick / plectrum / drumstick") in place of the initial "th"; SciTE opened it and showed me that same Japanese character followed immediately by "is app can break".
That's what I would expect. You saved the file in one of the Unicode encodings so the bytes were not the same as the original example. If you saved it as UTF-16, the first two bytes (representing the 6874) would be the same as in the original, while each of the subsequent Latin letters would now be represented by two bytes rather than 1 byte of the original. For example, the 6874 would be followed by 0069, while in the original file the letter 'i' was represented by a single byte with value 69.
When I tried to do the same thing you did in Notepad, I got a popup at save-time prompting me to enter an encoding other than ASCII. Saving it at as any of the Unicode encodings allowed it to load up fine on subsequent loads (ie asian char followed by English text, same as yours). In fact, doing the original "this app can break" example and saving the file as anything other than plain text works fine - since the encoding becomes explicit.
Incidentally, if your analysis is correct as to why Notepad screws this up, it should then theoretically screw up when opening any text document beginning with "th". Can anyone confirm this? I no longer have Notepad on my machine.
That's wrong too. Most sentences which begin with "th" do not have a byte representation that can be confused for UTF-16. For example, no odd number of bytes can be considered to be UTF-16 since UTF-16 encodes each character as 2 or 4 bytes. It's a rare coincidence that all the byte pairs in "this app can break" look like valid UTF-16. The longer the (plain) text, the lower the probability that its byte representation looks like valid UTF-16. Of course since "this app can break" maps to valid UTF-16, any number of repetitions of it do too.
So sure, what you describe might be what Notepad does, but it's not smart.
There's actually no smart way to do this. Let's say I open a plain text editor that saves into pure ASCII and type up "this app can break". Save it as file1.txt. You open some text editor which knows how to encode to UTF-16 and enter characters 6874 7369 6120 7070 6320 6e61 6220 6572 6b61. Save with with UTF-16 encoding (Not "unicode" or UTF-8) as file2.txt.
file1.txt and file2.txt are IDENTICAL. If I open either one of them in notepad, I will see both of them as Asian chars. If I use some other editor that defaults to ASCII for this, both of the files will display as "this app can break". In each case, each editor is "correct" 50% of the time and wrong the other 50% of the time. The whole trouble is that the bytes representing the English sentence and the Japanese sequence are identical.
And it's somehow no surprise that its dumb behaviour hasn't been fixed by MS.
Actually they did fix it. Many posters in this thread say that this no longer occurs in Vista. I would bet this is because the default save format is now one of the Unicode representations so this sentence is no longer ambiguous.
...And it doesn't even handle text encodings correctly!
Try this: write "this app can break" (without quotes), or any other text with the same pattern of spaces, in an otherwise-blank file, save it, and then reopen it. It'll show up as unprintable characters because that's (apparently) the magic sequence to switch Notepad to Unicode mode.
This is one of those situations where it's very easy for a human to know what the correct thing to do is (after all you just saved it as Windows 1252) but very difficult for the computer to get it right 100% of the time. Text files have no headers to tell Notepad or any other app what the encoding it, so Notepad has to guess. In this case, the 18 bytes that represent "this app can break" in Windows 1252 (or ASCII for that matter) also represent a string of 9 Japanese characters encoded as UTF-16.
For example: t is 0x74 and h is 0x68, and 6874 happens to be the Unicode codepoint of the first character displayed (these would not be unprintable to you if Asian language support was installed on your machine) - and so on - the byte representation of every subsequent pair of letters matches up to a UTF-16 representation of a valid Japanese Unicode character.
Notepad probably calls IsTextUnicode to figure these things out.
To reiterate, if any app is presented with the 18 bytes above - it has no way to know if those bytes correspond to input in ASCII/Win1252 or UTF-16 representation of Japanese - any app must guess (or simply default to ASCII - which is what most apps do anyway because they are ignorant of internationalization.)
The only way to avoid such problems is to use file formats that make encoding choice explicit. Guessing works well most of the time (MSIE does a good job guessing the language of a webpage, if the meta information was not provided, for example) but it's clearly not perfect.
I heard the author interviewed on the radio once - he was a total bore and he seemed to have no real insight or depth to his statements. I didn't really get the sense that he was dumbing it down for the radio audience - rather he seems to have very flat and one dimensional in his thoughts. He didn't say anything that wasn't an obvious extension of current technology and trends - and nothing that hasn't been part of SciFi culture for decades. Perhaps the book is different/better but based on this interview, I have no reason to think so.
As many have pointed out, this is not really a Turing test because the judge is not aware that they might be talking to a machine. I figured out that this was an important component a few years ago ;)
In 1999 or 2000, I took the Megahal codebase, linked it up to one of the Linux console AIM clients, trainined it on 2+ years of my own AIM logs that I had at the time, and let it sign onto my screen name when I was not in the dorm.
If anyone IMd me at those times, they always thought they were talking to some really distracted and likely intoxicated version of me. After all, the bot 'sounded' like me since it was trained on my own text - it emulated my diction and usage and topics. Yet at the same time it was spewing complete nonsense.
Of course once someone was told that they might end up chatting with the machine, that person could very easily tell the difference between me and the EdBot
"Google today announced its RC<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal
I was trying to figure out what the C stood for in RC and couldn't, so I clicked the attached story and sure enough, the project is actually called RE<C...
The first thing you should do is ask yourself whether googling for your Internet nickname would actually give the employer what they are looking for. You're applying to be a manager - what type of work did you do under your nickname that suggests managerial qualifications? Perhaps you're confusing establishing an online identity (which it sound like you did, using your nick) vs. identifying actual work relevant to the position.
That being said, I can think of a few situations where work done under a nick might be relevant to what you're trying to do - for example if you had managed an open source project under a pseudonym. In that case, you should certainly highlight that work but there are better ways to do so than putting your nick on your resume.
The easiest and best thing to do is to simply mention what you did right on your resume. If you managed an open source project, mention the project and your role on your resume. If you participated in some online management forums - to think of another example - why not just put that under the Interests area? That way you can tell the employer what you had done without making them look for it. This doesn't directly answer your question but it accomplishes the same goal.
The other thing you can do is make a professional website and mention it on your resume. The page can then link to whatever online activities you think are relevant to your goals. Mentioning a URL in the header of your resume would - I think - look more professional than mentioning a nick. It could also work even better in your favor - there could be employers out there who wouldn't bother to google your name but might follow the link you provide, and if your website reveals some strength then that's a good thing.
Finally, if you're going to be really passive aggressive and want to find ways to have the employer google your nick, you could always just place it into your email address. If you want to have them google for OpenSourceManagerDude, then try putting OpenSourceManagerDude@somedomain as your email address? This looks far less professional and is much less effective than the first two options, so I don't recommend it - just throwing it in for completeness' sake.
But again, the main thing you need to do is confirm in your mind that googling for your nickname would actually bring up the type of information that would tell an employer you're going to be a good manager. It's not clear to me how that could be.
This is a lie perpetuated by the credit card industry. You simply need credit cards with reasnoable limits, and you need to use them for about 6mo. to establish revolving debt.
After that they only hurt your credit score if their balance is nonzero at the exact moment the balance is reported 5-7 days prior to you checking your credit score.
That's absolutely untrue. The age of your oldest account of record is one of the biggest determinants of your credit score, all other things being equal. Someone who's had a responsible credit history for 20 years is a lesser credit risk than someone with the 6 months of history you mentioned. That means for example if you get a credit card at the beginning of your college education - even if you never use it - you'll be 4 years ahead in building your history compared to someone who gets a card when they graduate.
Perhaps you're arguing some other point but all I am saying is that having credit cards is an easy way to establish your history at an early point in your life - well in advance of needing mortgages or autoloans.
You're right in that having a larger balance at the time your score is checked if a factor since % of credit utilization is a factor of the score. So all things being equal, having more cards (and thus larger total available credit) while having very small balances (hopefully just whatever you're going to pay off at month's end) is beneficial. That being said, this is secondary to the average age of your credit. If you have a card that's 20 years old and you open another one today, even if this doubles your available credit, it hurts your score by reducing the average age of your accounts to 10 years.
However, they do make the banks wealthier. Every time you buy something on your credit card, a x% fee gets charged to the merchant, for the privilege of accepting a credit card. This costs the merchant, who in turn has to change his prices and charge you more
This may not be as straight-forward as you'd think. First, there's a cost associated with handling cash also - trips to the bank, risk of theft, etc, so at least some of the transaction fee is recouped in that way. In the case of entities like your cell phone company, I am almost positive that it's cheaper for them to process your automated credit card payment then to hire people to take your checks out of the mail and process them. In the case of web merchants, the business model is barely viable without credit cards to begin with.
Even if we limit the discussion to brick-and-mortar businesses that can easily accept cash, it's not clear that credit card transactions force them to raise their prices accross the board.
Let's consider two businesses. Business one is a Japanese noodle place on 6th Avenue that I go to for lunch sometimes. The place is always filled to capacity, and can handle no further business. Therefore it has remained a cash-only business.
Compare it to some other place which isn't utilizing its full capacity. Can they get better sales from credit cards? Sure, accepting credit cards will allow them to capture 3 demographics - those who love to charge everything to their cards, those without sufficient pocket cash at the moment, and those who go into credit card debt. If the business can sell more units of output to this larger demographic, its fixed costs (such as rent) will be averaged out accross more units sold. Thus, eventhough a percentage of the credit card purchases goes to banks, the business is clearly in better shape than it was before - all of its cash transactions are there, but now there are new transactions. Of course, some of the existing cash business will become credit card business and get hit with the fees, but it's possible that the bigger sales due to CC acceptance will more than make up for that.
Wrong. Using credit gets you into debt, maybe, but not me. Credit does not get you into debt; debt comes from not repaying your creditors.
People these days just can't accept personal responsibility for things; it's ridiculous.
You're correct, although I understand that some people can't resist the temptation to over-spend. From my point of view, use of credit cards can actually make people wealthier rather than poorer, in 4 ways:
* Rewards. It's easy to find a credit card that gives you some percentage of your spending back as cash or gasoline or airline miles. All other things being equal, this benefits the user - free money!
* Building of credit history. The longer you have credit card accounts in your credit profile (assuming you pay them off or at least pay on time) the better your credit score. This lets you borrow money at a lower rate when you realy have to - say a mortgage.
* Interest. When you buy an item with cash, you no longer have the cash. When you buy an item with a credit card, you get to keep that money until the bill is due - which could be a month or more in the future. You can put that money into a savings account meanwhile and earn interest.
* Barring scams and identity theft, credit is safer than cash. If you lose your credit card, you can replace it for free. Cash cannot be replaced in the same way. Also, credit cards provide a convenient way to dispute charges. Let's say you made a deposit for a service that was never provided. You may have a tough time chasing down the entity you made a deposit with, but you're a phone call and a fax away from your credit card refunding you the money and investigating (yes, in that order!)
Another great feature of credit cards is the monthly statement itemizing your expendetures. If you're into any type of cashflow analysis or budgeting, this could be valuable.
Of course these benefits only accrue to those with sufficient restraint to avoid abusing their cards. If you don't buy anything on the card that you'd not have bought with cash you have access to, you'll be ahead of the game.
I think you're asking an unreasonable question. The industry turnaround time is irrelevant to the particular business, software, and defect type that you're dealing with.
Like many other decisions, there is a simple balance between risk and reward here. The question is - what do you gain by doing the fix in 48 hours vs. what risk do you incur by foregoing the longer testing/QA cycle?
The answer to this question empowers you to deal with the customer more reasonably. If you're reasonably sure that this quick fix corrects the problem and does not add any new ones, and the problem is severe enough that it should not go untreated - why wait even 48 hours? Code it up and fix it.
On the other hand, if you can honestly say that the fix has major scope and brings a lot of risk/unknown with it, then you should make it clear to the customer that the possible reprocussions of rushing with this are greater than the problem you're trying to solve.
In general, bugs should be fixed as early as possible and as a programmer you should have a good sense of what's simple and safe and what's risky. You probably already know the answer to your own question, and the industry averages probably don't matter.
I agree in general but not necessarily in this case:
The underlying AP story is more specific: If everything works like it ought to and all the measurements are correct - then the kid's speed is averaged over 30-second quantum. While it's true that he could have been going above the limit for some of that time, it would also mean that he must have gone significantly under the limit for another part of that window in order for the averages to work out. Of course, if the cop measured the kid as speeding right in the beginning of the 30 second window, and the kid saw the cop right afterward and slammed on the brakes, that probably wouldn't really register on the GPS as speeding - but if the guy's a speeder - shouldn't his previous speed values also be over? Unless he's really timing the speeding and slowing down to fool the GPS, what are the chances that he wasn't speeding before or after being clocked, but only during that one moment?As someone who has had to ramp up his math skills recently, I admire what you're doing and wanted to share my experience. The main thing that struck me is that you're looking to do an entire high-school equivalent math program, which to me seems like a daunting and boring approach.
Instead of looking for a curriculum, it sounds easier to find some relevant problems and work backwards. You mentioned that your lack of math is holding you back. Why not identify some specific cases of this, and learn enough math to overcome whatever issue made you feel this way? Doing this enough times will give you a solid background in math, I think.
In my own case, the reason I had to ramp up on math is that I was taking a pretty hardcore machine learning class during my masters. The course assumed a much deeper knowledge of linear algebra than I had. I literally had to do hours of research to understand many slides from the lectures which were really intended to be background and proofs, not the meat of the course. You can imagine that by the time the course ended (I got an A- which was a big deal for this class) I had a much stronger foundation in linear algebra and other math concepts than I did initially - even though I didn't set out to learn that stuff. Call it just-in-time learning. Now I am studying for the CFA (Level 1) and it also has some math, although nothing too hardcore. Still, the first volume contains a quantitative methods section which talks about statistics and the like. So again, even though my goal is to learn Finance, not math, I ended up refreshing a bit of math in the process.
Maybe this "just in time" learning isn't for everyone but it seems good to me in that it forces you to learn math that's the most relevant to your life, and it in a sense forces you to make sure you've learned it well, given that you'll be applying it immediately.
Also, MIT has some online courses that you should check out. I know you talked about highschool level stuff but why not be even more ambitious? For example, there's a series of video lectures with dr. Gilbert Strange about Linear Algebra. I don't think the course requires too much other background (and again, if he talks about a concept that you don't know, this is a great opportunity for additional just-in-time learning).
The main thing I am trying to say is that you should set a goal for yourself that's narrower than "learning everything". Define a concrete problem and solve it. For example, your problem could be as simple as watching all of the lectures mentioned above, or reading some calculus text. Instead of spending years learning everything everyone tells you that you need to know before you can do calc, just do the reading and then branch out into understanding pre-requisites as you encounter them in the text. I think this is a much more structured and motivating way to do it.
Good luck!
It should be understood that this device does not provide continuous tuning as you play [which, if you think about it, would probably be impossible to implement and annoying to the player].
This technology simply allows you to place the guitar into a 'tune mode' having selected a particular tuning scheme, strum all the strings at once, and let the automated tuning pegs tighten or loosen your strings to match that scheme. According to the Tronical website, it may have up to 8 seconds to go from one tuning to another.
This is pretty much equivalent to using an electronic tuner, plucking one string at a time, watching the needle on the tuner, turning the peggs, replucking the string to check if the needle is now centered, repeating if necessary, and then moving on to the next string. Some argue that any use of electronic tuners is 'cheating' but most people are fine with that. Anyone who's fine with electronic tuners should be fine with this - tuning based on watching the needle is as ucnreative and deterministic as tuning using this device, so no purity is lost.