User: paulschreiber

a funny definition of "want"

On: Music Industry Seeks Payola Inquiry

[sorry about the double post, damn return key.]

My favourite quote from the article:

But a spokeswoman for the nation's biggest radio station group, Clear Channel Communications Inc., which was singled out for criticism in the letter, dismissed the RIAA's complaints as "absurd." She insisted that decisions about airplay are driven strictly by research showing what the public wants to hear.

Man, this woman is on some bad crack.

Paul

Re:Almost there...

On: Apple's Response to Microsoft: Unix Ads?

Along these lines, it would also be nice to have an easier way to start gui apps as an admin - sort of a graphical sudo. Of course I can do something like sudo open /path/to/Finder.app or whatever but it's a pain.

There's a shareware tool for this -- pesudo.

Paul

Windows timeline correction

On: Apple's Response to Microsoft: Unix Ads?

X is circa 1986. Microsoft Windows, at the *very* earliest, is 1989. Why can't people seem to grasp this concept? X has been around longer.

Windows 1.0 was released in November, 1985.

Paul

Jack Valenti said the same crap

On: CBDTPA Finds A Champion In the House

I'm sick of this "nobody wants broadband" garbage. Heck, even my mother likes having broadband to do her online banking and surf the web.

In a letter to the Washington Post, Jack Valenti wrote:

A recent survey revealed that 68 percent of all home computer users say they're satisfied with their normal 56K computer modem. It can download pretty much all that's on the Net, as not much (legal) material is out there that's chock full of graphics and in a consumer-friendly format to create the need for a cable modem or a digital subscriber line (DSL).

My unpublished reply:

Mr. Valenti's claim that "not much (legal) material is out there ... to create the need for a cable modem or a digital subscriber line (DSL)" is laughable.

Obviously, Mr. Valenti hasn't attempted to download a 650 MB Debian Linux Install CD.

Perhaps Adobe's After Effects video editing software is more his style. A 30-day trial version weighs in at a hefty 109 megabytes.

To put it in perspective: downloading this would take over four and a half hours on a "normal 56K computer modem" -- if you're lucky enough to live in a neighbourhood with good phone lines. If, like most people, Mr. Valenti is stuck at 33.6 Kbps, it would take closer to eight hours to finish. That's enough time to watch Erich von Stroheim's Greed in its entirety.

Paul

Re:Public? As in...

On: ACM Programming Contest Results

I'm a student at the University of Waterloo, and we're not quite a 'state school'. We get funding from our government (which is a province, btw, not a state) and private industry, but all of the students have to pay tuition.

Yeah, I know how UW is funded, I went there. :-) I said "think state school" for our American friends. UW is a lot closer to a state school (UC Berkley) than a private one (Stanford) in terms of its funding model.

If you read the UW overview, you'll see that it is described as a public university where the provincial government pays 55 percent of the cost of the education.

Which, if you're a foreign student, costs $24 000 a year, instead of the $5 400 Canadian students pay (our government subsidizes half of the cost of tuition)

You're off by a factor of two. International tuition fees are CAD$13,700 (USD $8500).

You might want to recheck your facts. And tuition isn't deregulated in Ontario yet. :P

It is, for certain programs, like computer science, medicine, law and some engineering disciplines. See this Gazette article from 1998.

Check your facts.

Paul

bogosort

On: Deep Algorithms?

you can't forget bogosort. :-)

Paul

Diffie-Hellman, too

On: Deep Algorithms?

Don't forget Diffie-Hellman key exchange, RSA's lesser-known partner in crime.

Paul

Re:MIT is over-rated...

On: ACM Programming Contest Results

I thought that Mathies were supposed to call it "U(W)". ;-)

Nah, that's just mathNEWS that does that. And yes, that is how they spell it.

Paul

Re:Notes from a PC user

On: Apple Wants Your Input

Have you used Virtual PC? It's pretty good. With version 5 and Mac OS X, I have a virtual Win2000 box, a DOS box and a Win98 box, though I don't use the latter two much.

Speed's a bit of an issue, but it should be more than adequate for 10-year-old DOS games. :)

Paul

Your DSL will be ready in 2 weeks

On: Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?

-- Telocity, early 2000

And it took 86 days to show up. No kidding.

FWIW, Telocity is now DirectTV broadband. I wonder if they're any better.

Paul

Re:MIT is over-rated...

On: ACM Programming Contest Results

University of Waterloo is just like every other Canadian University. It recieves subsidies from the Government to allow basically equivelent affordable cost on education in ANY field it offers.

As of a few years ago, the Ontario government deregulated tuition in certain professional programs (law, medicine, optometry, etc.) and some ATOP (Access To Opportunities Program, an expansion of "high tech" programs) ones (computer science, computer engineering), etc.

If you actually read the page I gave you, you'll see that tuition varies by faculty and program. Arts is $4400/year, while Computer Engineering is $6700/year.

Please dont make assumptions about things you know nothing about, especially considering I was commenting on something to which I grew up within 20 minutes drive from. The UofW is without a doubt in the top 5 computer education schools in the world.

First of all, I don't believe you, because anyone from Waterloo calls it UW, not "UofW." Second of all, I have a BMath (Computer Science) from the University of Waterloo (2001), so I know a thing or two about their CS program. :-)

Paul

Re:MIT is over-rated...

On: ACM Programming Contest Results

oh, whatever. waterloo is a public university (think state school). while it's more expensive than Simon Fraser (damned deregulated tuition), it's almost an order of magnitude cheaper than MIT when you factor in the weak Canadian dollar.

UW CS tution is about CAD$5400/year. MIT tuition is about US$26,000 (CAD $40,000) per year.

Paul

Python has operator overloading

On: What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

really, it does.

Paul

Oh, Canada

On: Broadband Is Dead (Or At Least Very Ill)

Broadband is alive and well north of the border. Right now, Bell (the local monopoly) is offering ADSL for $20/month for the first six months (price goes up to the regular $40/month after).

$20 CAD = $12 USD

Imagine: $12 a month for DSL. My last order (January) took only 4 days to get it up and running. Compare that to 84 days (literally) from Telocity in San Francisco.

My dad got a cable modem. He's paying $40 a month. And they allow connection sharing -- just a hub and DHCP, no special software, nothing.

At work, we have DSL from dsl.ca (someone not the phone monopoly) an we even have a static IP. Imagine that.

Paul

it must be spring in some part of the world

On: OS X 10.1 Coming Today (Sorta)

'cause that's when Steve said we'd get DVD playback. :)

Paul

my experience

On: Which Open Source Projects Are -Really- Collaborative?

I submitted a patch to Python, and it eventually made it in -- 1.6 or 2.0 -- it just took them a while to actually integrate it. This may/may not have had something to do with their moving at the time.

Still, status updates would be good and would encourage contributions from OSS newbies.

Paul

lunar calendar

On: Further Updates On Terrorist Attack

Remember that not everyone uses "our" calendar. This may be a significant date on other calendar systems.

Paul

Re:War where? Against whom?

On: Further Updates On Terrorist Attack

oh bullshit.

JFK was so not "one mad us citizen" it's not funny.

Please, don't even go there.

Paul

more on waterloo's midnight sun

On: American Solar Challenge Completed: Blue Went

First off, here are a few articles on the UW team:

• Midnight Sun finishes third in ASC
• Midnight Sun VI living up to top five prediction
• New Midnight Sun on the rise (with photos)
• Midnight Sun rising on UW (and cover image)

Then there's the official Midnight Sun site.

Paul

banner ads still running

On: Webvan Out Of Gas

I was just checking yahoo mail and saw a WebVan banner ad.

Paul

Already done -- CPR

On: C Styled Script - C-like Scripting Language

take a look at this article on perl.com.

you'll see that Inline::CPR lets you do this.

#!/usr/bin/cpr
int main(void) {
printf("Hello, world\n");
}

tada! interpreted C.

Paul

Re:Oh goody...

On: C Styled Script - C-like Scripting Language

POP = Post Office Protocol or Point of Presence

ATM = Adobe Type Manager or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (or Automated Teller Machine)

lovely TLAs

Paul

ENT webcasts and such

On: Launchcast Sued

jwz has an informative explanation of the different types of licences needed and how screwed up the system is. Here's an excerpt:

To qualify for a compulsory license, you have to follow certain rules that make them consider your webcast to be an ``Eligible Non-subscription Transmission'' (an ``ENT''). Don't ask me where they get these stupid names. The rules to qualify as an ENT are as follows.

(And note that these rules are for webcasts only: RF radio stations have a different, less strict, set of rules.)

• The webcast is not limited to particular users who pay for it (that's the ``non-subscription'' part.)

• The user must not be able to choose and receive a particular recording: that is, no playing songs on demand.

• In a three hour period, you can't play more than three tracks from a given album, and no more than two consecutively.

• In a three hour period, you can't play more than four tracks by a given artist, and no more than three consecutively.

• If the webcast is archived, the archive must be at least five hours long, and must not be made available for more than two weeks. The idea here is to make it hard for users to scan through the webcast to pick out and save individual songs.

• If the webcast repeats itself (plays in a loop) then the loop must be at least three hours long.

• The webcast must not publish prior announcements of the songs: you can't let the users know what songs are coming up next, and you can't publish your playlists ahead of time.

• You must identify the song title, album title, and the featured artist in text during the performance of the song.

Paul

technological solutions

On: Time Warner Says Employees Must Use AOL Mail

If you don't want to use AOL to check AOL mail, you can always use Netscape 6 or Claris Emailer (if you can find it).

Paul

Re:need...redesign....badly

On: Las Vegas's Seedy Technical Underbelly

jakob nielsen is gonna lay a beating on their ass for that. :)

Paul