I read you journals for a while now and thought you whould be interested in this Summery Article in the CS Monitor I whated to post it to a journal, but you've restricted replies to them.
I hope you will add it to you collection of links in your journal.
Here in the Golden State we have to buy special California formula gas that claimed to run cleaner then the rest of the nations. (It may even work if you ignore the 3-5 MPG loss in fuel efficiency) The relevance here is that Ethanol is one of the big ingredients in this gas.
A few years ago, One of the major gas producers found that it could make a much cleaner burning fuel using only petroleum based chemicals. It would cost less and save the air. Unfortunately the Feds stepped in an demanded that ethanol continued to be used instead.
There are indeed quite a number of people who would like to shot me in the face, and believe it or not, I met more then my share. If I had responded to these people with violence I would no longer be alive.
I however chose to responde with love and respect for their humanity and with a little luck lived to tell you about it.
I believe that it is you that have failed to see the larger picture. Every time a military grunt is order to kill another human being there are reprecussions. One of those is that more and more people want to shot you and members of your country.
Even so called "Honorable Wars" are the result of fear, hatred, and lack of respect for basic humanity. The military breads these charictoristic into its initiates. How can I respect anyone who is trained to kill and destroy? Moreover, how can anyone condone the teachin of this hate to young adults?
I would be glad to have a "terrorist" knock on my door. Even if I were to die because of it, I would at least be able to show him or her that I do not share my countries blood lust. To have the opprotuntiy to show love to those who hate us -- now that is something I would be willing to die for.
Question: Who were we attacked by? The 11 people most responcible for Sept 11 are dead.
But what about the leadership? I see no sign that we are even really looking that hard anymore. Arn't we now looking to make a "stable Iraq?" this doesn't sound like a way to prevent brainwashed extreamists from blowing themselves up. (c.f. Israel, Iraq, Spain, Oklahoma City)
Finally, in regards to you ego problem an the military. The idea that one cannot be critical of an orginazation like the US military because they some how deserve respect is perplexing. I see no honor in being in the buisness of fighting war. I infact find it offensive and wrong that my government on my behalf is using marketing tactics to recruit more otherwise honorable people into the worlds oldest profession for men. From my perspective military service, especially service entered into because of a sales pitch is no more honorable then prostitution.
I would be glad to be taught some respect by you, but I believe from your tone that in the end I would have no more respect for you then the people of the middle east do for our country -- and fear is a piss poor substitute for respect.
I don't think the Photographer I hired for our wedding was stupid. We looked for one who would give us the original images and because she shot some picutre during the wedding digitally we got those on CD (7.85 megapixel tiffs).
I remember hearing stories about the beginging of microcomputers and the need for efficient languages to take advantage of the faster and more complex architechure. C/C++, perl, and java as well as many others eventually would answer the call. When web browsers became the platform of choice (for a lot of applications anyway) asp, PHP, Javascript, and perl all took up the call.
Now with SMP on its way to becoming ubiquotus, "new" languages whill need to come into fasion which make threading obvious and intuitive for those who understand how to use them.
I don't have much experence beyond the "ooh cool" level, but I would guess that these languages will be related to LISP or ML. These functional languages tend to express operations in a more thread safe manor just by the way they work. Most don't have wide spread accpetance because they have traditionally been percieved as slow and bulky. (Though OCaml developers believe it's a myth and host a compition every year to try to prove it) If they can make threaded applications intuitive to write then I would guess that they will become much more popular in the next couple of years.
I'd really like to see other peoples views on programming paradgyms will bring about thread safe programming for the masses.
Collections of people that for centuries have been recognized as such have suddenly become buildings instead.
"School" in this (and all other cases except fish) refers to a gathering of students and teachers. All of these are people who ought to be refered to as such.
The same goes for "Church" "Government" "College/University" and "Team." Anyone using that or which in reference to any of these as lost touch with community (and perhaps reality).
Taking the side of caution was a mistake, Hachamovitch admitted. "I think we made the wrong decision here initially, and we're making the right one now."
This sounds like a familiar statment from Microsoft about internet technology. When the internet first became a "consumer level application" in about 1993-4 Microsoft avoided jumping on board hoping that "closed systems" loke AOL once was would catch on instead.
I've read many comments here to the effect that Microsoft did this because of a corperate culture that abhors the openness of the internet and their in ability to control it. I disagree. I believe that Microsoft has dedicated it's self to making software which everyone will use. This has ment they are constantly 3-4 years behind the technological curve when it comes to user experence.
The quote above seems to be a good example of Microsoft missing the boat and having to play catchup. It will not be the last. I predict that IE7 will take back significant market share over the next 2 years however because Microsoft has reduced the incentive to switch.
Having read all the way to the bottom of The Article, I found something interesting:
John Halliburton, e-commerce marketing manager for Martel Brothers Performance: We're also tweaking our pay-per-click landing pages in an effort to close the sale on the initial visit.
Kevin Beresford, president and CEO of Shari's Berries: I have to dig deeper. I want more data on how many people are buying on first visit. I need to understand why they come back and why they didn't buy the first time.
Both these retailers were more concerned about closing the initial sale. I really think that is a wrong message to take away from these numbers. Consumers are going to shop arround. the question these retailers ought to be asking is how can we make it easier to find out we are the best offer.
We are already seeing this type of behavior at places like priceline.com and LendingTree.com. As well as the numerous shopping engins already in on the web.
I think that retails thought of the web as the "Home shopping network on steriods" and are having trouble swallowing the idea of the internet as the "Global Mall."
As a previous poster mentioned class registration maybe not, but if you need student loans or grants or if you do any type of work for the school including internships, they want you SSN anyway and in all three cases (credit check and employment) they are allowed to ask for it. It is virtually impossible to get through 4 years of school and keep you SSN out of the database.
How would you feel if they designed bridges like that?
But bridges are designed like this, as are computers , office buildings etc...
I indeed would be more conserned about one-off designes then in proven building blocks. Most bridges these days use well tested prefabricated parts which are linked in known ways to span a given area.
Another example is the pc you are useing. The cards in it are most likely running on PCI and AGP busses. This is a form of encapsulation. The Main Board designer need not know what periferial are to be added, nor do video, sound, network card designers need to know what Main board will be used. Only a standard interface need be know.
I will grant, however, that for something like an Opperating System, there does need to be low level integration and coding. There is, however, no point in writing my web cgi scripts in Assembly simply because I'm not "bit shifting hot registers at runtime"
Has anyone considered the possibility that the essay could be out of date?
The model of "read the book - write a paper" is indicative of a society that must derive information from static sources like books. With the advent of electronic communications two things have happened that have modified this paradigm.
First, factual information and opinions can be quickly retrieved from a wide verity of people. Universities that still think that finding information at the library is a critical skill have never seen a search engine. Assignments like research papers deserve to be copied from the 'net because that is where information comes from these days. A better assignment might be a research paper that lists websites and then separates fact from fiction.
Second, long, monolog compositions are no longer in vogue. E-mail and web pages have given us a model of short opinions (take this post for example) followed up with responses. Instead of writing a 20,000 word term paper which simply shows the ability to regurgitate other peoples used up arguments, how about an online discussion. Everybody in class must post a 1 page response to the topic and then respond to 10 others. Students will also be expected to answer some of the responses to their original post and responses with the expectation that everyone write around 20,000 words. (Between 15 and 25 posts total)
This is actually the model for many online courses, but because accrediting agencies are stuck in the sixteenth century it is incredibly hard to get a degree without the worn out "reed the book - write a paper" model.
To get off the tinfoil hat posts for just a second,
What kind of database is going to be able to handle all this information. I've already heard someone say DNS where every company is responcible for tracking their own data and making it searchable, but what about, for example Pepsi. They could potentially produce 1e9 units in a year. Is database technology ready for those kind of numbers?
Before I rant, Google news turned up what I think is a much nicer artilc in the Macon Telegraph called "Johnny's not reading." by Ed Corson.
The title is in reference to the 1955 report by Rudolph Franz Flesch called "Why Johnny Can't Read" that plasted the whole language movement. Their has sence the dawn of history been dabates about the best way to learn to read, but I wnat to write for a few lines about my experence learning to read in the 80's and why I don't enjoy reading.
My lack of reading for pleasure did indeed start with my schoolong, but it wasn't how I learned to read but what and why. This is slashdot so I'll be blunt. The reading list in schools sucked. Of the 60 some odd books I read in school, I enjoyed no more then a handful. If "Harry Potter" had been part my reading class I might have actually "gotten into" reading.
Unfortunatly, the reading list was -- and is -- a political hot potato that if created more for it's apeal to the PC Culture Cops then the interest of 10 year olds. Most of the stuff I read was in the class room because the author "Brought a unique cultural perspective" reather then an engaging story.
Even when the liturature might have been enjoyable, reading it for class was not. comprehension tests meant that I read with an eye for content details, not naritive apeal. By the time I was in 6th grade, I would reread every paragraph at least once to make sure I could pass the test. This was never an enjoyable way to read, but it was what the system wanted.
Now days, I read a great deal. Two news papers, this and many other websites, technical manuals, and academic tomes, comprimize a good chunk of my time. I read because I want or need the information on the page, but I almost never consider reading something because its fun. That was not an aspect of reading I found until I was a senior in high school, and not because of the Shakespear I was reading in my english class.
Just incase you were wondering, the books I read in shcool that I enjoyed: Huckelberry Fin, Where the Red Fern Grows, The White Mountians, and Island of the Blue Dolphin.
Lets do something dramitic and put engaging book on the book list and drop the high stakes testing. Reading will never be the same.
I agree it ought to be really simple, but searching the text of a large database just isn't. If you have some idea how to do it, I'd encourage you to get the source and impliment it. I'd like to use it even if no one else would.
MrBlue VT:Talk about relevant. CmdrTaco should take to heart the comment about poor search.
I couldn't agree more, but as someone who is trying to set up a LAMP site let me tell you searces are not easy to do. If others agree with this post -- as the +5 moderation seems to indicate they are -- would anyone like to make a suggestion as to how it might be done? At the moment Slash uses the very limited function of the MATCH() command in MySQL. Does anyone have a better way of searching close to 10 million comments and stories stores in an overburdened MySQL database efficiently and effectivly? I have yet to find a good pre-built solution, and I'm sure I have no idea how to role my own.
How did I know that no one on slashdot would understand what it is to have power over another or to abuse that power. One of the main reasons that an otherwize good capitalist economy is responcible for so much devistation not only in the two-thirds world that suplies most of the labor and resources but also in post-industrialized nations is that people, espicially those with inordinate amounst of power, don't understand what it means beyong "being able to do what I want."
Power exist where ever one person is dependent on another for social, political or economic resources. In your example above you have very little real power because there is very little expectation that you bail out the hypothetical gambler. On the other hand if you employed said person and refued to pay him as you had agreed to knowing that the mob would take care of the problem before the gambler could take you to court, then yes you have power and have abused it.
Abuse of power also comes in the form of paying laborers saleries they cannot live on, Using political influence to dump toxic waist in a country that need cash because all its natural resources have been stripped by the very company that is now dumping there, or hiring employies for 19.5 hours a week to avoid paying them benifits. I could go on but Nike and Walmart have had enough bad press already.
As to the envrioment, it is actually extreamly tolerant of human presence and industry. With the exception of some of the more sensitive places like the Artic National Wildlife Preserve or the Florida Everglaids most ecosystems can handle a great deal of humad presence if we work within the limits. What is required is to live within those limits, even if it doesn't make sence to do so from a purely economic standpoint. I'm not an eco-nutcase. But I believe that we have a system motivated by profit at the expence of all else. I advocate economic encentives and disencentives (carrot and stick) for corperations to ensure that they stay within the safe limits of the systems they work within. I really don't think that too much to ask.
What qualifies and quantifies "ruining people's lives"? Be specific. Don't give examples. I want to know how you measure it.
Any person or corporation that denies those it has power over the resources they need for "live, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in favor of advantageous market results, or personal profit. Measured by the difference in living conditions between those with power and those without.
What qualifies and quantifies "ruining people's lives"? Be specific. Don't give examples. I want to know how you measure it.
Introducing pollutants or removing essential resources from a naturally occurring system to the point where the system either ceases to be self regulating or reduces in biological diversity. Measured by local changes in historic trends and species count.
I agree with you main point that there are times when holing on to the source code in encouraged. On-line games are one instance where I hope that the company does keep a lid on the code. I don't even certian Monopoly Operation systems for wanting to keep a close reign on there source, it is after all how they make money.
NVidia on the otherhand is making money purly on hardware and drivers are a sunk cost. They have to be availible or thier cards won't sell, and they have to be good or their cards will not be able to compete, but the hardware is what you hand your credit card over to aquire. There seems to be economic reason to with hold dirver source code other then habit and industry practice. The only explaination I can come up with is that the code reviels some intimate details about the inner workings of the hardware that should not be made public. On the other hand NVidia has been very open avout the capibilitits and functioning of their hardware and it is widly integrated into third party boards as in my IBM T41 laptop. (ok, I'll stop bragging)
In the end, I believe that the most important aspect of the free software movement has to do with hardware drivers. Remember RMS's story about wanting to modify the print queue to alert the right person when the printer jammed? With software, including operating systems, Open source is a philosophy about the plave and value of intelectual controls. Hardware drivers on the other hand allow one to use a piece of equipment that one physically owns. Open source drivers allow people to use the hardware they own in the manor that is most appropriate to their need and without the loss of commercial opprotunities. Therefore, I too would encourage NVidia to make their driver source code public.
So the easy thing to do would be to pump 2.6390 gallons of gas into an empty, approved, 5 gallon gas can. Now carefully poor from the approved container into a 5 liter Graduated Cylinder (borrow one from your local high school or college but be careful not to break it the big ones are expensive). If all goes well you should have pretty darn close to 10 liters of gas. Pour the measured quantity into you gas tank when your done.
Just for kicks, does anybody know if 2 liter soda bottles will hold Gas. They would be a cheeper alternitive, but my very well desolve or alter chemically when exposed to gas. (never tried it) As usual, don't do anything stupid that would get you or anyone else hurt. If you are incapible of determining the safty hazards of this activity please move to Oregon with the rest of the people who can't pump their own gas.
Actually with a 17 digit number ther would be 100,000,000,000,000,000 different VIN number and that doesn account for the fact that the 17 digits are alphanumeric. the problem is that there is information encoded in many of the digits. For example, the first charicter will idintify the country the engine and body were joined (where the care was "manufactured") others idintify the manufacturer, modle year, etc...
The problem will most likely be solved by assigning each country a secont third or fourth(for us and Japan) identifying digit opening up the rest of the namespace anew.
If you are getting calls from AT&T it is most likely because you have a "buisness relationship" with them. At the company I used to work for (small buisness type) an AT&T telemarketer conned the secretary into switching to AT&T Long Distance to spite the fact that we had a two year with huge early termination fee agreement with another company.
After this big mess was cleared up and the secretary was let go, we asked AT&T to place us on there "Do not call list" and were told that because they had establish a buisness relationship with us that we could not do this for three years. After 3 years of diligently insuring that we had non contact with AT&T, (not an easy thing to do) the calls finaly ceased.
Last month the weekly harrasment started again. When it was pointed out that we were on the national do not call list and that they were violating federal law, we were informed that we had an active account with the company. Checking our phone records showed that AT&T had charged us for a one minute call to 00 directory assistance. No once can remember making this call, and my boss is trying to dispute the charge, but now we have another three year for slimeball telemarketing form AT&T.
Slashdot Mirror
This is compleatly off topic
m l
Sulli,
I read you journals for a while now and thought you whould be interested in this Summery Article in the CS Monitor I whated to post it to a journal, but you've restricted replies to them.
I hope you will add it to you collection of links in your journal.
JFMILLER
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0718/dailyUpdate.ht
Here in the Golden State we have to buy special California formula gas that claimed to run cleaner then the rest of the nations. (It may even work if you ignore the 3-5 MPG loss in fuel efficiency) The relevance here is that Ethanol is one of the big ingredients in this gas.
A few years ago, One of the major gas producers found that it could make a much cleaner burning fuel using only petroleum based chemicals. It would cost less and save the air. Unfortunately the Feds stepped in an demanded that ethanol continued to be used instead.
Just follow the pork folks.
JFMILLER
There are indeed quite a number of people who would like to shot me in the face, and believe it or not, I met more then my share. If I had responded to these people with violence I would no longer be alive.
I however chose to responde with love and respect for their humanity and with a little luck lived to tell you about it.
I believe that it is you that have failed to see the larger picture. Every time a military grunt is order to kill another human being there are reprecussions. One of those is that more and more people want to shot you and members of your country.
Even so called "Honorable Wars" are the result of fear, hatred, and lack of respect for basic humanity. The military breads these charictoristic into its initiates. How can I respect anyone who is trained to kill and destroy? Moreover, how can anyone condone the teachin of this hate to young adults?
I would be glad to have a "terrorist" knock on my door. Even if I were to die because of it, I would at least be able to show him or her that I do not share my countries blood lust. To have the opprotuntiy to show love to those who hate us -- now that is something I would be willing to die for.
JFMILLER
WE WERE ATTACKED
Question: Who were we attacked by? The 11 people most responcible for Sept 11 are dead.
But what about the leadership? I see no sign that we are even really looking that hard anymore. Arn't we now looking to make a "stable Iraq?" this doesn't sound like a way to prevent brainwashed extreamists from blowing themselves up. (c.f. Israel, Iraq, Spain, Oklahoma City)
Finally, in regards to you ego problem an the military. The idea that one cannot be critical of an orginazation like the US military because they some how deserve respect is perplexing. I see no honor in being in the buisness of fighting war. I infact find it offensive and wrong that my government on my behalf is using marketing tactics to recruit more otherwise honorable people into the worlds oldest profession for men. From my perspective military service, especially service entered into because of a sales pitch is no more honorable then prostitution.
I would be glad to be taught some respect by you, but I believe from your tone that in the end I would have no more respect for you then the people of the middle east do for our country -- and fear is a piss poor substitute for respect.
JFMILLER
I don't think the Photographer I hired for our wedding was stupid. We looked for one who would give us the original images and because she shot some picutre during the wedding digitally we got those on CD (7.85 megapixel tiffs).
Somebody please mod this post up.
I remember hearing stories about the beginging of microcomputers and the need for efficient languages to take advantage of the faster and more complex architechure. C/C++, perl, and java as well as many others eventually would answer the call. When web browsers became the platform of choice (for a lot of applications anyway) asp, PHP, Javascript, and perl all took up the call.
Now with SMP on its way to becoming ubiquotus, "new" languages whill need to come into fasion which make threading obvious and intuitive for those who understand how to use them.
I don't have much experence beyond the "ooh cool" level, but I would guess that these languages will be related to LISP or ML. These functional languages tend to express operations in a more thread safe manor just by the way they work. Most don't have wide spread accpetance because they have traditionally been percieved as slow and bulky. (Though OCaml developers believe it's a myth and host a compition every year to try to prove it) If they can make threaded applications intuitive to write then I would guess that they will become much more popular in the next couple of years.
I'd really like to see other peoples views on programming paradgyms will bring about thread safe programming for the masses.
JFMILLER
Thanks for the link this is one of the thing that I have been seceretly wishing for.
I still would like something of a text editor for woindows that had on the fly spellchecking with some sence of intelegence about html mark-up.
JFMILLLER
I disagree.
Collections of people that for centuries have been recognized as such have suddenly become buildings instead.
"School" in this (and all other cases except fish) refers to a gathering of students and teachers. All of these are people who ought to be refered to as such.
The same goes for "Church" "Government" "College/University" and "Team." Anyone using that or which in reference to any of these as lost touch with community (and perhaps reality).
JFMILLER
This sounds like a familiar statment from Microsoft about internet technology. When the internet first became a "consumer level application" in about 1993-4 Microsoft avoided jumping on board hoping that "closed systems" loke AOL once was would catch on instead.
I've read many comments here to the effect that Microsoft did this because of a corperate culture that abhors the openness of the internet and their in ability to control it. I disagree. I believe that Microsoft has dedicated it's self to making software which everyone will use. This has ment they are constantly 3-4 years behind the technological curve when it comes to user experence.
The quote above seems to be a good example of Microsoft missing the boat and having to play catchup. It will not be the last. I predict that IE7 will take back significant market share over the next 2 years however because Microsoft has reduced the incentive to switch.
JFMILLER
We are already seeing this type of behavior at places like priceline.com and LendingTree.com. As well as the numerous shopping engins already in on the web.
I think that retails thought of the web as the "Home shopping network on steriods" and are having trouble swallowing the idea of the internet as the "Global Mall."
JFMILLER
As a previous poster mentioned class registration maybe not, but if you need student loans or grants or if you do any type of work for the school including internships, they want you SSN anyway and in all three cases (credit check and employment) they are allowed to ask for it. It is virtually impossible to get through 4 years of school and keep you SSN out of the database.
Yes,
I get 5.5-6 hours on my IBM T41 if I'm carful and not using the wirerless Network.
Note: I have the extra battery in the Drive bay.
How would you feel if they designed bridges like that?
But bridges are designed like this, as are computers , office buildings etc...
I indeed would be more conserned about one-off designes then in proven building blocks. Most bridges these days use well tested prefabricated parts which are linked in known ways to span a given area.
Another example is the pc you are useing. The cards in it are most likely running on PCI and AGP busses. This is a form of encapsulation. The Main Board designer need not know what periferial are to be added, nor do video, sound, network card designers need to know what Main board will be used. Only a standard interface need be know.
I will grant, however, that for something like an Opperating System, there does need to be low level integration and coding. There is, however, no point in writing my web cgi scripts in Assembly simply because I'm not "bit shifting hot registers at runtime"
JFMILLER
Has anyone considered the possibility that the essay could be out of date?
The model of "read the book - write a paper" is indicative of a society that must derive information from static sources like books. With the advent of electronic communications two things have happened that have modified this paradigm.
First, factual information and opinions can be quickly retrieved from a wide verity of people. Universities that still think that finding information at the library is a critical skill have never seen a search engine. Assignments like research papers deserve to be copied from the 'net because that is where information comes from these days. A better assignment might be a research paper that lists websites and then separates fact from fiction.
Second, long, monolog compositions are no longer in vogue. E-mail and web pages have given us a model of short opinions (take this post for example) followed up with responses. Instead of writing a 20,000 word term paper which simply shows the ability to regurgitate other peoples used up arguments, how about an online discussion. Everybody in class must post a 1 page response to the topic and then respond to 10 others. Students will also be expected to answer some of the responses to their original post and responses with the expectation that everyone write around 20,000 words. (Between 15 and 25 posts total)
This is actually the model for many online courses, but because accrediting agencies are stuck in the sixteenth century it is incredibly hard to get a degree without the worn out "reed the book - write a paper" model.
JFMILLER
To get off the tinfoil hat posts for just a second,
What kind of database is going to be able to handle all this information. I've already heard someone say DNS where every company is responcible for tracking their own data and making it searchable, but what about, for example Pepsi. They could potentially produce 1e9 units in a year. Is database technology ready for those kind of numbers?
JFMILLER
Before I rant, Google news turned up what I think is a much nicer artilc in the Macon Telegraph called "Johnny's not reading." by Ed Corson.
The title is in reference to the 1955 report by Rudolph Franz Flesch called "Why Johnny Can't Read" that plasted the whole language movement. Their has sence the dawn of history been dabates about the best way to learn to read, but I wnat to write for a few lines about my experence learning to read in the 80's and why I don't enjoy reading.
My lack of reading for pleasure did indeed start with my schoolong, but it wasn't how I learned to read but what and why. This is slashdot so I'll be blunt. The reading list in schools sucked. Of the 60 some odd books I read in school, I enjoyed no more then a handful. If "Harry Potter" had been part my reading class I might have actually "gotten into" reading.
Unfortunatly, the reading list was -- and is -- a political hot potato that if created more for it's apeal to the PC Culture Cops then the interest of 10 year olds. Most of the stuff I read was in the class room because the author "Brought a unique cultural perspective" reather then an engaging story.
Even when the liturature might have been enjoyable, reading it for class was not. comprehension tests meant that I read with an eye for content details, not naritive apeal. By the time I was in 6th grade, I would reread every paragraph at least once to make sure I could pass the test. This was never an enjoyable way to read, but it was what the system wanted.
Now days, I read a great deal. Two news papers, this and many other websites, technical manuals, and academic tomes, comprimize a good chunk of my time. I read because I want or need the information on the page, but I almost never consider reading something because its fun. That was not an aspect of reading I found until I was a senior in high school, and not because of the Shakespear I was reading in my english class.
Just incase you were wondering, the books I read in shcool that I enjoyed: Huckelberry Fin, Where the Red Fern Grows, The White Mountians, and Island of the Blue Dolphin.
Lets do something dramitic and put engaging book on the book list and drop the high stakes testing. Reading will never be the same.
JFMILLER
I agree it ought to be really simple, but searching the text of a large database just isn't. If you have some idea how to do it, I'd encourage you to get the source and impliment it. I'd like to use it even if no one else would.
MrBlue VT:Talk about relevant. CmdrTaco should take to heart the comment about poor search.
I couldn't agree more, but as someone who is trying to set up a LAMP site let me tell you searces are not easy to do. If others agree with this post -- as the +5 moderation seems to indicate they are -- would anyone like to make a suggestion as to how it might be done? At the moment Slash uses the very limited function of the MATCH() command in MySQL. Does anyone have a better way of searching close to 10 million comments and stories stores in an overburdened MySQL database efficiently and effectivly? I have yet to find a good pre-built solution, and I'm sure I have no idea how to role my own.
JFMILLER
How did I know that no one on slashdot would understand what it is to have power over another or to abuse that power. One of the main reasons that an otherwize good capitalist economy is responcible for so much devistation not only in the two-thirds world that suplies most of the labor and resources but also in post-industrialized nations is that people, espicially those with inordinate amounst of power, don't understand what it means beyong "being able to do what I want."
Power exist where ever one person is dependent on another for social, political or economic resources. In your example above you have very little real power because there is very little expectation that you bail out the hypothetical gambler. On the other hand if you employed said person and refued to pay him as you had agreed to knowing that the mob would take care of the problem before the gambler could take you to court, then yes you have power and have abused it.
Abuse of power also comes in the form of paying laborers saleries they cannot live on, Using political influence to dump toxic waist in a country that need cash because all its natural resources have been stripped by the very company that is now dumping there, or hiring employies for 19.5 hours a week to avoid paying them benifits. I could go on but Nike and Walmart have had enough bad press already.
As to the envrioment, it is actually extreamly tolerant of human presence and industry. With the exception of some of the more sensitive places like the Artic National Wildlife Preserve or the Florida Everglaids most ecosystems can handle a great deal of humad presence if we work within the limits. What is required is to live within those limits, even if it doesn't make sence to do so from a purely economic standpoint. I'm not an eco-nutcase. But I believe that we have a system motivated by profit at the expence of all else. I advocate economic encentives and disencentives (carrot and stick) for corperations to ensure that they stay within the safe limits of the systems they work within. I really don't think that too much to ask.
JFMILLER
Woops, the second question should be about how to ruin the envrioment
What qualifies and quantifies "ruining people's lives"? Be specific. Don't give examples. I want to know how you measure it.
Any person or corporation that denies those it has power over the resources they need for "live, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in favor of advantageous market results, or personal profit. Measured by the difference in living conditions between those with power and those without.
What qualifies and quantifies "ruining people's lives"? Be specific. Don't give examples. I want to know how you measure it.
Introducing pollutants or removing essential resources from a naturally occurring system to the point where the system either ceases to be self regulating or reduces in biological diversity. Measured by local changes in historic trends and species count.
JFMILLER
I agree with you main point that there are times when holing on to the source code in encouraged. On-line games are one instance where I hope that the company does keep a lid on the code. I don't even certian Monopoly Operation systems for wanting to keep a close reign on there source, it is after all how they make money.
NVidia on the otherhand is making money purly on hardware and drivers are a sunk cost. They have to be availible or thier cards won't sell, and they have to be good or their cards will not be able to compete, but the hardware is what you hand your credit card over to aquire. There seems to be economic reason to with hold dirver source code other then habit and industry practice. The only explaination I can come up with is that the code reviels some intimate details about the inner workings of the hardware that should not be made public. On the other hand NVidia has been very open avout the capibilitits and functioning of their hardware and it is widly integrated into third party boards as in my IBM T41 laptop. (ok, I'll stop bragging)
In the end, I believe that the most important aspect of the free software movement has to do with hardware drivers. Remember RMS's story about wanting to modify the print queue to alert the right person when the printer jammed? With software, including operating systems, Open source is a philosophy about the plave and value of intelectual controls. Hardware drivers on the other hand allow one to use a piece of equipment that one physically owns. Open source drivers allow people to use the hardware they own in the manor that is most appropriate to their need and without the loss of commercial opprotunities. Therefore, I too would encourage NVidia to make their driver source code public.
JFMILLER
So the easy thing to do would be to pump 2.6390 gallons of gas into an empty, approved, 5 gallon gas can. Now carefully poor from the approved container into a 5 liter Graduated Cylinder (borrow one from your local high school or college but be careful not to break it the big ones are expensive). If all goes well you should have pretty darn close to 10 liters of gas. Pour the measured quantity into you gas tank when your done.
Just for kicks, does anybody know if 2 liter soda bottles will hold Gas. They would be a cheeper alternitive, but my very well desolve or alter chemically when exposed to gas. (never tried it) As usual, don't do anything stupid that would get you or anyone else hurt. If you are incapible of determining the safty hazards of this activity please move to Oregon with the rest of the people who can't pump their own gas.
JFMILLER
Actually with a 17 digit number ther would be 100,000,000,000,000,000 different VIN number and that doesn account for the fact that the 17 digits are alphanumeric. the problem is that there is information encoded in many of the digits. For example, the first charicter will idintify the country the engine and body were joined (where the care was "manufactured") others idintify the manufacturer, modle year, etc...
The problem will most likely be solved by assigning each country a secont third or fourth(for us and Japan) identifying digit opening up the rest of the namespace anew.
If you are getting calls from AT&T it is most likely because you have a "buisness relationship" with them. At the company I used to work for (small buisness type) an AT&T telemarketer conned the secretary into switching to AT&T Long Distance to spite the fact that we had a two year with huge early termination fee agreement with another company.
After this big mess was cleared up and the secretary was let go, we asked AT&T to place us on there "Do not call list" and were told that because they had establish a buisness relationship with us that we could not do this for three years. After 3 years of diligently insuring that we had non contact with AT&T, (not an easy thing to do) the calls finaly ceased.
Last month the weekly harrasment started again. When it was pointed out that we were on the national do not call list and that they were violating federal law, we were informed that we had an active account with the company. Checking our phone records showed that AT&T had charged us for a one minute call to 00 directory assistance. No once can remember making this call, and my boss is trying to dispute the charge, but now we have another three year for slimeball telemarketing form AT&T.