I don't agree. I get thousands of spams a day but spam filtering is so good that it's not a problem anymore.
What is a problem is getting 10-20 personal emails a day, 50-100 mailing lists messages from lists that I actually want to read and sometimes participate in, and another 100-200 messages from lists that I read only occasionally but want to skim for important topics.
Good for you! I also buy from New Balance for this reason.
I'm always looking for more positive examples - companies that I should reward with my dollars because they use local workers or don't exploit slave labor. Any other companies you know about? It's much better to just remember the positive examples than the negative...
Government satellites regularly capture images at 1-meter resolution (I've seen many such images) and I think as high as 0.25-meter resolution is possible. (Any higher-resolution images you see online, like on Google Maps, were usually acquired by an airplane, not a satellite.)
Keep in mind, though, that the satellites with this kind of resolution are in fast-moving low Earth orbit and can only capture high-resolution images at near-nadir angles. So it's not possible to capture, for example, continuous video of an area at that resolution. With several satellites all coordinating, you could perhaps image each area once an hour on average.
Remember, the higher the resolution, the lower the coverage (in both space and time). NASA captures medium-resolution (250-m) images that provide global, daily coverage of the entire Earth. DOD captures on-demand high-resolution images of specific, carefully chosen targets but miss the rest of the world.
By encrypting your information, it will be transmitted to and stored on Google's servers in a format that is nearly impossible to interpret without the PIN. That means that without the PIN, no one, not even Google, will be able to read your data
I hate to say this, but you're lucky to be getting it for $1500. There are TOTALLY UNUSED domains that people are unwilling to sell me for even as high as $5000.
I'd say be creative, though: offer $1000 and a case of beer delivered to their office this coming Friday afternoon.
I don't think the bottleneck is human sifting, but rather data transmission and uplink time.
Yes, the primary problem is to send more interesting data in the same amount of uplink time.
However, a secondary problem is that the people most qualified to look for anomalies in those images are scientists with Ph.D.s, and they understandably don't want to waste hours and hours looking for needles in haystacks. So AI software that helps filter the images is very useful.
Re:Mars Exploration Rovers and the future
on
Mars Rover Upgraded
·
· Score: 1
Frankly, I see no reason there shouldn't be dozens of active missions to Mars at a given time.
1. The most cost-effective time for a trip to Mars is once every 26 months; it would be a huge waste of fuel to launch anything during the interim. 2. Every active mission needs at least dozens and usually hundreds of people actively working on it just to keep it going. 3. Mars surface missions relay data to Earth using orbiters; there's only a limited amount of bandwidth the existing orbiters could support. Even if we sent more orbiters, there's a limit to what the DSN can support here on Earth.
Among textbooks teaching general (i.e., not highly specialized) discrete mathematics, the Mathematical Association of America assigns a two-star (**) recommendation to Discrete Mathematics by Kenneth A. Ross and Charles R. B. Wright. Two stars means "highly recommended". Only one other textbook on general discrete mathematics received two stars. No textbook on general discrete mathematics received the highest rating: 3 stars. The book by Ross and Wright is quite good.
I think the truth may be that there is no truly great discrete math textbook out there. This book is simply one of the better ones out of a field of pretty mediocre books.
At least two of the best math professors I know teach discrete math with no textbook at all; these same professors do use a textbook in almost all of the other courses they teach. I think that says a lot.
I'm not buying the nonsensical argument that the media and big oil keep throwing the public about 'demand exceeding supply'. There are no supply and demand economics at work here. If that were the case, then one would have to assume that over the last 5 years, US consumption has tripled, because prices have tripled.
Except that oil prices are based on global demand, not U.S. demand, and global demand is going up very fast because of developing nations like China and India.
Generally prices go up if demand can't be met, and demand not being met is generally because supply is low, or the supplier is restricting output to drive prices up.
Or how about a major supply source being interrupted by, oh I don't know, a war? Iraq oil production is still not back to the levels it was before the war.
Seriously though. "Throwing your vote away" to the marginalized, independent candidates whenever you can is the only long-term solution. Voting cannot be simply about "this election, this candidate", sometimes you have to think long-term, no matter how dire the current situation may seem.
One pragmatic solution is to vote for the Democrat for president and maybe even for Congress, but then campaign hard for your favorite third-party candidate for your state senate, city mayor, etc. which will make a positive difference in your local community and also build up the third party so that they're in a better position to compete for the larger offices next election.
You forgot to upgrade the Dell to 667 MHz RAM to match the Mac and give it the high-end graphics card, not Intel integrated video. Then give the Mac two 512-MB DIMMS instead of a single 1 GB (still for a total of 1 GB), and the total is that the Dell is $2100 and the Mac is $2400.
Other differences: the Dell still doesn't have a built-in hi-res webcam, an IR remote control, optical digital audio, integrated Bluetooth, a tilt sensor to automatically park the hard drive when you drop it, or a backlit keyboard.
That's a good point. However, if you're going to build an application that opens its own window and doesn't really interact with the rest of the web browser, why even put it in the web browser at all? At that point you may as well have a client application, right? I guess I fail to see the advantage of a Java applet word processor, when I could have a client application (written in Java or any other language) that self-updates its code from a web server and has the option of storing / backing up my documents online, which seem to be the two main user advantages of a web-based word processor.
I agree, I think it's stupid when people put important information into a PDF file and give you no other way to browse and access it. That's not PDF's fault - PDF is great when you need a cross-platform, compact, reliable way to represent something intended to be printed.
I think you might be misinterpreting my comments as applying to Java in general - my complaints are specifically about Java applets.
Unfortunately, in practice Java applets are totally inadequate, even after all these years.
Really? In what way? Feel like justifying that in any way?
1. Java applets don't integrate with a website. I have two choices: either put the applet in a non-resizable rectangle, or pop up a new window.
2. Java applets don't render text the same way the surrounding website does, so I can't use even use the same font for text.
3. Swing does not provide buttons, menus, checkboxes, and other widgets that look and feel exactly like the same native widgets on that platform.
4. It is not possible to give keyboard focus to an applet, and then give focus back to the browser, entirely using the keyboard - this makes them inaccessible.
5. While an applet has focus, many keyboard commands to interact with the browser stop working.
6. Java applets still take a while to start up.
7. Most users do not have a recent-enough JRE installed, so you have to either stay compatible with an ancient version of Java, or require a large fraction of users to install the JRE before they can use your site. In contrast, over 80% of web surfers are now using an AJAX-capable web browser.
There is still no fast, totally cross-platform, bug-free GUI toolkit, with accessibility support and such.
Swing is all of that.
Accessibility is broken in applets. Swing has hundreds of known bugs; check out Sun's bug database. Sure, Swing is cross-platform - it gives you the same look and feel they've had for eight years that doesn't integrate at all with the local operating system. And even on modern hardware, Swing apps feel less responsive - things like scrolling or popping up a menu take an extra few milliseconds to pop up, and make things feel clunky.
OK, I gave you my complaints. If you want to refute them, give me one example of a great, polished, successful Java applet on a public website. Something that does something useful, integrates with the surrounding site, and works on all platforms (assuming you have the latest JRE and a modern web browser, of course).
I totally agree! Mac users totally love PDFs. They're super fast, you can turn ANY document into a PDF, effortlessly and flawlessly, you can crop them and convert them to other formats, you can view them in a web browser, you can send them to anyone to print, etc.
Adobe Reader is the only thing that sucks. PDF is great.
I agree that AJAX is not appropriate for writing a word processor, and I also agree that Java wasn't really intended for the server-side stuff it seems to be popular for now. And I agree that in theory Java applets should be used to create in-browser applications. Unfortunately, in practice Java applets are totally inadequate, even after all these years. There is still no fast, totally cross-platform, bug-free GUI toolkit, with accessibility support and such.
The funny thing is that browsers are full of bugs and AJAX applications usually have dozens if not hundreds of browser bug workarounds. But in a Java applet, if your JRE has a bug, you're usually stuck. JavaScript and modern browser DOMs have gotten flexible enough that it's actually possible to find a workaround for almost every bug imaginable.
If Java had a fast, totally cross-platform and bug-free GUI toolkit, with full accessibility support for the visually impaired, and it was embedded into all web browsers, then I'd agree, in many ways Java applets would be superior. But the fact is that Java applets have none of those things. Great idea, no execution.
AJAX is at its best when it takes a concept that fits very well into the web paradigm, and adds desktop-application-like interactivity. Google Maps is a perfect example of this. Unlike a Java applet, you get a nice resizable window, almost instantaneous startup, and working back/forward buttons.
A desktop application like Word is a bad match for either a Java applet or an AJAX application.
That's partially true, but another important aspect of it is that if they had planned on a five-year mission up-front, the budget would have been several times larger - and in fact the project might never have been funded at all. So they decided on a mission length long enough to get some interesting science done, but short enough to look cheap.
After 90 days, they went and asked for additional money. What's NASA going to do, stop running the rovers because they're over budget? Of course not. Unfortunately now they're eating into money that would have gone to other Mars missions. But it's still far more sensible to spend a dollar on the rovers already on Mars than on a future rover that may or may not make it to Mars.
Besides the fact that investors in Google have no voting shares.
Any responsible investor would read Google's prospectus, which makes it very clear how they intend to operate the company - and yes, they do intend to put their employees and customers first.
1. Security, security, security: (Mac OS X: check) bidirectional software firewall (check), Windows Services Hardening, which prevents obscure background processes from being hijacked and changing your system (no, but it's not clear that this is needed on Mac OS X now). There's also full-disk encryption (check)...User Account Protection, which invokes administrator privileges as needed(check).
2. Internet Explorer 7 (check - Safari does all that IE 7 does and more),
3. Righteous eye candy (check - Mac OS X is way ahead here)
4. Desktop search (check - Spotlight)
5. Better updates (check - Software Update)
6. More media (check - iTunes, iPhoto, etc.)
7. Parental controls (check - see the System Preferences)
8. Better backups (OK, Apple doesn't include a backup utility unless you purchase dot-Mac)
what feature will I get that I don't already have in Mac OS X 10.4?
Compatibility with more games. Other than WoW, what popular MMORPG runs on Mac OS X?
Compatibility with more vertical-market apps such as the one used by your employer.
Compatibility with more peripherals sold at retail stores.
Compatibility with web sites that are made exclusively for Microsoft Internet Explorer technology and for which there are no close substitutes.
But for the next 3-4 years, you'll get all of those things with Windows XP. So what motivation is there to "upgrade" to Windows Vista? If you wanted the 10 features listed in the article, you could get Mac OS X now. If you want the things you mentioned above, stick with the Windows box you have now and don't waste money on the upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
I do know people that had to get Top Secret clearence for an internship with the government. Its not as uncommon as you think.
It's not unheard of for an intern to get Confidential (level 3) clearance. Top Secret (level 5) clearance can take years, and is hardly necessary.
I don't agree. I get thousands of spams a day but spam filtering is so good that it's not a problem anymore.
What is a problem is getting 10-20 personal emails a day, 50-100 mailing lists messages from lists that I actually want to read and sometimes participate in, and another 100-200 messages from lists that I read only occasionally but want to skim for important topics.
Good for you! I also buy from New Balance for this reason.
I'm always looking for more positive examples - companies that I should reward with my dollars because they use local workers or don't exploit slave labor. Any other companies you know about? It's much better to just remember the positive examples than the negative...
Government satellites regularly capture images at 1-meter resolution (I've seen many such images) and I think as high as 0.25-meter resolution is possible. (Any higher-resolution images you see online, like on Google Maps, were usually acquired by an airplane, not a satellite.)
Keep in mind, though, that the satellites with this kind of resolution are in fast-moving low Earth orbit and can only capture high-resolution images at near-nadir angles. So it's not possible to capture, for example, continuous video of an area at that resolution. With several satellites all coordinating, you could perhaps image each area once an hour on average.
Remember, the higher the resolution, the lower the coverage (in both space and time). NASA captures medium-resolution (250-m) images that provide global, daily coverage of the entire Earth. DOD captures on-demand high-resolution images of specific, carefully chosen targets but miss the rest of the world.
By your definition, it's a passphrase.
From the FAQ (emphasis added by me):
What's the point of encrypting my information?
By encrypting your information, it will be transmitted to and stored on Google's servers in a format that is nearly impossible to interpret without the PIN. That means that without the PIN, no one, not even Google, will be able to read your data
I hate to say this, but you're lucky to be getting it for $1500. There are TOTALLY UNUSED domains that people are unwilling to sell me for even as high as $5000.
I'd say be creative, though: offer $1000 and a case of beer delivered to their office this coming Friday afternoon.
I don't think the bottleneck is human sifting, but rather data transmission and uplink time.
Yes, the primary problem is to send more interesting data in the same amount of uplink time.
However, a secondary problem is that the people most qualified to look for anomalies in those images are scientists with Ph.D.s, and they understandably don't want to waste hours and hours looking for needles in haystacks. So AI software that helps filter the images is very useful.
Frankly, I see no reason there shouldn't be dozens of active missions to Mars at a given time.
1. The most cost-effective time for a trip to Mars is once every 26 months; it would be a huge waste of fuel to launch anything during the interim.
2. Every active mission needs at least dozens and usually hundreds of people actively working on it just to keep it going.
3. Mars surface missions relay data to Earth using orbiters; there's only a limited amount of bandwidth the existing orbiters could support. Even if we sent more orbiters, there's a limit to what the DSN can support here on Earth.
Among textbooks teaching general (i.e., not highly specialized) discrete mathematics, the Mathematical Association of America assigns a two-star (**) recommendation to Discrete Mathematics by Kenneth A. Ross and Charles R. B. Wright. Two stars means "highly recommended". Only one other textbook on general discrete mathematics received two stars. No textbook on general discrete mathematics received the highest rating: 3 stars. The book by Ross and Wright is quite good.
I think the truth may be that there is no truly great discrete math textbook out there. This book is simply one of the better ones out of a field of pretty mediocre books.
At least two of the best math professors I know teach discrete math with no textbook at all; these same professors do use a textbook in almost all of the other courses they teach. I think that says a lot.
I'm not buying the nonsensical argument that the media and big oil keep throwing the public about 'demand exceeding supply'. There are no supply and demand economics at work here. If that were the case, then one would have to assume that over the last 5 years, US consumption has tripled, because prices have tripled.
Except that oil prices are based on global demand, not U.S. demand, and global demand is going up very fast because of developing nations like China and India.
Generally prices go up if demand can't be met, and demand not being met is generally because supply is low, or the supplier is restricting output to drive prices up.
Or how about a major supply source being interrupted by, oh I don't know, a war? Iraq oil production is still not back to the levels it was before the war.
Seriously though. "Throwing your vote away" to the marginalized, independent candidates whenever you can is the only long-term solution. Voting cannot be simply about "this election, this candidate", sometimes you have to think long-term, no matter how dire the current situation may seem.
One pragmatic solution is to vote for the Democrat for president and maybe even for Congress, but then campaign hard for your favorite third-party candidate for your state senate, city mayor, etc. which will make a positive difference in your local community and also build up the third party so that they're in a better position to compete for the larger offices next election.
You forgot to upgrade the Dell to 667 MHz RAM to match the Mac and give it the high-end graphics card, not Intel integrated video. Then give the Mac two 512-MB DIMMS instead of a single 1 GB (still for a total of 1 GB), and the total is that the Dell is $2100 and the Mac is $2400.
Other differences: the Dell still doesn't have a built-in hi-res webcam, an IR remote control, optical digital audio, integrated Bluetooth, a tilt sensor to automatically park the hard drive when you drop it, or a backlit keyboard.
That's a good point. However, if you're going to build an application that opens its own window and doesn't really interact with the rest of the web browser, why even put it in the web browser at all? At that point you may as well have a client application, right? I guess I fail to see the advantage of a Java applet word processor, when I could have a client application (written in Java or any other language) that self-updates its code from a web server and has the option of storing / backing up my documents online, which seem to be the two main user advantages of a web-based word processor.
I agree, I think it's stupid when people put important information into a PDF file and give you no other way to browse and access it. That's not PDF's fault - PDF is great when you need a cross-platform, compact, reliable way to represent something intended to be printed.
Here's one blog where dozens of people have posted their complaints with Swing - they say it better than I could:
3 /why_dont_you_sh.html
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2005/0
Really? In what way? Feel like justifying that in any way?
1. Java applets don't integrate with a website. I have two choices: either put the applet in a non-resizable rectangle, or pop up a new window.
2. Java applets don't render text the same way the surrounding website does, so I can't use even use the same font for text.
3. Swing does not provide buttons, menus, checkboxes, and other widgets that look and feel exactly like the same native widgets on that platform.
4. It is not possible to give keyboard focus to an applet, and then give focus back to the browser, entirely using the keyboard - this makes them inaccessible.
5. While an applet has focus, many keyboard commands to interact with the browser stop working.
6. Java applets still take a while to start up.
7. Most users do not have a recent-enough JRE installed, so you have to either stay compatible with an ancient version of Java, or require a large fraction of users to install the JRE before they can use your site. In contrast, over 80% of web surfers are now using an AJAX-capable web browser.
Swing is all of that.
Accessibility is broken in applets. Swing has hundreds of known bugs; check out Sun's bug database. Sure, Swing is cross-platform - it gives you the same look and feel they've had for eight years that doesn't integrate at all with the local operating system. And even on modern hardware, Swing apps feel less responsive - things like scrolling or popping up a menu take an extra few milliseconds to pop up, and make things feel clunky.
OK, I gave you my complaints. If you want to refute them, give me one example of a great, polished, successful Java applet on a public website. Something that does something useful, integrates with the surrounding site, and works on all platforms (assuming you have the latest JRE and a modern web browser, of course).
I totally agree! Mac users totally love PDFs. They're super fast, you can turn ANY document into a PDF, effortlessly and flawlessly, you can crop them and convert them to other formats, you can view them in a web browser, you can send them to anyone to print, etc.
Adobe Reader is the only thing that sucks. PDF is great.
I agree that AJAX is not appropriate for writing a word processor, and I also agree that Java wasn't really intended for the server-side stuff it seems to be popular for now. And I agree that in theory Java applets should be used to create in-browser applications. Unfortunately, in practice Java applets are totally inadequate, even after all these years. There is still no fast, totally cross-platform, bug-free GUI toolkit, with accessibility support and such.
The funny thing is that browsers are full of bugs and AJAX applications usually have dozens if not hundreds of browser bug workarounds. But in a Java applet, if your JRE has a bug, you're usually stuck. JavaScript and modern browser DOMs have gotten flexible enough that it's actually possible to find a workaround for almost every bug imaginable.
If Java had a fast, totally cross-platform and bug-free GUI toolkit, with full accessibility support for the visually impaired, and it was embedded into all web browsers, then I'd agree, in many ways Java applets would be superior. But the fact is that Java applets have none of those things. Great idea, no execution.
AJAX is at its best when it takes a concept that fits very well into the web paradigm, and adds desktop-application-like interactivity. Google Maps is a perfect example of this. Unlike a Java applet, you get a nice resizable window, almost instantaneous startup, and working back/forward buttons.
A desktop application like Word is a bad match for either a Java applet or an AJAX application.
That's partially true, but another important aspect of it is that if they had planned on a five-year mission up-front, the budget would have been several times larger - and in fact the project might never have been funded at all. So they decided on a mission length long enough to get some interesting science done, but short enough to look cheap.
After 90 days, they went and asked for additional money. What's NASA going to do, stop running the rovers because they're over budget? Of course not. Unfortunately now they're eating into money that would have gone to other Mars missions. But it's still far more sensible to spend a dollar on the rovers already on Mars than on a future rover that may or may not make it to Mars.
My understanding is that the proposed amount wasn't actually funded by Congress. Can anyone clarify this?
Besides the fact that investors in Google have no voting shares.
Any responsible investor would read Google's prospectus, which makes it very clear how they intend to operate the company - and yes, they do intend to put their employees and customers first.
Let's compare to Mac OS X, shall we?
1. Security, security, security: (Mac OS X: check) bidirectional software firewall (check), Windows Services Hardening, which prevents obscure background processes from being hijacked and changing your system (no, but it's not clear that this is needed on Mac OS X now). There's also full-disk encryption (check)...User Account Protection, which invokes administrator privileges as needed(check).
2. Internet Explorer 7 (check - Safari does all that IE 7 does and more),
3. Righteous eye candy (check - Mac OS X is way ahead here)
4. Desktop search (check - Spotlight)
5. Better updates (check - Software Update)
6. More media (check - iTunes, iPhoto, etc.)
7. Parental controls (check - see the System Preferences)
8. Better backups (OK, Apple doesn't include a backup utility unless you purchase dot-Mac)
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration (check - Bonjour, aka Rendezvous)
10. Quick setup (this isn't as much a feature as it is getting rid of bottlenecks in Windows - not needed
Again, nothing wrong with any of these features - but where is Microsoft innovating?
Compatibility with more games. Other than WoW, what popular MMORPG runs on Mac OS X?
Compatibility with more vertical-market apps such as the one used by your employer.
Compatibility with more peripherals sold at retail stores.
Compatibility with web sites that are made exclusively for Microsoft Internet Explorer technology and for which there are no close substitutes.
But for the next 3-4 years, you'll get all of those things with Windows XP. So what motivation is there to "upgrade" to Windows Vista? If you wanted the 10 features listed in the article, you could get Mac OS X now. If you want the things you mentioned above, stick with the Windows box you have now and don't waste money on the upgrade.