I wonder which is the bigger challange... installing linux on a tv box designed to run windoze, or to install windoze on a tv box designed to run linux?
Are you kidding? Sometimes it's tough enough trying to install windoze on a box designed to run windoze! =)
You're realy spplitting hairs here. But, for those of you who are interested, check out this web site: English errors page from wordorigins.org. They talk about acronyms, their origins, and some misconceptions about common acronyms.
It's pretty big, but it covers the basics + more. Even if you plan on mostly using MFC or something similar and not rolling your own raw-API program, this is definitely a worthy purchase.
Hmmm, you touched on something that I've always hated about napster: that damn client software! =) Granted, I haven't used napster in a while (5-6 months or so), but I think what I'm going to say probably still holds.
While napster may not be as buggy as scour (although I've never had _any_ problems with scour's client), the GUI to napster is/was absolutely atrocious. Window pane traversing that should have been implemented with tabs was done with buttons. Double click on a person's name and, for some reason, you get the context menu. "Close" it, and, without warning, it runs in the background with only an icon in the systray left. That last "feature" hacked me off when I first saw it because it seemed like the client was trying to intentionally trick me into believing that it had closed so it could serve up my files behind my back. When I first used it, you couldn't even change the settings on the fly; you had to restart the application (and that wasn't in the alpha stage either). Not to mention that the interface was/is just plain ugly, but that's just aesthetics.
Of course, this may have changed recently, but I think the winner for bad software development ethics, at least historically, goes to napster. I honestly think they should have looked at the client and said "Ok, that's a good prototype, now scrap it 'cause we need to write the _real_ client". Granted, the developers, at least originally, were young, so I can let it slide. I'd be interested to hear what you, or anyone else, thinks.
There has been a recent development for CDRs that supposedly protects you from buffer underruns. It's called "Burn Proof" technology, and it allows a CDR to pick up right where it left off when you buffer underrun. I've never used a "Burn Proof" CDR myself, but the thought of getting one to replace my old 2x burner did cross my mind. This technology is fairly new, and is hardware only (I believe Sanyo came up with it, but Plextor, and possibly others, has a drive out that uses this technology). Look ma, no more coasters! =)
Despite this statement, several members of the discussion list would not back away from charging that because of its inclusion of a compiler that was not binary compatible with anything else, Red Hat was beginning an attempt to create a proprietary distribution. Cox denied these charges in the discussion, reiterating his point that Red Hat's efforts were innovative, and not divergent.
When further questioned, Cox began mumbling about the DOJ,.NET, and FIN. It suddenly became clear that we were actually talking to Bill Gates in disguise. When the truth was revealed, Gates said, "Well, ya gotta admit, I had ya goin' there..."
All joking aside (And that was a joke. Laugh.), it seems to me that this is simply a case of over-zealousness getting the best of the situation.
Voice activated technology for the palm sounds interesting. It may be the one thing that Microsoft can't rip off. After all, if they tried to incorporate this technology into WinCE, they'd have to figure out a good way to parse out the expletives.
I know what preempting is, but I don't understand what makes something "fully preemptive". Why is "fully preemptive" better than, er, I guess, "partially preemptive", and what do these terms mean? Anyone care to elaborate? What will be gained by making the kernel "fully preemptive", and what state is the kernel in now that keeps it from being "fully preemptive"?
I think this is also a good way not only to prevent someone else from claiming an idea was theirs and patenting it, but also to take an idea you came up with and then open it up for use. It's like open-sourcing an idea. In preventing a patent on it and making it an antipatent, you liberate it and let others build on it.
Input is via a on-screen QWERTY keyboard which is part of the display at the bottom. I hope it is possible to replace this keyboard by a Fitaly keyboard, or by one of the various handwriting reconition techniques.
A register article mentions that they are developing a "natural handwriting recognition" system instead of using Palm's Graffiti.
Also, if you just scroll down the page, you can see that the headlines for "Recently on The Rumor Mill" are absurd. Take, for example "Borg Sue Apple Over Cube", an article about how The Borg from Start Trek say that the G4 cube idea was taken from their spaceship design. Also, there's "Professional Baseball sues Apple over sphere", which talks about how spherical speakers look like baseballs.
Does this mean that they will be releasing BFlat (or what ever) for Linux, Solaris, BeOS, MacOS, etc.
What this means is, not only will it work on Windows 2000, it will also work on Windows 98, Millenium, 95, NT4, and maybe even earlier versions of NT or Windows for Workgroups. That's 5 different platforms right there, maybe even more! =)
I know this may sound a bit sci-fi, but hear me out.
I can see this being applied to more than the web and FTP sites. As more applications move to a digital medium, we will have more opportunities to store all of our information in a digital format. This means that we will have opportunities to archive our data in a medium that lasts, theoretically, forever.
Picture it: if everything is stored digitally, then it won't be necessary to read to learn about history. All you'll need to do is load the data, and you'll be able to experience it for yourself. This archive already shows the potential for someone in the future to experience web browsing as it occurred today. Imagine if this was applied to more than just the web!
If all building and city layouts are stored in a digital form, then, in the future, all one needs to do to learn what Washington DC was like "way back" in the 1990's is load up the diagram, strap on a headset, and start touring the city. The possibilities are mind-boggling. With advances in neuroscience as well, we could theoretically replicate the entire experience, right down to the touch, taste, and smell.
OK, so the idea has been seen before in Star Trek (the Holodeck). But I truly believe that one day, this could be a possibility.
Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
By analogy, there really shouldn't be any records about the holocaust, since that is not a balanced look at society. I mean, why on earth would someone want to archive something so terrible? After all, it didn't reflect the average, everyday person.
Both of your posts seem to cry out "But what about the people without the internet? What about the others? Don't archive it! It's not fair to the disadvantaged!"
I doubt that the goal of archive.org is to create a snapshot that sums up life in the late 90's and beyond. What is being created is a look at a small portion of today's world. It IS historicaly significant and it is worthy of being archived simply because _it is happening_.
I agree, if future historians were to only look at what is archived by www.archive.org and use it to make judgements about today's society, they would be lead to believe that we were a bunch of wackos. But, by analogy, historians of today would not have a good idea of society in the 1700's if they only looked at what was written in a few letters back then. The internet is a small piece of the puzzle. Historians have the job of putting the puzzle together.
I just want to point out that I have bought two different versions of ethernet cards from Linksys (including the EtherFast 10/100), and each one worked with the tulip driver under linux. As far as trouble shooting goes, you really should go to their web site.
In fact, it is interesting to note that when you do a search for articles concerning the EtherFast 10/100, there are two: one on how to install under Windows 9.x, the other is how to install under Linux (note that there are no others, even NT). The article about linux even states that the tulip driver is on the disk provided by Linksys.
Now whether or not they will walk you through it on the phone or not, I dunno. But I never really need a company to do that. I'd rather just read some instructions and go through some online database than sit on the phone listening to elevator music while I wait for someone to get back from their smoke break.
Napster, in the way it is designed, causes itself to serve out mp3s even when the user doesn't really want to.
Anyone ever notice that when you "close" napster it just goes to your taskbar, serving off mp3s behind the scenes? I'm willing to bet half of the people who are serving out mp3s on college campuses just aren't aware of this (especially the less-experienced ones). Quite honestly, I find this "feature" annoying. Napster and its counter-intuitive response to closing the program gets about as much respect from me as a program that runs arbitrary code on my system.
If the chance of a match between two random DNA samples is 1/37.10^6, and they have 660000 samples in their database, then the likelihood -- assuming their system does'nt give false positives, which I doubt -- of a database match is... 1.78% !!! We don't know how much DNA tests they make each year, but it's porbably well over a thousand, wich leads to over 10 false positives a year! From the article: British authorities estimated that the likelihood of that match occurring at random was one in 37 million.
I have always found that the real problem with statistics is determining what they mean. There are some ambiguities in the statement presented in the article. What do the odds presented describe? Does it mean that there is a one-in-37 million chance that if you compare person X's DNA to a random person Y's that they will match? Or does this mean that the odds that person X's DNA will match any person within an extremely large database (one that theoretically could consist of the DNA of all of the people on earth) are one in 37 million? In the latter case, the statistic given seems very powerful. If there was only a one-in-37 million chance that they would match your DNA falsely when compared to all humans on earth, then DNA testing seems very reliable. In the former case, the statistic seems unconvincing. Also, I feel that it is important to note that DNA tests, to the best of my knowledge, are not performed "at random." While I admit that I am no expert on police procedure, I would assume that, typically, there is some evidence against the person who is on trial, and once they have pinpointed that person, they test to see if the DNA found at the scene of the crime matches that of the person. Here you introduce even more coincidences, like being in the same location as the DNA, knowing the victim, having a motive, etc. In this light, the odds seem to be almost astronomical. What are the odds that the person that the DNA matches lives in the same area, has a motive, was seen near the scene of the crime, etc? The seemingly large pool of 660,000 gets smaller very quickly. Assume that typically the pool you would test is around 20. The odds for a bad match there look more like.000054%. Still fairly large, but not too bad. It shows that DNA evidence is very convincing, but doesn't stand that well on its own. Hopefully, in most cases, if you did a test of all humans, you'd get a random guy living in China connected to a crime in Idaho rather than a local connected to it. Of course, we're just playing the odds at that point =)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't look too closely at the slashdot image.
The recursion will make your head hurt.
I wonder which is the bigger challange... installing linux on a tv box designed to run windoze, or to install windoze on a tv box designed to run linux?
Are you kidding? Sometimes it's tough enough trying to install windoze on a box designed to run windoze! =)XML is an initialism.
You're realy spplitting hairs here. But, for those of you who are interested, check out this web site:
English errors page from wordorigins.org. They talk about acronyms, their origins, and some misconceptions about common acronyms.
Almost all windows programmers agree that a good place to start is:
It's pretty big, but it covers the basics + more. Even if you plan on mostly using MFC or something similar and not rolling your own raw-API program, this is definitely a worthy purchase.Charles Petzold's Programming Windows
I was only able to write one PL/SQL script that "overworked" the server.
-Obligatory programming joke- It was so fast, it finished an infinite loop in under five seconds!If we're going to start indexing months at 0, then by golly the language should index its arrays at 0 too! =)
This system will make it easier for C programmers to think of time.
"It's simple: I just think of it as an multi-dimensional array."
Couldn't they have called it something better? I don't want to have to say "No, not CDDA, CDA. Yes, there is a difference." Let the confusion begin.
Hmmm, you touched on something that I've always hated about napster: that damn client software! =) Granted, I haven't used napster in a while (5-6 months or so), but I think what I'm going to say probably still holds.
While napster may not be as buggy as scour (although I've never had _any_ problems with scour's client), the GUI to napster is/was absolutely atrocious. Window pane traversing that should have been implemented with tabs was done with buttons. Double click on a person's name and, for some reason, you get the context menu. "Close" it, and, without warning, it runs in the background with only an icon in the systray left. That last "feature" hacked me off when I first saw it because it seemed like the client was trying to intentionally trick me into believing that it had closed so it could serve up my files behind my back. When I first used it, you couldn't even change the settings on the fly; you had to restart the application (and that wasn't in the alpha stage either). Not to mention that the interface was/is just plain ugly, but that's just aesthetics.
Of course, this may have changed recently, but I think the winner for bad software development ethics, at least historically, goes to napster. I honestly think they should have looked at the client and said "Ok, that's a good prototype, now scrap it 'cause we need to write the _real_ client". Granted, the developers, at least originally, were young, so I can let it slide. I'd be interested to hear what you, or anyone else, thinks.
This was not a rant, just a comment.
There has been a recent development for CDRs that supposedly protects you from buffer underruns. It's called "Burn Proof" technology, and it allows a CDR to pick up right where it left off when you buffer underrun. I've never used a "Burn Proof" CDR myself, but the thought of getting one to replace my old 2x burner did cross my mind. This technology is fairly new, and is hardware only (I believe Sanyo came up with it, but Plextor, and possibly others, has a drive out that uses this technology). Look ma, no more coasters! =)
More on burn proof technologyDespite this statement, several members of the discussion list would not back away from charging that because of its inclusion of a compiler that was not binary compatible with anything else, Red Hat was beginning an attempt to create a proprietary distribution.
Cox denied these charges in the discussion, reiterating his point that Red Hat's efforts were innovative, and not divergent.
When further questioned, Cox began mumbling about the DOJ, .NET, and FIN. It suddenly became clear that we were actually talking to Bill Gates in disguise. When the truth was revealed, Gates said, "Well, ya gotta admit, I had ya goin' there..."
All joking aside (And that was a joke. Laugh.), it seems to me that this is simply a case of over-zealousness getting the best of the situation.
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember previous articles are doomed to repeat them."
George SlashdotayanaVoice activated technology for the palm sounds interesting. It may be the one thing that Microsoft can't rip off. After all, if they tried to incorporate this technology into WinCE, they'd have to figure out a good way to parse out the expletives.
For those who care:
According to this page (#22), this was originally a quote from Lord Byron. Sans "motherfucker", of course.
I know what preempting is, but I don't understand what makes something "fully preemptive". Why is "fully preemptive" better than, er, I guess, "partially preemptive", and what do these terms mean? Anyone care to elaborate? What will be gained by making the kernel "fully preemptive", and what state is the kernel in now that keeps it from being "fully preemptive"?
I think this is also a good way not only to prevent someone else from claiming an idea was theirs and patenting it, but also to take an idea you came up with and then open it up for use. It's like open-sourcing an idea. In preventing a patent on it and making it an antipatent, you liberate it and let others build on it.
Input is via a on-screen QWERTY keyboard which is part of the display at the bottom. I hope it is possible to replace this keyboard by a Fitaly keyboard, or by one of the various handwriting reconition techniques.
A register article mentions that they are developing a "natural handwriting recognition" system instead of using Palm's Graffiti.
Also, if you just scroll down the page, you can see that the headlines for "Recently on The Rumor Mill" are absurd. Take, for example "Borg Sue Apple Over Cube", an article about how The Borg from Start Trek say that the G4 cube idea was taken from their spaceship design. Also, there's "Professional Baseball sues Apple over sphere", which talks about how spherical speakers look like baseballs.
Look at this page, which says
It's amazingly easy to create a rumor with no basis in reality that sounds as good as anything the rumor sites publish.
Well, I guess they were right about that, eh? =)
Maybe I'm out of it, but could someone please explain what the MPL is? Is it a Mozilla-specific license (Mozilla public license)?
Does this mean that they will be releasing BFlat (or what ever) for Linux, Solaris, BeOS, MacOS, etc.
What this means is, not only will it work on Windows 2000, it will also work on Windows 98, Millenium, 95, NT4, and maybe even earlier versions of NT or Windows for Workgroups. That's 5 different platforms right there, maybe even more! =)
Please note: the above was a joke.
Holy Cow.
I know this may sound a bit sci-fi, but hear me out.
I can see this being applied to more than the web and FTP sites. As more applications move to a digital medium, we will have more opportunities to store all of our information in a digital format. This means that we will have opportunities to archive our data in a medium that lasts, theoretically, forever.
Picture it: if everything is stored digitally, then it won't be necessary to read to learn about history. All you'll need to do is load the data, and you'll be able to experience it for yourself. This archive already shows the potential for someone in the future to experience web browsing as it occurred today. Imagine if this was applied to more than just the web!
If all building and city layouts are stored in a digital form, then, in the future, all one needs to do to learn what Washington DC was like "way back" in the 1990's is load up the diagram, strap on a headset, and start touring the city. The possibilities are mind-boggling. With advances in neuroscience as well, we could theoretically replicate the entire experience, right down to the touch, taste, and smell.
OK, so the idea has been seen before in Star Trek (the Holodeck). But I truly believe that one day, this could be a possibility.
Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
By analogy, there really shouldn't be any records about the holocaust, since that is not a balanced look at society. I mean, why on earth would someone want to archive something so terrible? After all, it didn't reflect the average, everyday person.
Both of your posts seem to cry out "But what about the people without the internet? What about the others? Don't archive it! It's not fair to the disadvantaged!"
I doubt that the goal of archive.org is to create a snapshot that sums up life in the late 90's and beyond. What is being created is a look at a small portion of today's world. It IS historicaly significant and it is worthy of being archived simply because _it is happening_.
I agree, if future historians were to only look at what is archived by www.archive.org and use it to make judgements about today's society, they would be lead to believe that we were a bunch of wackos. But, by analogy, historians of today would not have a good idea of society in the 1700's if they only looked at what was written in a few letters back then. The internet is a small piece of the puzzle. Historians have the job of putting the puzzle together.
I just want to point out that I have bought two different versions of ethernet cards from Linksys (including the EtherFast 10/100), and each one worked with the tulip driver under linux. As far as trouble shooting goes, you really should go to their web site.
In fact, it is interesting to note that when you do a search for articles concerning the EtherFast 10/100, there are two: one on how to install under Windows 9.x, the other is how to install under Linux (note that there are no others, even NT). The article about linux even states that the tulip driver is on the disk provided by Linksys.
Now whether or not they will walk you through it on the phone or not, I dunno. But I never really need a company to do that. I'd rather just read some instructions and go through some online database than sit on the phone listening to elevator music while I wait for someone to get back from their smoke break.
Napster, in the way it is designed, causes itself to serve out mp3s even when the user doesn't really want to.
Anyone ever notice that when you "close" napster it just goes to your taskbar, serving off mp3s behind the scenes? I'm willing to bet half of the people who are serving out mp3s on college campuses just aren't aware of this (especially the less-experienced ones). Quite honestly, I find this "feature" annoying. Napster and its counter-intuitive response to closing the program gets about as much respect from me as a program that runs arbitrary code on my system.
If the chance of a match between two random DNA samples is 1/37.10^6, and they have 660000 samples in their database, then the likelihood -- assuming their system does'nt give false positives, which I doubt -- of a database match is ... 1.78% !!! We don't know how much DNA tests they make each year, but it's porbably well over a thousand, wich leads to over 10 false positives a year!
I have always found that the real problem with statistics is determining what they mean. There are some ambiguities in the statement presented in the article.From the article: British authorities estimated that the likelihood of that match occurring at random was one in 37 million.
What do the odds presented describe? Does it mean that there is a one-in-37 million chance that if you compare person X's DNA to a random person Y's that they will match? Or does this mean that the odds that person X's DNA will match any person within an extremely large database (one that theoretically could consist of the DNA of all of the people on earth) are one in 37 million? In the latter case, the statistic given seems very powerful. If there was only a one-in-37 million chance that they would match your DNA falsely when compared to all humans on earth, then DNA testing seems very reliable. In the former case, the statistic seems unconvincing.
Also, I feel that it is important to note that DNA tests, to the best of my knowledge, are not performed "at random." While I admit that I am no expert on police procedure, I would assume that, typically, there is some evidence against the person who is on trial, and once they have pinpointed that person, they test to see if the DNA found at the scene of the crime matches that of the person. Here you introduce even more coincidences, like being in the same location as the DNA, knowing the victim, having a motive, etc. In this light, the odds seem to be almost astronomical. What are the odds that the person that the DNA matches lives in the same area, has a motive, was seen near the scene of the crime, etc? The seemingly large pool of 660,000 gets smaller very quickly. Assume that typically the pool you would test is around 20. The odds for a bad match there look more like