This reminds me of a series of K5 articles a while back: "A Casino Odyssey." The articles are longer than the Wired story, and told from a first-person perspective. Fascinating stuff:
First, more or less on-topic, and to clear up a common misconception: yes, the USPS has a monopoly on first-class mail. No, we shouldn't consider allowing competition. What most people don't know is that the USPS is mandated (by the same government that gave it the monopoly in the first place) to pick and and deliver at every address in the country every day. Think of the mind-boggling logistics behind that statement. Then realize that FedEx and UPS sometimes give their own deliveries to the USPS because they can't be bothered to go Smallville.
Second, on the Civil War remark, check out Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, which is based on just that premise: how could the South win the Civil War, and what would happen afterwords? Very nicely done.
Let me plug my favorite developer site: Perlmonks: the online community of Perl developers. Don't come expecting your hand to be held, but a little effort will be repaid several times over. Very many nice, knowledgeable people.
I used to run the network for a big architecture firm. We had a nice conference room with a 12-foot rear-projection glass screen, and an LCD projector in the room behind. On weekends we'd often have LAN parties, so one day I decided to drag my box into the room.
Man, I lasted about 3 minutes, and I thought I was going to puke. Staying as far from the screen as possible, I still had to move my head side-to-side to see all the action, and I had bad-ass motion sickness.
The resolution was actually pretty good, even for the 800x600 projector - no real pixelization. I wouldn't do it again, though. On an IMAX I bet it would be even worse.
If the cops get a search warrant for, say, pot plants in your house, they'll be able to tell pretty easily whether you're growing or not. Step 1: find all the plants; step 2: see if they're pot plants.
But say they want to look for incriminating digital evidence that you're growing or dealing pot. You can't just decrypt the stuff you want them to see and say, "This is not the encrypted data you're looking for. I can go on my way."
No, they're going to decrypt everything. This means that while they might not find evidence of pot, they might find something else. And sure, it may not stand up in a court of law... 3 years, 4 appeals, and 1 bankruptcy later.
In other news, researchers at MIT are now looking at ways to etch binary data on the inside of human skulls, claiming that human skull bone is a more reliable and longer-lived storage medium than most others available.
I was the IS manager at a large architecture firm for years. Architects are a pain in the ass to work with, but a good architect is worth his weight in gold. Architects at their best are integrators and managers as well as designers.
Other posters have mentioned heat, alarms and fire supression levels as examples of things an architect might not understand. In my experience, most architects are pretty good about subbing out work they know they can't do. Architects don't draw plans for the whole project - they design the frame and facades, the interiors and the fixtures, but they usually leave other work for specialists. This means that your plumbing, electrical, etc will be handled by a consultant who does it for a living.
Your best bet is to find an architect with demonstrated experience in the kind of project you have in mind. Then ask for references and visit his(her/its) past projects. If possible, talk with the internal project manager at those sites (the person who dealt with the architect on a daily basis).
Nearly any architect can probably do your job, but it will be very painful with one who is inexperienced. Architects have a long and formal internship system - let your architect get his computer room experience as an intern on someone else's project, not as a lead on your project.
I've read that document before, and I suggest that perhaps you need to re-read it with a more jaundiced eye towards your prejudices.
The document now contains several disclaimers admitting that the author's original conclusions have been undermined somewhat by his own hyperbole, ignorance and by new technology (the original was written in 1995 - in web terms, it may as well be written in hieroglyphics on decaying papyrus)(ok, so that's a little exageration of my own...:P ). It's still worth reading, but only after you filter it a little.
In particular, he doesn't account for cookies, which are great for web tracking (personally, I block nearly all cookies, but I don't think that session tracking is a malicious use). Cookies can give you very accurate data on visitor use, and proper reporting can turn that into very useful information.
Also, the points he (or she) and you make about IP addresses vs. sessions vs. users are valid, but overblown. Very few people access the same site from different IP address in a given session. You wouldn't want to bet your life savings on these numbers, but they're accurate over 90% of the time, and that's more than enough to get good information (as someone else once said, "Don't believe me? Next time you have a blood test, tell them to take it all to make sure they get an accurate reading.").
We've used WebTrends for month, and I like them quite a lot. For some things they are excellent; for others, not so. A word about methodology: WebTrends tracking code consists of a primary method and a fallback. The primary method uses JavaScript to compute a compressed string of data including much client information and appends this to an HTML image tag - this data is slurped into a database at WebTrends. If JavaScript is disabled, the hit still gets recorded, but without all the fancy extra info. They try to place a unique, persistent cookie with each image load (once per page).
According to WebTrends, over 95% of our visitors have both cookies and JavaScript enabled.
Their reporting tools are very good and comprehensive, containing everything I've seen from the best log analysis software and some things that software can't get (average screen resolution and window size, for instance - I love this). You can customize content groups to your heart's content by modifying some variables in their JS. Their site itself is well made and smart: their help system pops up a content-sensitive window with information for each specific page; if you click to a new page, the help window is updated. Yes, this is relatively easy to implement, but how many sites do it? Too few.
Now, not all is Madam George and roses (to coin a phrase). I've found that WebTrends reports at best 95% of our traffic. Periodically I run a couple home-brew Perl scripts on our logs and it always counts more hits than WebTrends shows (not an issue with my Perl-fu, BTW). Their tech support is decent, but not wonderful - if you have a real issue, you might run around a little. A couple times they've flat-out dropped large chunks of our traffic (e.g. 40% for a day), never to be seen again.
Finally, we get about 10% the traffic the original poster does, so I can't tell you how well they scale. They'll charge a pretty penny for that amount of traffic, too.
To summarize (whew): (a) WebTrends is pretty decent, and excellent for some things; (b) IP-based assumptions and cookie tracking can get you very accurate statistics as long as you can live with the limitations.
I've done this for years, and been very happy. A few words of advice:
Pick the motherboard first. Your main board is without a doubt the most important part of the machine. Don't skimp - buy the best. Everything else is easily replaceable, and nothing sucks like a slow or buggy main board.
Buy as much RAM as you can afford, and the slowest CPU your chosen motherboard will take. Then wait 'til CPU prices come down to upgrade. High-end CPUs are consistently the most over-priced component you'll buy.
Spend some time picking a case. Buy one that's easy to work on and has lots of room.
Shell out some dough for the best (not biggest) power supply you can. You don't want part of your shiny new system fragged by bad power.
Buy a great monitor. My monitor has lasted me through 2 complete rebuilds of my box (3.5 years), and has another few years left. The monitor is the most expensive single component, and the only one that you can never upgrade.
Unless you're ready for some pain, don't be a doof and try to overclock. The few % performance increase isn't worth frying a CPU, plus it means you don't need a $75 fan that sounds like a wind tunnel.
Be prepared for a bit of a pain in the ass. Don't count on manufacturer tech support to help you much - they'll mostly point fingers at other components. This is the part that sucks compared with buying a Dell.
Buying advice:
As others have said, NewEgg rocks.
Computers4Sure is awesome and I love them. I spend all day staring at 2 big CRTs so I'm pretty anal about them being perfect. These things are delicate, though, and can easily get munged in shipping. I ordered mine from Computers4Sure and one was badly misaligned when it came. I dialed their tech support, expecting the worst, and literally less than 10 minutes later I received a pre-paid UPS label via email. No hassle, no questions - all they wanted to know was that I wasn't happy. I got a new screen less than a week later. I've never seen a return handled so well.
I just turned WinMX on, gave high priority to all of the anime uploads, and then set GetRight to download as many episodes as possible. And it's not because I'm afraid that I'll lose my high bandwidth. It's because I feel like sending a nice little "fuck you" to Comcast while I still can.
That's like protesting a possible water rate hike by running your tap all day, or an electric rate hike by leaving your fridge open all day. Your sad little "protest" is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and doing demonstrable harm to everyone else who wants to use the resource. You're a short-sighted, anti-social idiot.
I bought this book, and I wish I hadn't. It's not horrible, but I think there are better alternatives (like "the Mouse book" - O'Reilly's CGI Programming with Perl, which I love). These are a couple of my specific gripes with the book:
It looks like a nice thick book, but it's very padded. The font is huge (12 to 14 points), there's a lot of padding
(most code samples listed twice, 40 pages of appendix material that could have
been 8 URLs), the margins are huge, and there's an awful lot of repetition (the
10 lines justifying -wT are repeated nearly every time it's used in a program). I bet that the Mouse book squeezes twice as much
content into 450 pages as this one does in 525.
Some chapters belong better in a Perl book ("Tied Variables").
Some inclusions/exclusions and focus choices are very odd. There's a very
detailed chapter for Mason, but no mention of templates (literally - not even in
the index).
Their style is very choppy. They'll present a couple lines of code, then a
paragraph talking about it, repeat. It's very difficult to get a cohesive view
of the program this way - it's spoon-fed to you rather than presented whole. (Undoubtedly this is why they repeat all the code at the end of each chapter, but I prefer longer chunks of unbroken code).
In short, the book is much more vocational than educational. I think this was a conscious decision of theirs, and as such I can hardly fault it - they know their target audience better than I do. However, I've not opened this book once since I read it (cover-to-cover), while I still refer to the Mouse weekly.
Need to
hack up some code fast? This book will help. If you really want to learn
CGI, to know why and how it works, to have a broader grounding in the
technologies used with it, and to build a firm foundation for future
self-teaching, then IMHO nothing beats the Mouse book.
Ok, I'm going to ramble a bit, but I think this is a good point. In 1976 Philip K Dick wrote this about his story Service Call:
When this story appeared many fans objected to it because of the negative attitude I expressed in it. But I was already beginning to suppose in my head the growing domination of machines over man, especially the machines we voluntarily surround ourselves with, which should, by logic, be the most harmless. I never assumed that some huge clanking monster would stride down Fifth Avenue, devouring New York; I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey. I never like the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.
Much of PKD's work was about the way machines sneak into our lives, slowly become necessary, then resist our best efforts to get rid of them. One of his stories (name escapes me) centers on a group of people, sole survivors of the last world war. All the natural resources of the planet are being consumed by two warring "autofacs" ("automatic factory" I think is the derivation), neither of which is smart enough to realize that the war is over. The humans are struggling to destroy the factories so they can regain control. Being a PKD story, of course they fail.
On the one hand, a pilotless bomber is a great idea - why risk a human life if a machine can do the job? On the other hand it's more than a little scary - when your wars are fought by machines, human beings are in the way.
For nearly all of history, some people have thought they have a license or right to kill other people. Its one of the primary activities of humans - kill other humans. To become more efficient at this, we keep making human-killing technology better and better. Now we're talking about giving that license to machines.
The biggest difference between the movie Blade Runner (which I love) and PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the movie was based (which I also love, for different reasons) is that in Dick's world androids have no compassion, no caritas. They have no inate regard for human life, or any life for that matter.
The Nuremburg trials established that "I was following orders" is not a valid excuse for committing atrocities during wartime. That only works for humans, though, since machines have no moral compass. We're talking about giving a license to kill humans to a machine with no soul, no regard for life, and no accountability. All in the name of efficiency.
For those curious (or who know already) about Conway's Game of Life, the best implementation I've seen is a Java applet by Alan Hensel. It has numerous popular patterns preloaded (including a Turing machine, IIRC). It's primary characteristic, though, is blazing speed - an order of magnitude faster than any other implementation I've seen, including compiled ones.
There's much debate about whether fingerprints are the primary keys to human identity. Law enforcement has based over 100 years of work on the premise that no two humans, anywhere, ever, have the same fingerprints. Some people say this is hogwash.
Let's leave out, for now, the fact that it's not possible to verify this claim at all: there's no way to test all living people and compare their prints. This is troubling, but a bit of a red herring.
More troubling is the way fingerprinting is practiced. There's a case in Philly right now where a federal judge has prohibited the prosecution from testifying that two fingerprints "match."
From this article:
But in 1993, a Supreme Court decision required judges to take a more active role in deciding what scientific evidence to admit. In the case of fingerprints, the so-called "Daubert" guidelines would lead to questions such as: Has the practice of fingerprint identification been adequately tested? What's the error rate? Are there standards and controls?
The answers, respectively, are "no," "no one knows," and "no."
I'm home sick and I don't feel like doing more research on this right now. The above links and Google will help if you want to look at it more.
"I had a Walkman with an Enya tape so I suggested that he go to bed and listen to it to see if it calmed him and it actually helped him sleep," Dr McDarby told the BBC programme Go Digital.
"That surprised me," continued Dr McDarby. "The 'Enya Treatment' reduces most people to gibbering idiocy."
Several years ago there was a property-tax revolt in Oregon, similar to an earlier one in California. In Oregon we don't pay sales tax, so property taxes are higher. Some businesses view this as a problem, since they typically own high-value property. Since the tax-limitation measures, state revenue has fallen dramatically. If the state hadn't started legalizing gambling (video poker machines, mostly) they'd be in even deeper shit than they are now.
So what the combo of less property tax and more gambling has done is shift the tax burden for schools from business to individuals, and disproportionately to poorer individuals, who tend to gamble more (this is not a value judgement, just a fact).
Also, Portland currently has the highest unemployment in the nation - about 9.5% last I checked. Furthermore, our Superintendent or Schools... well, we don't have one right now. Ben Canada (tenure of less than a year) was summarily dismissed for a variety of reasons (*cough* most of which were brought up in the hiring process, not that I'm bitter). This is one of the worst times, financially and politically, for the Portland Public Schools since they were founded.
I hope that helps put this quote from the article in context:
"What would it cost Portland Public Schools, which is already facing a $36 million shortfall, to sign that Microsoft School Agreement?
"A rough number? $500,000," Robinson said, "which translates, roughly, into 10 teaching positions."
The trouble is, if 60 days isn't enough time to audit 25,000 machines it sure as hell isn't enough time to convert them to Linux. It boggles my mind that Microsoft is going so far out of its way to piss people off. [Insert ob. Princess Cinnamon-Bun quote here]
To answer your question, I'm very reluctant to give out my email address (even a web-based spam-catcher) to anyone. I'm even more reluctant when I think it will be used to market to me.
I just downloaded a trial-ware app the other day, and the company in question also wanted my email address, physical address, who I worked for, etc. All of the form items were required. I said, "bullshit," and did a Google search for the program - a minute later I was installing it.
So here's a question back: Why are you requiring people to register in the first place? Not knowing you or your business, I'd make two guesses:
You're hoping to prevent your trialware being "pirated" or cracked, perhaps by keying each copy uniquely so you can identify the source of a cracked version.
To collect information so you can market to me later, or sell my personal information to some other company.
Frankly, I think they're both stupid reasons. First, you can't prevent a determined person from cracking your software, or getting a cracked copy if he/she wants it. Second, if you'r eethical and up-front about using the information for marketing purposes then most people will just opt-out.
Unless you've got a better reason, think hard about why you're making it more difficult for people to get your software - and why you weren't clueful enough to figure out people wouldn't register in the first place.
Lastly - hours?? That's one of the great things about online software distribution - you can have it right now. Unless I were convinced you were truly the only source in the world, I wouldn't even consider waiting that long.
Titanium has been used in high-end bicycles for some time. Litespeed and Merlin are the two big original manufacturers, although some others have come on board. Ti's pretty hard to work, though, so Joe's Bike Shop and Espresso isn't going to be able to buy the kit necessary to work it.
Litespeed cold works a lot of their tubing, which they say creates a stronger tube. They make some breath-takingbikes. And they're breath-takingly expensive, too, believe me.
For some time now people have been arguing the relative benefits of different bike materials. For most of bike history it was steel, but steel's heavy, plus it rusts. You're lucky to get a steel frame under 5 pounds. Some people still swear by the loose feel of a steel bike, but steel is on its way out. Because it's so damn heavy you can't make a really stiff bike from steel - tube stiffness squares as diameter doubles.
This is a win for aluminum, and the reason Cannondale can make such fat-tube aluminum bikes. The Litespeed Blade (Ti) has skinny, horizontally stiff and very aero tubing, but it's not so laterally stiff. Let me tell you, when you weigh 220 and you really pound on the pedals, you appreciate the extra width of aluminum tubing. Some people think it's too stiff, though. A nice aluminum frame (like mine, even if it's a few years old) can weigh 2.75 pounds. Unreal.
Carbon fiber has gotten big lately, too. Tell me this doesn't make your mouth water. That's right - it's got no seat tube. No way can you do that with any metal. Carbon's frighteningly light, but fragile - little scratches really build up and can adversly affect the frame. If you T-bone a carbon bike, one of two things will happen: (a) nothing, (b) you're walking home carrying $2,500 worth of plastic. Trek makes a lot of carbon bikes, including the one Lance Armstrong has been dominating the Tour with. That frame weighs 2.25 pounds.
Trouble is, the start-up cost for a carbon bike fab is astronomical - higher than any other material. If you want a custom frame, you're likely SOL. This is where Ti shines - custom frames are almost as easy as steel.
Here in Portland OR many people have taken up anti-spam measures. In Southeast Portland these signs don't last long before being torn down or, even better, defaced. A group has made giant stickers saying, "I AM UGLY LITTER" and pasted them over these "work from home/lose weight now" things. Very cool.
Off-topic, billboard defacing is quite a sport here. You may have seen a March of Dimes billboard feature Daisy Fuentes and the tagline, "Daisy takes folic acid. Do you?" The "folic" has been blacked out on many of these:)
Off-off-topic, Kate Moss was featured on a billboard for milk some years ago, when she was doing the Calvin Klein "Obsession" ads. There was a huge photo of her with a white milk "moustache" and the tagline, "Calcium. It's my obsession." The following letters were paint-bombed out on several of them - "Cal" & "i" - needless to say, they were replaced pretty fast.
Ok, this isn't a karma whore, since I'm already at the cap. It is one of my favorite Onion articles ever, though. I wonder if Steven likes it? I bet he would:)
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND--Nobel Prize-winning physicist Stephen Hawking stunned the international scientific community Monday with his latest breakthrough, a remarkably advanced cybernetic exoskeleton designed to replace his wheelchair.
Hawking, paralyzed since early adulthood with the degenerative nerve disease ALS, unveiled the new creation at a press conference at Cambridge University.
"I am faster, stronger... better than before," Hawking told reporters via his suit's built-in voice synthesizer.
Apparently these CDs still adhere to the Red Book (somehow). But the consensus seems to be that the Key2Audio protection isn't that great:
Bypassing it: CDFreaks article, although I don'tthink they're the original posters of this method.
Hardware solution: AOpen CD 56X AKH/A80 (unconfirmed)
Windows software solution #1: EAC. This is truly excellent software in its own regard, and apparently it bypasses Key2Audio nicely. You're better off Googling for EAC, as the site isn't updated often. Also check out the EAC mailing list, and this message in particular.
Windows software solution #2: CloneCD. Many swear by it, but I haven't used it myself.
Most importantly, the tests are over - this is for real. It seems that Celine is Sony's biggest-selling "artist" - they wouldn't use her as a beta test.
I went in and signed up for a new account (spambot12321), and I was never presented with a choice for these items. They asked if I'd like other things ("Send me special offers from selected Yahoo! partners through Yahoo! Delivers."), but the items listed in http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount never showed up.
So I don't know about other people who say they've already set these to "no," but at least for new accounts you're signed up for all of it whether you want to be or not. Bastards.
Breath into a paper bag for a minute before you hyperventilate. First, this wasn't a SLAPP, it was a court order. It wasn't even a criminal charge yet. More to the point, it was justified. Here's what the press release (which you obviously didn't read) says:
"The purpose of the search warrant was to determine the identity of the person who sent the email that caused our system to fail so we could then determine whether further investigation would be necessary."
Think for a second: you're a government agency, and you notice someone sending bits to your server that make it crash. What's your first response? What's anyone's first response? Find out who did it, and search warrants are very good at that.
Second, this all could have been avoided if Ian Gulliver hadn't freaked when he got the order. If he'd waited a bleeding 24 hours this would have been resolved and ORBZ could have gone on its merry way.
I'm going to resist drawing any parallels between your hysterical and incorrect assessment of the situation and Ian's similar reaction, except to say: pay attention. Life is hard enough without going off half-cocked on incomplete information.
Slashdot Mirror
First, more or less on-topic, and to clear up a common misconception: yes, the USPS has a monopoly on first-class mail. No, we shouldn't consider allowing competition. What most people don't know is that the USPS is mandated (by the same government that gave it the monopoly in the first place) to pick and and deliver at every address in the country every day. Think of the mind-boggling logistics behind that statement. Then realize that FedEx and UPS sometimes give their own deliveries to the USPS because they can't be bothered to go Smallville.
Second, on the Civil War remark, check out Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South , which is based on just that premise: how could the South win the Civil War, and what would happen afterwords? Very nicely done.
Let me plug my favorite developer site: Perlmonks: the online community of Perl developers. Don't come expecting your hand to be held, but a little effort will be repaid several times over. Very many nice, knowledgeable people.
I used to run the network for a big architecture firm. We had a nice conference room with a 12-foot rear-projection glass screen, and an LCD projector in the room behind. On weekends we'd often have LAN parties, so one day I decided to drag my box into the room.
Man, I lasted about 3 minutes, and I thought I was going to puke. Staying as far from the screen as possible, I still had to move my head side-to-side to see all the action, and I had bad-ass motion sickness.
The resolution was actually pretty good, even for the 800x600 projector - no real pixelization. I wouldn't do it again, though. On an IMAX I bet it would be even worse.
If the cops get a search warrant for, say, pot plants in your house, they'll be able to tell pretty easily whether you're growing or not. Step 1: find all the plants; step 2: see if they're pot plants.
... 3 years, 4 appeals, and 1 bankruptcy later.
But say they want to look for incriminating digital evidence that you're growing or dealing pot. You can't just decrypt the stuff you want them to see and say, "This is not the encrypted data you're looking for. I can go on my way."
No, they're going to decrypt everything. This means that while they might not find evidence of pot, they might find something else. And sure, it may not stand up in a court of law
In other news, researchers at MIT are now looking at ways to etch binary data on the inside of human skulls, claiming that human skull bone is a more reliable and longer-lived storage medium than most others available.
I was the IS manager at a large architecture firm for years. Architects are a pain in the ass to work with, but a good architect is worth his weight in gold. Architects at their best are integrators and managers as well as designers.
Other posters have mentioned heat, alarms and fire supression levels as examples of things an architect might not understand. In my experience, most architects are pretty good about subbing out work they know they can't do. Architects don't draw plans for the whole project - they design the frame and facades, the interiors and the fixtures, but they usually leave other work for specialists. This means that your plumbing, electrical, etc will be handled by a consultant who does it for a living.
Your best bet is to find an architect with demonstrated experience in the kind of project you have in mind. Then ask for references and visit his(her/its) past projects. If possible, talk with the internal project manager at those sites (the person who dealt with the architect on a daily basis).
Nearly any architect can probably do your job, but it will be very painful with one who is inexperienced. Architects have a long and formal internship system - let your architect get his computer room experience as an intern on someone else's project, not as a lead on your project.
I've read that document before, and I suggest that perhaps you need to re-read it with a more jaundiced eye towards your prejudices.
:P ). It's still worth reading, but only after you filter it a little.
The document now contains several disclaimers admitting that the author's original conclusions have been undermined somewhat by his own hyperbole, ignorance and by new technology (the original was written in 1995 - in web terms, it may as well be written in hieroglyphics on decaying papyrus)(ok, so that's a little exageration of my own...
In particular, he doesn't account for cookies, which are great for web tracking (personally, I block nearly all cookies, but I don't think that session tracking is a malicious use). Cookies can give you very accurate data on visitor use, and proper reporting can turn that into very useful information.
Also, the points he (or she) and you make about IP addresses vs. sessions vs. users are valid, but overblown. Very few people access the same site from different IP address in a given session. You wouldn't want to bet your life savings on these numbers, but they're accurate over 90% of the time, and that's more than enough to get good information (as someone else once said, "Don't believe me? Next time you have a blood test, tell them to take it all to make sure they get an accurate reading.").
We've used WebTrends for month, and I like them quite a lot. For some things they are excellent; for others, not so. A word about methodology: WebTrends tracking code consists of a primary method and a fallback. The primary method uses JavaScript to compute a compressed string of data including much client information and appends this to an HTML image tag - this data is slurped into a database at WebTrends. If JavaScript is disabled, the hit still gets recorded, but without all the fancy extra info. They try to place a unique, persistent cookie with each image load (once per page).
According to WebTrends, over 95% of our visitors have both cookies and JavaScript enabled.
Their reporting tools are very good and comprehensive, containing everything I've seen from the best log analysis software and some things that software can't get (average screen resolution and window size, for instance - I love this). You can customize content groups to your heart's content by modifying some variables in their JS. Their site itself is well made and smart: their help system pops up a content-sensitive window with information for each specific page; if you click to a new page, the help window is updated. Yes, this is relatively easy to implement, but how many sites do it? Too few.
Now, not all is Madam George and roses (to coin a phrase). I've found that WebTrends reports at best 95% of our traffic. Periodically I run a couple home-brew Perl scripts on our logs and it always counts more hits than WebTrends shows (not an issue with my Perl-fu, BTW). Their tech support is decent, but not wonderful - if you have a real issue, you might run around a little. A couple times they've flat-out dropped large chunks of our traffic (e.g. 40% for a day), never to be seen again.
Finally, we get about 10% the traffic the original poster does, so I can't tell you how well they scale. They'll charge a pretty penny for that amount of traffic, too.
To summarize (whew): (a) WebTrends is pretty decent, and excellent for some things; (b) IP-based assumptions and cookie tracking can get you very accurate statistics as long as you can live with the limitations.
- Pick the motherboard first. Your main board is without a doubt the most important part of the machine. Don't skimp - buy the best. Everything else is easily replaceable, and nothing sucks like a slow or buggy main board.
- Buy as much RAM as you can afford, and the slowest CPU your chosen motherboard will take. Then wait 'til CPU prices come down to upgrade. High-end CPUs are consistently the most over-priced component you'll buy.
- Spend some time picking a case. Buy one that's easy to work on and has lots of room.
- Shell out some dough for the best (not biggest) power supply you can. You don't want part of your shiny new system fragged by bad power.
- Buy a great monitor. My monitor has lasted me through 2 complete rebuilds of my box (3.5 years), and has another few years left. The monitor is the most expensive single component, and the only one that you can never upgrade.
- Unless you're ready for some pain, don't be a doof and try to overclock. The few % performance increase isn't worth frying a CPU, plus it means you don't need a $75 fan that sounds like a wind tunnel.
- Be prepared for a bit of a pain in the ass. Don't count on manufacturer tech support to help you much - they'll mostly point fingers at other components. This is the part that sucks compared with buying a Dell.
Buying advice:- It looks like a nice thick book, but it's very padded. The font is huge (12 to 14 points), there's a lot of padding
(most code samples listed twice, 40 pages of appendix material that could have
been 8 URLs), the margins are huge, and there's an awful lot of repetition (the
10 lines justifying -wT are repeated nearly every time it's used in a program). I bet that the Mouse book squeezes twice as much
content into 450 pages as this one does in 525.
- Some chapters belong better in a Perl book ("Tied Variables").
- Some inclusions/exclusions and focus choices are very odd. There's a very
detailed chapter for Mason, but no mention of templates (literally - not even in
the index).
- Their style is very choppy. They'll present a couple lines of code, then a
paragraph talking about it, repeat. It's very difficult to get a cohesive view
of the program this way - it's spoon-fed to you rather than presented whole. (Undoubtedly this is why they repeat all the code at the end of each chapter, but I prefer longer chunks of unbroken code).
In short, the book is much more vocational than educational. I think this was a conscious decision of theirs, and as such I can hardly fault it - they know their target audience better than I do. However, I've not opened this book once since I read it (cover-to-cover), while I still refer to the Mouse weekly.Need to hack up some code fast? This book will help. If you really want to learn CGI, to know why and how it works, to have a broader grounding in the technologies used with it, and to build a firm foundation for future self-teaching, then IMHO nothing beats the Mouse book.
On the one hand, a pilotless bomber is a great idea - why risk a human life if a machine can do the job? On the other hand it's more than a little scary - when your wars are fought by machines, human beings are in the way.
For nearly all of history, some people have thought they have a license or right to kill other people. Its one of the primary activities of humans - kill other humans. To become more efficient at this, we keep making human-killing technology better and better. Now we're talking about giving that license to machines.
The biggest difference between the movie Blade Runner (which I love) and PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the movie was based (which I also love, for different reasons) is that in Dick's world androids have no compassion, no caritas. They have no inate regard for human life, or any life for that matter.
The Nuremburg trials established that "I was following orders" is not a valid excuse for committing atrocities during wartime. That only works for humans, though, since machines have no moral compass. We're talking about giving a license to kill humans to a machine with no soul, no regard for life, and no accountability. All in the name of efficiency.
For those curious (or who know already) about Conway's Game of Life, the best implementation I've seen is a Java applet by Alan Hensel. It has numerous popular patterns preloaded (including a Turing machine, IIRC). It's primary characteristic, though, is blazing speed - an order of magnitude faster than any other implementation I've seen, including compiled ones.
Let's leave out, for now, the fact that it's not possible to verify this claim at all: there's no way to test all living people and compare their prints. This is troubling, but a bit of a red herring.
More troubling is the way fingerprinting is practiced. There's a case in Philly right now where a federal judge has prohibited the prosecution from testifying that two fingerprints "match." From this article: The answers, respectively, are "no," "no one knows," and "no."
I'm home sick and I don't feel like doing more research on this right now. The above links and Google will help if you want to look at it more.
Heh - actually I said "Cinnamon Bun" 'cause I couldn't remember how to spell "Leia" :)
So what the combo of less property tax and more gambling has done is shift the tax burden for schools from business to individuals, and disproportionately to poorer individuals, who tend to gamble more (this is not a value judgement, just a fact).
Also, Portland currently has the highest unemployment in the nation - about 9.5% last I checked. Furthermore, our Superintendent or Schools
I hope that helps put this quote from the article in context: The trouble is, if 60 days isn't enough time to audit 25,000 machines it sure as hell isn't enough time to convert them to Linux. It boggles my mind that Microsoft is going so far out of its way to piss people off. [Insert ob. Princess Cinnamon-Bun quote here]
I just downloaded a trial-ware app the other day, and the company in question also wanted my email address, physical address, who I worked for, etc. All of the form items were required. I said, "bullshit," and did a Google search for the program - a minute later I was installing it.
So here's a question back: Why are you requiring people to register in the first place? Not knowing you or your business, I'd make two guesses:
- You're hoping to prevent your trialware being "pirated" or cracked, perhaps by keying each copy uniquely so you can identify the source of a cracked version.
- To collect information so you can market to me later, or sell my personal information to some other company.
Frankly, I think they're both stupid reasons. First, you can't prevent a determined person from cracking your software, or getting a cracked copy if he/she wants it. Second, if you'r eethical and up-front about using the information for marketing purposes then most people will just opt-out.Unless you've got a better reason, think hard about why you're making it more difficult for people to get your software - and why you weren't clueful enough to figure out people wouldn't register in the first place.
Lastly - hours?? That's one of the great things about online software distribution - you can have it right now. Unless I were convinced you were truly the only source in the world, I wouldn't even consider waiting that long.
Titanium has been used in high-end bicycles for some time. Litespeed and Merlin are the two big original manufacturers, although some others have come on board. Ti's pretty hard to work, though, so Joe's Bike Shop and Espresso isn't going to be able to buy the kit necessary to work it.
:)
Litespeed cold works a lot of their tubing, which they say creates a stronger tube. They make some breath-taking bikes. And they're breath-takingly expensive, too, believe me.
For some time now people have been arguing the relative benefits of different bike materials. For most of bike history it was steel, but steel's heavy, plus it rusts. You're lucky to get a steel frame under 5 pounds. Some people still swear by the loose feel of a steel bike, but steel is on its way out. Because it's so damn heavy you can't make a really stiff bike from steel - tube stiffness squares as diameter doubles.
This is a win for aluminum, and the reason Cannondale can make such fat-tube aluminum bikes. The Litespeed Blade (Ti) has skinny, horizontally stiff and very aero tubing, but it's not so laterally stiff. Let me tell you, when you weigh 220 and you really pound on the pedals, you appreciate the extra width of aluminum tubing. Some people think it's too stiff, though. A nice aluminum frame (like mine, even if it's a few years old) can weigh 2.75 pounds. Unreal.
Carbon fiber has gotten big lately, too. Tell me this doesn't make your mouth water. That's right - it's got no seat tube. No way can you do that with any metal. Carbon's frighteningly light, but fragile - little scratches really build up and can adversly affect the frame. If you T-bone a carbon bike, one of two things will happen: (a) nothing, (b) you're walking home carrying $2,500 worth of plastic. Trek makes a lot of carbon bikes, including the one Lance Armstrong has been dominating the Tour with. That frame weighs 2.25 pounds.
Trouble is, the start-up cost for a carbon bike fab is astronomical - higher than any other material. If you want a custom frame, you're likely SOL. This is where Ti shines - custom frames are almost as easy as steel.
Thus endeth the lesson
Here in Portland OR many people have taken up anti-spam measures. In Southeast Portland these signs don't last long before being torn down or, even better, defaced. A group has made giant stickers saying, "I AM UGLY LITTER" and pasted them over these "work from home/lose weight now" things. Very cool.
:)
Off-topic, billboard defacing is quite a sport here. You may have seen a March of Dimes billboard feature Daisy Fuentes and the tagline, "Daisy takes folic acid. Do you?" The "folic" has been blacked out on many of these
Off-off-topic, Kate Moss was featured on a billboard for milk some years ago, when she was doing the Calvin Klein "Obsession" ads. There was a huge photo of her with a white milk "moustache" and the tagline, "Calcium. It's my obsession." The following letters were paint-bombed out on several of them - "Cal" & "i" - needless to say, they were replaced pretty fast.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3123/hawkingexo.html
Steven Hawking Builds Robotic Exoskeleton
- Bypassing it: CDFreaks article, although I don'tthink they're the original posters of this method.
- Hardware solution: AOpen CD 56X AKH/A80 (unconfirmed)
- Windows software solution #1: EAC. This is truly excellent software in its own regard, and apparently it bypasses Key2Audio nicely. You're better off Googling for EAC, as the site isn't updated often. Also check out the EAC mailing list, and this message in particular.
- Windows software solution #2: CloneCD. Many swear by it, but I haven't used it myself.
Most importantly, the tests are over - this is for real. It seems that Celine is Sony's biggest-selling "artist" - they wouldn't use her as a beta test.I went in and signed up for a new account (spambot12321), and I was never presented with a choice for these items. They asked if I'd like other things ("Send me special offers from selected Yahoo! partners through Yahoo! Delivers."), but the items listed in http://subscribe.yahoo.com/showaccount never showed up.
So I don't know about other people who say they've already set these to "no," but at least for new accounts you're signed up for all of it whether you want to be or not. Bastards.
Second, this all could have been avoided if Ian Gulliver hadn't freaked when he got the order. If he'd waited a bleeding 24 hours this would have been resolved and ORBZ could have gone on its merry way.
I'm going to resist drawing any parallels between your hysterical and incorrect assessment of the situation and Ian's similar reaction, except to say: pay attention. Life is hard enough without going off half-cocked on incomplete information.
Sheesh - how hard can it be? They're both registered in bloody Las Vegas already ...
Harrah's Entertainment, Inc (RIOSPORTS3-DOM)
1023 Cherry Road
Memphis, TN 38117
US
Domain Name: RIOSPORTS.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Wilkins, Bobby (BW1169) hwilkins@HARRAHS.COM
Harrah's Entertainment, Inc.
1023 Cherry Rd
Memphis, TN 38117-5423
(901) 537-3785 (FAX) (901) 820-2570
Billing Contact:
Howard, Anika (AHU21) anhoward@HARRAHS.COM
Harrah's Entertainment, Inc.
One Harrah's Court
Las Vegas, NV 89193-8905
702-407-6456 (FAX) 702-407-6500
Record last updated on 14-Jan-2002.
Record expires on 23-Feb-2004.
Record created on 23-Feb-2001.
Database last updated on 21-Mar-2002 02:57:00 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.HARRAHS.COM 12.104.204.36
NS2.HARRAHS.COM 12.104.204.38
Registrant:
Harrah's Entertainment, Inc (BETRIO2-DOM)
1023 Cherry Road
Memphis, TN 38117
US
Domain Name: BETRIO.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Wilkins, Bobby (BW1169) hwilkins@HARRAHS.COM
Harrah's Entertainment, Inc.
1023 Cherry Rd
Memphis, TN 38117-5423
(901) 537-3785 (FAX) (901) 820-2570
Billing Contact:
Howard, Anika (AHU21) anhoward@HARRAHS.COM
Harrah's Entertainment, Inc.
One Harrah's Court
Las Vegas, NV 89193-8905
702-407-6456 (FAX) 702-407-6500
Record last updated on 14-Jan-2002.
Record expires on 23-Feb-2004.
Record created on 23-Feb-2001.
Database last updated on 21-Mar-2002 02:57:00 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.HARRAHS.COM 12.104.204.36
NS2.HARRAHS.COM 12.104.204.38