Not necessarily this particular item, but cheap machines in general. For example, this whole election fiasco in America could have been resolved if simple voting software could be installed on units that were $50 apiece. No "it's too expensive to deploy" excuses, the entire nation could be outfitted with these machines for less than the price of George Bush's campaign.
Heck, there are probably millions of old machines sitting idle that could do this kind of job. If recreating new low-cost machines is a money losing proposition, how about tax incentives or such to create a nationwide repository of old machines that still have some use to them? Not every application needs a 1Ghz trillion color 512MB RAM Beowulf cluster. Send all the VIC-20's to Palm Beach County! (Big characters that senior citizens can read!)
I once tried about 10 different registrars in an attempt to register "---.com" Speednames was the only one which said I could register this domain. It was only a day later when they sent me another email saying the domain name was illegal and couldn't be registered.
Started my professional career for a Michigan-based consulting company CBSI. Michigan is about as dull as you want it to be, but a hard place to get excited about unless you are a serious sports fan.
Was sent to Hawaii for a six month stint. Perfect weather all the time, the most laid back culture I've ever seen. The place to be if you are a outdoors person or an ocean lover. But the cost of living is even higher than Silicon Valley, the overflow of tourists can get irritating, and after a couple of months rock fever starts to set in.
After that, I was sent to the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Lots of great, cheap food. Lots of great cheap anything, with the lowest cost of living of any place I've ever lived, and no state income tax to boot. A live music lovers paradise. But...it's still Texas. Outside of Austin, even within it, all the old Southern ways still hold true. Probably a bit disconcerning to people who weren't raised in that environment.
Got bored with Austin and finally packed my things to take a contract job in Silicon Valley. Lived in Mountain View, took the CalTrain to my job in San Mateo. Reverse commute, so traffic wasn't a problem. Loved being ecologically friendly, to the point where I could even take my bike on the trains and busses! Stanford, Fresh Choice, Frye's Electronics, Tony Romas, all within easy reach. Twas really like paradise to me, and in the six months I was there, I didn't have enough time to think of anything I didn't like about it.
But alas, I was destined to go to Japan. Lived in a Tokyo "apartment" about the size of a college dorm room, took trains where you could barely squeeze yourself on board, let alone a bike. The air is smoggy, the language and customs are strange, the double-standard between Japanese and foreigners will confound you til your dying days, and $5 for a cup of coffee (no refills) is the norm. But the people are friendly, and there's literally something for everybody. Japan is truely whatever you make of it, as long as you have the adventurous spirit to brave out the initial adjustment period. And it's here where I've dug my roots for the long haul.
I think I was going to make a point with all this, and it probably was something like this: Silicon Valley is a great place for a geek, but you really have to look at the whole picture of who you are and what you want out of live before you decide on the place where you will finally attach yourself.
I am starting to believe that we have the ability to see into the fourth dimension, but that we just don't know how to look for it.
I live up on a big hill, and each morning I usually go speeding down on my bicycle. There is one house down the hill with a particularly well-hidden driveway, out of which a car occasionally comes backing out. A couple of months ago I was racing down when the car starting backing out. There was no chance of stopping in time, so I had to crash into a nearby tree to avoid hitting the car. The usual pain and obscenities insued.
Now, a rational person would take this as a sign that he should bike more slowly and cautiously down this hill. Fortunately, I am blind to common sense. But a strange thing has happened. Twice since then, as I started biking down the hill, I had the "feeling" that the car was about to come backing out. Both times I slowed down. And both times my instinct was correct, as the car came backing out as my feeling indicated it would.
I could not see or hear the car (my bike is kind of noisy since hitting the tree), and even if I could I would have no way of knowing that the car was actually going to back up (as opposed to just idle there for a while) Is it possible from my previous accident that I've learned how to see where this car is going to be X seconds ahead of time?
The daily bike journey is the only time I ever really get this feeling, so I suppose I will continue the experiment until I either hit the car (or tree while avoiding it), or correctly predict its appearance enough times to convince me that it's not just a coincidence. But regardless, I'm not willing to rule out our capacity to see into a future (not "the future", since there are probably an infinite number of those...)
Bush leads by 30,000 votes in Florida with 96% of the polls closed, according to CNN.
Still, I think there are some real serious issues involved with CNN potentially tempering with the election by releasing Florida results early. If this kind of thing was happening in Peru or some other third world country, the United States itself would probably appeal the results of the election and ask for a re-vote.
Whats the problem? Open Source is a decision of the developer.
I don't object to the decision of the developer. I do object to people complaining when a developer/company makes the decision not to Open Source their code. The staunchest advocates of Open Source believe that all code should be that way. And then those who also defend privacy issues say they have the right to their secrets. It's those people with this hypocritical viewpoint that I'm attacking.
I am sick of hearing all of the hypocrites who can actually advocate Open Source and Privacy in the same breath.
If you believe in Open Source, wouldn't you believe that this world would be a whole lot better if everybody had access to every piece of information about everyone? Full disclosure to everybody would solve poverty, hunger, war, and almost every other major problem plaguing us!
If you are firm on maintaining your privacy, wouldn't you respect a company's rights to protect their own property? If your hernia or sexual adventures are important enough to protect with military-grade encryption, shouldn't those same benefits be given to the products that make companies like Microsoft billions of dollars a year?
Soylent Green: This concoction becomes so popular that the last human on earth eats himself, much like the Zen snake devouring itself from the tail up.
Short for Gaia RAM. How many terrabytes of space are we leaving to waste in all the trees, rocks, people, and gerbils in the world? I/We/Gaia owe it to the harmony of the universe to harness this potential!
Roma-ji wouldn't be a good choice, because there are several different types of roma-ji ("sha" or "sya"? "cha" or "tya"? "tsu" or "tu"?), which means you would have to parse for multiple, variable letter formations to find a keyword.
In addition to the pictoral kanji letters, Japanese also consists of two additional alphabets; hiragana (used in Native Japanese words) and katakana (used mostly for foreign loanwords) Both are under 128 characters each, so while it wouldn't be ASCII, you could program in Japanese using a one-byte character system.
If this is for a public access site, set up the browsers so they cannot manually enter URLs, then set up bookmarks to kid friendly indexes like Yahooligans This provides access to sites for "breast cancer" and "chicken recipes", but won't return anything for "hot anal sex"
Of course, the Amiga wasn't released until 1985, after other home computers with full color graphics, sprites, and multi-voice sound had been available for years (6 years for the Atari 800, 3 for the Commodore 64, to mention a few systems).
Even before the Commodore 64 there was the VIC-20.
8 colors, 3 sound channels, and even with only 3.5 of RAM it still played a mean game of GORF!
I think if anything, Amiga helped turn the corner from fun action games like Pac Man and Donkey Kong to bloated overkill like Defender of the Crown...
My iMode features a mobile version of Gunpey, the New Age Tetris successor. I have a permanent callous on my thumb from trying to move this stupid little joystick around faster than humanly possible. But it's only a matter of time before these phones become even more Gameboy-like, probably with the ability to download and play every classic game of the 20th century to boot.
Re:SearchSpell, "then" and "than"
on
Quickiefest 2000
·
· Score: 1
The beauty of searchspell is that I can fix things like this as soon as they are brought to my attention. "than" is now a suggested option for this search, but unfortunately still not number one (because "then" is a pretty common word in itself) I'll start working on phrase analysis in phase three, after a bit more algorithm tweaking. That will mean a massive increase in database size though, so I'll need a bit more muscle. But thanks to everybody who's slashdotted my site, I have a ton of data to analyze first. Does anyone know how well MySQL performs on databases of over 20GB? - Joe Petrow http://www.searchspell.com
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily this particular item, but cheap machines in general. For example, this whole election fiasco in America could have been resolved if simple voting software could be installed on units that were $50 apiece. No "it's too expensive to deploy" excuses, the entire nation could be outfitted with these machines for less than the price of George Bush's campaign.
Heck, there are probably millions of old machines sitting idle that could do this kind of job. If recreating new low-cost machines is a money losing proposition, how about tax incentives or such to create a nationwide repository of old machines that still have some use to them? Not every application needs a 1Ghz trillion color 512MB RAM Beowulf cluster. Send all the VIC-20's to Palm Beach County! (Big characters that senior citizens can read!)
While you're waiting, Slashdot had a nice review of The Story About Ping. Packet transit made so simple even a child can understand!
I once tried about 10 different registrars in an attempt to register "---.com" Speednames was the only one which said I could register this domain. It was only a day later when they sent me another email saying the domain name was illegal and couldn't be registered.
Was sent to Hawaii for a six month stint. Perfect weather all the time, the most laid back culture I've ever seen. The place to be if you are a outdoors person or an ocean lover. But the cost of living is even higher than Silicon Valley, the overflow of tourists can get irritating, and after a couple of months rock fever starts to set in.
After that, I was sent to the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Lots of great, cheap food. Lots of great cheap anything, with the lowest cost of living of any place I've ever lived, and no state income tax to boot. A live music lovers paradise. But...it's still Texas. Outside of Austin, even within it, all the old Southern ways still hold true. Probably a bit disconcerning to people who weren't raised in that environment.
Got bored with Austin and finally packed my things to take a contract job in Silicon Valley. Lived in Mountain View, took the CalTrain to my job in San Mateo. Reverse commute, so traffic wasn't a problem. Loved being ecologically friendly, to the point where I could even take my bike on the trains and busses! Stanford, Fresh Choice, Frye's Electronics, Tony Romas, all within easy reach. Twas really like paradise to me, and in the six months I was there, I didn't have enough time to think of anything I didn't like about it.
But alas, I was destined to go to Japan. Lived in a Tokyo "apartment" about the size of a college dorm room, took trains where you could barely squeeze yourself on board, let alone a bike. The air is smoggy, the language and customs are strange, the double-standard between Japanese and foreigners will confound you til your dying days, and $5 for a cup of coffee (no refills) is the norm. But the people are friendly, and there's literally something for everybody. Japan is truely whatever you make of it, as long as you have the adventurous spirit to brave out the initial adjustment period. And it's here where I've dug my roots for the long haul.
I think I was going to make a point with all this, and it probably was something like this: Silicon Valley is a great place for a geek, but you really have to look at the whole picture of who you are and what you want out of live before you decide on the place where you will finally attach yourself.
I live up on a big hill, and each morning I usually go speeding down on my bicycle. There is one house down the hill with a particularly well-hidden driveway, out of which a car occasionally comes backing out. A couple of months ago I was racing down when the car starting backing out. There was no chance of stopping in time, so I had to crash into a nearby tree to avoid hitting the car. The usual pain and obscenities insued.
Now, a rational person would take this as a sign that he should bike more slowly and cautiously down this hill. Fortunately, I am blind to common sense. But a strange thing has happened. Twice since then, as I started biking down the hill, I had the "feeling" that the car was about to come backing out. Both times I slowed down. And both times my instinct was correct, as the car came backing out as my feeling indicated it would.
I could not see or hear the car (my bike is kind of noisy since hitting the tree), and even if I could I would have no way of knowing that the car was actually going to back up (as opposed to just idle there for a while) Is it possible from my previous accident that I've learned how to see where this car is going to be X seconds ahead of time?
The daily bike journey is the only time I ever really get this feeling, so I suppose I will continue the experiment until I either hit the car (or tree while avoiding it), or correctly predict its appearance enough times to convince me that it's not just a coincidence. But regardless, I'm not willing to rule out our capacity to see into a future (not "the future", since there are probably an infinite number of those...)
97% of the votes in:
Bush: 2,759,232
Gore: 2,707,798
CNN estimates deceased Democratic governor Mel Carnahan wins Senate race in Missouri .
Still, I think there are some real serious issues involved with CNN potentially tempering with the election by releasing Florida results early. If this kind of thing was happening in Peru or some other third world country, the United States itself would probably appeal the results of the election and ask for a re-vote.
I don't object to the decision of the developer. I do object to people complaining when a developer/company makes the decision not to Open Source their code. The staunchest advocates of Open Source believe that all code should be that way. And then those who also defend privacy issues say they have the right to their secrets. It's those people with this hypocritical viewpoint that I'm attacking.
I am sick of hearing all of the hypocrites who can actually advocate Open Source and Privacy in the same breath.
If you believe in Open Source, wouldn't you believe that this world would be a whole lot better if everybody had access to every piece of information about everyone? Full disclosure to everybody would solve poverty, hunger, war, and almost every other major problem plaguing us!
If you are firm on maintaining your privacy, wouldn't you respect a company's rights to protect their own property? If your hernia or sexual adventures are important enough to protect with military-grade encryption, shouldn't those same benefits be given to the products that make companies like Microsoft billions of dollars a year?
Choose one, and shut up about the other!
The text is there, but all of the graphics are gone.
STOP THE HUMANOID STOP THE INTRUDER!
Soylent Green: This concoction becomes so popular that the last human on earth eats himself, much like the Zen snake devouring itself from the tail up.
The dolphins have mutated and are taking over the world!
searchspell.com
They already did that years ago, with The Simpsons meet The Critic.
Short for Gaia RAM. How many terrabytes of space are we leaving to waste in all the trees, rocks, people, and gerbils in the world? I/We/Gaia owe it to the harmony of the universe to harness this potential!
Roma-ji wouldn't be a good choice, because there are several different types of roma-ji ("sha" or "sya"? "cha" or "tya"? "tsu" or "tu"?), which means you would have to parse for multiple, variable letter formations to find a keyword.
In addition to the pictoral kanji letters, Japanese also consists of two additional alphabets; hiragana (used in Native Japanese words) and katakana (used mostly for foreign loanwords) Both are under 128 characters each, so while it wouldn't be ASCII, you could program in Japanese using a one-byte character system.
If this is for a public access site, set up the browsers so they cannot manually enter URLs, then set up bookmarks to kid friendly indexes like Yahooligans This provides access to sites for "breast cancer" and "chicken recipes", but won't return anything for "hot anal sex"
Even before the Commodore 64 there was the VIC-20. 8 colors, 3 sound channels, and even with only 3.5 of RAM it still played a mean game of GORF!
I think if anything, Amiga helped turn the corner from fun action games like Pac Man and Donkey Kong to bloated overkill like Defender of the Crown...
My iMode features a mobile version of Gunpey, the New Age Tetris successor. I have a permanent callous on my thumb from trying to move this stupid little joystick around faster than humanly possible. But it's only a matter of time before these phones become even more Gameboy-like, probably with the ability to download and play every classic game of the 20th century to boot.
The beauty of searchspell is that I can fix things like this as soon as they are brought to my attention. "than" is now a suggested option for this search, but unfortunately still not number one (because "then" is a pretty common word in itself) I'll start working on phrase analysis in phase three, after a bit more algorithm tweaking. That will mean a massive increase in database size though, so I'll need a bit more muscle. But thanks to everybody who's slashdotted my site, I have a ton of data to analyze first. Does anyone know how well MySQL performs on databases of over 20GB? - Joe Petrow http://www.searchspell.com
Write a program that hacks into the other program while it is running, gets its response, and then sends off the winning counter.
Poem rhythm is down pat,
But it lacks a soul.
(not to mention that true haiku requires a seasonal reference, but I doubt that's a condition of this contest...)
Type SYS 32800 123,45,6 into a Commodore 128 in BASIC mode...