Ali estimates that for every e-mail Penn Media
sends out, his firm wins one sale and retail
stores win 20.
Wow, A 2100 percent efficiency on advertisement! For every spam they send out
, the recipient buys 21 RC cars on average! For anyone still believing there is
any correlation between these numbers, please, use some common sense! The statement is so silly it just hurts to just think about the mental state of the person uttering it.
I do not think a perfect tracking system would be the answer
Most certainly not:-)
would you really like BubbleChick to know what pages you have surfed, what interests you have and how long you spent looking at banner X (and page X)?
I don't know. Who is BubbleChick? According to google she is a 17 year old girl who likes to chat. Which means I doubt she will be able to do me much harm with it.
But seriously. I was not proposing a perfect tracking system. We already have a flawed one, which suits most of us fine. It's called cookies. Unless you give the advertiser your name and address, there is little chance (s)he will be able to know who you are. Also, most browsers allow you to turn them off if you prefer that. And I have no qualms about somebody tracking my web-browsing habit anonymously. And, the advertisers already do this, but for some reason they don't seem to use it very much. It's possible they want a perfect system, but I do not.
Re:" ... Damn it! Why are they so stupid? ... "
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It's not stupidity that drives marketers to do such things. It's desperate greed.
Exactly. My comment was not about the marketers stupidity (because they are not). It was about people with actual websites selling ads to those marketers. Shure, today there is an established way of doing that, but it's entirely on the marketers terms.
Why would a website allow ads that drive more surfers away then generate revenue for the site? It's not that the marketer would care, once he has destroyed one place, he can buy ads somewhere else and destroy that too... But content-providers, (free) webhotels, etc... should really consider when it would be wise to do what the marketers want.
Now, I understand that your average mom and pop business can't do that. But why do the big players also who can actually dictate their own terms also use so annoying and stupid pop-ups/unders/whatever?
There is something fundamentally wrong with how even legitimate advertizing works on the Internet. I'm not talking about spam. I'm not talking about porn-sites. I'm talking about the everyday normal practice of pop-ups like msn, geocities or a number of others pop up.
One would figure that most of these big-time players (who can afford to do something different than the small porn-sites popping up every day) would do it, if they want to keep the surfers there. Yet most of the time, the same annoying pop-up comes up each time I click on a link (e.g. next page).
One should think that these people would be smart enough to understand that after having seen the same lotto ad 5 times in a minute, and not even once clicked on it, that I don't care much for lotto. But no! The website in question will continually annoy me with the same intrusive add, time after time, with the only reasonable conclusion that I will leave the site, and surf somewhere else. Thus the company looses one potential web-surfer and ad-revenue income.
Damn it! Why are they so stupid? This is what cookies are for! They should track my browsing behaviour, find out what I'm interested in, and serve me those kinds of ads. At the very least, they should rotate the ads. And once they have my cookie, they should limit the number of times they will show me the same ad in a given period.
There is a reason that web-advertisements are not effective! Even when they have all the tools they need to track my browsing behaviour, profile my browsing habits, check which ads I click on, etc, they still keep pestering me with the same ad for the same product ten times in a minute! Even when they know the only outcome of this is that they loose the opportunity to sell me other stuff!
Obviously, I can take some steps myself for myself to get rid of the annoyance, such as pop-up blockers and so on. But that is not my point. What I do not understand is why even the big guys (content-providers) insist on giving the cheesiest advertisers the opportunity to drive customers away from their site. One should think that they would be smarter, but obviously they are not!
Bah, people have been connecting nerve-cells with electrodes for a long time before. I fail to see why it's so special to use it to control a robot.
Now, if the robot would actually do something useful that we can't already build today with a cheap onboard computer, I would be impressed. But I suspect it doesn't. First, the article doesn't mention anything special it can do (it says it's a "thinker", but that's hardly productive unless we can figure out what it's "thinking" about). Secondly, it has only 60 connection points (surely not enough for any realistic kind of sensory input). Third, it has only "thousands of rat neuron cells". Finally, none of the researchers have any idea what they are doing (not that that's particulary bad, it's exactly what "research" means).
Sure, you can grow a cell-culture somewhere, and it may even have some of the same attributes as the real thing grown from the same cells. But it lacks it's overall organization (which is good, unless you want something that acts like a mouse) (but is bad, because we don't even know how to put any kind of structure in it), and we still don't understand it (which is bad, because we can't use it to do anything useful, nor can we mass-produce it once somebody has been able to splot out something that actually does something useful).
Sure, there probably are "interesting emergent properties" in cultures of nerve-cells. But don't expect a hybrot to take over the world in the next weeks... Actually, I'm more interested in the work in transforming them into this particular quote from the article: "Currently, Steven DeWeerth, professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, is using Potter's findings to build actual circuits in silicon, although this work is still preliminary.". Now, that could maybe lead us somewhere where we get a better understanding of how neurons combine to do stuff...
The boss (who is very technically astute) says: NO to using pthreads in any of our production applications. He wants us to do things the old fashion way (fork(), exec(), shared memory, etc).
I applaud your boss for his decision. There are many disadvantages of using threads, that I'm more than sure your boss knows about. See e.g. this discussion for more detail.
Now, granted, some applications will also benefit enough from threads to outweigh those disadvantages. It is rare, but it happens.
What I'm looking for are document technically detailed yet directed more towards management. Not something on the level of 'pthreads for Dummies', but more along the lines of 'pthreads for Managers'. Any suggestions? URLs or Books are fine."
If you have a boss that already knows enough technical stuff to micromanage your project in this way, I'm sure he is capable of googling out a pthread introduction himself. What you should be focusing on is explaining exactly why your projects needs threads, and why fork()/exec() won't cut it. This may also result in you accepting his decision, but that is as it should be.
Then what you consider will be the worst possible solution. I like having a really good 88-key weighted keyboard, a good selection of decent keyboard instrument sounds (unfortunately, I haven't, but that's because I can't afford it...), and a fairly standard sequencer with voice-tracks. Depending on your needs, a smaller keyboard will do, but never buy anything with less than 61 keys (76 is a good compromise between space and playability in my opinion, but for some reason, pretty rare to find). Note that weighted keys are not essential, cheap weighted are often worse to play than a good non-weighted. A good initial test for non-weighted keyboards is whether you can use about the same amount of force to get the same amount of sound if you press on the inner or outer part of the key.
While soft-synths sound cool in theory, they suck to work with. You can't actually "play" a soft-synth (at least not in my experience). With music coming out of the speakers half a second later than you pressed the corresponding key, it's impossible to keep in sync (or even play correctly).
A separate decent midi-keyboard and sound module/sound-card will often cost you 1 1/2 times as much as if the midi-keyboard came with sounds, but you may still prefer it, if you plan to add more gear later on (and never need to carry your gear to play somewhere else).
Most sound-sources are crap. You might as well live with it, and get a cheap one. Note that GM sucks most of all, but the price increase for getting decent stuff is much to high for the amateur like me (or you, I guess), and besides, it makes it simpler to use with standard software. $300 should be about the right price-range to start with (maybe less if it's a sound-card). Remember to go for quality (as in playability, realism) in sounds, and not quantity (you will never need those helicopter/gunshot/sitar/el-guitar patches anyway). Be aware of excessive reverb, which can often make something sound good at first, but sucks later on. If you like experimenting with the sounds themselves, buy a used old synth, such as a DX7 (which should be extremely cheap nowadays, and also has pretty decent keys:-), or confine your experiments to the soft-synths (but they are harder to work with, since the real-time use just sucks. There is definitely a big plus to have knobs you can actually touch instead of using a mouse).
In general, used stuff is good, you may find it in your local store (sometimes the store has a department for used stuff, sometimes they have a bulletin board), or in a magazine. But never buy used stuff unless you've seen it and tried it first (it might be very heavily used, and unless you know what to buy, it is a good idea to see if it fits your need)
Being a hacker type myself, I find it far to easy to be carried away by all the technology instead of making actual music. Electronic instruments often lack the same dynamics and expressitivity as a real one, and it's important to practice the real thing once in a while.
One of the great things about software, however, is the amount of educational software out there. I like using Band-In-A-Box as a great source of ideas. And also a decent air-training program, such as EarMaster Pro (there are lots of others). As for sequencers, any brand-name will do, they are much the same anyway (as with word-processors, etc...)
Unlike a car, rat poison, or a swimming pool a weapon is specifically designed to kill people - this is why I prefer to live in a country where guns are not generally owned by the public.
Well, I wouldn't say there is to much difference between rat poison and a gun. They are both intended to kill. And there are lots of guns intended to kill animals instead of humans, and I do not feel that they are any less dangerous...
Why is everyone gung ho on creating new programming languages.
Because it is fun, mostly. But also because different languages shape our thoughts in different ways, and can be used for different purposes.
What the hell is point of all these languages.
Solving problems. See above.
I'm still learning cobol in college right now. I'm off to Java next, and will barely learn C++.
Good for you! You have already decided to stop learning once you are out of college. I applaud your decision, please remember to tell any future employer this before he hires you, so he can save your salary!
This is like gnome and kde, and for everyone who's gung ho about replying "these are what gives us choice ", free is free people the only thing different between kde and gnome is the developers, they're all just trying to be another mac os/windows clone.
No, they don't. Wine is trying to be a windows clone. While most of GTK and Qt is obviously inspired by other WIMP-environments, that doesn't mean that they are trying to be windows clones.
The number 1 reason to use Eiffel is DbC (Design By Contract). Best explained as assertions on steroids. Obviously inspired by use of formal methods in academia.
Secondly, Eiffel is a reasonably clean OO language, with a mostly sane syntax, and it has GC. It is mostly the C++ model of OO (class-based, static typing, multiple inheritance is heavily used, focus on efficiency, etc...). Whether you prefer this, or something a little bit more mainstream, such as Ada is of course up to you, but DbC is a real winner.
Yes, you are obviously right. You should write to the SETI@home people and tell them why it is so important that they should do 101 signals instead of 100. Hey, if you are really lucky, you might even get 102! No, wait, we could miss it if there really was life in the 103 top signal! But to be sure, we should add the 104...
isnt it time we dumped the whole SISC architecture? like the ISA standard
As for as I know, the SISC (single instruction set computing), typically embodied by the instruction SBN (subtract and branch if negative) is only used as a joke, in the same manner as Intercal and Malbolge.
This is (one of the many reasons) why the GNU versions of everything should be standard on all systems in the universe.
No, it is not. While there are good reasons to prefer some GNU tools to some other tools under some circumstances, this is a bug that will be fixed soon enough. A user program should not be able to crash the kernel, and the fact that GNU mv seems to do some checks up front doesn't mean that it's actually better in any way (it might be better in other ways, however).
Also, "alias mv mv -i" is a Very Good Idea(tm)
No, again, it isn't. It gives you the habit of believing that mv is really mv -i. So whenever you use someone elses account, or are working on some other machine, you risk doing something really stupid.
Besides, I happen to quite often use a shared development account that for hysterical raisins have set exactly this alias in it's startup files. I've yet to find a time where it has been more useful than annoying, and I doubt I'll ever find it. If you are worried about deleting stuff, use backups.
This is quite interesting. And I definitely think you are on to something. I've read some very highly acclaimed books of this type myself, and can't say I have become much smarter. But then again, I might be to stupid to understand it... Or I might be to smart to gain anything by reading what should be common sense, you decide.
Of course, as with almost all books, you will learn something, but you are not going to get much smarter by reading this, than almost any other book on mostly anything else. So why does this kind of book, almost always get a cult-like following? Beats me... Maybe we should all take up Dogberts course in common sense for people without common sense?
Anyone? Bullshit. People with experience on ships would likely know. Everyone else should probably shut up and not confuse the guy.
Aha, so that's how it is. When you have experience on ships everything becomes clear. Because anyone that has ever worked offshore, will obviously understand ethernet cabling much better than everyone else.
For your information, I actually do have some experience on ships. I make software that is used on ships, and occasionally travel out to them. And I can assure you that whatever works in your office with regards to cabling, works there too.
But as other posters have pointed out, it might not be the ship itself that is worrying. It could be the radar, the engine, or a number of other factors. But a large ship is nothing special.
Now, can you please explain to me how someone with experience on ships should be able to guess what kind of environment he is speaking of?
I loathe the idea of telling my mom (who lives 3,000 miles alway) to open a 'shell window' and type in badly spelt commands in a case sensitive manner.
Actually, that is something I would love to be able to do.
In windows, you generally have to say. Ok, right click on that funny icon right there. What, you say? Don't you find it? Ok, it should have a label called "foo". Oh, you are running the norwegian version, hmm.. in that case it should be called "bar" or something. You still can't find it. Let's see, which version of windows are you running? Hmm, you are right, how would you know? I think I remember that in windows 98 it used to be somewhere else...
Sure, these visual environments might be user-friendly when you do not know the command-name, but are at least somewhat able to use a computer, and can find it by experimenting. Asking your mom to do that experimenting and tell you what happens on her screen is not so fun...
The result of all this is that I usually answer that I do not know, and even if I knew the answer, I wouldn't be able to tell her, because it's "complicated to explain over the phone". That usually stops her from bothering me anymore, and since a computer really isn't very essential to her life, I couldn't really care less...
I would suspect most large ships built of metal which is of course permanently grounded to the saltwater in the sea would be as reasonable to work with as any other building. But since you ask this question, you probably worry about something.
So, why would you run grounded ethernet? What's wrong with a normal Cat-5? What kind of ship is it? How far is it between the pc's? Have you considered fiber? Unless you can say a bit more about why you worry, it's impossible for anyone to give a qualified answer.
But from what I can see, this lies far into the future. Even capturing only online life (but that's hardly useful enough), it would have to have one gigantic memory.
But the annoying parts are the security considerations. Obviously, I don't want anyone but myself to access it. And requiring huge storage, and being to important to lose, it would need to stay somewhere safe (probably in a fire-proof cabinet at home, or at some other secure location).
To communicate with it, I would need encryption. Not such a big deal, it could be a really secure private key system, and you could carry around a personal encryption device to communicate with it. The encryption device would need some way to authenticate me as a user (a fingerprint scanner combined with a password would probably do the trick).
The carry-around gadget would need some really nifty acquisition devices. Ideally, those would be whatever you sense, but that is probably too hard. So the device I carry with me would need a high-definition camera and audio recorder. Ideally, it should record at all times, but I would be willing to accept something that would only record when I told it to. And it must be small enough and invisible enough to not bother me (or other people I communicate with) It should also be possible to plug it into any computer system I use. And it would need some decent amount of temporary storage (for at least a week), since it can't possibly be connected to the real storage at all times.
The carry-around device would also need a way to show me the data it stores. Since any information there is potentially sensitive, I should not be forced to show even fragments of them unencrypted on the computer system I happen to use, unless that is what I want. So I should be able to browse the memory-bank in fully encrypted mode, and extract only the pieces I need.
For searching to be effective, it would need at least rudimentary voice-recognition and OCR capabilities (it doesn't need to be perfect, but good enough for searching to be possible). Simply going through days of video to find what I want wouldn't be much fun.
Ideally, such a device should also be tamper-free (again, some type of encryption is needed, but this time to protect it from it's owner). That means that one could extract bits from it and use it in the court as valid evidence. Of course, such evidence must be provided by the owner (if the courts could order it, nobody would want such a device). But it would be really useful to be able to show live video of the guy mugging you.
I'm sure you could build something much less ambitious that would still be useful. But damnit, this would be the ultimate PDA. And I want that! (Anyone take a guess as to how long it takes before we can find this in the stores? 20 years perhaps?)
But how about a standard dishwasher connected to a large tank of cleaning fluid in a closed circuit (you can replace the cleaning fluid every few months, and add some filters at the drain to catch the worst impurities). For extra points, replace the drawers with removable CD racks, so you can simply insert a shelf of CD's at the time... Now you can probably wash tens of thousand CDs per day...
If you ever thought Alice to be intelligent, try this:
you: Do you know what kind of Ice cream I prefer?
[Alice will undoubtedly answer something witty]
you: My favourite ice cream is chocolate
[Alice will undoubtedly answer something witty]
you: What is my favourite kind of ice cream?
[Alice will still fail to provide the correct answer, although it may still be witty]
The reasons Alice seems intelligent is because we want to be fooled. But something with that kind of learning ability is not something I consider intelligent. Of course, with people, this kind of thing comes up all the time, because people aren't paying attention. Not so with Alice, you can try it as many times you want, and Alice will never learn.
I'm not really sure if it's worth the trouble to get all those old peripherals to work. Most people who buy refurbished products don't want to deal with troublesome peripherals anyway.
You should probably just throw them out, and put in more modern (but dirt cheap) stuff. Then you can stack those weird devices up in piles, waiting untill you have at least a dozen of a given type. At that time, you may invest time in finding a driver. By working this way, you can also use time to your advantage. Instead of you using your time to find those old drivers, write a letter to the manufacturer, and ask them to dig up the old drivers.
I hardly looked at the power tap...
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Ants Invade iBook
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· Score: 2
The floor, man! The floor! It is so damn ugly! Where in the world did you get that kind of floor panel from?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, A 2100 percent efficiency on advertisement! For every spam they send out , the recipient buys 21 RC cars on average! For anyone still believing there is any correlation between these numbers, please, use some common sense! The statement is so silly it just hurts to just think about the mental state of the person uttering it.
Most certainly not :-)
would you really like BubbleChick to know what pages you have surfed, what interests you have and how long you spent looking at banner X (and page X)?
I don't know. Who is BubbleChick? According to google she is a 17 year old girl who likes to chat. Which means I doubt she will be able to do me much harm with it.
But seriously. I was not proposing a perfect tracking system. We already have a flawed one, which suits most of us fine. It's called cookies. Unless you give the advertiser your name and address, there is little chance (s)he will be able to know who you are. Also, most browsers allow you to turn them off if you prefer that. And I have no qualms about somebody tracking my web-browsing habit anonymously. And, the advertisers already do this, but for some reason they don't seem to use it very much. It's possible they want a perfect system, but I do not.
Exactly. My comment was not about the marketers stupidity (because they are not). It was about people with actual websites selling ads to those marketers. Shure, today there is an established way of doing that, but it's entirely on the marketers terms.
Why would a website allow ads that drive more surfers away then generate revenue for the site? It's not that the marketer would care, once he has destroyed one place, he can buy ads somewhere else and destroy that too... But content-providers, (free) webhotels, etc... should really consider when it would be wise to do what the marketers want.
Now, I understand that your average mom and pop business can't do that. But why do the big players also who can actually dictate their own terms also use so annoying and stupid pop-ups/unders/whatever?
One would figure that most of these big-time players (who can afford to do something different than the small porn-sites popping up every day) would do it, if they want to keep the surfers there. Yet most of the time, the same annoying pop-up comes up each time I click on a link (e.g. next page).
One should think that these people would be smart enough to understand that after having seen the same lotto ad 5 times in a minute, and not even once clicked on it, that I don't care much for lotto. But no! The website in question will continually annoy me with the same intrusive add, time after time, with the only reasonable conclusion that I will leave the site, and surf somewhere else. Thus the company looses one potential web-surfer and ad-revenue income.
Damn it! Why are they so stupid? This is what cookies are for! They should track my browsing behaviour, find out what I'm interested in, and serve me those kinds of ads. At the very least, they should rotate the ads. And once they have my cookie, they should limit the number of times they will show me the same ad in a given period.
There is a reason that web-advertisements are not effective! Even when they have all the tools they need to track my browsing behaviour, profile my browsing habits, check which ads I click on, etc, they still keep pestering me with the same ad for the same product ten times in a minute! Even when they know the only outcome of this is that they loose the opportunity to sell me other stuff!
Obviously, I can take some steps myself for myself to get rid of the annoyance, such as pop-up blockers and so on. But that is not my point. What I do not understand is why even the big guys (content-providers) insist on giving the cheesiest advertisers the opportunity to drive customers away from their site. One should think that they would be smarter, but obviously they are not!
Now, if the robot would actually do something useful that we can't already build today with a cheap onboard computer, I would be impressed. But I suspect it doesn't. First, the article doesn't mention anything special it can do (it says it's a "thinker", but that's hardly productive unless we can figure out what it's "thinking" about). Secondly, it has only 60 connection points (surely not enough for any realistic kind of sensory input). Third, it has only "thousands of rat neuron cells". Finally, none of the researchers have any idea what they are doing (not that that's particulary bad, it's exactly what "research" means).
Sure, you can grow a cell-culture somewhere, and it may even have some of the same attributes as the real thing grown from the same cells. But it lacks it's overall organization (which is good, unless you want something that acts like a mouse) (but is bad, because we don't even know how to put any kind of structure in it), and we still don't understand it (which is bad, because we can't use it to do anything useful, nor can we mass-produce it once somebody has been able to splot out something that actually does something useful).
Sure, there probably are "interesting emergent properties" in cultures of nerve-cells. But don't expect a hybrot to take over the world in the next weeks... Actually, I'm more interested in the work in transforming them into this particular quote from the article: "Currently, Steven DeWeerth, professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, is using Potter's findings to build actual circuits in silicon, although this work is still preliminary.". Now, that could maybe lead us somewhere where we get a better understanding of how neurons combine to do stuff...
No it isn't. 0:00am is midnight. 12:00am is noon.
I applaud your boss for his decision. There are many disadvantages of using threads, that I'm more than sure your boss knows about. See e.g. this discussion for more detail.
Now, granted, some applications will also benefit enough from threads to outweigh those disadvantages. It is rare, but it happens.
What I'm looking for are document technically detailed yet directed more towards management. Not something on the level of 'pthreads for Dummies', but more along the lines of 'pthreads for Managers'. Any suggestions? URLs or Books are fine."
If you have a boss that already knows enough technical stuff to micromanage your project in this way, I'm sure he is capable of googling out a pthread introduction himself. What you should be focusing on is explaining exactly why your projects needs threads, and why fork()/exec() won't cut it. This may also result in you accepting his decision, but that is as it should be.
While soft-synths sound cool in theory, they suck to work with. You can't actually "play" a soft-synth (at least not in my experience). With music coming out of the speakers half a second later than you pressed the corresponding key, it's impossible to keep in sync (or even play correctly).
A separate decent midi-keyboard and sound module/sound-card will often cost you 1 1/2 times as much as if the midi-keyboard came with sounds, but you may still prefer it, if you plan to add more gear later on (and never need to carry your gear to play somewhere else).
Most sound-sources are crap. You might as well live with it, and get a cheap one. Note that GM sucks most of all, but the price increase for getting decent stuff is much to high for the amateur like me (or you, I guess), and besides, it makes it simpler to use with standard software. $300 should be about the right price-range to start with (maybe less if it's a sound-card). Remember to go for quality (as in playability, realism) in sounds, and not quantity (you will never need those helicopter/gunshot/sitar/el-guitar patches anyway). Be aware of excessive reverb, which can often make something sound good at first, but sucks later on. If you like experimenting with the sounds themselves, buy a used old synth, such as a DX7 (which should be extremely cheap nowadays, and also has pretty decent keys:-), or confine your experiments to the soft-synths (but they are harder to work with, since the real-time use just sucks. There is definitely a big plus to have knobs you can actually touch instead of using a mouse).
In general, used stuff is good, you may find it in your local store (sometimes the store has a department for used stuff, sometimes they have a bulletin board), or in a magazine. But never buy used stuff unless you've seen it and tried it first (it might be very heavily used, and unless you know what to buy, it is a good idea to see if it fits your need)
Being a hacker type myself, I find it far to easy to be carried away by all the technology instead of making actual music. Electronic instruments often lack the same dynamics and expressitivity as a real one, and it's important to practice the real thing once in a while.
One of the great things about software, however, is the amount of educational software out there. I like using Band-In-A-Box as a great source of ideas. And also a decent air-training program, such as EarMaster Pro (there are lots of others). As for sequencers, any brand-name will do, they are much the same anyway (as with word-processors, etc...)
Well, I wouldn't say there is to much difference between rat poison and a gun. They are both intended to kill. And there are lots of guns intended to kill animals instead of humans, and I do not feel that they are any less dangerous...
Because it is fun, mostly. But also because different languages shape our thoughts in different ways, and can be used for different purposes.
What the hell is point of all these languages.
Solving problems. See above.
I'm still learning cobol in college right now. I'm off to Java next, and will barely learn C++.
Good for you! You have already decided to stop learning once you are out of college. I applaud your decision, please remember to tell any future employer this before he hires you, so he can save your salary!
This is like gnome and kde, and for everyone who's gung ho about replying "these are what gives us choice ", free is free people the only thing different between kde and gnome is the developers, they're all just trying to be another mac os/windows clone.
No, they don't. Wine is trying to be a windows clone. While most of GTK and Qt is obviously inspired by other WIMP-environments, that doesn't mean that they are trying to be windows clones.
It's exactly the opposite in fact! ObjC is weakly typed, Eiffel is strongly typed. And the added safety of DbC makes it even more so...
Secondly, Eiffel is a reasonably clean OO language, with a mostly sane syntax, and it has GC. It is mostly the C++ model of OO (class-based, static typing, multiple inheritance is heavily used, focus on efficiency, etc...). Whether you prefer this, or something a little bit more mainstream, such as Ada is of course up to you, but DbC is a real winner.
Yes, you are obviously right. You should write to the SETI@home people and tell them why it is so important that they should do 101 signals instead of 100. Hey, if you are really lucky, you might even get 102! No, wait, we could miss it if there really was life in the 103 top signal! But to be sure, we should add the 104...
As for as I know, the SISC (single instruction set computing), typically embodied by the instruction SBN (subtract and branch if negative) is only used as a joke, in the same manner as Intercal and Malbolge.
Oh, you probably meant CISC, never mind...
No, it is not. While there are good reasons to prefer some GNU tools to some other tools under some circumstances, this is a bug that will be fixed soon enough. A user program should not be able to crash the kernel, and the fact that GNU mv seems to do some checks up front doesn't mean that it's actually better in any way (it might be better in other ways, however).
Also, "alias mv mv -i" is a Very Good Idea(tm)
No, again, it isn't. It gives you the habit of believing that mv is really mv -i. So whenever you use someone elses account, or are working on some other machine, you risk doing something really stupid.
Besides, I happen to quite often use a shared development account that for hysterical raisins have set exactly this alias in it's startup files. I've yet to find a time where it has been more useful than annoying, and I doubt I'll ever find it. If you are worried about deleting stuff, use backups.
Of course, as with almost all books, you will learn something, but you are not going to get much smarter by reading this, than almost any other book on mostly anything else. So why does this kind of book, almost always get a cult-like following? Beats me... Maybe we should all take up Dogberts course in common sense for people without common sense?
Aha, so that's how it is. When you have experience on ships everything becomes clear. Because anyone that has ever worked offshore, will obviously understand ethernet cabling much better than everyone else.
For your information, I actually do have some experience on ships. I make software that is used on ships, and occasionally travel out to them. And I can assure you that whatever works in your office with regards to cabling, works there too.
But as other posters have pointed out, it might not be the ship itself that is worrying. It could be the radar, the engine, or a number of other factors. But a large ship is nothing special.
Now, can you please explain to me how someone with experience on ships should be able to guess what kind of environment he is speaking of?
Actually, that is something I would love to be able to do.
In windows, you generally have to say. Ok, right click on that funny icon right there. What, you say? Don't you find it? Ok, it should have a label called "foo". Oh, you are running the norwegian version, hmm.. in that case it should be called "bar" or something. You still can't find it. Let's see, which version of windows are you running? Hmm, you are right, how would you know? I think I remember that in windows 98 it used to be somewhere else...
Sure, these visual environments might be user-friendly when you do not know the command-name, but are at least somewhat able to use a computer, and can find it by experimenting. Asking your mom to do that experimenting and tell you what happens on her screen is not so fun...
The result of all this is that I usually answer that I do not know, and even if I knew the answer, I wouldn't be able to tell her, because it's "complicated to explain over the phone". That usually stops her from bothering me anymore, and since a computer really isn't very essential to her life, I couldn't really care less...
So, why would you run grounded ethernet? What's wrong with a normal Cat-5? What kind of ship is it? How far is it between the pc's? Have you considered fiber? Unless you can say a bit more about why you worry, it's impossible for anyone to give a qualified answer.
But the annoying parts are the security considerations. Obviously, I don't want anyone but myself to access it. And requiring huge storage, and being to important to lose, it would need to stay somewhere safe (probably in a fire-proof cabinet at home, or at some other secure location).
To communicate with it, I would need encryption. Not such a big deal, it could be a really secure private key system, and you could carry around a personal encryption device to communicate with it. The encryption device would need some way to authenticate me as a user (a fingerprint scanner combined with a password would probably do the trick).
The carry-around gadget would need some really nifty acquisition devices. Ideally, those would be whatever you sense, but that is probably too hard. So the device I carry with me would need a high-definition camera and audio recorder. Ideally, it should record at all times, but I would be willing to accept something that would only record when I told it to. And it must be small enough and invisible enough to not bother me (or other people I communicate with) It should also be possible to plug it into any computer system I use. And it would need some decent amount of temporary storage (for at least a week), since it can't possibly be connected to the real storage at all times.
The carry-around device would also need a way to show me the data it stores. Since any information there is potentially sensitive, I should not be forced to show even fragments of them unencrypted on the computer system I happen to use, unless that is what I want. So I should be able to browse the memory-bank in fully encrypted mode, and extract only the pieces I need.
For searching to be effective, it would need at least rudimentary voice-recognition and OCR capabilities (it doesn't need to be perfect, but good enough for searching to be possible). Simply going through days of video to find what I want wouldn't be much fun.
Ideally, such a device should also be tamper-free (again, some type of encryption is needed, but this time to protect it from it's owner). That means that one could extract bits from it and use it in the court as valid evidence. Of course, such evidence must be provided by the owner (if the courts could order it, nobody would want such a device). But it would be really useful to be able to show live video of the guy mugging you.
I'm sure you could build something much less ambitious that would still be useful. But damnit, this would be the ultimate PDA. And I want that! (Anyone take a guess as to how long it takes before we can find this in the stores? 20 years perhaps?)
...try an industrial dishwasher!
But how about a standard dishwasher connected to a large tank of cleaning fluid in a closed circuit (you can replace the cleaning fluid every few months, and add some filters at the drain to catch the worst impurities). For extra points, replace the drawers with removable CD racks, so you can simply insert a shelf of CD's at the time... Now you can probably wash tens of thousand CDs per day...
The reasons Alice seems intelligent is because we want to be fooled. But something with that kind of learning ability is not something I consider intelligent. Of course, with people, this kind of thing comes up all the time, because people aren't paying attention. Not so with Alice, you can try it as many times you want, and Alice will never learn.
You should probably just throw them out, and put in more modern (but dirt cheap) stuff. Then you can stack those weird devices up in piles, waiting untill you have at least a dozen of a given type. At that time, you may invest time in finding a driver. By working this way, you can also use time to your advantage. Instead of you using your time to find those old drivers, write a letter to the manufacturer, and ask them to dig up the old drivers.
The floor, man! The floor! It is so damn ugly! Where in the world did you get that kind of floor panel from?