No, it won't "solve the problem", but it's a lot easier to learn about democracy, modern agriculture, and AIDS prevention if you have access to a knowledge base.
A place that I do some work for is experimenting with using VNC for tech support. Talking to the person is useful, no doubt, but being able to actually see what's going on on their desktop is priceless.
It works pretty well if both ends are on high-speed net connections.
Imagine the rainbow effect you'd get if the refresh rate wasn't high enough; launch a new ad campaign, and half the planet calls in sick with a blinding headache.
Nope, not really. Far more scientific papers are written in English than in any other language, because it's the language most scientists have in common (this is different from being the language spoken by the most people; more people speak Chinese than any other language, but relatively few people who aren't Chinese speak it).
100 years ago, scientific papers were commonly written in German.
200 years ago, they were commonly written in Latin.
As I understand it, looping is in fact a big problem for robots. There are a number of ways of getting around it. A brute-force method would be to just limit the search tree depth to say, 20 levels or so (I pulled that number out of my butt, of course, so it would need some tuning based on how many levels you're likely to see on a real site).
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that more sophisticated robots (e.g., Google) actually do fairly sophisticated content analysis of the pages they retrieve to decide whether what they're seeing is really "new" or the same junk they've already seen before.
Google sees index.php as one page, and does not attempt to submit any data via get/post.
Hmm... I see plenty of pages in Google that have URLs with GET parameters, so there must be some way of getting it to crawl them. Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying? Maybe the key here is to provide an alternate route to those pages without doing anything fancy (drop-down menus, radio buttons, etc.). Just generate another page that contains a regular link to all your pages. You could hide that page from your regular users by, say, linking it to a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF. A robot will find it, but most of your users won't even notice.
Well, there's a Google hack for recipes that seems to work okay. You put in the ingredients that you have on hand and it tries to find recipes using those ingredients.
Oddly enough, I just saw this on someone's weblog earlier today. Synchronicity is a peculiar thing.
Shirky is thought provoking, but he fails to explain why, if the "mental transaction cost" associated with making small payments is such a show stopper, there are vending machines all over the place.
From what I've seen of the two, Bitpass is a lot easier to set up on the user end. Peppercoin requires the user to download and install software, while Bitpass doesn't. While you and I might not be too troubled by this, many people are. That's a significant advantage for Bitpass. Also, Bitpass appears to be considerably easier to set up on the server end, though that's just my impression from reading the docs. I haven't actually implemented either yet.
This could change if Peppercoin managed to convince the major browser players to include their software with the browser. Certainly having Rivest onboard will go a long way toward getting some credibility for Peppercoin.
Until fairly recently, I was using an old K6-133 box as a router (in conjunction with Coyote Linux). It worked great, but was rather bulky.
I have an AT keyboard (pre-PS/2 model, with an adaptor so it'll plug into a PS/2 connector) stuck behind the machines. Once in a while I'll need to pull it out when USB quits working for some reason.
It's hard to imagine ANY scenario under which SCO comes out a long-term winner on this. Maybe they thought IBM would buy them out to shut them up, but it's clear that they were dead wrong on that (anyone who's familiar with IBM's litigation history could'v e told them how unlikely that was... if IBM settled nuisance suits, they'd have them coming out of the woodwork).
It would be interesting to see the GPL tested in court, though.
And they do a lot of things that make no sense at all, such as the procedure for adding RAM to a PowerMac 9500 model.
I'm not sure what kind of store-brand crack the guys in Cupertino were smoking when they came up with that one. I mean, removing ALL cards (including the CPU), disconnecting ALL cables and physically removing the motherboard from the case just to add or remove RAM?
Yowza.
Yes, I'm bitter about spending a few hours tracking down a flaky RAM stick. Disassemble, swap sticks, reassemble, run until flakiness occurs (or doesn't).
It also ignores the fact that people will and do support content creators which make stuff they like.
Exactly. This is more or less how PBS gets along, right? "This Changelings CD was made possible by generous donations from abracadabra, annie,...koran, krysith,...zebraguy, zuzmatazz"
No one is getting rich from PBS, but there are people making a living from it.
I have to ask where you get off telling me that there should be a hard cap on the limit of my copyright
Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power to... to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for
limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
As I understand it (and I'm not even an amateur in this field, so take this for what it's worth) that's one of the major problems facing genetic scientists. There are many, many cases where they know which gene is responsible for something, but they don't yet know how how that gene is switched on (or off).
I guess it's like knowing the root password, but not having a shell or any other way of making use of it.:-)
Interesting stuff, with some good humor (I especially liked "Windows NT/2000/XP are not possessed of such tender sensibilities; still, we'll deceive them too, as they have their own little quirks. Besides, it's easy and fun.").
Personally, I hate rebooting and I also need to test my Java code on Mac OS X, so how I handle this problem is by keeping my source code in a directory on my Linux machine mountable via Samba and NFS. Compiling and testing on Windows 2000 or OS X is just a matter of hitting a button on the KVM switch. You could probably do it via VNC if you don't want to invest in a KVM (or, of course, if you don't mind having multiple monitors and keyboards, you could just have independent machines).
Slashdot Mirror
Add me to the chorus.
:-)
I still run a couple of Linux boxes, and still enjoy tinkering with Linux.
As Neal Stephenson said, though, some days you just want to go to Disneyland. My spankin' new G5 lets me do that.
AND I'm able to run all my favorite tools (gcc, mySQP, Apache, PHP....) right out of the box.
Rich Unixy Goodness in a Candy-Coated Shell (tm). What's not to like?
Yes, it was expensive, but this is BY FAR the most pleasant personal computing environment I've ever owned.
Note that this is coming someone who hated pre-OS X Macs, so I'm not a Mac fanatic (although that may well change
The page for the Inform language is already starting to load sluggishly for me.
Anyone want to give us a capsule summary of what this language offers? It sounds interesting.
No, it won't "solve the problem", but it's a lot easier to learn about democracy, modern agriculture, and AIDS prevention if you have access to a knowledge base.
A place that I do some work for is experimenting with using VNC for tech support. Talking to the person is useful, no doubt, but being able to actually see what's going on on their desktop is priceless.
It works pretty well if both ends are on high-speed net connections.
a good place to get information on (and maybe even interact or get involved with) your own neighborhood?
.sig). :-)
I'm workin' on it (see
Seriously, I miss the days of the local BBS, when all the locals would sometimes get together for a beer or whatever.
Imagine the rainbow effect you'd get if the refresh rate wasn't high enough; launch a new ad campaign, and half the planet calls in sick with a blinding headache.
Heh.
Nope, not really. Far more scientific papers are written in English than in any other language, because it's the language most scientists have in common (this is different from being the language spoken by the most people; more people speak Chinese than any other language, but relatively few people who aren't Chinese speak it).
100 years ago, scientific papers were commonly written in German.
200 years ago, they were commonly written in Latin.
Times change.
print("Some page...");
As I understand it, looping is in fact a big problem for robots. There are a number of ways of getting around it. A brute-force method would be to just limit the search tree depth to say, 20 levels or so (I pulled that number out of my butt, of course, so it would need some tuning based on how many levels you're likely to see on a real site).
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that more sophisticated robots (e.g., Google) actually do fairly sophisticated content analysis of the pages they retrieve to decide whether what they're seeing is really "new" or the same junk they've already seen before.
http://domain/index.php?act=showpost&postid=12 44
Google sees index.php as one page, and does not attempt to submit any data via get/post.
Hmm... I see plenty of pages in Google that have URLs with GET parameters, so there must be some way of getting it to crawl them. Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying? Maybe the key here is to provide an alternate route to those pages without doing anything fancy (drop-down menus, radio buttons, etc.). Just generate another page that contains a regular link to all your pages. You could hide that page from your regular users by, say, linking it to a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF. A robot will find it, but most of your users won't even notice.
Is there a Google for recipes?
Well, there's a Google hack for recipes that seems to work okay. You put in the ingredients that you have on hand and it tries to find recipes using those ingredients.
Oddly enough, I just saw this on someone's weblog earlier today. Synchronicity is a peculiar thing.
Shirky is thought provoking, but he fails to explain why, if the "mental transaction cost" associated with making small payments is such a show stopper, there are vending machines all over the place.
With Bitpass, at least, you can go to their site and click on the "Share" tab.
They don't have a HUGE number of clients yet, but it seems to be growing pretty fast.
From what I've seen of the two, Bitpass is a lot easier to set up on the user end. Peppercoin requires the user to download and install software, while Bitpass doesn't. While you and I might not be too troubled by this, many people are. That's a significant advantage for Bitpass. Also, Bitpass appears to be considerably easier to set up on the server end, though that's just my impression from reading the docs. I haven't actually implemented either yet.
This could change if Peppercoin managed to convince the major browser players to include their software with the browser. Certainly having Rivest onboard will go a long way toward getting some credibility for Peppercoin.
1GB per cubic centimeter? a 5GB rod is 5x1x1 centimeters...doesn't make a dvd seem enormous to me.
You're ignoring the size of the playback mechanism, which would presumably be much smaller than a DVD drive.
Okay, I'll take one for the team and make the obligatory Simpsons reference.
"Margaret, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics."
Until fairly recently, I was using an old K6-133 box as a router (in conjunction with Coyote Linux). It worked great, but was rather bulky.
I have an AT keyboard (pre-PS/2 model, with an adaptor so it'll plug into a PS/2 connector) stuck behind the machines. Once in a while I'll need to pull it out when USB quits working for some reason.
Sure! You just have to attach a percolator in place of the heat sink, although I think AMD still has the technological edge there. :-)
It's hard to imagine ANY scenario under which SCO comes out a long-term winner on this. Maybe they thought IBM would buy them out to shut them up, but it's clear that they were dead wrong on that (anyone who's familiar with IBM's litigation history could'v e told them how unlikely that was... if IBM settled nuisance suits, they'd have them coming out of the woodwork).
It would be interesting to see the GPL tested in court, though.
They do things that make a lot of sense
:-)
And they do a lot of things that make no sense at all, such as the procedure for adding RAM to a PowerMac 9500 model.
I'm not sure what kind of store-brand crack the guys in Cupertino were smoking when they came up with that one. I mean, removing ALL cards (including the CPU), disconnecting ALL cables and physically removing the motherboard from the case just to add or remove RAM?
Yowza.
Yes, I'm bitter about spending a few hours tracking down a flaky RAM stick. Disassemble, swap sticks, reassemble, run until flakiness occurs (or doesn't).
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It also ignores the fact that people will and do support content creators which make stuff they like.
Exactly. This is more or less how PBS gets along, right? "This Changelings CD was made possible by generous donations from abracadabra, annie,...koran, krysith,...zebraguy, zuzmatazz"
No one is getting rich from PBS, but there are people making a living from it.
sending mail is currently unsupported.
Here's some sample code for doing that. GPL, baby!
cat | mail username
This is a mail message
^D
Hope your users are pleased with this upgrade!
Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8:
That's who gets off telling you.
They still need to learn how to turn it on.
:-)
As I understand it (and I'm not even an amateur in this field, so take this for what it's worth) that's one of the major problems facing genetic scientists. There are many, many cases where they know which gene is responsible for something, but they don't yet know how how that gene is switched on (or off).
I guess it's like knowing the root password, but not having a shell or any other way of making use of it.
Interestingly enough, one of the sidebar links from that page attempts to install Gator.
Interesting stuff, with some good humor (I especially liked "Windows NT/2000/XP are not possessed of such tender sensibilities; still, we'll deceive them too, as they have their own little quirks. Besides, it's easy and fun.").
Personally, I hate rebooting and I also need to test my Java code on Mac OS X, so how I handle this problem is by keeping my source code in a directory on my Linux machine mountable via Samba and NFS. Compiling and testing on Windows 2000 or OS X is just a matter of hitting a button on the KVM switch. You could probably do it via VNC if you don't want to invest in a KVM (or, of course, if you don't mind having multiple monitors and keyboards, you could just have independent machines).