Countries use standards to benefit their own companies, and put hurdles in the path of outsiders. With the WTO and all, standards are one way to put up trade barriers.
Example: the NTSC, PAL, SECAM, MESECAM, etc standards for broadcast TV. Why do we have so many of them?
Another example: HDTV (US picked 8-VSB, Japan picked COFDM).
China has now realised that it is heavy enough (in "Gorilla" terms) that it is beginning to throw its weight around. A recent example was the new DVD format, EVD
I'd like to give a piece of my mind to the reps who voted for this bill. How could they have voted, without some period of a public comment, seeing the fact that spam affects EVERYBODY?
I'm sorry, but detailed (hourly?) data is almost all for pay. Everywhere you look, you'll have to pay to get at the data. Please browse around in that site and see if you can find detailed data for free. I could not (but I could be mistaken, and wouldn't mind being corrected).
I work in machine learning, and weather forecasting has always seemed like an interesting problem to explore. However, the lack of accurate raw data (temperature, dewpoints, pressure, humidity, precipitation, etc.) going back 30-40 years is a handicap. Where can one get such raw data, in a machine-readable format?
Also, I have been toying with the idea of writing a script to automatically grade the predictions put out by Wunderground and Weather.com, to see how accurate they are. It would be nice to see if it is really worth it to rely on their 5-day forecast.
NASDAQ claims to have resumed trading (reversed the halt) at 11:55AM. Archipelago jumped the gun and resumed it at 11:19 itself. Obviously they wanted make a few quick bucks. Note the volume of COCO: 20x the normal volume. Archipelago makes money when shares trade on its systems. Therefore, it is (was) in its selfish interest to resume trading quickly, so that more trades of this "hot" stock would happen on its network, thereby ensuring more revenues.
It looks like Archipelago screwed up. The people who did the fanch options thing better go after Archipelago.
The facts are simple. The market lists the price of a security. I look at the price. And I buy it if it looks good.
If the primary purpose of the market (NASDAQ) is to facilitate trading, then they better be sure that mistakes do not happen.
When a doctor screws up and leaves a scalpel inside a patient's stomach, the patient doesn't pull a Gandhi and say "oops, mistakes happen". He sues the doctor.
When you are driving along merrily on the highway, and lose your concentration and rear-end somebody, you are not automatically let off without consequences ; you pay (higher insurance, suspended license, whatever).
There must be consquences to NASDAQ screwing things up. If the people who "bought low and sold high" (as the story calls them) end up losing money, it is the NASDAQ's fault. They can't just cancel some trades, and leave the others hanging.
Here's one quote:
According to Harish Pillay, chief technology architect for Red Hat Asia, the scalability of threading has increased from 1,200 to 32,000 threads with NPTL. This translates to significant performance boosts when running multithreading applications such as Java software and databases, he said. More importantly, the enhancement puts RHEL 3.0 in better stead against rival OS Unix, which has long been equipped with more advanced-threading capabilities.
Whaaat? This guy is the CTO of RH Asia, and doesn't even know WHAT his chief product is? If RedHat Linux is not a variant of Unix, then why is RedHat offering courses on Unix ?
And here's a quote from a RedHat document, titled "
History of Unix, Linux, and Open Source / Free Software": 2.1.5. Comparing Linux and Unix
This book uses the term ``Unix-like'' to describe systems intentionally like Unix. In particular, the term ``Unix-like'' includes all major Unix variants and Linux distributions. Note that many people simply use the term ``Unix'' to describe these systems instead.
I can't believe this guy is so high up in RH hierarchy. Doesn't look good for RedHat.
Here's a quote:
When a patent is first filed, the key hurdles are novelty and obviousness; i.e., does this idea really represent something new, and is it informed by a particular creativity? Eighty percent of patent applications are rejected for failing to meet those first hurdles.
Someone please tell the writer about some of the "novel" patents issued by the USPTO.
If you read the NYT article, it clearly says that some unscrupulous vendors were clogging up the search results. So, on the first page of Google results, you'd get most of the sites from the same vendor (shell sites, put up specifically to increase the number of links between them, thereby increasing the PageRank).
Google is trying to level the playing field, so that no one site can dominate the results.
Looking at your complaint, I think it would make sense for Google to have a "vendors" checkbox, which would list sites selling stuff, as opposed to sites giving out information.
All this talk about accents reminds me of this golden oldie (supposedly appeared in the FEER):
Room Service: Morny. Rune-sore-bees. Hotel Guest: Oh, sorry. I thought I dialed Room Service. RS: Rye, rune-sore-bees. Morny. Djewish to odor sunteen? HG: Uh... yes. I'd like some bacon and eggs. RS: Ow July den? HG: What? RS: Aches. Ow July den? Pry, boy, pooch...? HG: Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry. Scrambled please. RS: Ow July dee baycome? Crease? HG: Crisp will be fine. RS: Hokay. An Santos? HG: What? RS: Santos. July Santos? HG: Ugh. I don't know... I don't think so. RS: No. Judo one toes? HG: Look, I feel really bad about this, but I don't know what "judo one toes" means. I'm sorry. RS: Toes! Toes! Why djew Don Juan toes? Ow bow cenglish mopping we bother? HG: English muffin! I've got it! You were saying toast! Fine. An English muffin will be fine. RS: We bother? HG: No. Just put the bother on the side. RS: Wad? HG: I'm sorry. I meant butter. Butter on the side. RS: Copy? HG: I feel terrible about this but... RS: Copy. Copy, tea, mill... HG: Coffee! Yes, coffee please. And that's all. RS: One Minnie. Ass rune torino fee, strangle aches, crease baycome, tossy cenglish mopping we bother honey sigh, and copy. Rye? HG: Whatever you say. RS: Hokay. Tendjewberrymud. HG: You're welcome.
All you would need to have a public debate about the annual budget would be to draft a law making tax withholding illegal. Thus, on April 15th, millions of taxpayers would suddenly realize that the government wants them to fork over tens of thousands of dollars, and that half of the time they spend at work is going to fund whatever pork-barrel special interest is delivering the votes to the politicos.
Why do you think the election day (Nov 1st or thereabouts) is at almost the furthest point away from April 15th ? Do you think the politicians would get away with all the crap if election day was, for example, April 16th?
It would be quite easy to mirror these documents offshore. Of course, thats not the point; the need of the hour is to mirror these document inside the US to press home the point of "civil
disobedience".
Here's a suggestion (offered free) to the tablet makers: why not support Linux on these tablets? If you remove the cost of the software, the price of the tablets will come down, maybe just enough to sustain the platform.
With the availibility of OSS, bitchin' about proprietary software makes no sense. (Oh no, not the Chewbacca defense!)
IMHO, all Linux needs is a couple of "success stories" where a hardware mfr opted for Linux and saved itself from ruin, and you'll have hw mfrs falling over each other trying to support the OS.
This is ridiculous. How long before you have to "license" the car you drive?
If the company is "licensing" this product to you, then its the owner. Shouldn't that carry some responsibility? Like, can this company be sued if you make a mistake with this tool and injure yourself? Can you sue the "owner" (the company) for not teaching you how to operate it properly? (I know, I hate to bring in more lawyers, but sometimes you have to resort to such techniques).
A long long time ago, when the algorithms bible CLR was in its first edition (yes, that long ago), I went over to our campus bookstore to buy it. It was listed at about $84 in the textbooks section. As I meandered around, I came to the general sci/math books section. And what do I see? The same CLR (exact same edition), listed at $76. Not a huge difference, but a difference nevertheless. I was dumbfounded: what kind of a person would mark up textbook prices for students??
CAPTCHAs use a very basic (minimal) portion of our cognitive abilities: to read. They would be much more powerful if they tasked our higher abilities: to reason.
For example, show 4 pictures; three of them of the same animal (say, a tiger) and the fourth of a random animal (say, a rhino). Ask the user to pick the odd one out. Make them grayscale, so that a color histogramming technique can't be used.
Another example: show an analog clock, and ask the user to enter the time shown.
By deploying 100s of such little "CAPTCHAs", the site owners can make the bots' task that much more difficult.
And heck, if someone can develop bots that can still do well, I'd say it's a big leap for AI and Cognition! Give the bot-writer a tenured faculty position at CMU.:-)
E-voting itself is not a bad idea (the convenience of not having to deal with reams of paper ballots, fewer counting mistakes ("hanging Chad"), etc.). However, there needs to be a better audit trail left. If the voting machine simply reports the count, then it is noy good. It should be hooked up to a printer, where it can print out a little cards with a 2-D barcode (like PDF417, with lots of error-correction) on them, which can be counted with high accuracy on a scanner, in case of a dispute.
On the other hand, if the CPU cycles are going to a good cause, $79 is a quite affordable donation.
On the other hand, would the project be better off accepting $100 (which is what $79 would be before taxes, or thereabouts) from you, per year, in cash?
There's more to such clusters than just the cost of the CPU. Things like storage, interconnect (no, you can't use the $5 Dlink cards from BestBuy), cooling, powerplant, etc. come to mind.
Of course, there's also this concept of "theoretical FLOPS", which is open to interpretation... we'll have to wait and see what the LINPACK (and other such benchmark) numbers report.
Slashdot Mirror
Example: the NTSC, PAL, SECAM, MESECAM, etc standards for broadcast TV. Why do we have so many of them?
Another example: HDTV (US picked 8-VSB, Japan picked COFDM).
China has now realised that it is heavy enough (in "Gorilla" terms) that it is beginning to throw its weight around. A recent example was the new DVD format, EVD
Also, I have been toying with the idea of writing a script to automatically grade the predictions put out by Wunderground and Weather.com, to see how accurate they are. It would be nice to see if it is really worth it to rely on their 5-day forecast.
It looks like Archipelago screwed up. The people who did the fanch options thing better go after Archipelago.
The facts are simple. The market lists the price of a security. I look at the price. And I buy it if it looks good.
If the primary purpose of the market (NASDAQ) is to facilitate trading, then they better be sure that mistakes do not happen.
When a doctor screws up and leaves a scalpel inside a patient's stomach, the patient doesn't pull a Gandhi and say "oops, mistakes happen". He sues the doctor.
When you are driving along merrily on the highway, and lose your concentration and rear-end somebody, you are not automatically let off without consequences ; you pay (higher insurance, suspended license, whatever).
There must be consquences to NASDAQ screwing things up. If the people who "bought low and sold high" (as the story calls them) end up losing money, it is the NASDAQ's fault. They can't just cancel some trades, and leave the others hanging.
The accountant is asked, "how much is 2+2?", replies (in a low), "how much do you want it to be?".
Here's one quote:
According to Harish Pillay, chief technology architect for Red Hat Asia, the scalability of threading has increased from 1,200 to 32,000 threads with NPTL. This translates to significant performance boosts when running multithreading applications such as Java software and databases, he said. More importantly, the enhancement puts RHEL 3.0 in better stead against rival OS Unix, which has long been equipped with more advanced-threading capabilities.
Whaaat? This guy is the CTO of RH Asia, and doesn't even know WHAT his chief product is? If RedHat Linux is not a variant of Unix, then why is RedHat offering courses on Unix ?
And here's a quote from a RedHat document, titled " History of Unix, Linux, and Open Source / Free Software":
2.1.5. Comparing Linux and Unix
This book uses the term ``Unix-like'' to describe systems intentionally like Unix. In particular, the term ``Unix-like'' includes all major Unix variants and Linux distributions. Note that many people simply use the term ``Unix'' to describe these systems instead.
I can't believe this guy is so high up in RH hierarchy. Doesn't look good for RedHat.
Here's a quote:
When a patent is first filed, the key hurdles are novelty and obviousness; i.e., does this idea really represent something new, and is it informed by a particular creativity? Eighty percent of patent applications are rejected for failing to meet those first hurdles.
Someone please tell the writer about some of the "novel" patents issued by the USPTO.
"Common sense" comes to mind.
If you read the NYT article, it clearly says that some unscrupulous vendors were clogging up the search results. So, on the first page of Google results, you'd get most of the sites from the same vendor (shell sites, put up specifically to increase the number of links between them, thereby increasing the PageRank).
Google is trying to level the playing field, so that no one site can dominate the results.
Looking at your complaint, I think it would make sense for Google to have a "vendors" checkbox, which would list sites selling stuff, as opposed to sites giving out information.
and by the same token, whats the point of reading the review after watching the movie? The deed's been done. Why dwell on it?
Quite a conundrum, ain't it?
All this talk about accents reminds me of this golden oldie (supposedly appeared in the FEER):
Room Service: Morny. Rune-sore-bees.
Hotel Guest: Oh, sorry. I thought I dialed Room Service.
RS: Rye, rune-sore-bees. Morny. Djewish to odor sunteen?
HG: Uh... yes. I'd like some bacon and eggs.
RS: Ow July den?
HG: What?
RS: Aches. Ow July den? Pry, boy, pooch...?
HG: Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry. Scrambled please.
RS: Ow July dee baycome? Crease?
HG: Crisp will be fine.
RS: Hokay. An Santos?
HG: What?
RS: Santos. July Santos?
HG: Ugh. I don't know... I don't think so.
RS: No. Judo one toes?
HG: Look, I feel really bad about this, but I don't know what "judo one toes" means. I'm sorry.
RS: Toes! Toes! Why djew Don Juan toes? Ow bow cenglish mopping we bother?
HG: English muffin! I've got it! You were saying toast! Fine. An English muffin will be fine.
RS: We bother?
HG: No. Just put the bother on the side.
RS: Wad?
HG: I'm sorry. I meant butter. Butter on the side.
RS: Copy?
HG: I feel terrible about this but...
RS: Copy. Copy, tea, mill...
HG: Coffee! Yes, coffee please. And that's all.
RS: One Minnie. Ass rune torino fee, strangle aches, crease baycome, tossy cenglish mopping we bother honey sigh, and copy. Rye?
HG: Whatever you say.
RS: Hokay. Tendjewberrymud.
HG: You're welcome.
I'd hate to say this too, since it is wrong.
Microsoft's internal network was compromised, as reported by the BBC, and many other news agencies.
So, please do some research before welcoming your "secure" overlords...
Why do you think the election day (Nov 1st or thereabouts) is at almost the furthest point away from April 15th ? Do you think the politicians would get away with all the crap if election day was, for example, April 16th?
Think about it.
Someone's already working on it, chief!
I miss my vt220... but really, what I really miss is my Volker-Craig VC4404, with the cast-iron body....
With the availibility of OSS, bitchin' about proprietary software makes no sense. (Oh no, not the Chewbacca defense!)
IMHO, all Linux needs is a couple of "success stories" where a hardware mfr opted for Linux and saved itself from ruin, and you'll have hw mfrs falling over each other trying to support the OS.
If the company is "licensing" this product to you, then its the owner. Shouldn't that carry some responsibility? Like, can this company be sued if you make a mistake with this tool and injure yourself? Can you sue the "owner" (the company) for not teaching you how to operate it properly? (I know, I hate to bring in more lawyers, but sometimes you have to resort to such techniques).
For example, show 4 pictures; three of them of the same animal (say, a tiger) and the fourth of a random animal (say, a rhino). Ask the user to pick the odd one out. Make them grayscale, so that a color histogramming technique can't be used.
Another example: show an analog clock, and ask the user to enter the time shown.
By deploying 100s of such little "CAPTCHAs", the site owners can make the bots' task that much more difficult.
And heck, if someone can develop bots that can still do well, I'd say it's a big leap for AI and Cognition! Give the bot-writer a tenured faculty position at CMU. :-)
I hope so, if their concept of a "tallest building" includes the toothpick-like antennae.
On the other hand, would the project be better off accepting $100 (which is what $79 would be before taxes, or thereabouts) from you, per year, in cash?
Of course, there's also this concept of "theoretical FLOPS", which is open to interpretation... we'll have to wait and see what the LINPACK (and other such benchmark) numbers report.