Will the interactions between all the individual devices create something more than the sum of their parts?
You've just demonstrated that the answer is "yes", so this isn't really a good Ask Slashdot. But I shouldn't quibble, since you've raised an interesting topic -- and persuaded me not to buy an autonomous vacuum cleaner. Or any other autonomous device.
Until I went looking for a copy of Shelley's sonnet to cut and paste, I didn't realize that it originated as a sort of friendly contest between him and Smith. The web is definitely an educational place!
Slashcode bug: you apparently copied that text from a page that used Microsoft Latin1 encoding, aka CP1252. This allows you to represent the EM dash with 0x97. That shouldn't actually work, since Slashdot advertises its pages as using the ISO version of Latin1, 8859-1, which doesn't use that value. Ironic at site that is so unfriendly to Microsoft. Also interesting that Firefox ignores this inconsistency between a page's advertised and actual encoding.
The correct, vendor neutral way to represent an EM dash on a Latin1 page is to use a character entity (& mdash; or & #8212; space added after the & to get past filter). Slashcode used to allow this, but now removes character entities. Correct encoding is obviously not a high priority!
This report is mostly useless... the technologies used in the media are never printed on the packaging.
But publicizing the problem is a good way to get full disclosure on the packaging. If this report attracts enough attention, you can expect to see advertisements for "archival quality" optical disks. Hardly useless.
Actually, the Ten Commandments did a lot to fix that kind of abuse. Before they were handed down, nobody could figure out exactly why The Lord was Smiting them. Lot was really pissed when he wife was turned into a pillar of salt for undocumented sins.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias, 1818
It's the developers decision to use unsafe code in the.NET platform. I certainly wouldn't call this a huge mistake made by MS.
Except that a primary purpose of.NET is to create a security layer, so that badly-written applications don't screw up your system. This is why Microsoft is telling developers to stop using native Windows APIs and code to.NET instead -- it's supposed to be safer.
Paypal hasn't "banned" any country. They started out as a U.S.-only operation and have been grandually adding other countries to their system. Given the complexities of international financial transfers, it's hardly suprising that they haven't yet covered the entire planet.
That would make sense. But then again, the NSA is notoriously uptight about releasing this kind of information. (There's a story about how the air conditioning in NSA headquarters doesn't work, because nobody had the authorization to tell the contractor how many people were going to work in the building.) So either your story is a good, but unauthorized, guess. Or you've just spilled a government secret, and will shortly be moving to Guantanamo!
When learning algorithms, the algorithm should be be written in as high a level language as possible, preferably natural language of the student.
Which is actually what Knuth does. But then he goes on to "implement" the algorithm on his pseudo-machine.
This approach was much easier to justify when he came up with it back in the 60s. Except for Fortran (obviously not suitable for a CS text) or Lisp (a kind of language I can't picture Knuth using), there was simply no high-level language most people had access to. And giving code examples in a particular machine language would have made forced the students to make assumption that might not apply for a lot of machines. Even byte-oriented addressing was not universally accepted!
But that's a long time ago. I guess what disturbs me about this project is not so much the specific weirdnesses -- the "generic" pseudo machine, and the idea of writing a comprehensive text for such a huge subject. It's that Knuth assigned himself some very specific goals 40 years ago, and refuses to acknowledge all the changes that made these goals obsolete.
I don't blame people for naively posting lame "I'm stuck" questions. I do blame editors for being too lazy to filter them out. And (not for the last time, alas): IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO POST A QUESTION ON SLASHDOT UNLESS IT WILL LEAD TO AN INTERESTING DISCUSSION. A question that can be answered by a simple google is not very interesting.
Your other comments rest on the assumption that you can only talk about algorithms by writing code in an actual executable language. But lots of CS books don't do that. They rely on pseudo-code, or they compare implementations in various high- and low-level languages. Even TAOCP is written so you can skip over the MIX parts.
Besides, if the code examples are obsolete in 10 years, so what? Most textbooks require major revision after that long. (Not to be confused with the pseudo-revisions done every year so that new textbooks don't have to compete with used ones.) And that's in standard disciplines that change relatively slowly. Nothing changes as quickly as CS!
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Knuth had what seemed like a good idea 40 years ago and can't let it go. (Actually, two of them; the other was that he could write a single comprehensive CS textbook.) That inability to see the flaws in a pet idea seems to be all too common among computer people.
I seem to recall reading that TAOCP was originally intended as a single volume. The project grew, because computer science grew as fast as Knuth could write. In the late 70s, Knuth joked that people should please stop doing any research, so he could finish the series!
I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.
It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!
Probably won't work. Unless the call center person has an option on his screen that says, "Callee dead, remove from database," nothing will change.
There's a common fallacy people use when dealing with call centers. Because they hear a human voice on the other end, they assume they're talking to an actual human being. The human on the phone is just acting as a carbon-based interface unit. Actual decisions are made by a not very bright computer system that's programmed to maximize exposure to the people they're trying to get to. Minimizing time wasted on calling the wrong people is a priority, but not a big one, so the system always has bugs like this one. And of course pissing people off by wasting their time is a matter of no concern at all.
This story might help illustrate the problem, even though it's about a different kind of call center. A certain prominent bank once decided that somebody who owed them money lived with me. A complete mistake, but not a far-fetched one: we had the same (unusual) last name, and his last known address was on a street (again, with an unusual name) that I had lived on ten years before. I get a call. I explain that I don't even know this person. They promise to correct the error. I get another call. Same explanation, same promise. Went on day after day, until I came to recognize the voices of the people in the call center. Presumably they also recognized me, but simply didn't have the freedom of action to stop calling me, and no option on their computer screens that reliably handled this particular problem. I finally said, "I want to talk to your supervisor," and repeated that line for about 5 minutes, despite various assurances that I didn't need to. I finally got somebody with the power to correct the error. But no apology, of course.
...the US wasn't being paranoid when they implemented the USA Patriot act -- it was simply a police-state power grab.
Why do you think police states happen? Because somebody decides that Evil Overlord looks good on their resume? Only in comic books. Real world police states happen because the citizenry becomes afraid, and decides to trade social freedom for a sense of security. Sometimes cynical politicians exploit public paranoia, but the most dangerous leaders are those who validate themselves by a sense of persecution.
You raise an important issue, and one that people don't pay enough attention to. However, it doesn't begin with Google. For a long time we've been seeing media conglomerates monopolize print and broadcast channels by buying up independent providers. They tried to do the same thing on the web by buying search engines and turning them into "portals". Fortunately, this attempt was a total disaster; unfortunately it destroyed some perfectly good search engines through mismanagement and loss of credibility. One reason Google took so long going public was their desire to avoid that kind of takeover.
I'm not too worried about Google becoming the Microsoft of the Web. They've been good online citizens, and they've focused on facilitating access to other people's content rather than trying to create their own content monopoly. Still, it's only reasonable to keep on eye on their plans, and not assume that they'll always do the right thing. But for now, I find their entrance into new markets (and their astonishing financial success!) quite reassuring.
Is Audio Hijack one of those products that substites its own speaker driver, so you can record the output of any program? If so, you couldn't use it with Skype -- you'd only get half the conversation.
And I though the show was just an excuse to recycle old WW II movie plots. (Compare "Balance of Terror" with The Enemy Below.) It just goes to show that show works on many levels *smirk*.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a school of thought that says that intelligence is based on randomness.
Slashcode bug: you apparently copied that text from a page that used Microsoft Latin1 encoding, aka CP1252. This allows you to represent the EM dash with 0x97. That shouldn't actually work, since Slashdot advertises its pages as using the ISO version of Latin1, 8859-1, which doesn't use that value. Ironic at site that is so unfriendly to Microsoft. Also interesting that Firefox ignores this inconsistency between a page's advertised and actual encoding.
The correct, vendor neutral way to represent an EM dash on a Latin1 page is to use a character entity (& mdash; or & #8212; space added after the & to get past filter). Slashcode used to allow this, but now removes character entities. Correct encoding is obviously not a high priority!
Actually, the Ten Commandments did a lot to fix that kind of abuse. Before they were handed down, nobody could figure out exactly why The Lord was Smiting them. Lot was really pissed when he wife was turned into a pillar of salt for undocumented sins.
Paypal hasn't "banned" any country. They started out as a U.S.-only operation and have been grandually adding other countries to their system. Given the complexities of international financial transfers, it's hardly suprising that they haven't yet covered the entire planet.
The weather's fine, but the recreational facilities leave something to be desired.
That would make sense. But then again, the NSA is notoriously uptight about releasing this kind of information. (There's a story about how the air conditioning in NSA headquarters doesn't work, because nobody had the authorization to tell the contractor how many people were going to work in the building.) So either your story is a good, but unauthorized, guess. Or you've just spilled a government secret, and will shortly be moving to Guantanamo!
This approach was much easier to justify when he came up with it back in the 60s. Except for Fortran (obviously not suitable for a CS text) or Lisp (a kind of language I can't picture Knuth using), there was simply no high-level language most people had access to. And giving code examples in a particular machine language would have made forced the students to make assumption that might not apply for a lot of machines. Even byte-oriented addressing was not universally accepted!
But that's a long time ago. I guess what disturbs me about this project is not so much the specific weirdnesses -- the "generic" pseudo machine, and the idea of writing a comprehensive text for such a huge subject. It's that Knuth assigned himself some very specific goals 40 years ago, and refuses to acknowledge all the changes that made these goals obsolete.
I don't blame people for naively posting lame "I'm stuck" questions. I do blame editors for being too lazy to filter them out. And (not for the last time, alas): IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO POST A QUESTION ON SLASHDOT UNLESS IT WILL LEAD TO AN INTERESTING DISCUSSION. A question that can be answered by a simple google is not very interesting.
Your other comments rest on the assumption that you can only talk about algorithms by writing code in an actual executable language. But lots of CS books don't do that. They rely on pseudo-code, or they compare implementations in various high- and low-level languages. Even TAOCP is written so you can skip over the MIX parts.
Besides, if the code examples are obsolete in 10 years, so what? Most textbooks require major revision after that long. (Not to be confused with the pseudo-revisions done every year so that new textbooks don't have to compete with used ones.) And that's in standard disciplines that change relatively slowly. Nothing changes as quickly as CS!
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Knuth had what seemed like a good idea 40 years ago and can't let it go. (Actually, two of them; the other was that he could write a single comprehensive CS textbook.) That inability to see the flaws in a pet idea seems to be all too common among computer people.
Besides, if you're stupid enough to study CS without actually reading the code, you have no hope of even BSing your way through a course.
Good that you spend all your effort twidling bits, instead of understanding the algorithm? So instead he has to update it for the machine architecture of the decade.I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.
It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!
A cow in a greenhouse? That's like a bull in a chinashop!
I still find it easier to compose HTML by hand. But thanks for reminding me to keep an eye on alternatives.
There's a common fallacy people use when dealing with call centers. Because they hear a human voice on the other end, they assume they're talking to an actual human being. The human on the phone is just acting as a carbon-based interface unit. Actual decisions are made by a not very bright computer system that's programmed to maximize exposure to the people they're trying to get to. Minimizing time wasted on calling the wrong people is a priority, but not a big one, so the system always has bugs like this one. And of course pissing people off by wasting their time is a matter of no concern at all.
This story might help illustrate the problem, even though it's about a different kind of call center. A certain prominent bank once decided that somebody who owed them money lived with me. A complete mistake, but not a far-fetched one: we had the same (unusual) last name, and his last known address was on a street (again, with an unusual name) that I had lived on ten years before. I get a call. I explain that I don't even know this person. They promise to correct the error. I get another call. Same explanation, same promise. Went on day after day, until I came to recognize the voices of the people in the call center. Presumably they also recognized me, but simply didn't have the freedom of action to stop calling me, and no option on their computer screens that reliably handled this particular problem. I finally said, "I want to talk to your supervisor," and repeated that line for about 5 minutes, despite various assurances that I didn't need to. I finally got somebody with the power to correct the error. But no apology, of course.
I'm not too worried about Google becoming the Microsoft of the Web. They've been good online citizens, and they've focused on facilitating access to other people's content rather than trying to create their own content monopoly. Still, it's only reasonable to keep on eye on their plans, and not assume that they'll always do the right thing. But for now, I find their entrance into new markets (and their astonishing financial success!) quite reassuring.
Moderation -1: mindless repetition of old joke
Is Audio Hijack one of those products that substites its own speaker driver, so you can record the output of any program? If so, you couldn't use it with Skype -- you'd only get half the conversation.
And I though the show was just an excuse to recycle old WW II movie plots. (Compare "Balance of Terror" with The Enemy Below.) It just goes to show that show works on many levels *smirk*.
Not a rumor. One of those lame trekkie paperbacks, due out in a couple of months. Possibly with a guest appearance by Denny Crane.