So big deal. Writing an effective content-based spam filter isn't hard. Writing an effective content-based spam filter without false positives is just about impossible. If you don't mind missing some of your email, fine. But most of us don't have that luxury.
And then there's housing. Last time I was looking for a place to live, I didn't even look at the classifieds. They're a pain to sort through, even online. Craigslist housing listings let you drill down by neighborhood, price -- even landlord pet policy. Plus you can click through to a map. And a lot of landlords post pictures.
As we speak, there are over 18000 real-estate listings on the original SF area Craigslist, including a lot of 6- and 7-figure homes. Housing in California is big business. Craigslist could make a lot of money just charging token fees for this service, never mind going for what the market will bear. But naw, as long as Craig Newmark and company are making expenses, they could give a shit.
That's not up to eBay. They own exactly 25%, which they bought from a former employee. Unless Craigslist starts handing out more equity, they're not going to get a chance to expand their stake. Judging from the attitude expressed in Craig Newmark's blog, that's not going to happen any time soon.
I think what really pisses off the newspapers is that Craigslist doesn't even charge for most of its services. They originally didn't charge for any ("we're not a commercial operation!") but finally conceded that they needed some cash flow, and started charging San Francisco area employers for job listings. (Job listings in other areas are still free.) Obviously eBay grabbed that stake in them with the hopes of getting them to realize more of their cash potential. But unless they can find another former employee to buy out, that's not gonna happen.
MakeLoveNotSpam, was extremely well received despite the whines and hand wringing from the no-one-should-ever-actively-defend-themselves crowd.
Hand wringing? Like all vigilantes, you love to emphasis your own macho attitude and the supposed wimpiness of your detractors. Whereas the real issue is the collatoral damage.
Another half-assed anarchist. Tearing down civilization requires individual initiative! If you want to be a lawless rebel, get started right now -- don't wait for some "asteroid" to give you permission!
Absolutely correct. Sound-cancelling headphones have their uses, but they're all in environments much more noisy than any office. I bought a pair of Sony Fontopia in-ear headphones, which come with a multi-sized set of plugs. As a bonus, the sound quality is better than for any other headphones I've ever owned. And they're a lot easier to store than over-the-ear headphones.
Not quite the same kind of hacking. The USB cable is meant to be used the way you used it. (Very likely you could have found out the same thing by reading the SDK manuals, though it is more fun to discover this stuff on your own.) But Verizon seems to have decided that their customers can't be allowed to use Bluetooth except for specific authorized purposes. Getting around their limitations involves disabling the activation and modifying the firmware. Not for the faint of heart!
What functionality to you get from any hack? 99% of the hacks you see on Slashdot have no functional purpose, beyond some small (even imaginary) improvement in features or efficiency. Which is hardly worth the risk of damaging the thing you're trying to hack.
But all hacks are useful for teaching yourself about the technology. And that's not a small goal.
Doxygen is an absolute must if you need to document C++ APIs. Used with Graphviz, you do get clickable web diagrams that are very useful for visualizing class relationships. But note that the diagrams are not publication quality, since Graphviz has only the most primitive line-drawing features.
In theory you can use Doxygen with any OO language, provided you can get a parser for that language. But I haven't heard a lot about Doxygen outside the C++ community. I imagine Java people mostly stick with JavaDoc, since that comes with the JDK. But I consider Doxygen to be far superior.
Re:A Games CD for Linux on BitTorrent ... mmm..
on
Games Knoppix
·
· Score: 1
The lameness they're filtering against is a certain kind of feeble troll that used to be popular around here, when somebody realized that a lot of posts with a lot of short lines made a discussion impossible to read.
You might be able to get around the filter by putting your HTML list on one long line. But if you can, that's a bug, since a troll could do that too. I'd suggest just putting long lists like yours in a simple wrapped paragraph. It doesn't look as cool, but it isn't particularly hard to read.
And if they distributed the Microsoft ntfs.sys file they'd really be in trouble, since they don't have a license for it. There are two ways around this: you make it easy for people to remaster the CD using their own copies of ntfs.sys, or you use a third-party driver.
Language Nazis are always obnoxious, but you're a step below that. The legal rules that dictate "proper trademark usage" are meant to protect the trademark, nothing else. Thus they're of interest only to the owners of the trademark -- and their lawyers.
Lego puts those notices on their web site to cover their legal asses. They know full well that few people will change they way they talk. Their real purpose is to claim in court that they followed all the rules. The fact that nobody else does is neither here nor there.
I once worked at a high-tech company where the name of a certain well-known software technology was suddenly deemed to be a valuable trademark. Everybody, especially the tech writers, was lectured at length about all the usage "mistakes" they'd been making. And everybody, especially the tech writers, nearly rioted when they discovered the clunky, ugly, weird language they'd have to use in the future.
In the real world, the name of something is noun. Slashdot lives in the real world.
I found this interview with its developers. The motivation seems to be, "Windows is too bloated and unreliable, Linux isn't sufficiently GUI-centric." The unspoken assumption is that there's no third choice because nobody's bothered to write one.
Which ignores a lot of history: we've seen QNX, BeOS, NEXT, and a lot of others. If you want to justify SkyOS, you don't compare it Windows or Linux -- you compare it to all the OSs that have failed to penetrate the x86 user base, and explain why SkyOS can succeed where they failed.
If I recall the "plot" of T3, Skynet used viruses to distribute itself throughout cyberspace, thus rendering itself immune to physical attack. But then, it went and started a nuclear war that would have destroyed the electronic infrastructure it was distributed through. A very irritating plot contradiction.
Offtopic grammar fascism rant: the rule I like best for dealing with the -us, -i issue goes as follows. Few people really know Latin grammar, so it's silly to try to inflect every Latin-derived word according to the rules that Julius Caesar would have used. In a few cases, the original Latin inflection is the one that everybody knows, so you say "agenda" and "data", not "agendums" and "datums". But for everything else, you save yourself trouble and (a particular point for technical writers) make your prose clearer by sticking with simple English inflections.
Where this falls down is the weird anxiety everybody seems to have to honor some ultimate notion of correctness. So whenever they see a word that ends with -us -- or even a word that ends with an "es" sound, they go back into High School English mode and flounder about. Sometimes the result is just unnecessarily pretentious ("styli" instead of "styluses"). Sometimes you end up making obscure mistakes that old Julius would have laughed at ("octopus" is Greek, not Latin, so the "correct" plural is "octopods"). And sometimes you end up imposing pseudo-Latin rules on words that have always used English inflections -- as with the Buffy fans who keep asking each other "What's the plural of apocalypse?"
So chill out everybody. You speak your own language better than you think you do!
"Non-GPL"? That's an interesting way to put it. The problem with writing a driver for NTFS is that Microsoft keeps making undocumented changes in the system. (Sabotaging third-party driver vendors, or just their usual compulsive bit-twiddling? Only The Shadow Knows.) Captive-NTFS's workaround is to provide hooks for Microsoft's NTFS.sys. Which they can't distribute, for obvious reasons. But there's nothing to prevent you from copying the file from an XP installation.
Though it is possible that "Non-GPL" refers to something else.
Do the math. First class postage costs 37 cents -- more if you're sending from outside the U.S. Add in the cost of the envelope, and nearly 1/3 of the total cost goes to transmission. That's many times what PayPal charges.
If you want to send more money (and I'm not going to discourage you!) Snail Mail makes more sense. But not as much as you might think. You really need to use and check, and that imposes banking and handling costs on your recipient.
Sure its free to send money. But if you're doing commercial transactions (and I suspect any account that receives a lot of payments gets classified as "commercial"), you have to pay a fee. Not bad, as credit card payments go, but not free either.
I don't think the central tenet of the movie was environmental, but there did seem to be a fairly regular pattern of appreciation of nature & criticism of human excesses.
There, I agree with you. And that was also a theme in Princess Mononoke, Castle in the Sky, and My Neighbor Tortoro. (Which are all the movies I've seen that are original Miyazaki stories.) But only one of these (PM) is explicitly about the environment. And even there, there's a sort of fatalistic attitude -- people will muck things up, and you can't hope to save everything.
I think the bottom line is that Miyazaki cares deeply about the environment, and this shows in the stories he tells. But that's very different from making a movie with "Protect the environment!" as a moral. I don't think he's ever done that, with the prossible exception of PM
It is funny though that we are being slowly transitioned and nobody notices.
Except that the transition has been stalled for a long time. It's even lost a little ground. We no longer have dual-unit highway signs, for example.
I think we can survive without a complete transition on the consumer level -- which is where most of the resistance is. What's unforgivable is the degree to which English Measure (the original name; the system predates the Revolution!) is still used in science and technology. It's most conspicuous and painful when we lose a space probe. But think was this lack of standardization does day-to-day to U.S. competitiveness!
It's also important to note that the metric system took over not because it's "more rational" but because it was a system everybody could agree on. Before the metric system, you saw different units of measure for different countries and even different professions.
Which brings us back to our original discussion. The same people who invented the metric system tried to fix the calendar too. Never caught on outside of France. Nor have dozens of other "reform" measures ever attracted more than a few overenthusiastic proponents. It's just not worth the trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, everybody knows that "Flamebait" is shorthand for "You suck!"
So big deal. Writing an effective content-based spam filter isn't hard. Writing an effective content-based spam filter without false positives is just about impossible. If you don't mind missing some of your email, fine. But most of us don't have that luxury.
...only outlaws will have useless dangerous prank toys!
Yeah, 'cause that worked so well with addictive drugs....
As we speak, there are over 18000 real-estate listings on the original SF area Craigslist, including a lot of 6- and 7-figure homes. Housing in California is big business. Craigslist could make a lot of money just charging token fees for this service, never mind going for what the market will bear. But naw, as long as Craig Newmark and company are making expenses, they could give a shit.
That's not up to eBay. They own exactly 25%, which they bought from a former employee. Unless Craigslist starts handing out more equity, they're not going to get a chance to expand their stake. Judging from the attitude expressed in Craig Newmark's blog, that's not going to happen any time soon.
I think what really pisses off the newspapers is that Craigslist doesn't even charge for most of its services. They originally didn't charge for any ("we're not a commercial operation!") but finally conceded that they needed some cash flow, and started charging San Francisco area employers for job listings. (Job listings in other areas are still free.) Obviously eBay grabbed that stake in them with the hopes of getting them to realize more of their cash potential. But unless they can find another former employee to buy out, that's not gonna happen.
Another half-assed anarchist. Tearing down civilization requires individual initiative! If you want to be a lawless rebel, get started right now -- don't wait for some "asteroid" to give you permission!
Absolutely correct. Sound-cancelling headphones have their uses, but they're all in environments much more noisy than any office. I bought a pair of Sony Fontopia in-ear headphones, which come with a multi-sized set of plugs. As a bonus, the sound quality is better than for any other headphones I've ever owned. And they're a lot easier to store than over-the-ear headphones.
Not quite the same kind of hacking. The USB cable is meant to be used the way you used it. (Very likely you could have found out the same thing by reading the SDK manuals, though it is more fun to discover this stuff on your own.) But Verizon seems to have decided that their customers can't be allowed to use Bluetooth except for specific authorized purposes. Getting around their limitations involves disabling the activation and modifying the firmware. Not for the faint of heart!
But all hacks are useful for teaching yourself about the technology. And that's not a small goal.
It true! Here's a picture! And here she is with her father. Notice how they cleverly composed the image to hide the tips of her ears!
In theory you can use Doxygen with any OO language, provided you can get a parser for that language. But I haven't heard a lot about Doxygen outside the C++ community. I imagine Java people mostly stick with JavaDoc, since that comes with the JDK. But I consider Doxygen to be far superior.
You might be able to get around the filter by putting your HTML list on one long line. But if you can, that's a bug, since a troll could do that too. I'd suggest just putting long lists like yours in a simple wrapped paragraph. It doesn't look as cool, but it isn't particularly hard to read.
And if they distributed the Microsoft ntfs.sys file they'd really be in trouble, since they don't have a license for it. There are two ways around this: you make it easy for people to remaster the CD using their own copies of ntfs.sys, or you use a third-party driver.
Lego puts those notices on their web site to cover their legal asses. They know full well that few people will change they way they talk. Their real purpose is to claim in court that they followed all the rules. The fact that nobody else does is neither here nor there.
I once worked at a high-tech company where the name of a certain well-known software technology was suddenly deemed to be a valuable trademark. Everybody, especially the tech writers, was lectured at length about all the usage "mistakes" they'd been making. And everybody, especially the tech writers, nearly rioted when they discovered the clunky, ugly, weird language they'd have to use in the future.
In the real world, the name of something is noun. Slashdot lives in the real world.
Which ignores a lot of history: we've seen QNX, BeOS, NEXT, and a lot of others. If you want to justify SkyOS, you don't compare it Windows or Linux -- you compare it to all the OSs that have failed to penetrate the x86 user base, and explain why SkyOS can succeed where they failed.
Offtopic grammar fascism rant: the rule I like best for dealing with the -us, -i issue goes as follows. Few people really know Latin grammar, so it's silly to try to inflect every Latin-derived word according to the rules that Julius Caesar would have used. In a few cases, the original Latin inflection is the one that everybody knows, so you say "agenda" and "data", not "agendums" and "datums". But for everything else, you save yourself trouble and (a particular point for technical writers) make your prose clearer by sticking with simple English inflections.
Where this falls down is the weird anxiety everybody seems to have to honor some ultimate notion of correctness. So whenever they see a word that ends with -us -- or even a word that ends with an "es" sound, they go back into High School English mode and flounder about. Sometimes the result is just unnecessarily pretentious ("styli" instead of "styluses"). Sometimes you end up making obscure mistakes that old Julius would have laughed at ("octopus" is Greek, not Latin, so the "correct" plural is "octopods"). And sometimes you end up imposing pseudo-Latin rules on words that have always used English inflections -- as with the Buffy fans who keep asking each other "What's the plural of apocalypse?"
So chill out everybody. You speak your own language better than you think you do!
Though it is possible that "Non-GPL" refers to something else.
I'm so happy for you.
If you want to send more money (and I'm not going to discourage you!) Snail Mail makes more sense. But not as much as you might think. You really need to use and check, and that imposes banking and handling costs on your recipient.
Sure its free to send money. But if you're doing commercial transactions (and I suspect any account that receives a lot of payments gets classified as "commercial"), you have to pay a fee. Not bad, as credit card payments go, but not free either.
I think the bottom line is that Miyazaki cares deeply about the environment, and this shows in the stories he tells. But that's very different from making a movie with "Protect the environment!" as a moral. I don't think he's ever done that, with the prossible exception of PM
I think we can survive without a complete transition on the consumer level -- which is where most of the resistance is. What's unforgivable is the degree to which English Measure (the original name; the system predates the Revolution!) is still used in science and technology. It's most conspicuous and painful when we lose a space probe. But think was this lack of standardization does day-to-day to U.S. competitiveness!
It's also important to note that the metric system took over not because it's "more rational" but because it was a system everybody could agree on. Before the metric system, you saw different units of measure for different countries and even different professions.
Which brings us back to our original discussion. The same people who invented the metric system tried to fix the calendar too. Never caught on outside of France. Nor have dozens of other "reform" measures ever attracted more than a few overenthusiastic proponents. It's just not worth the trouble.