In the area of my ignorance, though, I don't know if inductive losses would ever be significant for a superconductor. One of the defining characteristics of superconductivity is that external magnetic fields only penetrate a tiny distance (~100 nanometers) into the superconductor. I don't know if there might be a similar oddity which prevents them from generating a magnetic field outside of the conductor and coupling with other conductors.
No, there's nothing that keeps superconductors from making external fields. In fact, one of the most common applications of superconductors is as electromagnets.
The GP post is just completely incorrect about all transmission lines being DC. You are right, they're normally AC. However, the reasons they're AC might not apply to superconductors. The reason AC became the standard way to transmit electric power was that AC can be put through a transformer, and with a transformer you can step up the voltage for long-distance transmission, then step it back down again at the end. The higher voltage gives smaller ohmic power losses. With a superconductor, you don't have to worry about ohmic power losses, and that might make it more practical to transmit power using DC. The advantage would be that you'd have no inductive losses. The disadvantage would be that you'd need an inverter at the end in order to convert to AC, since the user's building is full of AC devices. Inverters are not perfectly efficient, and they're also not cheap, so maybe that's worse than just accepting the inductive losses.
Trying to imagine an application where you'd really want to use superconducting power transmission with DC, one that occurs to me is if you have a big photovoltaic farm in Arizona, and you want to send all that energy to Los Angeles. The photovoltaics produce DC, so somewhere, somehow you've got to have an inverter. Maybe you'd put the inverter at the LA end, and avoid inductive losses. But it would be a huge engineering project to lay a trench from Arizona to LA and fill it with liquid nitrogen.
What was hilarious was when the service would go down, and I would call Time Warner about it. It was just silly trying to get a tech support person who even understood what usenet was. They would tell me that they they weren't the Usenet company, and I had to call Usenet directly. They would think I was talking about Google groups. They would refuse to acknowledge that they had any such service, even when I would point out to them that there was some server called something like news.rr.com, which had been working the day before.
It's not just the alt.* groups or the binary groups. My ISP (Time Warner) dropped usenet access completely last month. I'm sure that's what the other ISPs will do soon as well. Gawd, I remember calling my ISP when their news server went down, and it was like pulling teeth to get anyone on the phone who had even heard of usenet, or would admit that they (at that time) provided such a service.
This whole thing is really sad. I love usenet. It's basically the only way I form more than passing personal relationships online. It's a great way to learn about and stay up with anything you're interested in. My ISP completely dropped usenet access last month.
I suspect that a lot of usenet users are simply going to give up at this point. There's been a vast amount of spam recently for knockoffs of shoes, purses, and watches. Many people whose ISPs have given up are not going to go to the trouble of finding affordable usenet access. Personally, I tried paying octanews, who ripped me off. Then for a while I used google groups, which reminded me of how much better a newsreader is than a web browser for participating in usenet. Finally a slashdotter recommended astraweb, which is working great for me now. Many people who had been using text-only usenet may not realize that you can pay for usenet access by the gigabyte rather than by the month, which means you can basically pay $10 and have usenet access for the indefinite future.
I mentioned usenet to my sister the other day, and she asked me what it was and why I wanted to use it. I actually had a hard time explaining it until I thought about it later. Basically, it gets the job of running a discussion group done way better than web browser interface. It's also noncommercial and very general -- none of this stuff about screwing around with some specific web-based group that will evaporate in a few years and that has no world-wide profile.
In French, for example, you create the past tense of a verb by conjugating either avoir (to have) or etre (to be), then using a special ending for your action verb. Whether you use avoir or etre is determined entirely by whether or not your main verb is transitive or intransitive (one that has vs one that doesn't necessarily need a direct object). It's a simple distinction, but even at university level we were reduced to memorizing an mnemonic device (DR AND MRS VAN DER TRAMPS) to list the few intransitive verbs.
You've got this garbled. Etre verbs are always intransitive, but intransitive verbs are not always etre verbs. The etre verbs do need to be memorized. There are lots and lots of intransitive verbs in French, and only about 20 etre verbs. For instance, you say j'ai vecu, not je suis vecu, even though vivre is intransitive.
Tartini is OSS that has some similar functionality. I'd love to get it running, but when I tried, I failed. If anyone can give instructions that work for compiling it on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, I'd be very grateful. I emailed the author, and he tried to help me, but I was out of my depth with Qt, and gave up for lack of time. Below is what he told me about the problems I was experiencing.
> apt-get install libqwt-dev libqt4-dev fftw3-dev > $ qmake pitch.pro > WARNING: Failure to find: rtAudio/rtAudio.cpp The file is rtAudio/RtAudio.cpp. Note the different case. So either rename that file to lowercase, or change the line in thepitch.proto upper case. > > $ make >/usr/share/qt3/bin/uic dialogs/settingsdialog.ui -o > dialogs/settingsdialog.h > uic: File generated with too recent version of Qt Designer (4.0 vs. 3.3.7) > make: *** [dialogs/settingsdialog.h] Error 1 Looks like it still using Qt3. You will have to set you Qt environment variables to use Qt4. ie QTDIR to the Qt4 base path. and QMAKESPEC = ${QTDIR}/mkspecs/linux-g++ (And possibly QTINC and QTLIB) An if it isn't already, you will have to compile Qt4.
This is an excellent article about functional programming.
Ocaml has a very good reputation. It compiles to native code, and has performance comparable to C. It's agnostic about programming style. You can use it as if it was C with garbage collection, or you can us it in an fp style, or you can mix the two. There are good libraries. Because of the way the garbage collector is designed, it doesn't support SMP to the extent that erlang does. The design of ocaml includes some conscious trade-offs of elegance for performance. In particular, strings are not lists.
Erlang's claim to fame is that any code you write will automagically take advantage of SMP.
Haskell's design focuses on elegance, sometimes at the expense of performance. It's strongly focused on the functional style.
[...]the price of OLPC will come down as the volume ramps up [...] The price of eeepc and similar is at the bottom of the commercially viable pricing point for this kind of hardware. There's a reason that you don't see anything dropping under that price point, or anything really beating it at that price point. Market pressure for this class of machine is still to drive the price of the hardware up. (Look at the recent eeepc models.)
I think what you're saying is partly right and partly wrong.
One reason you don't see retail systems priced very low is that so many people want Windows. I used to buy the Great Quality machines at Fry's for $200. They came with Linux on them. After carrying them for several years, Fry's stopped selling them, and now the cheapest desktop machines they sell are about $400-500, with Vista on them. From talking to a couple of people who worked at Fry's, it sounds like the problem was they were having way too many returns on the machines. Apparently most people were buying them to run Windows. Some didn't understand that they weren't getting a machine with Windows. Others bought them intending to install a pirated copy of Windows, but had problems with the install, so they returned it. None of this is relevant to something like OLPC, which doesn't need to run Windows.
Another thing is that it's true the price of the OLPC will come down as the volume ramps up, but the price of commodity hardware is also dropping like crazy. The price of all the components (hard drive, ram, cpu) are all extremely low now, and the computing power you need for something like an XO is ten years behind the cutting edge. I think people are not noticing how ridiculously cheap hardware is getting. For instance, let's say that last year a low-end machine with Windows XP and Office was $450, consisting of manufacturing ($150), MS tax ($200), and retail profit ($100). This year, manufacturing the same hardware might cost $80. But oops, now XP is no longer available on new machines, and to run Vista you need higher specs. So even though the manufacturing cost should be half what it was 12 months ago, the price you see on a retail shelf is the same. Note that none of this logic applies to OLPC. The specs that were good enough to run sugar last year are still good enough to run sugar this year. There's no MS tax, and no retail profit margin.
And finally, it's not obvious to me that it makes sense for a program like OLPC to be shipping a bespoke, newly manufactured machine. In the grandparent post, I listed how I can assemble a used desktop system, paying retail here in the US, for $180, including an LCD monitor. This is a system with twice the memory of the xo, and a bigger screen. Sure, it doesn't have some of the same features as the xo (portability, wireless, ability to run from a human-powered generator), but I'm not convinced that those features are really vital. I think the focus on getting brand-new hardware rather than used hardware is another product of the way Windows has taught people to think. Buying a cheap used machine to run Windows is a losing proposition, because you're probably getting a system that's full of malware and doesn't have a Windows install CD; but that logic doesn't apply if you're not running Windows.
What you say is perfectly reasonable. However, the economics of this kind of thing tends to work out so that any any given time, some people are willing to pay more to be on the cutting edge of technology, while others are perfectly happy to save some money by lagging behind. I recently downgraded my cable modem to a slower level of service in order to save $15/mo. I simply don't need the extra bandwidth. There's also the issue that for many types of internet access you're sharing bandwidth with your neighbors because it's all going through the same pipe to the same switch. And ISPs have to oversubscribe their lines; if they were to guarantee every user x amount of bandwidth, even if they all got online at the same time, they would have to charge much, much more.
So basically the ISP has to set some rate structure. Their interest in constructing that rate structure is in maximizing their profits. As a consumer, my interest is in minimizing what I pay for the level of service I'm currently happy with. My interests are also opposed to my neighbors. The competition among all these competing interests can probably be balanced by the ordinary mechanisms of capitalism, provided that they're not a monopoly. In my area, TWC has a broadband monopoly. That's the thing to get upset about and to try to fix. If people are upset about the rate structure offered to them, then there are basically two possibilities: the rate structure is unfair because there's a monopoly, or the rate structure is fair as determined by the laws of supply and demand.
I use clusty.com for searches. The results seem to be of the same quality as google's, and their privacy policy is much better.
Now I just need a good way to access usenet. My ISP dropped usenet access last month. I tried buying access from octanews.com, and they ripped me off (currently going through the chargeback process with the credit card company). So now I'm the proud owner of the email address ineverreadmailsenttothis@yahoo.com, which I used to register a google account so I can post on usenet via google groups. Yech. Anyone know a good company to buy a cheap block access (*not* monthly) usenet account from?
What about emissions? I learned recently, to my surprise, that a motorcycle pollutes about 10x as much per mile as a car. Emissions equipment is heavy. A one- or two-cylinder diesel is something that I'd imagine would pollute like hell.
I'm not trying to bash olpc -- I liked it enough to donate one. But I wonder whether the olpc is simply coming to market too late, and at too high a price, to be relevant. This article is an example of how fuzzy the boundary is between xo+sugar and a standard linux distro running on commodity hardware such as a eeepc or a standard laptop or desktop machine. There are basically three reasons I can see why olpc can be relevant:
It's so cheap that it can be given away to lots of kids in developing countries.
It's rugged and portable, can run on a generator, and has a combination of price and features (like wireless) that you don't see in ordinary laptops.
There's something really cool and innovative about sugar that makes it better suited for use by kids than a standard desktop environment.
I've never tried sugar, so I can't say anything for sure about #3, but I'm pretty skeptical. My own kids use gnome, and it works fine for them. The fuzzy boundary demonstrated by the article makes me doubt whether sugar by itself is all that relevant.
Re #2, I'm not convinced that it's really all that important for these kids to have this particular combination of features. Is portability really that critical? How much does it matter if the machine stays in the kid's home, or at school? Is the wireless really that useful in real life, in the environments where xo's are getting used? These features seem to be tied to a particular educational philosophy and imagined model of use, but it's not clear to me whether that's really happening. One of the big killer apps for olpc was supposed to be distribution of free electronic textbooks, and that is something I know something about (see my sig); basically the free electronic textbooks that exist today are disproportionately slanted toward esoteric graduate-level books on things like quantum field theory, with less for college freshmen, and essentially nothing for K-12.
And then there's #1, price. So far they've only got the xo's price down to $200, and $200 is not all that competitive against commodity hardware at this point. I'm going to have to compare with retail options here in the developed world (US), since that's what I have experience with. You can get a gPC from walmart for $200. I recently walked in to a Salvation Army thrift shop and bought a perfectly fine used desktop system for $89 -- and that wasn't a fluke, because there were two other machines on the shelf at the same price point that looked just fine. Memory upgrades for used machines are ridiculously cheap these days, ~$13 (including shipping) on ebay for 512 MB. So for the same price as the xo, I could spend $89 for a used desktop, $13 for a memory upgrade, $8 for a mouse and keyboard (typical sale price at Fry's), and maybe $70 for a cheap LCD (again, not an unusual sale price at Fry's). Now I'm not saying that this particular method of assembling a cheap, used desktop system is appropriate for getting a machine into the hands of a kid in Cambodia, but I think it does show that commodity hardware is getting so insanely cheap so fast that there's a real possibility that olpc will simply become irrelevant because it's overtaken by events.
They try to intimidate you into using only eBay's own on-site message system to contact bidders instead of e-mailing them directly. [...] I've had problems with more than a few bidders who refuse to answer my e-mails or to pay me directly instead of through eBay's Checkout because they think it's not "official" otherwise, and that I am trying to pull some sort of scam on them.
I have to sympathize at least a little with those users. I recently bought something on ebay, and I have no less than 7 emails about it in my in-box, from 5 different addresses. This seems to be the norm these days for ebay transactions, and it's just plain confusing. Actually, ebay in general is just insanely baroque and confusing for the inexperienced user. There are a gazillion different little widgets, and the whole design of the web site looks like something from somebody's 1997 geocities site.
I run a site that catalogs free books, and accepts user-submitted reviews. (See my sig.) It's a constant source of amazement to me what a low level of morality (and intelligence) some authors have. They'll add their book to the catalog even though it's not free. (The site's UI tells them very clearly that it has to be free online in order to be listed.) Then they'll post their own "review" of the book, which reads exactly like a dust-cover blurb rather than a review. Then I check the email address they used to sign up on the site, and it's the same as the email address of the author of the book -- this despite the fact that the button they had to click on to submit their review was labeled I am not the author, and have no personal, professional, or business relationship with the author. I am submitting my review..
About 50% of the reviews I get are like this, and I have to delete them by hand. I don't actually get that many reviews submitted, which is a good thing in a way, because if the site was really busy I'd never be able to keep up.
I don't think there's any way of solving this problem, since the internet was designed for anonymous use, and even if it was technically feasible to verify identities on the internet, I wouldn't want to do it. Amazon tries fairly hard to deal with this problem. These days they won't let you submit reviews unless you've bought something from them, which is probably a reasonable way to stop sock puppets. They also try to get you to build up a reputation for your online persona, even if it's not publicly tied to a meatspace identity. That doesn't really work that well, though. For instance, there are certain people on amazon who submit something like ten reviews per day, 365 days per year -- obviously they're not really reading all those books. I also don't see any way to stop the phenomenon of the author getting his friends, family, and grad students to write good amazon reviews of his book.
Because of all this, I'm suspicious of any statistical method of analyzing user-submitted reviews. You just have no way of knowing which reviewers are honest. You really have to look at the individual reviews and see if what they say makes sense. Ebay feedback is an example of how silly this can all get, even in a community where people really do have long-term online identities that they have an interest in maintaining good reputations for. What the heck does it tell you if the seller has 99% positive feedback? Absolutely nothing. You have to read the 1% negative reviews and try to evaluate whether they sound reasonable.
Actually, you're wrong about the reoccurring charge thing. They can EASILY block all charges from a company, and I've had it offered to me (and taken them up on that offer). This was with HSBC.
Maybe it depends on the credit card company. I attempted to do it recently with Mastercard, and all they would do for me was change the number.
The best thing to do is to call your credit card company and inform them that AOL is still continuing to bill you after you've already quit their service, and that you want to block any further attempts by AOL to bill your credit card.
This doesn't actually work, in my experience. They can't permanently block a recurring charge like this. What actually does work is if you tell the credit card company that AOL is being unresonsive, and therefore you want to change your credit card number. This sounds like a big deal, but actually it isn't. They send you a new card within a week. You have to contact any other companies that have recurring charges on that card, and give them the new number (or switch them to a different card, if waiting a week will take too long).
Unfortunately, for the money you've already paid, you're probably going to have to see a lawyer, and it just isn't worth it, despite the fact that fraudulent billing is actually a pretty serious offense.
No, you just have to do a chargeback. You call the credit card company and tell them you want to do a chargeback. They send you some paperwork, you respond with information on what happened. You may or may not succeed. It may depend on the quality of the documentation you have.
Thanks for your post. I didn't know that there were plans to implement silverlight in other browsers. After reading your post and the WP article, however, it sounds like silverlight is a long way from (a) being available in other browsers, and (b) having an install base that extends beyond people using recent versions of IE. The mac version isn't out yet. The linux version is far off in the future (and I have to wonder whether it will end up being another unusable, patent-crippled technology like gnash). A lot of this also hinges on the question of what's installed by default in various browsers, because most users will never bother to install a plugin. Is silverlight installed by default in Windows versions of FF these days?
In the sites I visit, it's still pretty rare to see content presented in flash that would more appropriately be presented in html. I assume this is because people want to get indexed by google and have a high page rank, and they know they won't get indexed if it's in flash. If that's the case, then it's actually a bad thing that google is going to start indexing flash content.
As far as silverlight, what are the chances that it will succeed? I'm optimistic that it will fail. Although Windows has a high market share, especially in the US, IE doesn't have anywhere near that market share. There are entire countries in Europe where Firefox is the majority browser. I don't see how any web developer could commit themselves to silverlight when it means locking out so many users.
I am an AMTD customer. Can you please explain this transfer in a little more details to spare me from doing the research?
Well, let's say you're going to switch to scottrade, which is what I did. Basically all you do is call up scottrade and tell them what you want to do. They'll guide you through the process of transferring your positions from ameritrade to them -- they're motivated to help you complete the process, because they want you as a customer. It was pretty easy when I did it. The only minor hassle was that small amounts of money ($5 and $10 amounts) kept showing up in my ameritrade account for a while from dividends from the stocks I'd had in that account before, and I had to talk to ameritrade to get that money sent to me (couldn't have them write me a check by the normal mechanism, because I no longer had a functioning account). Although the experience with Ameritrade was annoying, the whole thing did kind of work out well in a way, because Ameritrade gave me a certain number of free trades when I opened my account, whereas Scottrade would have charged me $7 a trade. So I got all my positions established for free, and then transferred them to a brokerage that wasn't so incredibly clueless about security and running a w3c-standards-compliant web site.
I set up an account with them, using a single-purpose email address, amtdcrowell06 at lightandmatter.com. Notice the amtd on the front, which was a unique prefix I chose just for use with them. I started getting spam like crazy. Strangely enough, the spam was all about stocks -- pump-and-dump stuff. Ameritrade tried to blame it on a virus, which wasn't very plausible, since I was running FreeBSD, postfix, and mutt. They tried to blame it on a brute force or dictionary attack, which also wasn't very plausible -- the prefix doesn't really consist of dictionary words, and 13 characters, consisting of a mixture of letters and digits, gives a total of 10^20 possible addresses that would have had to be checked by brute force.
I wouldn't have minded if it was a myspace account or something, but these were people who had large amounts of my money. I migrated my account to scottrade. Years later the news broke that ameritrade had leaked tons of email addresses. They blamed it on some unknown insider. Since people had been telling them about the problem for years, you'd think they'd have clued in a lot earlier. It's amazing how bad an internet-based company can be at the internet thing. If any slashdotters are using ameritrade, you might want to think about switching to some other company. (Ameritrade's web interface also had some functionality that didn't work properly in Firefox on Linux.) You can transfer your portfolio from one company to another without having to pay capital gains, and without incurring transaction costs.
The 8th edition will no longer be available from the publisher. Here's the ISBN on the new edition. Here's a free copy of the new edition. The bookstore will have to order the new edition for next semester. End of story.
Then you can happily move to either a different book (that is older but still in print)
This doesn't make sense. Switching to a different book will have the same effect of killing off the used book market.
or give your students an extra week or two to acquire the book online or from off-campus used book stores.
This also doesn't make sense. The book is out of print, so there's no reliable source of copies of it, new or used. I could tell my students to scrounge around in used book stores, or on alibris.com, for used copies, but they wouldn't be able to find enough copies.
Why do professors always want to use the most recent version? Is it only because they know everyone can get a copy? Wouldn't it be easier (and legal) to solve this problem by publishing a page-number alignment table so that ALL old versions could be used in the same class?
I'm a college professor. We don't have any choice about changing editions. The old editions just go out of print. The actual changes from one edition to the next may be minor, and students who are able to get their hands on an old edition may be able to figure out, e.g., which homework problems have been renumbered, but there's no way the typical professor is going to go to the amount of effort that would be required to publish conversion charts, etc. You also have to realize that the bookstore is not interested in getting stuck with books that they can't sell. Even if some students might be willing to use an old edition, the bookstore isn't going to sell used copies of an old edition, because it would create a huge hassle for them. They's get students buying the used version, then finding out it was an old edition and returning it. The bookstore then has to process the return (which is expensive and time-consuming for them to do), and is stuck with an expensive book they can't sell and can't return.
Yes, teachers do get a kick back. One of my professors told our post grad class (during one of the much loved 'pub lectures') how they could stand to make $1000s from recommending the 'right' books.
I'm a college professor, and I've never been offered such a kickback. I don't know anybody who has. If publishers made such offers, I think word would get out very quickly.
You are stealing from the pockets of the professors who change the text book every semester making your used book worthless.
There are some logical and factual problems with your post.
First off, if a book is being changed "every semester," then that's not changing from one edition to the next of the same book, it's changing from one book to some other, completely different book. That doesn't happen because a professor is trying to line his pockets, it happens because a professor tried a book and didn't like it. New editions do come out more often than they should, but new editions of a book don't come out "every semester."
The typical college textbook has to be used by dozens of different schools if it's going to be commercially viable. The most successful books are used at thousands of schools. Therefore the chances that the professor making textbook choices is also the author of the book are fairly small.
I think the real phenomenon you're really trying to describe, in a garbled, confused way, is that the publishers bring out new editions of books about every 2-3 years. Yes, this is an abusive practice. Yes, it's meant to kill off the used book market. Yes, it tends to enrich the author of the book. However, what you don't seem to understand is that when this happens, the professor who's using the book in his course has absolutely no choice in the matter. I'm a college professor. Here's what happens in this situation. The book rep shows up at my office, we chat a little bit, and then she gets to the point: the 9th edition of Halliday and Resnick is coming out in a couple of months. The 8th edition will no longer be available from the publisher. Here's the ISBN on the new edition. Here's a free copy of the new edition. The bookstore will have to order the new edition for next semester. End of story. I have no choice whatsoever about whether to switch to the new edition. There's a bad guy in this story, but the bad guy is the publisher, not the professor using the book.
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In the area of my ignorance, though, I don't know if inductive losses would ever be significant for a superconductor. One of the defining characteristics of superconductivity is that external magnetic fields only penetrate a tiny distance (~100 nanometers) into the superconductor. I don't know if there might be a similar oddity which prevents them from generating a magnetic field outside of the conductor and coupling with other conductors.
No, there's nothing that keeps superconductors from making external fields. In fact, one of the most common applications of superconductors is as electromagnets.
The GP post is just completely incorrect about all transmission lines being DC. You are right, they're normally AC. However, the reasons they're AC might not apply to superconductors. The reason AC became the standard way to transmit electric power was that AC can be put through a transformer, and with a transformer you can step up the voltage for long-distance transmission, then step it back down again at the end. The higher voltage gives smaller ohmic power losses. With a superconductor, you don't have to worry about ohmic power losses, and that might make it more practical to transmit power using DC. The advantage would be that you'd have no inductive losses. The disadvantage would be that you'd need an inverter at the end in order to convert to AC, since the user's building is full of AC devices. Inverters are not perfectly efficient, and they're also not cheap, so maybe that's worse than just accepting the inductive losses.
Trying to imagine an application where you'd really want to use superconducting power transmission with DC, one that occurs to me is if you have a big photovoltaic farm in Arizona, and you want to send all that energy to Los Angeles. The photovoltaics produce DC, so somewhere, somehow you've got to have an inverter. Maybe you'd put the inverter at the LA end, and avoid inductive losses. But it would be a huge engineering project to lay a trench from Arizona to LA and fill it with liquid nitrogen.
What was hilarious was when the service would go down, and I would call Time Warner about it. It was just silly trying to get a tech support person who even understood what usenet was. They would tell me that they they weren't the Usenet company, and I had to call Usenet directly. They would think I was talking about Google groups. They would refuse to acknowledge that they had any such service, even when I would point out to them that there was some server called something like news.rr.com, which had been working the day before.
It's not just the alt.* groups or the binary groups. My ISP (Time Warner) dropped usenet access completely last month. I'm sure that's what the other ISPs will do soon as well. Gawd, I remember calling my ISP when their news server went down, and it was like pulling teeth to get anyone on the phone who had even heard of usenet, or would admit that they (at that time) provided such a service.
This whole thing is really sad. I love usenet. It's basically the only way I form more than passing personal relationships online. It's a great way to learn about and stay up with anything you're interested in. My ISP completely dropped usenet access last month.
I suspect that a lot of usenet users are simply going to give up at this point. There's been a vast amount of spam recently for knockoffs of shoes, purses, and watches. Many people whose ISPs have given up are not going to go to the trouble of finding affordable usenet access. Personally, I tried paying octanews, who ripped me off. Then for a while I used google groups, which reminded me of how much better a newsreader is than a web browser for participating in usenet. Finally a slashdotter recommended astraweb, which is working great for me now. Many people who had been using text-only usenet may not realize that you can pay for usenet access by the gigabyte rather than by the month, which means you can basically pay $10 and have usenet access for the indefinite future.
I mentioned usenet to my sister the other day, and she asked me what it was and why I wanted to use it. I actually had a hard time explaining it until I thought about it later. Basically, it gets the job of running a discussion group done way better than web browser interface. It's also noncommercial and very general -- none of this stuff about screwing around with some specific web-based group that will evaporate in a few years and that has no world-wide profile.
You've got this garbled. Etre verbs are always intransitive, but intransitive verbs are not always etre verbs. The etre verbs do need to be memorized. There are lots and lots of intransitive verbs in French, and only about 20 etre verbs. For instance, you say j'ai vecu, not je suis vecu, even though vivre is intransitive.
Tartini is OSS that has some similar functionality. I'd love to get it running, but when I tried, I failed. If anyone can give instructions that work for compiling it on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, I'd be very grateful. I emailed the author, and he tried to help me, but I was out of my depth with Qt, and gave up for lack of time. Below is what he told me about the problems I was experiencing.
This is an excellent article about functional programming.
Ocaml has a very good reputation. It compiles to native code, and has performance comparable to C. It's agnostic about programming style. You can use it as if it was C with garbage collection, or you can us it in an fp style, or you can mix the two. There are good libraries. Because of the way the garbage collector is designed, it doesn't support SMP to the extent that erlang does. The design of ocaml includes some conscious trade-offs of elegance for performance. In particular, strings are not lists.
Erlang's claim to fame is that any code you write will automagically take advantage of SMP.
Haskell's design focuses on elegance, sometimes at the expense of performance. It's strongly focused on the functional style.
I think what you're saying is partly right and partly wrong.
One reason you don't see retail systems priced very low is that so many people want Windows. I used to buy the Great Quality machines at Fry's for $200. They came with Linux on them. After carrying them for several years, Fry's stopped selling them, and now the cheapest desktop machines they sell are about $400-500, with Vista on them. From talking to a couple of people who worked at Fry's, it sounds like the problem was they were having way too many returns on the machines. Apparently most people were buying them to run Windows. Some didn't understand that they weren't getting a machine with Windows. Others bought them intending to install a pirated copy of Windows, but had problems with the install, so they returned it. None of this is relevant to something like OLPC, which doesn't need to run Windows.
Another thing is that it's true the price of the OLPC will come down as the volume ramps up, but the price of commodity hardware is also dropping like crazy. The price of all the components (hard drive, ram, cpu) are all extremely low now, and the computing power you need for something like an XO is ten years behind the cutting edge. I think people are not noticing how ridiculously cheap hardware is getting. For instance, let's say that last year a low-end machine with Windows XP and Office was $450, consisting of manufacturing ($150), MS tax ($200), and retail profit ($100). This year, manufacturing the same hardware might cost $80. But oops, now XP is no longer available on new machines, and to run Vista you need higher specs. So even though the manufacturing cost should be half what it was 12 months ago, the price you see on a retail shelf is the same. Note that none of this logic applies to OLPC. The specs that were good enough to run sugar last year are still good enough to run sugar this year. There's no MS tax, and no retail profit margin.
And finally, it's not obvious to me that it makes sense for a program like OLPC to be shipping a bespoke, newly manufactured machine. In the grandparent post, I listed how I can assemble a used desktop system, paying retail here in the US, for $180, including an LCD monitor. This is a system with twice the memory of the xo, and a bigger screen. Sure, it doesn't have some of the same features as the xo (portability, wireless, ability to run from a human-powered generator), but I'm not convinced that those features are really vital. I think the focus on getting brand-new hardware rather than used hardware is another product of the way Windows has taught people to think. Buying a cheap used machine to run Windows is a losing proposition, because you're probably getting a system that's full of malware and doesn't have a Windows install CD; but that logic doesn't apply if you're not running Windows.
What you say is perfectly reasonable. However, the economics of this kind of thing tends to work out so that any any given time, some people are willing to pay more to be on the cutting edge of technology, while others are perfectly happy to save some money by lagging behind. I recently downgraded my cable modem to a slower level of service in order to save $15/mo. I simply don't need the extra bandwidth. There's also the issue that for many types of internet access you're sharing bandwidth with your neighbors because it's all going through the same pipe to the same switch. And ISPs have to oversubscribe their lines; if they were to guarantee every user x amount of bandwidth, even if they all got online at the same time, they would have to charge much, much more.
So basically the ISP has to set some rate structure. Their interest in constructing that rate structure is in maximizing their profits. As a consumer, my interest is in minimizing what I pay for the level of service I'm currently happy with. My interests are also opposed to my neighbors. The competition among all these competing interests can probably be balanced by the ordinary mechanisms of capitalism, provided that they're not a monopoly. In my area, TWC has a broadband monopoly. That's the thing to get upset about and to try to fix. If people are upset about the rate structure offered to them, then there are basically two possibilities: the rate structure is unfair because there's a monopoly, or the rate structure is fair as determined by the laws of supply and demand.
I use clusty.com for searches. The results seem to be of the same quality as google's, and their privacy policy is much better.
Now I just need a good way to access usenet. My ISP dropped usenet access last month. I tried buying access from octanews.com, and they ripped me off (currently going through the chargeback process with the credit card company). So now I'm the proud owner of the email address ineverreadmailsenttothis@yahoo.com, which I used to register a google account so I can post on usenet via google groups. Yech. Anyone know a good company to buy a cheap block access (*not* monthly) usenet account from?
What about emissions? I learned recently, to my surprise, that a motorcycle pollutes about 10x as much per mile as a car. Emissions equipment is heavy. A one- or two-cylinder diesel is something that I'd imagine would pollute like hell.
I'm not trying to bash olpc -- I liked it enough to donate one. But I wonder whether the olpc is simply coming to market too late, and at too high a price, to be relevant. This article is an example of how fuzzy the boundary is between xo+sugar and a standard linux distro running on commodity hardware such as a eeepc or a standard laptop or desktop machine. There are basically three reasons I can see why olpc can be relevant:
I've never tried sugar, so I can't say anything for sure about #3, but I'm pretty skeptical. My own kids use gnome, and it works fine for them. The fuzzy boundary demonstrated by the article makes me doubt whether sugar by itself is all that relevant.
Re #2, I'm not convinced that it's really all that important for these kids to have this particular combination of features. Is portability really that critical? How much does it matter if the machine stays in the kid's home, or at school? Is the wireless really that useful in real life, in the environments where xo's are getting used? These features seem to be tied to a particular educational philosophy and imagined model of use, but it's not clear to me whether that's really happening. One of the big killer apps for olpc was supposed to be distribution of free electronic textbooks, and that is something I know something about (see my sig); basically the free electronic textbooks that exist today are disproportionately slanted toward esoteric graduate-level books on things like quantum field theory, with less for college freshmen, and essentially nothing for K-12.
And then there's #1, price. So far they've only got the xo's price down to $200, and $200 is not all that competitive against commodity hardware at this point. I'm going to have to compare with retail options here in the developed world (US), since that's what I have experience with. You can get a gPC from walmart for $200. I recently walked in to a Salvation Army thrift shop and bought a perfectly fine used desktop system for $89 -- and that wasn't a fluke, because there were two other machines on the shelf at the same price point that looked just fine. Memory upgrades for used machines are ridiculously cheap these days, ~$13 (including shipping) on ebay for 512 MB. So for the same price as the xo, I could spend $89 for a used desktop, $13 for a memory upgrade, $8 for a mouse and keyboard (typical sale price at Fry's), and maybe $70 for a cheap LCD (again, not an unusual sale price at Fry's). Now I'm not saying that this particular method of assembling a cheap, used desktop system is appropriate for getting a machine into the hands of a kid in Cambodia, but I think it does show that commodity hardware is getting so insanely cheap so fast that there's a real possibility that olpc will simply become irrelevant because it's overtaken by events.
They try to intimidate you into using only eBay's own on-site message system to contact bidders instead of e-mailing them directly. [...] I've had problems with more than a few bidders who refuse to answer my e-mails or to pay me directly instead of through eBay's Checkout because they think it's not "official" otherwise, and that I am trying to pull some sort of scam on them.
I have to sympathize at least a little with those users. I recently bought something on ebay, and I have no less than 7 emails about it in my in-box, from 5 different addresses. This seems to be the norm these days for ebay transactions, and it's just plain confusing. Actually, ebay in general is just insanely baroque and confusing for the inexperienced user. There are a gazillion different little widgets, and the whole design of the web site looks like something from somebody's 1997 geocities site.
I run a site that catalogs free books, and accepts user-submitted reviews. (See my sig.) It's a constant source of amazement to me what a low level of morality (and intelligence) some authors have. They'll add their book to the catalog even though it's not free. (The site's UI tells them very clearly that it has to be free online in order to be listed.) Then they'll post their own "review" of the book, which reads exactly like a dust-cover blurb rather than a review. Then I check the email address they used to sign up on the site, and it's the same as the email address of the author of the book -- this despite the fact that the button they had to click on to submit their review was labeled I am not the author, and have no personal, professional, or business relationship with the author. I am submitting my review..
About 50% of the reviews I get are like this, and I have to delete them by hand. I don't actually get that many reviews submitted, which is a good thing in a way, because if the site was really busy I'd never be able to keep up.
I don't think there's any way of solving this problem, since the internet was designed for anonymous use, and even if it was technically feasible to verify identities on the internet, I wouldn't want to do it. Amazon tries fairly hard to deal with this problem. These days they won't let you submit reviews unless you've bought something from them, which is probably a reasonable way to stop sock puppets. They also try to get you to build up a reputation for your online persona, even if it's not publicly tied to a meatspace identity. That doesn't really work that well, though. For instance, there are certain people on amazon who submit something like ten reviews per day, 365 days per year -- obviously they're not really reading all those books. I also don't see any way to stop the phenomenon of the author getting his friends, family, and grad students to write good amazon reviews of his book.
Because of all this, I'm suspicious of any statistical method of analyzing user-submitted reviews. You just have no way of knowing which reviewers are honest. You really have to look at the individual reviews and see if what they say makes sense. Ebay feedback is an example of how silly this can all get, even in a community where people really do have long-term online identities that they have an interest in maintaining good reputations for. What the heck does it tell you if the seller has 99% positive feedback? Absolutely nothing. You have to read the 1% negative reviews and try to evaluate whether they sound reasonable.
Maybe it depends on the credit card company. I attempted to do it recently with Mastercard, and all they would do for me was change the number.
This doesn't actually work, in my experience. They can't permanently block a recurring charge like this. What actually does work is if you tell the credit card company that AOL is being unresonsive, and therefore you want to change your credit card number. This sounds like a big deal, but actually it isn't. They send you a new card within a week. You have to contact any other companies that have recurring charges on that card, and give them the new number (or switch them to a different card, if waiting a week will take too long).
No, you just have to do a chargeback. You call the credit card company and tell them you want to do a chargeback. They send you some paperwork, you respond with information on what happened. You may or may not succeed. It may depend on the quality of the documentation you have.
Thanks for your post. I didn't know that there were plans to implement silverlight in other browsers. After reading your post and the WP article, however, it sounds like silverlight is a long way from (a) being available in other browsers, and (b) having an install base that extends beyond people using recent versions of IE. The mac version isn't out yet. The linux version is far off in the future (and I have to wonder whether it will end up being another unusable, patent-crippled technology like gnash). A lot of this also hinges on the question of what's installed by default in various browsers, because most users will never bother to install a plugin. Is silverlight installed by default in Windows versions of FF these days?
In the sites I visit, it's still pretty rare to see content presented in flash that would more appropriately be presented in html. I assume this is because people want to get indexed by google and have a high page rank, and they know they won't get indexed if it's in flash. If that's the case, then it's actually a bad thing that google is going to start indexing flash content.
As far as silverlight, what are the chances that it will succeed? I'm optimistic that it will fail. Although Windows has a high market share, especially in the US, IE doesn't have anywhere near that market share. There are entire countries in Europe where Firefox is the majority browser. I don't see how any web developer could commit themselves to silverlight when it means locking out so many users.
I am an AMTD customer. Can you please explain this transfer in a little more details to spare me from doing the research?
Well, let's say you're going to switch to scottrade, which is what I did. Basically all you do is call up scottrade and tell them what you want to do. They'll guide you through the process of transferring your positions from ameritrade to them -- they're motivated to help you complete the process, because they want you as a customer. It was pretty easy when I did it. The only minor hassle was that small amounts of money ($5 and $10 amounts) kept showing up in my ameritrade account for a while from dividends from the stocks I'd had in that account before, and I had to talk to ameritrade to get that money sent to me (couldn't have them write me a check by the normal mechanism, because I no longer had a functioning account). Although the experience with Ameritrade was annoying, the whole thing did kind of work out well in a way, because Ameritrade gave me a certain number of free trades when I opened my account, whereas Scottrade would have charged me $7 a trade. So I got all my positions established for free, and then transferred them to a brokerage that wasn't so incredibly clueless about security and running a w3c-standards-compliant web site.
A classic example of this is Ameritrade.
I set up an account with them, using a single-purpose email address, amtdcrowell06 at lightandmatter.com. Notice the amtd on the front, which was a unique prefix I chose just for use with them. I started getting spam like crazy. Strangely enough, the spam was all about stocks -- pump-and-dump stuff. Ameritrade tried to blame it on a virus, which wasn't very plausible, since I was running FreeBSD, postfix, and mutt. They tried to blame it on a brute force or dictionary attack, which also wasn't very plausible -- the prefix doesn't really consist of dictionary words, and 13 characters, consisting of a mixture of letters and digits, gives a total of 10^20 possible addresses that would have had to be checked by brute force. I wouldn't have minded if it was a myspace account or something, but these were people who had large amounts of my money. I migrated my account to scottrade. Years later the news broke that ameritrade had leaked tons of email addresses. They blamed it on some unknown insider. Since people had been telling them about the problem for years, you'd think they'd have clued in a lot earlier. It's amazing how bad an internet-based company can be at the internet thing. If any slashdotters are using ameritrade, you might want to think about switching to some other company. (Ameritrade's web interface also had some functionality that didn't work properly in Firefox on Linux.) You can transfer your portfolio from one company to another without having to pay capital gains, and without incurring transaction costs.
This doesn't make sense. Switching to a different book will have the same effect of killing off the used book market.
This also doesn't make sense. The book is out of print, so there's no reliable source of copies of it, new or used. I could tell my students to scrounge around in used book stores, or on alibris.com, for used copies, but they wouldn't be able to find enough copies.
I'm a college professor. We don't have any choice about changing editions. The old editions just go out of print. The actual changes from one edition to the next may be minor, and students who are able to get their hands on an old edition may be able to figure out, e.g., which homework problems have been renumbered, but there's no way the typical professor is going to go to the amount of effort that would be required to publish conversion charts, etc. You also have to realize that the bookstore is not interested in getting stuck with books that they can't sell. Even if some students might be willing to use an old edition, the bookstore isn't going to sell used copies of an old edition, because it would create a huge hassle for them. They's get students buying the used version, then finding out it was an old edition and returning it. The bookstore then has to process the return (which is expensive and time-consuming for them to do), and is stuck with an expensive book they can't sell and can't return.
Yes, teachers do get a kick back. One of my professors told our post grad class (during one of the much loved 'pub lectures') how they could stand to make $1000s from recommending the 'right' books.
I'm a college professor, and I've never been offered such a kickback. I don't know anybody who has. If publishers made such offers, I think word would get out very quickly.
There are some logical and factual problems with your post.