Heh. Might be a while. I always rent for at least a year before committing on real estate.:)
Currently, I'm thinking that living downtown would be nice. Okay, yes, it's expensive, but it's nice. I like being within walking distance of fun places to be. Last few years I've been kinda out in the boonies and it'll be good to be in the local vicinity of entertainment.
Yeah, I've got friends of friends in the area whom I'm talking to. I doubt I'd buy a home in Memphis proper. Property tax would kill a man. The wheel tax ain't much by all accounts ($75 or so). But I might rent a place in Memphis itself for the first year or so. Depends on how the market is.
Don't kid yourself. I was at AutoZone's corporate offices last week, for an interview. They have some very knowledgable tech people there, and many programmers who know their shit. It's a heavily tech atmosphere around there, and I would not be at all surprised to find clued in people at all levels.
For example, someone might come up with an equally effective way of calculating particle behaviour that uses a different representation. Suppose, hypothetically, this involved coloured cubes. This does not mean that particles are in reality coloured cubes - its just a model.
Okay, but here's the deal.. We believe the universe to pretty much act in an ordered fashion, and the order is that defined by mathematics. In a sense, mathematics itself comes from the order that we can see.
So if the model says that strings work better than particles, then why not assume it is actually is strings? If a better model that uses cubes comes along, why not assume it is indeed made of cubes? Until we can actually *see* what the hell it really is, what does it matter if one assumes that the low levels are vibrating strings or colored cubes or vaguely unicorn shaped 8 dimensional objects? The truth is that point particles make no more sense than anything else does. We don't know what's really there, but if we find a model that describes the behavior to the limit of our observational ability, and the model says it has to be strings, then hey, strings it is. It makes no difference. The fact that it really might be something else doesn't matter if we cannot observe any differences in the behavior of reality vs. behavior of the mathematical model.
What really exists that far down in scale is so unbelievably out of our reach that it really doesn't much matter if you think it actually exists or think it's a handy metaphor.
Serious question, then. Science is an epistemology reliant on testing, and the knowledge gained from that epistemology. If there is no scientific test for string theory, how can string theory be considered a true theory? It seems it could be, at most, an hypothesis.
You're more or less correct. "String Theory" is just a name. It's possible that it can be tested, it's just that nobody has come up with a way to actually do it yet. It's not really far enough along to be able to come up with a good method to do so, methinks.
But "String Hypothesis" doesn't have the same ring to it.:)
Yes, that's a terrible analogy, but it shows that they have a bit of a point: any business would go out of business if they had to fix problems that were ineffable at the time of the original sale.
The problem is that you can reverse this concept with regards to software. If the vendor doesn't patch the exploits/bugs in their product, people will stop using said product because the holes in it will eventually make it unusable for many applications.
He has a point, but it's not a very good one. All he's saying is that most widespread attacks are script-kiddie attacks. Big deal. We already knew that. However, that's due to the fact that those people capable of discovering new exploits, for the most part, are white hat people who release the exploit info in order to get it fixed.
Yes, it sucks that releasing a patch leads to script-kiddie attacks on that exploit. But I find it hard to believe that they really think that if the situation were otherwise, and exploits didn't get fixed/patched until they were already seriously exploited in the wild, that this state of affairs would somehow be better in any way. Does everybody have to be rooted before a patch comes out to fix the problem? Or is it better to have the patch available and then be able to more squarely blame end users for not upgrading their boxes? There's really no alternative to these two scenarios. Take your pick.
In fact, one of his beats is an honest to god staple of rock and pop production (ignoring rap for the moment,) usually used quietly in the background to 'beef' up the live drum track. Sarah McLaughlan, etc, musicians like that regularly sample James Brown beats to sonicaly thicken a mix.
I think you're referring to the beat in "Funky Drummer", IIRC. If I'm wrong, then I'd be interested in knowing which song this actually is.
Note the article mentions it depends where you stand, as your a much better ground than the lights. If this is indeed true,, you stealing just as much energy by standing under them as a few lights would be...
No. You're a better ground than the air *around* the lights. Meaning that you equalize the potential difference better than the air does, and thus the lights dim.
It doesn't mean that you're conducting as much energy as is going through the lights just by being there. It means you're bringing the ground higher up in the air than it would be if you weren't standing there, and thus there's less potential from the top of the light to the bottom of the light.
If having an inductor under a power line is theft -- what isn't?
How is it *not* theft? You're siphoning power from the line, just as much as if you'd put a cable and transformer up on the thing. Exactly as if you'd done that, in fact.
The lack of a direct connection does not imply that no connection exists between the two. It's theft because you're taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying for it. Power. There no "waste" from those lines in that way. If nothing uses that EM field, then there's no drain as such.
An EM Field is not a real physical object. That's one reason we call it a "field". What it really is is a function of distance from the power line (in this case). The field only exists insofar as it can be used. But there's no electrons flying through the air or something like that. There's no radio waves transmitting this "field". An EM field can propagate through space with no transmission vector whatsoever because it's not really there at all. It's a property of space itself. See?
Actually, it's 10 digits, not 8. And yes, they use both zero (0) and the letter O. The zero's are more elongated vertically, and the O's are actually slightly elongated horizontally. Therefore there's about 10^36 possible codes.
Winning caps look like this (fake number, obviously):
12345 ABCDE
ONE FREE SONG
Centered. The blank line is actually about half a line.
Losers look like this:
PLAY
AGAIN
Simple enough. If you hold it up so that the yellow cap is facing the light, yes, you can peer down the side and make out enough to tell which is which, especially on the Sierra Mist bottles. The Pepsi bottles are harder, but since that foul stuff is undrinkable anyway, stick to the clear drinks.
Note, I have not tried this in a store. I have, however, won a few songs on Sierra Mist bottles.
My suggestion: Start taking stuff apart. I mean, you're a computer guy. You've likely got stuff that your computer talks to. Learn to program those devices. It doesn't have to be complex hardware driver type crap, just start reverse engineering something and brainstorm what kind of cool stuff you can program it to do. Hell, go get a set of Lego Mindstorms and ignore their control software. Write your own. Think big, and then break it down into small sections. If that doesn't give you a project to do, then nothing will.
You *don't* need a specific goal to reach to program something for fun. You just need a *reason* to do it, and that reason can be as simple as "I got this cool new toy and I want to figure out how the hell it works".
Short version: They're removing user:pass@server support from IE, period. Any URL's in IE with a user:pass in them will get a "Invalid Syntax Error".
So if your website or app has need of user:pass functionality, be aware that as soon as the service pack comes out, it'll be broken for all IE users. Might want to start using some other method like cookies or something.
The Linksys "router" is basically just a NAT box. Connect the DW6000 to the WAN port. The Linksys would get an IP from the DW6000 box via DHCP, then do NAT services to anything on it's LAN side. Shouldn't be any strange configuration to it whatsoever.
I've used Linksys boxes to connect stuff similar to this before, and don't think it would really be a problem if you know what the box is actually doing.. I guess you could set the thing up in router mode if you wanted, but it really shouldn't be necessary.
And their reputation among every knowledgable, professional, admin I know of is in the toilet.
The only people who seem to like them are the kinds of people I'd NEVER in a million years hire to clean my pool, much less admin a network.
That's as may be, but still, the choice is there, type of thing. Networks that have spammers tend to appear on SPEWS first, funnily enough. For end users, SPEWS serves as a pretty good tool if used mostly as a way to flag messages. Blocking them outright at the ISP level seems like not the best move in the world sometimes.
they apparently owe nobody a duty of care to ensure only the "bad people" are blacklisted.
Of course they do. It's a reputation thing. If they were to list IPs at random, then nobody would use the list. That people do use the list is a sign that they don't act carelessly in listing IPs in there. SPEWS is a little more strict than most lists of this nature, but then some ISPs want that. It's freedom of choice, baby.
The reason they think they're effective is that they have simple statistics to back them up.
The common sense approach says that someone who actively blocks advertising will be annoyed by intrusive advertising and that they will think that relevant targeted advertising (think Google's ad words method) is generally okay. It's not intrusive, it's relevant to what you're searching for, etc. This makes sense and is pretty much the case.
But the real world data shows that advertising in whatever annoying form they can come up with is "effective" in the sense that the gain compared to the cost is relatively high compared with traditional advertising. It's so cheap to throw out millions of popup ads, that even if you only have.0001 percent of a response, you can make bank on the deal.
Of course, this ignores the fundamental concept of the backlash effect, where those people who may have bought from a company at a future date now will no longer do so. Consumer memory is long lived. Look at x10.com. X10 is a fun little protocol for home automation that's kinda nifty. I have loads of X10 gear and use it for all sorts of things. Turn the lights on when I walk into a room, for example. But when I try to tell anybody about it, I have to explain that X10, the protocol, isn't the same as x10.com, the super annoying company that sells X10 gear. Generally I direct them to smarthome.com instead.
So essentially, these companies are simply taking a short sighted view and drawing incorrect conclusions.
Telemarketing is another story. It's true that if you ask most anybody, they'd definitely agree to be on a do-not-call list, especially one backed up by legal means. However, that doesn't change the fact that these self-same folks would indeed buy something from a telemarketer doing a cold call to them. People are too lazy to sign up for a DNC list if it's at all difficult (as in "mailing a letter to sign up for it" difficult), and would generally simply put up with these calls or ignore them. They don't find them annoying enough to actually do anything but complain about it. Only a small percentage sign up in those cases. Thus the telemarketers fought the easy to sign up for national DNC registry tooth and nail, because it was easy enough to do that millions and millions of people did indeed sign up for it. Even though nearly every state already had DNC lists, the percentage numbers were low and the telemarketers still sold stuff and made money. Did all these people who signed up on the national DNC registry not buy stuff before? Of course they did, some of them. Otherwise the telemarketers wouldn't be worried about it.
To go a bit further, it's one thing if you're trying to sell a specific service or product. In that case, ad words on google are more effective. But increasingly, companies are trying to sell an "image", and you can't target that to a specific search parameter. They want *everybody* to associate their company with something. Beer advertising is the epitomy of this. I mean, Coors can't sell their beer when you search for "piss water", can they?;) Instead, they show the mountains, the clear mountain streams, and a whole lot of other crap to sell an image of refreshment or relaxation. Coke/Pepsi does the same thing, in a different way.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Might be a while. I always rent for at least a year before committing on real estate. :)
Currently, I'm thinking that living downtown would be nice. Okay, yes, it's expensive, but it's nice. I like being within walking distance of fun places to be. Last few years I've been kinda out in the boonies and it'll be good to be in the local vicinity of entertainment.
Yeah, I've got friends of friends in the area whom I'm talking to. I doubt I'd buy a home in Memphis proper. Property tax would kill a man. The wheel tax ain't much by all accounts ($75 or so). But I might rent a place in Memphis itself for the first year or so. Depends on how the market is.
You live in Memphis?
:)
Not yet. Gimme a month and I will though. I accepted their job offer.
Oh, I already have. They impressed me as some very clueful people around there, and hey, Memphis is a cool town.
:D
I'll definitely get that t-shirt made after I start working there.
Don't kid yourself. I was at AutoZone's corporate offices last week, for an interview. They have some very knowledgable tech people there, and many programmers who know their shit. It's a heavily tech atmosphere around there, and I would not be at all surprised to find clued in people at all levels.
The day after I get a job offer from AutoZone, they get sued by SCO. Great. Just fuckin' great.
For example, someone might come up with an equally effective way of calculating particle behaviour that uses a different representation. Suppose, hypothetically, this involved coloured cubes. This does not mean that particles are in reality coloured cubes - its just a model.
Okay, but here's the deal.. We believe the universe to pretty much act in an ordered fashion, and the order is that defined by mathematics. In a sense, mathematics itself comes from the order that we can see.
So if the model says that strings work better than particles, then why not assume it is actually is strings? If a better model that uses cubes comes along, why not assume it is indeed made of cubes? Until we can actually *see* what the hell it really is, what does it matter if one assumes that the low levels are vibrating strings or colored cubes or vaguely unicorn shaped 8 dimensional objects? The truth is that point particles make no more sense than anything else does. We don't know what's really there, but if we find a model that describes the behavior to the limit of our observational ability, and the model says it has to be strings, then hey, strings it is. It makes no difference. The fact that it really might be something else doesn't matter if we cannot observe any differences in the behavior of reality vs. behavior of the mathematical model.
What really exists that far down in scale is so unbelievably out of our reach that it really doesn't much matter if you think it actually exists or think it's a handy metaphor.
Serious question, then. Science is an epistemology reliant on testing, and the knowledge gained from that epistemology. If there is no scientific test for string theory, how can string theory be considered a true theory? It seems it could be, at most, an hypothesis.
:)
You're more or less correct. "String Theory" is just a name. It's possible that it can be tested, it's just that nobody has come up with a way to actually do it yet. It's not really far enough along to be able to come up with a good method to do so, methinks.
But "String Hypothesis" doesn't have the same ring to it.
Yes, that's a terrible analogy, but it shows that they have a bit of a point: any business would go out of business if they had to fix problems that were ineffable at the time of the original sale.
The problem is that you can reverse this concept with regards to software. If the vendor doesn't patch the exploits/bugs in their product, people will stop using said product because the holes in it will eventually make it unusable for many applications.
He has a point, but it's not a very good one. All he's saying is that most widespread attacks are script-kiddie attacks. Big deal. We already knew that. However, that's due to the fact that those people capable of discovering new exploits, for the most part, are white hat people who release the exploit info in order to get it fixed.
Yes, it sucks that releasing a patch leads to script-kiddie attacks on that exploit. But I find it hard to believe that they really think that if the situation were otherwise, and exploits didn't get fixed/patched until they were already seriously exploited in the wild, that this state of affairs would somehow be better in any way. Does everybody have to be rooted before a patch comes out to fix the problem? Or is it better to have the patch available and then be able to more squarely blame end users for not upgrading their boxes? There's really no alternative to these two scenarios. Take your pick.
In fact, one of his beats is an honest to god staple of rock and pop production (ignoring rap for the moment,) usually used quietly in the background to 'beef' up the live drum track. Sarah McLaughlan, etc, musicians like that regularly sample James Brown beats to sonicaly thicken a mix.
I think you're referring to the beat in "Funky Drummer", IIRC. If I'm wrong, then I'd be interested in knowing which song this actually is.
Note the article mentions it depends where you stand, as your a much better ground than the lights. If this is indeed true,, you stealing just as much energy by standing under them as a few lights would be...
No. You're a better ground than the air *around* the lights. Meaning that you equalize the potential difference better than the air does, and thus the lights dim.
It doesn't mean that you're conducting as much energy as is going through the lights just by being there. It means you're bringing the ground higher up in the air than it would be if you weren't standing there, and thus there's less potential from the top of the light to the bottom of the light.
Kinda neat.
http://random.bounceme.net
If having an inductor under a power line is theft -- what isn't?
How is it *not* theft? You're siphoning power from the line, just as much as if you'd put a cable and transformer up on the thing. Exactly as if you'd done that, in fact.
The lack of a direct connection does not imply that no connection exists between the two. It's theft because you're taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying for it. Power. There no "waste" from those lines in that way. If nothing uses that EM field, then there's no drain as such.
An EM Field is not a real physical object. That's one reason we call it a "field". What it really is is a function of distance from the power line (in this case). The field only exists insofar as it can be used. But there's no electrons flying through the air or something like that. There's no radio waves transmitting this "field". An EM field can propagate through space with no transmission vector whatsoever because it's not really there at all. It's a property of space itself. See?
Doh! You're right. My mistake.
Actually, it's 10 digits, not 8. And yes, they use both zero (0) and the letter O. The zero's are more elongated vertically, and the O's are actually slightly elongated horizontally. Therefore there's about 10^36 possible codes.
Winning caps look like this (fake number, obviously):
12345
ABCDE
ONE FREE
SONG
Centered. The blank line is actually about half a line.
Losers look like this:
PLAY
AGAIN
Simple enough. If you hold it up so that the yellow cap is facing the light, yes, you can peer down the side and make out enough to tell which is which, especially on the Sierra Mist bottles. The Pepsi bottles are harder, but since that foul stuff is undrinkable anyway, stick to the clear drinks.
Note, I have not tried this in a store. I have, however, won a few songs on Sierra Mist bottles.
Let's be pedantic here and say, "With apologies to Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin", since Jabberwocky wasn't a Python film.
Or, let's be extra pedantic here and realize that the (modified) quote was, in fact, out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail instead.
My suggestion: Start taking stuff apart. I mean, you're a computer guy. You've likely got stuff that your computer talks to. Learn to program those devices. It doesn't have to be complex hardware driver type crap, just start reverse engineering something and brainstorm what kind of cool stuff you can program it to do. Hell, go get a set of Lego Mindstorms and ignore their control software. Write your own. Think big, and then break it down into small sections. If that doesn't give you a project to do, then nothing will.
You *don't* need a specific goal to reach to program something for fun. You just need a *reason* to do it, and that reason can be as simple as "I got this cool new toy and I want to figure out how the hell it works".
Yes, but they did provide warning:
k b; [LN];834489
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
Note that this KB article was changed today to reflect that it is indeed in this patch, however, this article has been up since Early January or so...
Not that I think it's the right way to do things, but they did provide some warning that it was coming.
They must've sat for hours thinking of how to solve their problem and simply could not come up with an answer.
; [LN];834489
Actually, they do have another, real, answer to the problem. Not that it's a very good one either, but hey, read it yourself.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
Short version: They're removing user:pass@server support from IE, period. Any URL's in IE with a user:pass in them will get a "Invalid Syntax Error".
So if your website or app has need of user:pass functionality, be aware that as soon as the service pack comes out, it'll be broken for all IE users. Might want to start using some other method like cookies or something.
Why would it matter?
The Linksys "router" is basically just a NAT box. Connect the DW6000 to the WAN port. The Linksys would get an IP from the DW6000 box via DHCP, then do NAT services to anything on it's LAN side. Shouldn't be any strange configuration to it whatsoever.
I've used Linksys boxes to connect stuff similar to this before, and don't think it would really be a problem if you know what the box is actually doing.. I guess you could set the thing up in router mode if you wanted, but it really shouldn't be necessary.
Yeah, that is some poor moderation there. Amazing. :)
Is it bad that my first thought was "Newton or Asimov"?
Not that bad. You could have thought of the bartender from Love Boat.
And their reputation among every knowledgable, professional, admin I know of is in the toilet.
The only people who seem to like them are the kinds of people I'd NEVER in a million years hire to clean my pool, much less admin a network.
That's as may be, but still, the choice is there, type of thing. Networks that have spammers tend to appear on SPEWS first, funnily enough. For end users, SPEWS serves as a pretty good tool if used mostly as a way to flag messages. Blocking them outright at the ISP level seems like not the best move in the world sometimes.
they apparently owe nobody a duty of care to ensure only the "bad people" are blacklisted.
Of course they do. It's a reputation thing. If they were to list IPs at random, then nobody would use the list. That people do use the list is a sign that they don't act carelessly in listing IPs in there. SPEWS is a little more strict than most lists of this nature, but then some ISPs want that. It's freedom of choice, baby.
The reason they think they're effective is that they have simple statistics to back them up.
.0001 percent of a response, you can make bank on the deal.
;) Instead, they show the mountains, the clear mountain streams, and a whole lot of other crap to sell an image of refreshment or relaxation. Coke/Pepsi does the same thing, in a different way.
The common sense approach says that someone who actively blocks advertising will be annoyed by intrusive advertising and that they will think that relevant targeted advertising (think Google's ad words method) is generally okay. It's not intrusive, it's relevant to what you're searching for, etc. This makes sense and is pretty much the case.
But the real world data shows that advertising in whatever annoying form they can come up with is "effective" in the sense that the gain compared to the cost is relatively high compared with traditional advertising. It's so cheap to throw out millions of popup ads, that even if you only have
Of course, this ignores the fundamental concept of the backlash effect, where those people who may have bought from a company at a future date now will no longer do so. Consumer memory is long lived. Look at x10.com. X10 is a fun little protocol for home automation that's kinda nifty. I have loads of X10 gear and use it for all sorts of things. Turn the lights on when I walk into a room, for example. But when I try to tell anybody about it, I have to explain that X10, the protocol, isn't the same as x10.com, the super annoying company that sells X10 gear. Generally I direct them to smarthome.com instead.
So essentially, these companies are simply taking a short sighted view and drawing incorrect conclusions.
Telemarketing is another story. It's true that if you ask most anybody, they'd definitely agree to be on a do-not-call list, especially one backed up by legal means. However, that doesn't change the fact that these self-same folks would indeed buy something from a telemarketer doing a cold call to them. People are too lazy to sign up for a DNC list if it's at all difficult (as in "mailing a letter to sign up for it" difficult), and would generally simply put up with these calls or ignore them. They don't find them annoying enough to actually do anything but complain about it. Only a small percentage sign up in those cases. Thus the telemarketers fought the easy to sign up for national DNC registry tooth and nail, because it was easy enough to do that millions and millions of people did indeed sign up for it. Even though nearly every state already had DNC lists, the percentage numbers were low and the telemarketers still sold stuff and made money. Did all these people who signed up on the national DNC registry not buy stuff before? Of course they did, some of them. Otherwise the telemarketers wouldn't be worried about it.
To go a bit further, it's one thing if you're trying to sell a specific service or product. In that case, ad words on google are more effective. But increasingly, companies are trying to sell an "image", and you can't target that to a specific search parameter. They want *everybody* to associate their company with something. Beer advertising is the epitomy of this. I mean, Coors can't sell their beer when you search for "piss water", can they?