Being forced to do problem solving is tedious and boring. Being forced to do it without a calculator is just needlessly frustrating. And if you don't know the concepts you can't do the problems at all.
"Show your work" are the magic words. When you pop in an equation to a calculator it just spits out the answer. If you require students show their work they have to apply the concepts to go step by step but they don't have to manually multiply and divide complex numbers which is just tedious and pointless. The net result is that they can do the homework in a reasonable amount of time and learn everything they need to know.
It's often the case that I work backwards from the answer to the question in order to try to understand how to solve the problem. If you require a student to show their work then the answer doesn't give them an out. It's an additional help so they can be sure they got the right answer and better understand how it works.
Forcing students to focus on specific problems is why students get completely lost when going from Java to another language. They don't understand the concepts. They wasted hundreds of dollars learning syntax.
I know quite a few languages because I learn concepts so the learning curve going from one language to another is minimal.
"They spend 4 year of college being taught education theory and taking some science/math on the side"
At ASU they spend 2.5 years getting a liberal education with a large dose of Math taught at a watered down level. They then spend 1.5 years learning how to actually teach.
It's sufficient for teaching because at least in HS you're teaching at a level well below your capabilities and you teach the same thing over and over and over. A Math teacher builds their math education in the classroom.
The problems with teachers is not that they don't know the material. It's that they can't relate the material in an effective way. Being overly educated in the field doesn't help in any way shape or form to be able to relate the lower level material.
It doesn't matter one bit if I know how to do function pointers and what not if my job is to simply teach variable pointers and linked lists.
And I don't need 4 years of Computer Science to be able to teach linked lists as the crown of a high school comp sci education when you learn how to do those in the first or second semester of a Comp Sci degree. Knowing how to write an OS does nothing to help me teach students how to write a program that stores and traverses a list of numbers.
Knowing how to teach is the only thing that helps there and that's why it's emphasized over higher level material.
if Google is watching they may end up witnessing a crime or few and they're obligated to report it. At least I'd hope they'd have the integrity to do so. They're first party. They're not signing away their right to read your mail. They've just agreed not to share that information with others unless required by law. If Google flags your account for whatever reason, as long as they don't share it with people who don't need to know, there's no invasion of privacy.
If the government intercepts an e-mail and finds it originated from Google they can get a warrent and request that Google cough up all the information they can. The cops need one legally gained piece of information to get probable cause which opens up a door to much more information. Google can do their own investigation and decide whether or not to fight to keep that information private. Or if they confirm in their own minds a crime is being committed, they should be more than happy to help law enforcment.
And I would certainly hope Google would keep records and comply.
It's amazing how often computer crimes happen and those who could fit all the pieces together to save a person's livlihood just don't care. It's not their country, it's not their state, it's not them, it's not big enough, they don't care.
build a projector. $150 for a decent overhead projector and that's pretty much all you need. You just remove the backlighting from the panel and lay it on top of the projector.
Instead of paying $300 or more per bulb you only pay about $30. I set myself up a projector using the LCD screen from an old VictorMaxx Stuntmaster and at 10 feet it projected a 22" image from a 1.5" LCD panel. I had the advantage that the VictorMaxx takes a standard RCA input. By default it just has a funky non standard connector.
If I could find a decent LCD panel I'd make a permanent setup. The LCD panel I used had a resolution of about 80x60. Portable gaming console screens are 320x240 which isn't too terrible.
I used Ethereal back when I was playing with Try2Hack and discovered what information was being sent for The Kill Everyone Project. I then fired up my custom "hacker" program and proceeded to destroy the world approximatly five times per packet.
After crashing the high score page from an integer overflow caused by my rediculously high score, I decided that maybe I should stop.
So after beating the internet, what purpose does a book on Ethereal serve?
What would actually be handy is a browser that you can tell to "step" through message transmissions. The owner of the "Kill Everyone Project" challenged me to hack his other games after I e-mailed him to explain what I did and how he could fix it. The only reason I couldn't do it was because after some cookie passing with my program I couldn't quite get the SWF file with the session ID. With a real browser with "step" it would be possible to let it load up the game session like normal but then set it to "step" mode and be able to edit packets before they go to the server.
I don't imagine it would be too terribly difficult to add such a feature to Mozilla. It would be nice to have a text window that shows what data is actually being sent up to the server with the option to have to manually okay each packet so you could edit out any info you'd rather the server didn't have.
Like when certain Javascript pages try to grab system information.
I started working on some computationly heavy statistical distribution equations in C++ in order to prototype some functions. I used doubles for eveyrthing because I needed the precision.
When I moved it over to C# the speed went noticibly up.
But then again compiled QuickBASIC could do math as fast as any other language. It was just the graphics that were slow. Fast math isn't much of a trick since all the basic computations are done in hardware. The compiler just needs to take advantage of it.
If you need real time, new and delete are about 10 times slower than free and calloc. You don't have access to those functions in Java or C#. If you need raw speed, higher level languages aren't going to cut it. They have too much "safety" built in which kills performance in some cases.
If all you need is math, then any language will do.
I kill off any message that contains a script tag instantly.
There's no legitimate use for javascript in an e-mail. E-mails are not web-pages. The only interaction an e-mail needs is a link if that.
If you need to show someone some neat javascript trick you post it on a site and tell the user to go to the site.
Joe jobs will go up eventually but like I said in my other post, you can't fight spammers with computers alone. There has to be some manual work involved.
Like beating them over the head with shovels and making sure the only domains that make it into the filter are legitimate spam domains.
It's also not costly to initiate a connection to domains to verify they're live. It'd be very easy to plug in a simple TCP/IP winsock class into part of the processing program to try to connect to the domains you're ripping out of e-mails.
IcarusIndie.com started in January of 2001. I've been "in business" for over 3 years already. It started as a hobby and I actually didn't get the business license and go that route for 8 months after. I've been building web-sites for about 8 years now.
In three years the site has evolved immensly and I've been through a number of crunches which resulted in adapting or dying. Obviously I've adapted. Currently Google AdSense and some restructuring has replaced the need for being a full pay site.
Whether or not a site lives or dies depends entirely on whether the owners are either idiots (go bankrupt or in debt rather than find ways to make money to cover costs) or just don't like paying the money and move on to something new.
Icarus Independent will never run me into the ground from costs because I have the ability to make it a pay site at the drop of a hat. I drop the htaccess file in the directories and suddenly nobody can access them without paying for an All Access Pass. Bandwidth usage drops to an acceptible level and money shows up in my account. There really is no excuse for a web-site to push the owners into debt. There are always ways to cut costs.
Sites that go bankrupt and die are run by people who's conviction to not charge the visitor overides common sense.
If bandwidth is too much you can kill off content or start charging for content while you find a better way to recoup costs. And there's no rule that says you can't switch between being a pay and free site during the course of a month.
Worst case you move into a virtual hosting package and pay $20 - $30 a month or less while you try to maintain as much of the site as possible and rebuild from there until you can afford your own server again. In my case, worst case I'd go back to DSL with a flat rate and hardware restricted transfer per month. But I can't forsee any reason why I'd be in that position where I couldn't afford colocation.
So yeah, unless Spymac falls into the "we'd rather go into debt and die than charge users" category, the odds of them being around in 10 years is pretty high.
this is NOT like having a massive billboard in your house unless you requested said billboard to be in your house. If I want to put up an ugly billboard in my own house that's very much my own business.
In fact, I think Mrs. Senator with too much time on her hands will be horrified that most teenages post many billboards on their walls. They're called "posters."
This senator should get to work right away drafting a bill to make it illegal for me to sign up for anything that invades my privacy. It should be illegal for me to choose to fill out surveys.
There goes Gator (nothing ever has all bad side effects). There goes every credit card company. In fact, there goes every targeted ad company that uses private information to send you junk.
Arnold had it right when he said the California government should be part time so they don't have time to waste drafting up silly laws.
When he said it no one was sure what silly legislation he was talking about.
A number of people have successfully signed up so it's not a consistent problem. I ran into the problem once myself and then it magically went away. I created an account with a non secured connection and then creating accounts with the secured connection worked fine without changing anything.
If you're having trouble signing up with the OpenSSL secured version use
The site fully functions both with http and https since not all browsers support certificates and I havn't figured out what makes it choak with https on an inconsistant basis.
BTW, "missing entries" means that one of the form entries wasn't set. The only ones it checks for that error are the username, two password entries and the challengeid.
a dedicated server sitting at the ISP, a laptop, a home server, and a home work station and a system sitting up in the closet.
I used to think it was nice having lots of computers. But once I hit three systems it was getting ugly. One work station, one test system and a dedicated server. Getting rid of the dedicated server and going to two systems at home was very nice.
It's definitly not worth it to fork out several hundred minimum to assemble a system just to try a "free" OS. I have an extra computer to try out Linux's latest offering every once in awhile. If you have an extra system lying around then it may be worth it to just use it to try Linux.
In my case, I really don't care to have three systems junking up my room. My home server runs WindowsXP and Linux didn't wow me enough to take it's place. Now that I got Server 2003 for free from the Uni it's highly unlikely that Linux will replace it once 2003 replaces XP.
And when I buy my new system to get back into the upper range of systems, it'll get 2K on it and replace the current 2K system which will be relegated to the attic.
Next time I try Linux, I'll definitly be checking out this offering so I don't have to pull down a third system into my room.
it allows you to not have to set up a dual boot and let users keep their solitaire while you slowly migrate over. If there's something that will only work on Linux (or that you want users using on Linux) you can force them to use just that app in Linux so they don't freak out from being dumped in the lake and expected to swim.
I also would rather see how Linux is progressing by installing it like another application in Windows than having to set up a dual boot or dedicate an entire PC to it. It's far less of a hassle.
check out the anonymous e-mail through www.icarusindie.com
Instead of a picture I just present a riddle or other question.
A human can search Google for the answer in order to be able to send their anonymous message. A program would need to be written and trained to be able to do that specifically for my web-site. I'm confident only someone with an academic interest in such a challenge would do it. And so far it hasn't been abused.
I use the same type of challenge but render the text to an image and add some noise on the Indie-Mail sign up page to keep bots off.
I also use a server generated ChallengeID that must be present which prevents anyone from using any page but the one I offer to even attempt to submit the form. If you don't use my page, the challenge file isn't generated on the server and without the file the server will ignore the request to process the form. You are also never sent the question number or question in text form. Everything the server needs to know about what question you're supposed to supply the answer to is stored in the server generated file that never leaves the server. And everything you need to know is in an image.
So far that hasn't been broken either. And if it is, I can adapt faster than bots can.
I've been doing this with my e-mail server (link in sig) for at least a year now. You can view the entire list of domains I filter at the Indie-Mail site. I even have a right up describing the why and how of this system on www.icarusindie.com called "An Analysis of Spam." And this is probably the 20th time I'm hawked this method up on Slashdot.
The process is mostly automated but when it comes to blacklisting a domain, it's manual. You cannot automate it fully because legitimate domains make it into spams. yahoo, msn and w3c.org are the most common. Even without it being intentional on the spammers part. The automated part rips through e-mail logs pulling out who it's to, from and the subject and then all the urls. I can then clear out any entries that are going to account that aren't mine. And from there I go through and make sure the ones that do get added are actually spam domains.
A computer can't really tell the difference between a spam domain and a legitimate domain. Humans can.
Spam domains are blatently labeled like "medsforyou.com" contain random letters and numbers or have the spams images linked in the root. 8000hosting.com/ad.jpg is a big giant clue that this is a spam domain. I've seen links with 6 or 7 subdomains tacked on. I manually remove all the subdomain garbage and block the main one.
The link ripper not only yanks out the root domain (and any subdomains) but also the exact URL of what it was pointing to.
The main problem with anti-spam tools is that they rely on computers to find patterns. Spammers are not computers. They're idiots but not computers. And you can't get around the fact you need humans to be effective without causing colateral damage. Spammers do not always use computer identifiable patterns.
The other "problem" with this method is that it only says 50% of the bandwidth cost at max since the server has to recieve the message for parsing. So it's only good for people offering e-mail services like myself who can't risk being over zealous in fighting spam which could result in losing other people's e-mail.
ISPs are forced for the sake of bandwidth to use IP blacklisting while this sort of method would work as a secondary filter.
Again, there is no silver bullet. You cannot just rely on one form of spam protection if your goal is irradication. This method is just the least error prone when done properly. IP blacklisting can be like nuking a small villiage to kill a fly. This is a highly focused and reasonably sized flyswatter that may occasionally flak off some paint if swung too hard.
And never underestimate the number of domains spammers own. I get a dozen or so new domains to filter out ever few days. I may get spam but at least it's costing them real money to get it to me.
Since Google announced GMail I decided it was about time I took a stab at offering e-mail services seriously. Even if it was just April 1st and Google was just joking.
So I whipped up some scripts to work on top of Mercury Mail and added OpenSSL to the server. Currently the web-mail portion is text only. This allows you to report spam before it gets into your POP3 client without notifying the spammers if they have externally linking images or whatnot.
When you delete a message, it's gone. I was going to go with Google AdSense to try to support the cost but Google's systems obviously can't read your e-mail so the ads weren't working out. So it's just free and no ads. In the future I may find a way to get Google AdSense to mesh with it.
The cool feature though is the full text search. It uses a modified version of DGS Search which by default is too anal about how it creates the links to the files it finds to be usable. So I fixed it.
15,000KB max file attachments, no storage limits (just don't use it for file storage).
So if you're interested in how the features of GMail are going to work for you, give Indie-Mail a try. Just create an account, forward some e-mails to it and try it out.
I'll be working on spiffying up the look of it over time. My goal was to just get it functional and secured.
that voice telephone wasn't needed. And if it was ever invented there would be no practical use for it.
This was shortly before it was invented.
There are some very smart people in the world who are incredibly short sighted. Quantum Cryptography will be very handy when quantum computers become common place making cracking current codes not much of an issue. And I don't think people realize how much technology is packed into a modem. Building quantum modems "cheaply" is a good first step to building more general computing systems based on that technology.
And just to cut people off at the pass, the 640K comment was made for exactly one chip at one point in time in a debate over how much of the 1MB of ram supported by the chip should be given to the user for program use.
Natural control: Outside of the tropics where Caulerpa occurs naturally, there is no known marine life that eats C. taxifolia in any significant quantities. C. taxifolia contains toxins that are distasteful to species that might feed on it.
distasteful. Not deadly. It's not killing all the marine life in it's path. They're just eating McDonald's.
Microsoft employs a city. They don't need everybody working on Windows. They don't need everybody working on Office, etc. They have very large, very dedicated and well paid teams working on those products.
They're simply branching out. Claiming they're afraid of losing their OS base because they're branching into other areas is as a silly as claiming they thought Windows was going out when they started working on Office.
What do you do when you have more money than you know what to do with? Find more ways to spend it. You can't just throw money/people at a software program and expect it be better. There's a point where throwing more money and people at a project just hurts the project. So, you take all these extra people and get them going on other products.
If you think of all their products as stock, they're diversifying their funds. It's not that they expect Windows to fail. It's that they don't care if it does but they're going ahead with it as though it's not.
helped get me a modeling gig. Marching band teaches you how to walk both confidently and with style.
In my old school marching band was just walking up and down the street. In my new school it was walking up and down the street I think once or twice but the rest of the time it was doing half time shows and competitions with formations and whatnot which was really cool. I had to learn how to basically run and play at the same time while keeping the instrument level.
Kind of like running with a video camera and not bouncing it around.
A lot of people don't get the practical applications of things like that because they're too concerned with not being "geeky" and just plain short sighted.
And this is why schools tend to cut music programs while the athletic department gets gobs of money.
with a background in marching band (or martial arts) and steady hands.
All he's doing is adding a weight to make it hard for you to move your hands. And you can tell he's having a rough time with it as many of the shots are crooked. It's not properly weighted on the other side so he has to push down with one hand, up with the other and maintain a horizontal position throughout the shot. And he can't do it so the image is tilted most of the time. He'd have a chance of keeping the horizontal straight if he made a "T" instead of an "L"
This is why real steady cams are mounted on the chest like a snare drum. The springs/hydrolics take care of the vertical bounce and the mounting position balances the horizontal. The operator would have to bend over to one side to tilt the shot. If you want to get an "up" shot you bend over, point the camera up and walk backwards.
This is also why most movies move the camera around a lot. Besides it adding to the scene. It's actually easier to keep a steady path of movement than to hold a camera still.
many of the companies/charities supplying the refurbs are based in the US or other countries which do care about copyright violations. A company based in such a country committing a crime in another country will be prosecuted in their home country.
It'd be like Sony opening up shop somewhere to sell/give away pirated CDs of competing record companies. Sony would be taken to court in whatever country it's parent headquarters is in.
If a charity has no ties to the US or any other nation that enforces copyright laws then they would be capable of not caring.
If a charity is knowingly working with a company committing piracy it could bite them in the ass no matter if they do think of themselves as Robin Hood.
Slashdot Mirror
too many disruptive trolls.
They're going to need a lot of fast fingured moderators to keep that place "holy."
Ben
concepts are more important.
Being forced to do problem solving is tedious and boring. Being forced to do it without a calculator is just needlessly frustrating. And if you don't know the concepts you can't do the problems at all.
"Show your work" are the magic words. When you pop in an equation to a calculator it just spits out the answer. If you require students show their work they have to apply the concepts to go step by step but they don't have to manually multiply and divide complex numbers which is just tedious and pointless. The net result is that they can do the homework in a reasonable amount of time and learn everything they need to know.
It's often the case that I work backwards from the answer to the question in order to try to understand how to solve the problem. If you require a student to show their work then the answer doesn't give them an out. It's an additional help so they can be sure they got the right answer and better understand how it works.
Forcing students to focus on specific problems is why students get completely lost when going from Java to another language. They don't understand the concepts. They wasted hundreds of dollars learning syntax.
I know quite a few languages because I learn concepts so the learning curve going from one language to another is minimal.
"They spend 4 year of college being taught education theory and taking some science/math on the side"
At ASU they spend 2.5 years getting a liberal education with a large dose of Math taught at a watered down level. They then spend 1.5 years learning how to actually teach.
It's sufficient for teaching because at least in HS you're teaching at a level well below your capabilities and you teach the same thing over and over and over. A Math teacher builds their math education in the classroom.
The problems with teachers is not that they don't know the material. It's that they can't relate the material in an effective way. Being overly educated in the field doesn't help in any way shape or form to be able to relate the lower level material.
It doesn't matter one bit if I know how to do function pointers and what not if my job is to simply teach variable pointers and linked lists.
And I don't need 4 years of Computer Science to be able to teach linked lists as the crown of a high school comp sci education when you learn how to do those in the first or second semester of a Comp Sci degree. Knowing how to write an OS does nothing to help me teach students how to write a program that stores and traverses a list of numbers.
Knowing how to teach is the only thing that helps there and that's why it's emphasized over higher level material.
Ben
if Google is watching they may end up witnessing a crime or few and they're obligated to report it. At least I'd hope they'd have the integrity to do so. They're first party. They're not signing away their right to read your mail. They've just agreed not to share that information with others unless required by law. If Google flags your account for whatever reason, as long as they don't share it with people who don't need to know, there's no invasion of privacy.
If the government intercepts an e-mail and finds it originated from Google they can get a warrent and request that Google cough up all the information they can. The cops need one legally gained piece of information to get probable cause which opens up a door to much more information. Google can do their own investigation and decide whether or not to fight to keep that information private. Or if they confirm in their own minds a crime is being committed, they should be more than happy to help law enforcment.
And I would certainly hope Google would keep records and comply.
It's amazing how often computer crimes happen and those who could fit all the pieces together to save a person's livlihood just don't care. It's not their country, it's not their state, it's not them, it's not big enough, they don't care.
Ben
build a projector. $150 for a decent overhead projector and that's pretty much all you need. You just remove the backlighting from the panel and lay it on top of the projector.
Instead of paying $300 or more per bulb you only pay about $30. I set myself up a projector using the LCD screen from an old VictorMaxx Stuntmaster and at 10 feet it projected a 22" image from a 1.5" LCD panel. I had the advantage that the VictorMaxx takes a standard RCA input. By default it just has a funky non standard connector.
If I could find a decent LCD panel I'd make a permanent setup. The LCD panel I used had a resolution of about 80x60. Portable gaming console screens are 320x240 which isn't too terrible.
Ben
I used Ethereal back when I was playing with Try2Hack and discovered what information was being sent for The Kill Everyone Project. I then fired up my custom "hacker" program and proceeded to destroy the world approximatly five times per packet.
After crashing the high score page from an integer overflow caused by my rediculously high score, I decided that maybe I should stop.
So after beating the internet, what purpose does a book on Ethereal serve?
What would actually be handy is a browser that you can tell to "step" through message transmissions. The owner of the "Kill Everyone Project" challenged me to hack his other games after I e-mailed him to explain what I did and how he could fix it. The only reason I couldn't do it was because after some cookie passing with my program I couldn't quite get the SWF file with the session ID. With a real browser with "step" it would be possible to let it load up the game session like normal but then set it to "step" mode and be able to edit packets before they go to the server.
I don't imagine it would be too terribly difficult to add such a feature to Mozilla. It would be nice to have a text window that shows what data is actually being sent up to the server with the option to have to manually okay each packet so you could edit out any info you'd rather the server didn't have.
Like when certain Javascript pages try to grab system information.
Ben
"almost" means "many of, but not all."
Congratulations on finding the games section where it didn't womp the best ATI card until you get into the higher resolution ranges.
However, you'll notice on the preceeding pages, "over 100% better" was a very common occurance in areas like shaders and lighting and whatnot.
Pointing out areas where the GeForce doesn't beat the ATI at 100% does exactly nothing to diminish the point of the article submitter.
This is why he said "almost every" and not "all."
Ben
since Microsoft's Windows Update page is getting really bogged down you can download the patches from this Mirror.
Ben
I started working on some computationly heavy statistical distribution equations in C++ in order to prototype some functions. I used doubles for eveyrthing because I needed the precision.
When I moved it over to C# the speed went noticibly up.
But then again compiled QuickBASIC could do math as fast as any other language. It was just the graphics that were slow. Fast math isn't much of a trick since all the basic computations are done in hardware. The compiler just needs to take advantage of it.
If you need real time, new and delete are about 10 times slower than free and calloc. You don't have access to those functions in Java or C#. If you need raw speed, higher level languages aren't going to cut it. They have too much "safety" built in which kills performance in some cases.
If all you need is math, then any language will do.
Ben
I kill off any message that contains a script tag instantly.
There's no legitimate use for javascript in an e-mail. E-mails are not web-pages. The only interaction an e-mail needs is a link if that.
If you need to show someone some neat javascript trick you post it on a site and tell the user to go to the site.
Joe jobs will go up eventually but like I said in my other post, you can't fight spammers with computers alone. There has to be some manual work involved.
Like beating them over the head with shovels and making sure the only domains that make it into the filter are legitimate spam domains.
It's also not costly to initiate a connection to domains to verify they're live. It'd be very easy to plug in a simple TCP/IP winsock class into part of the processing program to try to connect to the domains you're ripping out of e-mails.
Ben
an unlawful act.
But if you're going to do it anyway, take a video camera.
Ben
IcarusIndie.com started in January of 2001. I've been "in business" for over 3 years already. It started as a hobby and I actually didn't get the business license and go that route for 8 months after. I've been building web-sites for about 8 years now.
In three years the site has evolved immensly and I've been through a number of crunches which resulted in adapting or dying. Obviously I've adapted. Currently Google AdSense and some restructuring has replaced the need for being a full pay site.
Whether or not a site lives or dies depends entirely on whether the owners are either idiots (go bankrupt or in debt rather than find ways to make money to cover costs) or just don't like paying the money and move on to something new.
Icarus Independent will never run me into the ground from costs because I have the ability to make it a pay site at the drop of a hat. I drop the htaccess file in the directories and suddenly nobody can access them without paying for an All Access Pass. Bandwidth usage drops to an acceptible level and money shows up in my account. There really is no excuse for a web-site to push the owners into debt. There are always ways to cut costs.
Sites that go bankrupt and die are run by people who's conviction to not charge the visitor overides common sense.
If bandwidth is too much you can kill off content or start charging for content while you find a better way to recoup costs. And there's no rule that says you can't switch between being a pay and free site during the course of a month.
Worst case you move into a virtual hosting package and pay $20 - $30 a month or less while you try to maintain as much of the site as possible and rebuild from there until you can afford your own server again. In my case, worst case I'd go back to DSL with a flat rate and hardware restricted transfer per month. But I can't forsee any reason why I'd be in that position where I couldn't afford colocation.
So yeah, unless Spymac falls into the "we'd rather go into debt and die than charge users" category, the odds of them being around in 10 years is pretty high.
Ben
this is NOT like having a massive billboard in your house unless you requested said billboard to be in your house. If I want to put up an ugly billboard in my own house that's very much my own business.
In fact, I think Mrs. Senator with too much time on her hands will be horrified that most teenages post many billboards on their walls. They're called "posters."
This senator should get to work right away drafting a bill to make it illegal for me to sign up for anything that invades my privacy. It should be illegal for me to choose to fill out surveys.
There goes Gator (nothing ever has all bad side effects). There goes every credit card company. In fact, there goes every targeted ad company that uses private information to send you junk.
Arnold had it right when he said the California government should be part time so they don't have time to waste drafting up silly laws.
When he said it no one was sure what silly legislation he was talking about.
Well, now we have an example.
Ben
how many rods are in a mile? 320.
A number of people have successfully signed up so it's not a consistent problem. I ran into the problem once myself and then it magically went away. I created an account with a non secured connection and then creating accounts with the secured connection worked fine without changing anything.
If you're having trouble signing up with the OpenSSL secured version use
The non secured version
The site fully functions both with http and https since not all browsers support certificates and I havn't figured out what makes it choak with https on an inconsistant basis.
BTW, "missing entries" means that one of the form entries wasn't set. The only ones it checks for that error are the username, two password entries and the challengeid.
Ben
a dedicated server sitting at the ISP, a laptop, a home server, and a home work station and a system sitting up in the closet.
I used to think it was nice having lots of computers. But once I hit three systems it was getting ugly. One work station, one test system and a dedicated server. Getting rid of the dedicated server and going to two systems at home was very nice.
It's definitly not worth it to fork out several hundred minimum to assemble a system just to try a "free" OS. I have an extra computer to try out Linux's latest offering every once in awhile. If you have an extra system lying around then it may be worth it to just use it to try Linux.
In my case, I really don't care to have three systems junking up my room. My home server runs WindowsXP and Linux didn't wow me enough to take it's place. Now that I got Server 2003 for free from the Uni it's highly unlikely that Linux will replace it once 2003 replaces XP.
And when I buy my new system to get back into the upper range of systems, it'll get 2K on it and replace the current 2K system which will be relegated to the attic.
Next time I try Linux, I'll definitly be checking out this offering so I don't have to pull down a third system into my room.
Ben
it allows you to not have to set up a dual boot and let users keep their solitaire while you slowly migrate over. If there's something that will only work on Linux (or that you want users using on Linux) you can force them to use just that app in Linux so they don't freak out from being dumped in the lake and expected to swim.
I also would rather see how Linux is progressing by installing it like another application in Windows than having to set up a dual boot or dedicate an entire PC to it. It's far less of a hassle.
Ben
check out the anonymous e-mail through www.icarusindie.com
Instead of a picture I just present a riddle or other question.
A human can search Google for the answer in order to be able to send their anonymous message. A program would need to be written and trained to be able to do that specifically for my web-site. I'm confident only someone with an academic interest in such a challenge would do it. And so far it hasn't been abused.
I use the same type of challenge but render the text to an image and add some noise on the Indie-Mail sign up page to keep bots off.
I also use a server generated ChallengeID that must be present which prevents anyone from using any page but the one I offer to even attempt to submit the form. If you don't use my page, the challenge file isn't generated on the server and without the file the server will ignore the request to process the form. You are also never sent the question number or question in text form. Everything the server needs to know about what question you're supposed to supply the answer to is stored in the server generated file that never leaves the server. And everything you need to know is in an image.
So far that hasn't been broken either. And if it is, I can adapt faster than bots can.
Ben
I've been doing this with my e-mail server (link in sig) for at least a year now. You can view the entire list of domains I filter at the Indie-Mail site. I even have a right up describing the why and how of this system on www.icarusindie.com called "An Analysis of Spam." And this is probably the 20th time I'm hawked this method up on Slashdot.
The process is mostly automated but when it comes to blacklisting a domain, it's manual. You cannot automate it fully because legitimate domains make it into spams. yahoo, msn and w3c.org are the most common. Even without it being intentional on the spammers part. The automated part rips through e-mail logs pulling out who it's to, from and the subject and then all the urls. I can then clear out any entries that are going to account that aren't mine. And from there I go through and make sure the ones that do get added are actually spam domains.
A computer can't really tell the difference between a spam domain and a legitimate domain. Humans can.
Spam domains are blatently labeled like "medsforyou.com" contain random letters and numbers or have the spams images linked in the root. 8000hosting.com/ad.jpg is a big giant clue that this is a spam domain. I've seen links with 6 or 7 subdomains tacked on. I manually remove all the subdomain garbage and block the main one.
The link ripper not only yanks out the root domain (and any subdomains) but also the exact URL of what it was pointing to.
The main problem with anti-spam tools is that they rely on computers to find patterns. Spammers are not computers. They're idiots but not computers. And you can't get around the fact you need humans to be effective without causing colateral damage. Spammers do not always use computer identifiable patterns.
The other "problem" with this method is that it only says 50% of the bandwidth cost at max since the server has to recieve the message for parsing. So it's only good for people offering e-mail services like myself who can't risk being over zealous in fighting spam which could result in losing other people's e-mail.
ISPs are forced for the sake of bandwidth to use IP blacklisting while this sort of method would work as a secondary filter.
Again, there is no silver bullet. You cannot just rely on one form of spam protection if your goal is irradication. This method is just the least error prone when done properly. IP blacklisting can be like nuking a small villiage to kill a fly. This is a highly focused and reasonably sized flyswatter that may occasionally flak off some paint if swung too hard.
And never underestimate the number of domains spammers own. I get a dozen or so new domains to filter out ever few days. I may get spam but at least it's costing them real money to get it to me.
Ben
Since Google announced GMail I decided it was about time I took a stab at offering e-mail services seriously. Even if it was just April 1st and Google was just joking.
So I whipped up some scripts to work on top of Mercury Mail and added OpenSSL to the server. Currently the web-mail portion is text only. This allows you to report spam before it gets into your POP3 client without notifying the spammers if they have externally linking images or whatnot.
When you delete a message, it's gone. I was going to go with Google AdSense to try to support the cost but Google's systems obviously can't read your e-mail so the ads weren't working out. So it's just free and no ads. In the future I may find a way to get Google AdSense to mesh with it.
The cool feature though is the full text search. It uses a modified version of DGS Search which by default is too anal about how it creates the links to the files it finds to be usable. So I fixed it.
15,000KB max file attachments, no storage limits (just don't use it for file storage).
So if you're interested in how the features of GMail are going to work for you, give Indie-Mail a try. Just create an account, forward some e-mails to it and try it out.
I'll be working on spiffying up the look of it over time. My goal was to just get it functional and secured.
Ben
that voice telephone wasn't needed. And if it was ever invented there would be no practical use for it.
This was shortly before it was invented.
There are some very smart people in the world who are incredibly short sighted. Quantum Cryptography will be very handy when quantum computers become common place making cracking current codes not much of an issue. And I don't think people realize how much technology is packed into a modem. Building quantum modems "cheaply" is a good first step to building more general computing systems based on that technology.
And just to cut people off at the pass, the 640K comment was made for exactly one chip at one point in time in a debate over how much of the 1MB of ram supported by the chip should be given to the user for program use.
Ben
Natural control: Outside of the tropics where Caulerpa occurs naturally, there is no known marine life that eats C. taxifolia in any significant quantities. C. taxifolia contains toxins that are distasteful to species that might feed on it.
2 03 .htm
distasteful. Not deadly. It's not killing all the marine life in it's path. They're just eating McDonald's.
http://swr.nmfs.noaa.gov/hcd/caulerpa/factsheet
Yes it's bad. No, it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
Ben
lets trash the moon before we even get there.
On the "bright" side at least when we finally do start a colony (permanent or otherwise) the astronauts will feel right at home.
Ben
Microsoft employs a city. They don't need everybody working on Windows. They don't need everybody working on Office, etc. They have very large, very dedicated and well paid teams working on those products.
They're simply branching out. Claiming they're afraid of losing their OS base because they're branching into other areas is as a silly as claiming they thought Windows was going out when they started working on Office.
What do you do when you have more money than you know what to do with? Find more ways to spend it. You can't just throw money/people at a software program and expect it be better. There's a point where throwing more money and people at a project just hurts the project. So, you take all these extra people and get them going on other products.
If you think of all their products as stock, they're diversifying their funds. It's not that they expect Windows to fail. It's that they don't care if it does but they're going ahead with it as though it's not.
Ben
helped get me a modeling gig. Marching band teaches you how to walk both confidently and with style.
In my old school marching band was just walking up and down the street. In my new school it was walking up and down the street I think once or twice but the rest of the time it was doing half time shows and competitions with formations and whatnot which was really cool. I had to learn how to basically run and play at the same time while keeping the instrument level.
Kind of like running with a video camera and not bouncing it around.
A lot of people don't get the practical applications of things like that because they're too concerned with not being "geeky" and just plain short sighted.
And this is why schools tend to cut music programs while the athletic department gets gobs of money.
Ben
with a background in marching band (or martial arts) and steady hands.
All he's doing is adding a weight to make it hard for you to move your hands. And you can tell he's having a rough time with it as many of the shots are crooked. It's not properly weighted on the other side so he has to push down with one hand, up with the other and maintain a horizontal position throughout the shot. And he can't do it so the image is tilted most of the time. He'd have a chance of keeping the horizontal straight if he made a "T" instead of an "L"
This is why real steady cams are mounted on the chest like a snare drum. The springs/hydrolics take care of the vertical bounce and the mounting position balances the horizontal. The operator would have to bend over to one side to tilt the shot. If you want to get an "up" shot you bend over, point the camera up and walk backwards.
This is also why most movies move the camera around a lot. Besides it adding to the scene. It's actually easier to keep a steady path of movement than to hold a camera still.
Ben
many of the companies/charities supplying the refurbs are based in the US or other countries which do care about copyright violations. A company based in such a country committing a crime in another country will be prosecuted in their home country.
It'd be like Sony opening up shop somewhere to sell/give away pirated CDs of competing record companies. Sony would be taken to court in whatever country it's parent headquarters is in.
If a charity has no ties to the US or any other nation that enforces copyright laws then they would be capable of not caring.
If a charity is knowingly working with a company committing piracy it could bite them in the ass no matter if they do think of themselves as Robin Hood.
Ben