I have the latest version of IE and those pages work just like they're supposed to.
Whining that IE 5.0 doesn't fully support CSS is just braindead. It's an old browser. MS has been working on compliance and updating their browsers. If you insist on using a broken version when fixed versions are available, that's your issue. Not Microsoft's.
IE 5.0 has been fixed to support lots of new things. And now it's called IE 6.0. What did the guy bitching about IE 5.0 seriously expect? That MS would make changes but keep the same version number?
"MS IE is not CSS compliant"
Which version? Apparently Mr 5.0 hasn't figured out that when MS puts out an update for IE it usually changes the version number. MS was obviously aware that 5.0 wasn't up to spec. So they patched it. The latest patch brings you up to 6.0. So if you're not keeping up with patches then you really have no place to bitch. They did obviously fix the problems. You just refuse to apply the patch(es).
cable companies aren't allowed to offer the same packages they do now.
I'd imagine it'll be more like pay your current rate for all the channels OR $5 per channel plus a base rate.
For people who only want a few channels, the $5 per plus base will be a better deal. For those who want a lots of channels, it's better to just stick with the current plan.
Nothing really changes for people who like having hundreds of channels (most subscribers) and the cable companies pick up parents who would otherwise not pay for cable because they're forced to have access to channels they deem inappropriate. When you have to block more channels than you watch it's better to just not have cable for many parents. If they could not have those channels come to their home, that's much better.
I'm sure lots of parents would be happy to pay for a few channels like Disney, Nickelodean, and Discovery if they didn't have to have all the other crap comming in with it that they have to worry about their kids stumbling onto.
But as it is, they just don't buy cable. If cable companies aren't retarded about this it's very easy for them to not lose their current base of subscribers and also pick up people like the above.
but you're not forced to store all that food and whatnot on your property.
I had to strain to get RedHat to fit onto a system that XP had no problem fitting onto. It didn't help that RedHat thinks it's a good idea to copy the entire CD to the HD before installing. And there's no obvious option (if there is even one) to install directly from the CD. I also have never had to swap a CD to install Windows.
And then when it was all said and done, even with a minimal installation, it was mostly junk on the harddrive. That RedHat box is now sitting up in my closet doing nothing. I already have Windows. So "it's free" doesn't mean anything. I just has an extra system so I thought I'd give it a shot again. Not impressed.
"That sounds like fascism, to me."
Sound like an intelligent thing to do to me. Nobody is saying other choices shouldn't be available. Just that all those choices shouldn't be in one single package. How hard is it to offer cut down versions of Mandrake? KDE edition contains all the KDE stuff. Gnome edition contains all the gnome stuff. Not hard.
It's very much fascism when the only choice is to download up to a gig and a half of crap and be be forced to burn it to CD and then have it all be crammed onto your system even though 90+% of it you don't need. And good luck getting rid of it. Windows has an easy to find and use remove programs. Not Linux.
It's not fascism to give people the choice of not having a choice. A clean install of Windows is very much that: clean. No junk. There's no such thing as a clean install of Linux. The options are bloated or more bloated.
When you buy a car you get very few choices. When you buy a car you don't get a dozen steering wheels to go with it. By your analogy, imagine Linux as going to a car dealership, buying a car and getting a truck load of every option imaginable that you're expected to store in your garage.
If we try to screw around with earth and screw up we're all dead. You've got billions of lives at stake over things that you assume are bad. I don't see how one can believe in evolution and object to a changing world.
"this planet is becoming significantly less Earth-like"
Earth changes. According to evolution it used to be a big giant block of ice. Earth has alledgedly been through a lot worse than anything man has managed to throw at it.
On the other hand, if Mars is dead, there's no harm in trying to liven it up a bit. Worst case we just make it more difficult on ourselves to make it livable. And we can learn from our mistakes so if we decide to go mucking around with Earth we aren't taking uneducated guesses about what might do what.
We're getting a new solar heater for our house and it costs several thousand dollars. It will take a decade or more to recoup the costs in cost savings.
With fission and fusion the idea is to take a relativly small amount of energy to start a chain reaction that releases a very large amount of energy.
There is a solar array by the university but it's unsightly. We just don't have the stuff to make solar cells efficient enough to be practical. We can't very well be driving along at 20 miles per hour with 200 square feet of solar cells on the roof of the car that only has room for half a person.
Using the sun directly as a power source isn't looking very promising. So we make use of it instead to grow crops and whatnot. It's not like the sun's power is just going to waste. Trying to use it make electricity just isn't working out. The sun seems to be a screwdriver that we're attempting to pound nails in with.
Maybe one day we'll find a material that reaches a practical amount of efficency for solar cells. In the mean time we need power and fussion and fission are the most practical and cost effective.
a lot of companies took on a lot of fat. When the boom ended the companies cut the fat. It takes a lot more man power to get something up and running quickly than it does to maintain it. And of course with all these people working and making money it trickles down leading to more jobs all around since we all like to buy and eat crap and it takes people to make that crap.
Unless Al Gore actually invented the internet it's very difficult to claim Clinton had anything to do with the employment rate considering anyone who could write HTML could get a job.
Now companies are being more "sensible" with where they put their money at the expense of American workers since the only thing that matters is the value of their stock.
This genius idea of jacking up minimum wage a couple bucks is only going to encourage companies to look elsewhere since that minimum wage trickles up fast. Every company is built like a pyramid. The idea is to work your way up it or jump to new pyramids as bricks fall out. Forcing companies to fatten up the bottom is just going to encourage them to cut off layers.
I just can't wait to need a college education just so McDonald's can justify paying me $12.00 an hour to flip burgers.
Hiring standards are already overly strict at some companies as it is for grunt labor.
is that there is a very finite number of customers for things like electricity and phone service. You need a very large customer base in order to be able to charge a reasonable amount.
When you allow competition those that attempt to compete are forced to either charge less than it costs to supply the service or charge more. If they charge less but can't get the customer base they go out of business. If they charge more people tend not to switch. And if you don't charge enough less, nobody cares enough to switch.
Cox saves us all of a buck or two over Qwest on phone service. We never bothered to switch until we switched to Cox for high speed internet.
And of course the only reason Cox had the money to implement phone service is because they're the monopoly on cable service.
In cases like this it's actually better for the government to force the monopoly to act in the best interest of the people than to allow competition which just gives people the false impression that it'll lead to cheaper prices and better service.
Competition in these cases are almost always forced to either cut corners to survive or charge more.
"Life On-Line" is my current attempt at something different. It's essentially the game of life on-line but with the premise of the "Original Position." Upon logging in you're given a random life and a random name to go with it. What you do from there is up to you. When you die, you reenter the world as another random life.
The protocol is open and explained at the web-site. There's also a minimalist client suitable for using as a basis for more advanced (graphically or otherwise) versions. Source code and.Net 2003 project space included. I'm going to try to put out an OpenGL based client by next weekend.
Currently the Natural Laws are the original Game Of Life rules. But the engine is suitable for handling up to 256 different lifeforms and any set of laws to govern the consequences of interaction between the various life forms.
The server is up and running though a bit slow since it's on a cable connection. Once it's verified to be stable it'll be moved onto a 10Mbit line and work will begin on more advanced "worlds."
MS Office is seamless. Why in the world would MS want to try to work with every document format on the face of the planet? Most of which it doesn't have rights to? You'd have a never ending selection of formats to save in. If you want cross platform with MS Office you save in CSV or RTF.
"Try to edit an MS Office 2003 file on a system that's using MS Office '97."
So you're telling me Open Office has exactly one file format?
All MS Office products offer the ability to save your work in any relavent MS format all the way down to the first release of the product.
If you need to use a 2003 document in 97 you save the file as a 97 or earlier document. All versions are backwards compatible. No duh they're not forward compatible. Kinda hard to see the future. Formats change as more features get thought up.
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and either assume Open Office has never changed it's file formats or saves them in such a way that old versions can ignore new data it doesn't understand. Or, all documents are saved in all formats simultaniously and the version loading the version just picks the one it understands best.
Or more likely, you've failed to make some valid point against MS.
Open Office has it's own formats and just works with whatever it can get its hands on. If you need PDF files you buy Adobe Acrobat (or whatever it is now) and you're all set to go. You can convert MS documents back and forth to and from PDF to your hearts content as long as you have MS Office as well. OmniPage can take advantage of any format you've installed on your system much like VirtualDub can work with any codec you have installed.
It's really not MS' place to sell a product that takes the place of Acrobat. After all, aren't you all bitching about how MS is such a monopoly?
So why are you now complaining when MS doesn't support competing formats?
Open Source can get away with reverse engineering. MS would be sued for it.
the company that would have dominated would have been the next most user/developer friendly OS.
Considering it's 2004 and Linux is just starting to be "ready for the desktop" while Windows was ready for the desktop from 3.0 on (except for ME which was always destined for its own recycle bin) it wouldn't have been any open source offerings.
Open Source isn't structured nearly well enough for rapid development and deployment like commercial offerings. Especially when it comes to large scale projects like operating systems. You need dedicated professionals working full time to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time.
Gimp has been around for who knows how long and it's just finally beginning to be noticed as a potential competitor to Photoshop which has been an industry standard for years.
Photoshop was built by dedicated professionals for dedicated professionals. Gimp was built by hobbyists for hobbyists.
The most successful (as in most advanced) offerings of Linux are all offered by corporations with dedicated paid professionals working on it. And those companies are quickly realizing that free doesn't pay the bills. It costs real money to make a real product. Or lots and lots of time. And meanwhile, the world has work to do.
And once the free product catches up, now you've got to convince people they should throw away a very expensive piece of software that's served them for years and use yours instead.
I am paying them to teach me. I am not paying them so I could do something I could just as well do without paying them.
It's exactly the teachers job to feed me information in an intelligent manner so that I can understand it.
It is NOT the teachers job to just stand there while you read the book. While you try to figure out what the hell it's talking about. And while you work the problems.
If I'm expected to do all that then why in the world am I paying them?
And after this semester I won't be. I don't play stupid games. I'm there to be taught. Not to teach myself. I can teach myself for free on my own time.
At least while I work on my teaching degree it will all be immediatly applicable. And when I'm done I'll be able to do something few teachers are capable of: teaching.
Maybe you don't have a problem with teachers who don't teach. I do.
how many people completely miss the point of "The Passion."
Apparently they were two busy being mortified by the violence to read the subtitles which did in fact reveal much about Christ's teachings. Not only "The Passion" as in his death and resurrection but his passion as in the number of times he forgave those who were scorning him. If you notice he even forgave the people who nearly whipped him to death. The verse at the beginning was also key but apparently ignored considering all the critisism about it being anti-semetic. What part of "our" didn't they comprehend? Some guy even when so far as to try to tell Gibson to put a disclaimer at the end. IT WAS AT THE BEGINNING!
One reviewer was so dense they complained (paraphrasing) "so much for love they neighbor." What part of forgiving your tormentors isn't loving your neighbor? Geesh. Apparently we're too accustomed to Disney morality tales where it's all cutesy and they spell it out for you at the end like you're 2 years old.
The whole reason "satan" was put in was to give Mel something of a narrarator. When Satan spoke it was usually a negation of something out of the Bible. I'd imagine that people who never read the Bible (or don't know even the basics) had no clue what the point of the snake was at the beginning. It was a reference to what God said in the Garden of Eden after kicking Adam and Eve out.
This movie really revealed a lot about those who reviewed it. The people who didn't "get it" and whined about the violence and didn't catch the doctrine that was presented are probably just generally bad at philosophy or never took the time to study the Bible. It's an art film. It wasn't intended to be a mass market film.
This is not a movie that you can just be a professional critic and have a valid opinion. It's amazing how many critics complained that a square has three sides.
On Topic: Life of Brian is hilarious and I'll definitly be seeing it in the theater. I've watched the DVD many times.
I don't know if I'll buy "The Passion" on DVD. It's not exactly a movie you'd watch just for the heck of it.
is that you can't just take computer science and come out knowing how to program. Maybe some universities are better than others. If you're not programming on your own time and putting out real demonstrations you're wasting your time with comp sci. I've been very unimpressed with the program at my Uni so I'm cutting out the middle man and switching to getting a secondary education teaching degree in math instead. A degree is a degree when looking for a programming job. It's experience that means anything. And I'd rather teach programming.
I don't need a piece of paper to tell me I know how to program. Certainly not a $16,000 piece of paper. I could buy a car, and the books and teach myself (like I've been doing for 16 years) for that kind of money and do just as well or better.
The students who excel in programming in reality don't need the university. There are those who teach themselves and those who need to be taught. Those who need to be taught will fail in programming because you never stop learning. You can't be a follower and be successful in that field. And if you're the kind of person who can teach yourself, you don't very well need to spend thousands of dollars for someone to teach you.
And in the case of my physics classes I'm paying them quite a bit of money so I can teach myself. Literally. One day a week I'm expected to show up in class and the teacher isn't there. It's just a TA who doesn't say anything. You're just supposed to sit there and work a stupid little workbook of the likes I havn't seen since elementary school. Which is really annoying. And needless to say, I've not been attending. I don't play stupid little games.
The problem isn't that there isn't enough math and physics being offered. It's that it's not being taught.
so your complaining that the e-book can be changed so you prefer the hardcopy but you also claim that hardcopies are being changed.
I'm failing to see how your reasoning fits your conclusion as both mediums are equally subceptible to revisions.
The advantage of electronic books is that a simple program can be written to compare previous versions to new versions to see what exactly has been changed in seconds.
Try that with a hard copy of an encyclopedia.
You're also making the faulty assumption that all changes are bad. The reason history gets "revised" is because as more work is done more facts come to light. It's not always the case that the revision is a step in the wrong direction. It's more often the case that a revision corrects something that was wrongly assumed in the past.
It's also the case that competing versions of any topic exist at the same time. You can't very well compare versions with hardcopies nearly as easily as you can with electronic versions. Because it requires searching. Electronic searches are always faster and more comprehensive than manual searches. When you're manually looking for name or word it's easy to overlook a mention in large volumns. An electronic search will never miss regardless of the size.
This study was done with only ~1054 respondants of only about half were in education type jobs so the sample size sucks. The +/- error on such a small sample size is something like 5% or more if I remember correctly. In reality there may have been only 100 teachers asked how they like their job. A decent sized school has more teachers than that. So it's flawed right off the bat. They should have asked at least 1000 from each job type they were interested in from a range of employers around the country. As it is they may have simply stuck to a single city.
This is also Britain. Not the US. Our school systems are much different. They also fail to tell you how many in each category are "happy" or "miserable." 8% may not be very happy but a large portion may be happy. And "happy" is good enough. This would be a more enlightening study if they had used a significantly larger sample and if they couldn't bother to report the percentage on all the possible answers, they should have at least chosen the worst case. I'd rather know how many people are miserable than "very happy." "Happy," "somewhat happy," "content," are all good signs of a decent profession. But if a large portion respond "very unhappy" then that tells you something. I don't expect a job to make me "very happy." "Very happy" is something family and friends should make you. But I'd rather not work a job that I can expect to be "very unhappy" working.
"Something is wrong if the failing gradeschooler has more common sense than a college grad PHB."
Smart people often think too hard about problems. It's not that they can't/don't understand it's that they assume the problem is more complicated than it is. I spent several hours trying to solve a complex equation when around midnight one night I realized it was a simple matrix problem. I had been thinking about it in symbolic terms where all the entries in the matrix are variables when I finally realized in the code I'd be dealing with actual numbers. So it reduced to simple linear algebra. I was looking for an O(c) solution when a more general solution was far simpler to implement and more functional. I solved for the O(c) solution for a smaller matix but the problem explodes in difficulty as the matrix size increases.
I've currently solved another problem that was about the same way. I wanted an O(c) solution but even Mathematica is telling me it's not possible (it's not really a linear problem) so I'm working on solving it in a slightly less obvious manner.
A failing 6th grader isn't necessarily smarter. They just think about things on a simpler level and sometimes that level is appropriate for the problem.
I've been programming for about 16 years now and I'm not even 24 yet. I currently have a job doing programming and it's mildly entertaining as I'm comming up with solutions to problems I didn't think I was capable of solving. I'm doing math problems that I havn't come across in any schooling yet. The problem is that it's a job and that I'm sitting behind a desk with nothing to look at besides a screen. I'd rather choose to program when I want to. Not because I have to.
This coupled with the fact my GPA isn't up to par with the uni's requirements since there's too much BS for me to care, I'm switching majors to secondary education. Specifically math. I've been teaching myself programming since I started. There's no point in wasting money playing stupid little games just for a piece of paper for a job I don't particulary like anyway. I've had very few good teachers which has resulted in me teaching myself the courses anyway. So why pay them? Actually, only one teacher comes to mind that was excellent.
Talking to some people I know I found out that a certain high school in my area has their comp sci classes taught by the coaches. That's an excellent opportunity.
It also works out nicely since it would have been 2 more years to finish out the comp sci degree but it's also only going to be about 2 years to get an education degree if I pack in about 16 credit hours every semester.
was I able to make a little over $5 with only 3 clicks on the ads I'm displaying. I used Commission Junction for about a year and racked in 70,000+ impressions with about 7000 click thrus. Didn't make a penny. That's why I went to a subscription based web-site. After a review not too long ago I decided to cut down the number of sections that require a pass. Those major sections that don't require a pass now have Google Ads.
The rate variance is why Google doesn't tell you how much a click is worth. It varies from a few cents to a few dollars and possibly more depending on the ad. I run a programming site so I get some expensive programming ads.
Google is being incredibly generous with their AdSense program and I would hope Google would be able to find a way to take out the idiots who try to abuse it rather than cripple the program.
At the start all ad programs paid decently for click-thrus but morons abused it and morons ran the programs so they couldn't deal with it. Or they simply decided they could make more money if they went pay per sale since the advertisers would get the same amount (or more since web-sites got desperite and would flood visiters) of exposure for a lot less money.
It's an absolutly retarded program from a publisher's view. You basically have to sell the ad. You have to dedicate the page the ad is on to the ad so that people will buy what the ad is selling. The standard is about a 1.0% click-thru rate. And of those you now have a fraction of a percent that will compulsive buy. I had one text ad with Commission Junction that did a 10% click thru rate. But I would only get paid if someone bought the book right then. Nobody did so I never got paid. But the seller got lots of free publicity.
One major game development web-site I know has basically signed up for every ad program on the planet and then ran it through their custom script that selects which program to display an ad from to the visitor. I noticed they have Google Adsense worked into the mix as well. I have to wonder how much that stupid monkey and other flashing banners are worth that they don't just stick with Google and dump the rest of the ad systems.
you append or prepend a random sequence of letters to the IP address and pass that sequence to the client in the form. The client then passes it back to the server so it can open up the file by recreating the file name from it and the IP.
"but inherently prohibitively flawed for any global purpose..."
Only if you're not a problem solver. The IP basically amounts to a private key since it's grabbed from the request header and the sequence is essentially the public key.
And frankly no, it's not a big deal. If you were planning on marketing something like this to a massive number of users then you would need to spend the five minutes needed to rectify the situation.
In my case, I might get around to changing how the file is named to account for same IPs overlapping.
This isn't for the mainstream. And it's not difficult for anyone to get the answer. A computer may exist that can find the solution but it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper to bark up someone else's tree.
"If it's something that you have to explain to your parents how it works"
Why would I have to explain to my parents how to answer a question? And why would I force them to go through a script? I can access the common account from any e-mail client since I have the password. All the script is, is a custom e-mail client.
There are a million and one ways to organize a challenge system that will confound any computer that a spammer has access to. If not completely, to the point that it's a waste of time to try to break the system.
You seem to be confusing what computers can do with what is feasible.
"Besides, you're still talking about text, and if the answer can be found on a Google search, then a script can figure it out, too."
Scripts can't understand context. They may find the question but they won't be able to discern what text on the page is the answer. It's one thing to just assume it can be done and quite another to assume someone is going to go to the trouble of trying it.
The only reason to try to break a script set up like mine is purely academic. It takes all of two seconds to break the script so that no answer is correct and then a day or two to swap it out with something else.
The amount of effort needed to break a bot is infinitly less than the effort needed to come up with the bot.
"Show all of the images as grayscale so that image scanning software can't tell the difference between the yellow of a sunflower and the gray of a building."
Why? Anyone with that kind of money to afford such a system that could do those opperations has the money and know how to set up their own anonymous mailer.
Again, you're confusing what's feasible with what's possible.
My free anonymous (as in they can only be traced back to a common e-mail account on my server) e-mailer uses a simple quiz to keep spammers out.
The form page records the IP address of the visitor along the with the question number they were given in a file named with the IP address. That number is never sent to the client. When they hit submit the file of their IP is opened, the question number is read in and the answer given by the user is compared to the stored answer. The file is then deleted and if the answer was correct the e-mail is sent. Otherwise it's not.
This forces my custom form to be used to be able to send the e-mails. And it's not possible to simply keep refreshing the submit page to keep sending the message.
And the challenge is in the form of old riddles and a couple new ones like "what's your favorite color?"
Things a bot would never get but that anyone who knows how to use Google can. Someone would have to program a custom bot with the answers in order to even attempt to spam. And even then since everything goes through my mail server nobody is going to sneak garbage past me for long and I know who your ISP is.
I also include a disclaimer with every e-mail. It'd be quite silly for me not to.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the latest version of IE and those pages work just like they're supposed to.
Whining that IE 5.0 doesn't fully support CSS is just braindead. It's an old browser. MS has been working on compliance and updating their browsers. If you insist on using a broken version when fixed versions are available, that's your issue. Not Microsoft's.
IE 5.0 has been fixed to support lots of new things. And now it's called IE 6.0. What did the guy bitching about IE 5.0 seriously expect? That MS would make changes but keep the same version number?
"MS IE is not CSS compliant"
Which version? Apparently Mr 5.0 hasn't figured out that when MS puts out an update for IE it usually changes the version number. MS was obviously aware that 5.0 wasn't up to spec. So they patched it. The latest patch brings you up to 6.0. So if you're not keeping up with patches then you really have no place to bitch. They did obviously fix the problems. You just refuse to apply the patch(es).
Ben
cable companies aren't allowed to offer the same packages they do now.
I'd imagine it'll be more like pay your current rate for all the channels OR $5 per channel plus a base rate.
For people who only want a few channels, the $5 per plus base will be a better deal. For those who want a lots of channels, it's better to just stick with the current plan.
Nothing really changes for people who like having hundreds of channels (most subscribers) and the cable companies pick up parents who would otherwise not pay for cable because they're forced to have access to channels they deem inappropriate. When you have to block more channels than you watch it's better to just not have cable for many parents. If they could not have those channels come to their home, that's much better.
I'm sure lots of parents would be happy to pay for a few channels like Disney, Nickelodean, and Discovery if they didn't have to have all the other crap comming in with it that they have to worry about their kids stumbling onto.
But as it is, they just don't buy cable. If cable companies aren't retarded about this it's very easy for them to not lose their current base of subscribers and also pick up people like the above.
Ben
but you're not forced to store all that food and whatnot on your property.
I had to strain to get RedHat to fit onto a system that XP had no problem fitting onto. It didn't help that RedHat thinks it's a good idea to copy the entire CD to the HD before installing. And there's no obvious option (if there is even one) to install directly from the CD. I also have never had to swap a CD to install Windows.
And then when it was all said and done, even with a minimal installation, it was mostly junk on the harddrive. That RedHat box is now sitting up in my closet doing nothing. I already have Windows. So "it's free" doesn't mean anything. I just has an extra system so I thought I'd give it a shot again. Not impressed.
"That sounds like fascism, to me."
Sound like an intelligent thing to do to me. Nobody is saying other choices shouldn't be available. Just that all those choices shouldn't be in one single package. How hard is it to offer cut down versions of Mandrake? KDE edition contains all the KDE stuff. Gnome edition contains all the gnome stuff. Not hard.
It's very much fascism when the only choice is to download up to a gig and a half of crap and be be forced to burn it to CD and then have it all be crammed onto your system even though 90+% of it you don't need. And good luck getting rid of it. Windows has an easy to find and use remove programs. Not Linux.
It's not fascism to give people the choice of not having a choice. A clean install of Windows is very much that: clean. No junk. There's no such thing as a clean install of Linux. The options are bloated or more bloated.
When you buy a car you get very few choices. When you buy a car you don't get a dozen steering wheels to go with it. By your analogy, imagine Linux as going to a car dealership, buying a car and getting a truck load of every option imaginable that you're expected to store in your garage.
No thanks.
Ben
If we try to screw around with earth and screw up we're all dead. You've got billions of lives at stake over things that you assume are bad. I don't see how one can believe in evolution and object to a changing world.
"this planet is becoming significantly less Earth-like"
Earth changes. According to evolution it used to be a big giant block of ice. Earth has alledgedly been through a lot worse than anything man has managed to throw at it.
On the other hand, if Mars is dead, there's no harm in trying to liven it up a bit. Worst case we just make it more difficult on ourselves to make it livable. And we can learn from our mistakes so if we decide to go mucking around with Earth we aren't taking uneducated guesses about what might do what.
Ben
We're getting a new solar heater for our house and it costs several thousand dollars. It will take a decade or more to recoup the costs in cost savings.
With fission and fusion the idea is to take a relativly small amount of energy to start a chain reaction that releases a very large amount of energy.
There is a solar array by the university but it's unsightly. We just don't have the stuff to make solar cells efficient enough to be practical. We can't very well be driving along at 20 miles per hour with 200 square feet of solar cells on the roof of the car that only has room for half a person.
Using the sun directly as a power source isn't looking very promising. So we make use of it instead to grow crops and whatnot. It's not like the sun's power is just going to waste. Trying to use it make electricity just isn't working out. The sun seems to be a screwdriver that we're attempting to pound nails in with.
Maybe one day we'll find a material that reaches a practical amount of efficency for solar cells. In the mean time we need power and fussion and fission are the most practical and cost effective.
Ben
a lot of companies took on a lot of fat. When the boom ended the companies cut the fat. It takes a lot more man power to get something up and running quickly than it does to maintain it. And of course with all these people working and making money it trickles down leading to more jobs all around since we all like to buy and eat crap and it takes people to make that crap.
Unless Al Gore actually invented the internet it's very difficult to claim Clinton had anything to do with the employment rate considering anyone who could write HTML could get a job.
Now companies are being more "sensible" with where they put their money at the expense of American workers since the only thing that matters is the value of their stock.
This genius idea of jacking up minimum wage a couple bucks is only going to encourage companies to look elsewhere since that minimum wage trickles up fast. Every company is built like a pyramid. The idea is to work your way up it or jump to new pyramids as bricks fall out. Forcing companies to fatten up the bottom is just going to encourage them to cut off layers.
I just can't wait to need a college education just so McDonald's can justify paying me $12.00 an hour to flip burgers.
Hiring standards are already overly strict at some companies as it is for grunt labor.
Ben
is that there is a very finite number of customers for things like electricity and phone service. You need a very large customer base in order to be able to charge a reasonable amount.
When you allow competition those that attempt to compete are forced to either charge less than it costs to supply the service or charge more. If they charge less but can't get the customer base they go out of business. If they charge more people tend not to switch. And if you don't charge enough less, nobody cares enough to switch.
Cox saves us all of a buck or two over Qwest on phone service. We never bothered to switch until we switched to Cox for high speed internet.
And of course the only reason Cox had the money to implement phone service is because they're the monopoly on cable service.
In cases like this it's actually better for the government to force the monopoly to act in the best interest of the people than to allow competition which just gives people the false impression that it'll lead to cheaper prices and better service.
Competition in these cases are almost always forced to either cut corners to survive or charge more.
Ben
make sure the client.ini has the proper settings to point at the server.
Ben
completely different.
.Net 2003 project space included. I'm going to try to put out an OpenGL based client by next weekend.
"Life On-Line" is my current attempt at something different. It's essentially the game of life on-line but with the premise of the "Original Position." Upon logging in you're given a random life and a random name to go with it. What you do from there is up to you. When you die, you reenter the world as another random life.
The protocol is open and explained at the web-site. There's also a minimalist client suitable for using as a basis for more advanced (graphically or otherwise) versions. Source code and
Currently the Natural Laws are the original Game Of Life rules. But the engine is suitable for handling up to 256 different lifeforms and any set of laws to govern the consequences of interaction between the various life forms.
The server is up and running though a bit slow since it's on a cable connection. Once it's verified to be stable it'll be moved onto a 10Mbit line and work will begin on more advanced "worlds."
Ben
MS can, too, but then they'd be sued.
Complaining MS doesn't support PDF is like complaining Windows Media Player doesn't support RealMedia.
And it's not too tough to make a PDF out of an MS Office document if you pay for Acrobat. It's not about what it can do. It's about proper licensing.
Ben
MS Office is seamless. Why in the world would MS want to try to work with every document format on the face of the planet? Most of which it doesn't have rights to? You'd have a never ending selection of formats to save in. If you want cross platform with MS Office you save in CSV or RTF.
"Try to edit an MS Office 2003 file on a system that's using MS Office '97."
So you're telling me Open Office has exactly one file format?
All MS Office products offer the ability to save your work in any relavent MS format all the way down to the first release of the product.
If you need to use a 2003 document in 97 you save the file as a 97 or earlier document. All versions are backwards compatible. No duh they're not forward compatible. Kinda hard to see the future. Formats change as more features get thought up.
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and either assume Open Office has never changed it's file formats or saves them in such a way that old versions can ignore new data it doesn't understand. Or, all documents are saved in all formats simultaniously and the version loading the version just picks the one it understands best.
Or more likely, you've failed to make some valid point against MS.
Open Office has it's own formats and just works with whatever it can get its hands on. If you need PDF files you buy Adobe Acrobat (or whatever it is now) and you're all set to go. You can convert MS documents back and forth to and from PDF to your hearts content as long as you have MS Office as well. OmniPage can take advantage of any format you've installed on your system much like VirtualDub can work with any codec you have installed.
It's really not MS' place to sell a product that takes the place of Acrobat. After all, aren't you all bitching about how MS is such a monopoly?
So why are you now complaining when MS doesn't support competing formats?
Open Source can get away with reverse engineering. MS would be sued for it.
Ben
the company that would have dominated would have been the next most user/developer friendly OS.
Considering it's 2004 and Linux is just starting to be "ready for the desktop" while Windows was ready for the desktop from 3.0 on (except for ME which was always destined for its own recycle bin) it wouldn't have been any open source offerings.
Open Source isn't structured nearly well enough for rapid development and deployment like commercial offerings. Especially when it comes to large scale projects like operating systems. You need dedicated professionals working full time to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time.
Gimp has been around for who knows how long and it's just finally beginning to be noticed as a potential competitor to Photoshop which has been an industry standard for years.
Photoshop was built by dedicated professionals for dedicated professionals. Gimp was built by hobbyists for hobbyists.
The most successful (as in most advanced) offerings of Linux are all offered by corporations with dedicated paid professionals working on it. And those companies are quickly realizing that free doesn't pay the bills. It costs real money to make a real product. Or lots and lots of time. And meanwhile, the world has work to do.
And once the free product catches up, now you've got to convince people they should throw away a very expensive piece of software that's served them for years and use yours instead.
Ben
I am paying them to teach me. I am not paying them so I could do something I could just as well do without paying them.
It's exactly the teachers job to feed me information in an intelligent manner so that I can understand it.
It is NOT the teachers job to just stand there while you read the book. While you try to figure out what the hell it's talking about. And while you work the problems.
If I'm expected to do all that then why in the world am I paying them?
And after this semester I won't be. I don't play stupid games. I'm there to be taught. Not to teach myself. I can teach myself for free on my own time.
At least while I work on my teaching degree it will all be immediatly applicable. And when I'm done I'll be able to do something few teachers are capable of: teaching.
Maybe you don't have a problem with teachers who don't teach. I do.
Ben
how many people completely miss the point of "The Passion."
Apparently they were two busy being mortified by the violence to read the subtitles which did in fact reveal much about Christ's teachings. Not only "The Passion" as in his death and resurrection but his passion as in the number of times he forgave those who were scorning him. If you notice he even forgave the people who nearly whipped him to death. The verse at the beginning was also key but apparently ignored considering all the critisism about it being anti-semetic. What part of "our" didn't they comprehend? Some guy even when so far as to try to tell Gibson to put a disclaimer at the end. IT WAS AT THE BEGINNING!
One reviewer was so dense they complained (paraphrasing) "so much for love they neighbor." What part of forgiving your tormentors isn't loving your neighbor? Geesh. Apparently we're too accustomed to Disney morality tales where it's all cutesy and they spell it out for you at the end like you're 2 years old.
The whole reason "satan" was put in was to give Mel something of a narrarator. When Satan spoke it was usually a negation of something out of the Bible. I'd imagine that people who never read the Bible (or don't know even the basics) had no clue what the point of the snake was at the beginning. It was a reference to what God said in the Garden of Eden after kicking Adam and Eve out.
This movie really revealed a lot about those who reviewed it. The people who didn't "get it" and whined about the violence and didn't catch the doctrine that was presented are probably just generally bad at philosophy or never took the time to study the Bible. It's an art film. It wasn't intended to be a mass market film.
This is not a movie that you can just be a professional critic and have a valid opinion. It's amazing how many critics complained that a square has three sides.
On Topic: Life of Brian is hilarious and I'll definitly be seeing it in the theater. I've watched the DVD many times.
I don't know if I'll buy "The Passion" on DVD. It's not exactly a movie you'd watch just for the heck of it.
Ben
is that you can't just take computer science and come out knowing how to program. Maybe some universities are better than others. If you're not programming on your own time and putting out real demonstrations you're wasting your time with comp sci. I've been very unimpressed with the program at my Uni so I'm cutting out the middle man and switching to getting a secondary education teaching degree in math instead. A degree is a degree when looking for a programming job. It's experience that means anything. And I'd rather teach programming.
I don't need a piece of paper to tell me I know how to program. Certainly not a $16,000 piece of paper. I could buy a car, and the books and teach myself (like I've been doing for 16 years) for that kind of money and do just as well or better.
The students who excel in programming in reality don't need the university. There are those who teach themselves and those who need to be taught. Those who need to be taught will fail in programming because you never stop learning. You can't be a follower and be successful in that field. And if you're the kind of person who can teach yourself, you don't very well need to spend thousands of dollars for someone to teach you.
And in the case of my physics classes I'm paying them quite a bit of money so I can teach myself. Literally. One day a week I'm expected to show up in class and the teacher isn't there. It's just a TA who doesn't say anything. You're just supposed to sit there and work a stupid little workbook of the likes I havn't seen since elementary school. Which is really annoying. And needless to say, I've not been attending. I don't play stupid little games.
The problem isn't that there isn't enough math and physics being offered. It's that it's not being taught.
Ben
so your complaining that the e-book can be changed so you prefer the hardcopy but you also claim that hardcopies are being changed.
I'm failing to see how your reasoning fits your conclusion as both mediums are equally subceptible to revisions.
The advantage of electronic books is that a simple program can be written to compare previous versions to new versions to see what exactly has been changed in seconds.
Try that with a hard copy of an encyclopedia.
You're also making the faulty assumption that all changes are bad. The reason history gets "revised" is because as more work is done more facts come to light. It's not always the case that the revision is a step in the wrong direction. It's more often the case that a revision corrects something that was wrongly assumed in the past.
It's also the case that competing versions of any topic exist at the same time. You can't very well compare versions with hardcopies nearly as easily as you can with electronic versions. Because it requires searching. Electronic searches are always faster and more comprehensive than manual searches. When you're manually looking for name or word it's easy to overlook a mention in large volumns. An electronic search will never miss regardless of the size.
Ben
This study was done with only ~1054 respondants of only about half were in education type jobs so the sample size sucks. The +/- error on such a small sample size is something like 5% or more if I remember correctly. In reality there may have been only 100 teachers asked how they like their job. A decent sized school has more teachers than that. So it's flawed right off the bat. They should have asked at least 1000 from each job type they were interested in from a range of employers around the country. As it is they may have simply stuck to a single city.
This is also Britain. Not the US. Our school systems are much different. They also fail to tell you how many in each category are "happy" or "miserable." 8% may not be very happy but a large portion may be happy. And "happy" is good enough. This would be a more enlightening study if they had used a significantly larger sample and if they couldn't bother to report the percentage on all the possible answers, they should have at least chosen the worst case. I'd rather know how many people are miserable than "very happy." "Happy," "somewhat happy," "content," are all good signs of a decent profession. But if a large portion respond "very unhappy" then that tells you something. I don't expect a job to make me "very happy." "Very happy" is something family and friends should make you. But I'd rather not work a job that I can expect to be "very unhappy" working.
"Something is wrong if the failing gradeschooler has more common sense than a college grad PHB."
Smart people often think too hard about problems. It's not that they can't/don't understand it's that they assume the problem is more complicated than it is. I spent several hours trying to solve a complex equation when around midnight one night I realized it was a simple matrix problem. I had been thinking about it in symbolic terms where all the entries in the matrix are variables when I finally realized in the code I'd be dealing with actual numbers. So it reduced to simple linear algebra. I was looking for an O(c) solution when a more general solution was far simpler to implement and more functional. I solved for the O(c) solution for a smaller matix but the problem explodes in difficulty as the matrix size increases.
I've currently solved another problem that was about the same way. I wanted an O(c) solution but even Mathematica is telling me it's not possible (it's not really a linear problem) so I'm working on solving it in a slightly less obvious manner.
A failing 6th grader isn't necessarily smarter. They just think about things on a simpler level and sometimes that level is appropriate for the problem.
Ben
I've been programming for about 16 years now and I'm not even 24 yet. I currently have a job doing programming and it's mildly entertaining as I'm comming up with solutions to problems I didn't think I was capable of solving. I'm doing math problems that I havn't come across in any schooling yet. The problem is that it's a job and that I'm sitting behind a desk with nothing to look at besides a screen. I'd rather choose to program when I want to. Not because I have to.
This coupled with the fact my GPA isn't up to par with the uni's requirements since there's too much BS for me to care, I'm switching majors to secondary education. Specifically math. I've been teaching myself programming since I started. There's no point in wasting money playing stupid little games just for a piece of paper for a job I don't particulary like anyway. I've had very few good teachers which has resulted in me teaching myself the courses anyway. So why pay them? Actually, only one teacher comes to mind that was excellent.
Talking to some people I know I found out that a certain high school in my area has their comp sci classes taught by the coaches. That's an excellent opportunity.
It also works out nicely since it would have been 2 more years to finish out the comp sci degree but it's also only going to be about 2 years to get an education degree if I pack in about 16 credit hours every semester.
Ben
just glue two DVD+/-Rs together. You could even glue a DVD-R to a DVD+R to get a maximum compatibility disc.
Ben
was I able to make a little over $5 with only 3 clicks on the ads I'm displaying. I used Commission Junction for about a year and racked in 70,000+ impressions with about 7000 click thrus. Didn't make a penny. That's why I went to a subscription based web-site. After a review not too long ago I decided to cut down the number of sections that require a pass. Those major sections that don't require a pass now have Google Ads.
The rate variance is why Google doesn't tell you how much a click is worth. It varies from a few cents to a few dollars and possibly more depending on the ad. I run a programming site so I get some expensive programming ads.
Google is being incredibly generous with their AdSense program and I would hope Google would be able to find a way to take out the idiots who try to abuse it rather than cripple the program.
At the start all ad programs paid decently for click-thrus but morons abused it and morons ran the programs so they couldn't deal with it. Or they simply decided they could make more money if they went pay per sale since the advertisers would get the same amount (or more since web-sites got desperite and would flood visiters) of exposure for a lot less money.
It's an absolutly retarded program from a publisher's view. You basically have to sell the ad. You have to dedicate the page the ad is on to the ad so that people will buy what the ad is selling. The standard is about a 1.0% click-thru rate. And of those you now have a fraction of a percent that will compulsive buy. I had one text ad with Commission Junction that did a 10% click thru rate. But I would only get paid if someone bought the book right then. Nobody did so I never got paid. But the seller got lots of free publicity.
One major game development web-site I know has basically signed up for every ad program on the planet and then ran it through their custom script that selects which program to display an ad from to the visitor. I noticed they have Google Adsense worked into the mix as well. I have to wonder how much that stupid monkey and other flashing banners are worth that they don't just stick with Google and dump the rest of the ad systems.
Ben
at least have the sense to attach it as a reply to a lame attempt at first post at the top.
Ben
you append or prepend a random sequence of letters to the IP address and pass that sequence to the client in the form. The client then passes it back to the server so it can open up the file by recreating the file name from it and the IP.
"but inherently prohibitively flawed for any global purpose..."
Only if you're not a problem solver. The IP basically amounts to a private key since it's grabbed from the request header and the sequence is essentially the public key.
And frankly no, it's not a big deal. If you were planning on marketing something like this to a massive number of users then you would need to spend the five minutes needed to rectify the situation.
In my case, I might get around to changing how the file is named to account for same IPs overlapping.
Ben
"then it's just not a mainstream solution"
This isn't for the mainstream. And it's not difficult for anyone to get the answer. A computer may exist that can find the solution but it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper to bark up someone else's tree.
"If it's something that you have to explain to your parents how it works"
Why would I have to explain to my parents how to answer a question? And why would I force them to go through a script? I can access the common account from any e-mail client since I have the password. All the script is, is a custom e-mail client.
There are a million and one ways to organize a challenge system that will confound any computer that a spammer has access to. If not completely, to the point that it's a waste of time to try to break the system.
You seem to be confusing what computers can do with what is feasible.
"Besides, you're still talking about text, and if the answer can be found on a Google search, then a script can figure it out, too."
Scripts can't understand context. They may find the question but they won't be able to discern what text on the page is the answer. It's one thing to just assume it can be done and quite another to assume someone is going to go to the trouble of trying it.
The only reason to try to break a script set up like mine is purely academic. It takes all of two seconds to break the script so that no answer is correct and then a day or two to swap it out with something else.
The amount of effort needed to break a bot is infinitly less than the effort needed to come up with the bot.
"Show all of the images as grayscale so that image scanning software can't tell the difference between the yellow of a sunflower and the gray of a building."
Why? Anyone with that kind of money to afford such a system that could do those opperations has the money and know how to set up their own anonymous mailer.
Again, you're confusing what's feasible with what's possible.
Ben
My free anonymous (as in they can only be traced back to a common e-mail account on my server) e-mailer uses a simple quiz to keep spammers out.
The form page records the IP address of the visitor along the with the question number they were given in a file named with the IP address. That number is never sent to the client. When they hit submit the file of their IP is opened, the question number is read in and the answer given by the user is compared to the stored answer. The file is then deleted and if the answer was correct the e-mail is sent. Otherwise it's not.
This forces my custom form to be used to be able to send the e-mails. And it's not possible to simply keep refreshing the submit page to keep sending the message.
And the challenge is in the form of old riddles and a couple new ones like "what's your favorite color?"
Things a bot would never get but that anyone who knows how to use Google can. Someone would have to program a custom bot with the answers in order to even attempt to spam. And even then since everything goes through my mail server nobody is going to sneak garbage past me for long and I know who your ISP is.
I also include a disclaimer with every e-mail. It'd be quite silly for me not to.
Ben
"Cheny's undisclosed location interestingly enough or at least I've seen him around the Jackson area a number of times"
I suggest you wear your tinfoil hat. The government is gonna get you now.
Ben