Er... how would a property owner prevent the jamming signal from leaving their property? Radio waves don't respect property lines, or even building walls.
I certainly wouldn't want my (hypothetical) cell phone to not work just because I walk past a theatre on a public sidewalk.
I've found the articles very informative and well-written. They include references to more information (books, web sites).
As a side note, I find the topic of this Ask Slashdot a little funny. Geeks aren't some separate species; they're humans, and can eat and exercise the same way as all of the other humans.:)
When I was a senior in high school I attended a "science and engineering" conference for college-bound seniors. The main presenter at the conference was a researcher at the NASA JPL and Caltech.
He used earth-based telescopes to take pictures of asteroids. The problem is that the pictures were very blurry. They were almost unusuable.
To solve the problem, they took ten or fifteen pictures, each from a slightly different angle. The pictures were scanned into a computer, and then a software program would analyze the pictures, producing one much sharper picture. The results were incredible. Of course, that was the point: impress students enough to make them want to be engineers.:)
--Bruce
(My memory of this is a little fuzzy, so a few details might be off.)
Interviews should determine two things: whether a person can do the job, and whether they will do the job. Riddles don't really figure into either of those.
--Bruce
Re:Software Development for the World
on
wxWindows vs. MFC
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Why limit yourself to two platforms? Write the back-end of your chess program so that it communicates with a front-end client by passing certain messages (perhaps in XML format). You might even make the message specifications public so that others could write clients for your chess engine.
There's already a very good solution for doing this: XWT.
XWT allows you to write the interface in XML and JavaScript, and the XWT viewer then downloads and displays that interface. When computation needs to be done, the XWT interface makes an XML-RPC call to a server.
In fact, there's even a demo chess program on the XWT site, now that I think about it.:)
A few weeks ago someone I know gave me a call. They wanted me to come take a look at their (almost brand new) computer, complaining that it was "really slow" and that it "locked up".
I paid them a visit. Sure enough, their 1.6GHz, 512MB computer was incredibly slow. Menus often didn't pop up until 15 or 20 seconds after they were clicked, explorer windows "froze" (didn't respond to keyboard or mouse input, but did repaint themselves), and the computer wouldn't shut down properly (forcing a cold power-off, often resulting in filesystem corruption).
I looked in the registry and discovered that there were about 20 programs being started automatically when Windows booted. I backed up that registry location, then deleted everything there and rebooted. The problem was gone!
I added the programs back in groups to determine which one was the culprit. Any guesses what it was? That's right! A spyware program! My hunch is that this family's teenage son unwittingly installed it along with one of his many P2P filesharing programs.
This family told me that they had purchased their new computer because the old one was having lots of problems. The new computer was supposed to be fast, easy to use, and low maintenance. A spyware program almost ruined their $1500 investment.
And one other thing—get rid of the purposefully annoying features.
Remove the "Do you want to upgrade to QuickTime Pro?" window that appears each time you start the program. Most people want to use QuickTime to view a movie; the free version does this fine, so there's no reason for most people to upgrade to the Pro version. All the nag screen does is annoy people.
And while they're at it, make it not put the "Upgrade to QuickTime Pro" icon on my desktop each time I launch QuickTime. If I wanted an icon there, I'd put it there. I certainly don't want an Apple ad there. It even comes back after I delete it!
These two annoyance features make me avoid QuickTime if I possibly can.
In almost all cases, an anonymous proxy will get around these guys. (We miss you, Safeweb!)
Might I recommend Orangatango? They provide basically the same service as SafeWeb, but with a much better interface. And they provide anonymous e-mail, too!
(Disclosure: I work there.)
--Bruce
Re:It is not a problem with RPM
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
This problem will be gone if every RPM based distro are following the LSB. Even if they are all following the LSB very religiously, it is still possible to encounter this sort of problem.
I came across an O'Reilly article today that discusses this. It's titled "Wireless at Sea: A Report from the MacMania Alaska Cruise".
An excerpt:
The connection speed was, as expected, both slow and highly latent because of the satellite relay, but it was effective enough to handle email and limited Web browsing, as well as an upload of my dog mushing pictures.
The problem with running phones over this service is that the 802.11b network could be knocked off the air by an interfering signal.
I wouldn't want to depend on a wireless phone that disconnects every time an amateur radio operator goes on the air.
(Interesting side note: I worked at Intel when they were doing interoperability testing of DSL in its early days. One of the big problems that they had was that every time someone turned on their vacuum cleaner, the internet connection would get dropped.:)
That said, such a service would be cool, and would be a good alternative for many types of communication. I just wouldn't want to rely on it for business or for calling 911.
I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster.
My, my. Such bold statements about a language that's not even completely designed yet.:)
I, for one, am very excited about the changes in Perl 6. I don't see the "complete mess" that you refer to. In fact, I have two main impressions from reading the Apocalypses and Exegesises:
Perl 6 is going to be much cleaner. Modules, the class keyword, everything-is-a-closure, better subroutine argument passing, etc.
Perl 6 is going to be much cooler. The new pair type, the smart-match operator (=~), the given and when constructs, possible inclusion of superposition (any and all), Pythonesqe saved bytecode, etc.
I've read the Perl RFCs, most of what Larry, Damian, and Dan have written about Perl 6, and the Perl 6 mailing lists. From what I've seen so far, the language (and the design and implementation of Parrot) are looking very cool.
Sounds like Intel. I used to work there, and they're bit paranoid about security. Search your bag on the way in and on the way out. No ID badge, no entry. As I was leaving, they were rebadging everyone with biometric (facial recognition) badges.
As for the first, I don't think that you're going to find a completely automated solution. First of all, OCR isn't terribly accurate to begin with. Second, you have to convert OCR'd plain text to marked up XML. You'll probably have to do this by hand unless the manual you're entering is terribly structured.
However, I'd certainly recommend using DocBook as your intermediate XML format. It's a well-designed language targeted at technical manuals. Don't re-invent the wheel with your own XML format and XSLT style sheets.
DocBook supports RTF, PDF, HTML, PS, LaTeX, and other output formats. Do yourself a favor and use it.
FlipDog crawls the web and uses machine-learning technology to extract job listings from companies' web sites. You can then browse through them at their web site, filtering based on location, position category, etc.
The technology was developed by WhizBang Labs, and is quite cool. They basically take a small set of job listings that their crawler finds, have a human classify parts of the web page (job title, location, description, etc.) and then let their software program loose on it. It analyzes the human-filtered web pages, "learns" how to extract relevant data, and then uses that to classify all of the other crawled pages. Of course, this is over-simplified, but that's the basic idea.
(I'm not affiliated with them, other than successfully finding a job there.)
Orangatango is one of the few internet privacy companies left, with ZeroKnowledge fading and SafeWeb focusing on VPNs now.
They offer many cool features, including location- and browser-independent bookmarks, e-mail anonymity and spam prevention that really works, and IP address hiding. Check them out if you're interested.
I do really quick Google searches straight from the address bar in Mozilla. goo red hat brings me the same page as if I had entered "red hat" in the text box on Google's home page. gool debian is just like I had pressed "I'm Feeling Lucky" after entering "debian".
To set this up, first bookmark the following links:
Then go to Manage Bookmarks, right-click on the Google Search bookmark, open its properties page, and enter "goo" in the keyword field. Do the same for the "lucky" bookmark, but enter "gool" as the keyword (or "lucky", or whatever). Restart Mozilla, and then you've got super-fast searches.
sshd, running on my machine for about 8 months, has accumulated a mere 2 minutes and 30 seconds of CPU time. Of course, sshd forks off a new process for each connection, but all of the ones on my machine (some of which are at least a week old) have used 0:00. If someone knows a way I can measure the actual time spent by the daemon, I'd like to hear it, but I assume for now that it is *very small*.
Try ps axS | grep sshd | grep -v grep. The -S switch for ps makes it show time spent by a process and all its dead children. Also check out the -S switch for top.
We use Perl for many tasks where I work, and have several thousand lines of our own library files. I've found it to be very maintainable and incredibly flexible. Our coders write excellent, well-designed, readable code in Perl. Most of the time we take advantage of Perl's easy, powerful features so we can develop quickly. However, when we need to optimize, that's available as well. It's turned out to be a great tool for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Er... how would a property owner prevent the jamming signal from leaving their property? Radio waves don't respect property lines, or even building walls.
I certainly wouldn't want my (hypothetical) cell phone to not work just because I walk past a theatre on a public sidewalk.
--Bruce
There have been some excellent articles and discussion on this subject over the past few months over at kuro5hin:
I've found the articles very informative and well-written. They include references to more information (books, web sites).
As a side note, I find the topic of this Ask Slashdot a little funny. Geeks aren't some separate species; they're humans, and can eat and exercise the same way as all of the other humans. :)
--Bruce
When I was a senior in high school I attended a "science and engineering" conference for college-bound seniors. The main presenter at the conference was a researcher at the NASA JPL and Caltech.
He used earth-based telescopes to take pictures of asteroids. The problem is that the pictures were very blurry. They were almost unusuable.
To solve the problem, they took ten or fifteen pictures, each from a slightly different angle. The pictures were scanned into a computer, and then a software program would analyze the pictures, producing one much sharper picture. The results were incredible. Of course, that was the point: impress students enough to make them want to be engineers. :)
--Bruce
(My memory of this is a little fuzzy, so a few details might be off.)
One of interview methods that makes the most sense to me is described in the The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing.
Interviews should determine two things: whether a person can do the job, and whether they will do the job. Riddles don't really figure into either of those.
--Bruce
There's already a very good solution for doing this: XWT.
XWT allows you to write the interface in XML and JavaScript, and the XWT viewer then downloads and displays that interface. When computation needs to be done, the XWT interface makes an XML-RPC call to a server.
In fact, there's even a demo chess program on the XWT site, now that I think about it. :)
--Bruce
A few weeks ago someone I know gave me a call. They wanted me to come take a look at their (almost brand new) computer, complaining that it was "really slow" and that it "locked up".
I paid them a visit. Sure enough, their 1.6GHz, 512MB computer was incredibly slow. Menus often didn't pop up until 15 or 20 seconds after they were clicked, explorer windows "froze" (didn't respond to keyboard or mouse input, but did repaint themselves), and the computer wouldn't shut down properly (forcing a cold power-off, often resulting in filesystem corruption).
I looked in the registry and discovered that there were about 20 programs being started automatically when Windows booted. I backed up that registry location, then deleted everything there and rebooted. The problem was gone!
I added the programs back in groups to determine which one was the culprit. Any guesses what it was? That's right! A spyware program! My hunch is that this family's teenage son unwittingly installed it along with one of his many P2P filesharing programs.
This family told me that they had purchased their new computer because the old one was having lots of problems. The new computer was supposed to be fast, easy to use, and low maintenance. A spyware program almost ruined their $1500 investment.
--Bruce
And one other thing—get rid of the purposefully annoying features.
Remove the "Do you want to upgrade to QuickTime Pro?" window that appears each time you start the program. Most people want to use QuickTime to view a movie; the free version does this fine, so there's no reason for most people to upgrade to the Pro version. All the nag screen does is annoy people.
And while they're at it, make it not put the "Upgrade to QuickTime Pro" icon on my desktop each time I launch QuickTime. If I wanted an icon there, I'd put it there. I certainly don't want an Apple ad there. It even comes back after I delete it!
These two annoyance features make me avoid QuickTime if I possibly can.
--Bruce
Might I recommend Orangatango? They provide basically the same service as SafeWeb, but with a much better interface. And they provide anonymous e-mail, too!
(Disclosure: I work there.)
--Bruce
Um... were you drunk when you wrote this?
--Bruce
I came across an O'Reilly article today that discusses this. It's titled "Wireless at Sea: A Report from the MacMania Alaska Cruise".
An excerpt:
--Bruce
Perhaps someone can help me out here. Does power disappation scale linearly with clock speed and number of transistors? Or something else?
If it does, wouldn't two 1GHz chips dissapate as much heat as one 2GHz chip, thereby erasing any gains?
--Bruce
The problem with running phones over this service is that the 802.11b network could be knocked off the air by an interfering signal.
I wouldn't want to depend on a wireless phone that disconnects every time an amateur radio operator goes on the air.
(Interesting side note: I worked at Intel when they were doing interoperability testing of DSL in its early days. One of the big problems that they had was that every time someone turned on their vacuum cleaner, the internet connection would get dropped. :)
That said, such a service would be cool, and would be a good alternative for many types of communication. I just wouldn't want to rely on it for business or for calling 911.
--Bruce
My, my. Such bold statements about a language that's not even completely designed yet. :)
I, for one, am very excited about the changes in Perl 6. I don't see the "complete mess" that you refer to. In fact, I have two main impressions from reading the Apocalypses and Exegesises:
I've read the Perl RFCs, most of what Larry, Damian, and Dan have written about Perl 6, and the Perl 6 mailing lists. From what I've seen so far, the language (and the design and implementation of Parrot) are looking very cool.
--Bruce
Do you work at the BSA, or perhaps Microsoft? :)
--Bruce
Sounds like Intel. I used to work there, and they're bit paranoid about security. Search your bag on the way in and on the way out. No ID badge, no entry. As I was leaving, they were rebadging everyone with biometric (facial recognition) badges.
Always gave me the creeps.
--Bruce
...to check out the XML Resume Library. :)
--Bruce
Or you could just use SpamAssassin, which is designed specifically to do this and has many more rules that have been created by others.
--Bruce
You've got two problems here:
As for the first, I don't think that you're going to find a completely automated solution. First of all, OCR isn't terribly accurate to begin with. Second, you have to convert OCR'd plain text to marked up XML. You'll probably have to do this by hand unless the manual you're entering is terribly structured.
However, I'd certainly recommend using DocBook as your intermediate XML format. It's a well-designed language targeted at technical manuals. Don't re-invent the wheel with your own XML format and XSLT style sheets.
DocBook supports RTF, PDF, HTML, PS, LaTeX, and other output formats. Do yourself a favor and use it.
--Bruce
FlipDog crawls the web and uses machine-learning technology to extract job listings from companies' web sites. You can then browse through them at their web site, filtering based on location, position category, etc.
The technology was developed by WhizBang Labs, and is quite cool. They basically take a small set of job listings that their crawler finds, have a human classify parts of the web page (job title, location, description, etc.) and then let their software program loose on it. It analyzes the human-filtered web pages, "learns" how to extract relevant data, and then uses that to classify all of the other crawled pages. Of course, this is over-simplified, but that's the basic idea.
(I'm not affiliated with them, other than successfully finding a job there.)
--Bruce
Orangatango is one of the few internet privacy companies left, with ZeroKnowledge fading and SafeWeb focusing on VPNs now.
They offer many cool features, including location- and browser-independent bookmarks, e-mail anonymity and spam prevention that really works, and IP address hiding. Check them out if you're interested.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Orangatango
--Bruce
I do really quick Google searches straight from the address bar in Mozilla. goo red hat brings me the same page as if I had entered "red hat" in the text box on Google's home page. gool debian is just like I had pressed "I'm Feeling Lucky" after entering "debian".
To set this up, first bookmark the following links:
- Google Search
- Google I'm Feeling Lucky
Then go to Manage Bookmarks, right-click on the Google Search bookmark, open its properties page, and enter "goo" in the keyword field. Do the same for the "lucky" bookmark, but enter "gool" as the keyword (or "lucky", or whatever). Restart Mozilla, and then you've got super-fast searches.--Bruce
Er... you mean like AOL's $23.95/month internet service? Or perhaps the newly-unveiled AT&T Unlimited Plan? Or local telephone service in the U.S.?
I've created a "hidden" discussion for exactly this purpose.
All posts in that thread will be mailed to the government on Saturday, January 26.
--bruckie
I realize you're trolling, but I'm taking the bait. Complex data structures like this are where Perl shines.
For example:
my $list_of_lists = [
['foo', 'bar', 'baz'],
['a', 'b', 'c'],
];
And then to print it out...
foreach my $list (@$list_of_lists) {
print join (' ', @$list);
print "\n";
}
It's really quite easy.
We use Perl for many tasks where I work, and have several thousand lines of our own library files. I've found it to be very maintainable and incredibly flexible. Our coders write excellent, well-designed, readable code in Perl. Most of the time we take advantage of Perl's easy, powerful features so we can develop quickly. However, when we need to optimize, that's available as well. It's turned out to be a great tool for us.
--Bruce