The artist makes the medium viable for art, not the other way around. If you can make something creative with popsicle sticks and glue, then that's art. It's the same with anything.
It's awesome we're even still talking about Mozilla considering the doom and gloom that was spewed because it didn't result in an instant competitor to IE.
Mozilla isn't perfect, but we're all better off living in world with a valid browser alternative.
Yeah, that's definitely the best scene in the movie and it illustrates Mark's unyielding determination despite constant failure. Even people who hate American Movie crack up at Uncle Bill's Oscar worthless performance.
"The real problem is that XML only partly addresses the problems that relational database solved years ago (organizing and data accessable), but it does it without any of the efficiency benefits of a well designed database server."
You're definitely using XML for the wrong reasons if a database sounds like a better alternative. XML is mainly for sending data from one program to another or file formats for when a database is overkill. You want other programs as far from your Database as possible.
If another program requests something from your DB you get the data, generate an XML file, and send it back. A good example of this are RSS files on most weblogs these days. They query the news database and generate an XML document that you can use to syndicate their headlines. Here is Slashdot's.
XML is bad like Democracy is bad. It's just better than the alternatives.
I had a problem at work when we switched from AutoCAD to Solidworks. Our manufacturing software couldn't read the new BOM files, which were Excel's.xls. Without ever looking at our system's BOM files before I wrote a program that read the.xls and built a proper XML BOM file our system could read. If our system wasn't using XML, who knows how long it would have taken me to figure out the intricacies of a proprietary file format.
"There's a direct correlation here to the telephone companies; It's so much more efficient to have all network and routing done by one central switch than to put some sort of router in each home..."
People don't get lung cancer from everyone's home router. If you can concentrate your air pollution away from where people want to go (the complete opposite of what auto pollution does), you can increase the quality of life for people.
I was in McDonalds the other day and the standard menus above the cashiers were replaced by hi def plasma screens with the menus printed on them. They also had ads running for their various food items. It looked fantastic, although I try not to eat there on principle.
It would be great if someone hacked into their wi-fi network and change the menu items to include more exotic items:
French Fries $2.49 Chicken Nuggets $3.99 Grimace Testicles $1.99
"The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer"
I host my site at ipowerweb and their rates are $7.95/month for 30GB of traffic. That's about $0.27 per GB of data, not $1 as you claim. If your other figures are accurate, you can have 1000 daily visitors on a video blog for $96 a year.
From Google's Trademark Lawyer: "Our brand is very important to us, and as I'm sure you'll understand, we want to make sure that when people use "Google," they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general."
Band-Aids and Kleenex have been milking this name recognition forever. If you're trying to build a brand synonymous with "searching," what the hell else would you want to happen?
P.S. Mr. McFedries, feel free to include "washizu" in your dictionary as "to completely satisfied in the bedroom."
Most people I know use it in the Philadelphia area. On many roads the toll booths are unattended and you're just supposed to throw your change in (AC-Expressway is like this in many places).
Also, the battery running out in your actual EZ-Pass can cause errors, but this isn't the fault of the reader. There should be some kind of indicator on the pass itself.
As a third world dictator, the tags had better stay on so I can control production levels and crush subversive activities.
EZ Pass and Door Locks
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"the same techniques that enable an electronic sensor to record data from an E-ZPass tag or an office door to open for people with chip-equipped cards in their pockets"
I know many who have EZ-Pass (mine was ordered and never came) and it has so many false positives for non-payment it's insane. Along with your fine you get a nice little picture in the mail of your car going through the toll even though they have that car in their EZ-Pass database!
My apartment building uses the electronic key lock with a motion sensor on the inside. I'd say it's broken about 5% of the time, which is a lot if that's where you are every day.
"Patent office does a search (web or otherwise) on prior art, billing the individual/corporation that submits the patent at a standard rate. If no prior art is found, the patent office does not bill. The company is able to challenge any claims to prior art. Each challenge to a claim at prior art costs a certain fee."
You should seriously patent this idea before someone steals it.
Typically these jobs that take weeks instead of hours are assigned to the wrong people, not the wrong language. The right person should figure out the best solution for the problem and tackle the problem correctly. The wrong person will go after it in his favorite language and ignore the best way if it includes any amount of work before he begins coding.
A lot of people here are criticizing the plan as a waste of money, but instead of making a cost vs benefit calculation most seem to be implying no benefits at all.
Anything that gets more information into a poor kid's head sounds like a benefit to me. Even if you only look at improvement in helping a kid with his homework, that's a great benefit right there. I know my childhood would have been a lot different if I had such easy access to information (it wasn't really around until my late teens).
I read most of this while snowed in the other day. I liked some of his ideas, especially about how nerds aren't popular because it takes too much work to be popular, but I wasn't necessarily convinced about any of them. It was filled with anecdotal evidence about his high school experiences and a makes assumptions as if the reader experienced similar social structures. The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it can always be combatted and to go on to make decisions based on that evidence can be wasteful or dangerous.
Popularity is about as subjective as you can get, despite his high school crew's attempts at measuring it via a lunch table scale. Decisions should be made based on an analysis of one case, which lends nicely to a single student having problems who can talk to a parent, teacher, older sibling, etc. If you can't talk to any of those, find someone.
By the way, where on the scale would you be if you sat in the library more than the lunch room?
"Reading the above, I have no idea whether the graphics looked good or bad. Specifically, who's ass are we using as a reference? Jennifer Lopez's? Strom Thurmond's? I need more information!"
Think Strom 3 years ago. Not that he looks any different at 97 than he does now at 100.
I saw Sovereign at E3 2000 and the graphics looked like ass back then. It scaled up from a single tank to an entire planet, though. The game had some neat features, but it didn't seem to solve any of the obvious problems a MM strategy game would have. In most current persistant world games you don't regress if you haven't been logged on in a while. That doesn't work in a strategy game, so what do you do?
Slashdot Mirror
The artist makes the medium viable for art, not the other way around. If you can make something creative with popsicle sticks and glue, then that's art. It's the same with anything.
I wrote a module for my site that caches headlines from feeds you enter in.
Check it out.
(You need to register to edit the feeds you want to subscribe to)
It's awesome we're even still talking about Mozilla considering the doom and gloom that was spewed because it didn't result in an instant competitor to IE.
Mozilla isn't perfect, but we're all better off living in world with a valid browser alternative.
"It's alright..."
Yeah, that's definitely the best scene in the movie and it illustrates Mark's unyielding determination despite constant failure. Even people who hate American Movie crack up at Uncle Bill's Oscar worthless performance.
American Movie, a documentary about a Wisconsin horror movie director with no money and an even less grip on reality. It's hilarious.
"The real problem is that XML only partly addresses the problems that relational database solved years ago (organizing and data accessable), but it does it without any of the efficiency benefits of a well designed database server."
You're definitely using XML for the wrong reasons if a database sounds like a better alternative. XML is mainly for sending data from one program to another or file formats for when a database is overkill. You want other programs as far from your Database as possible.
If another program requests something from your DB you get the data, generate an XML file, and send it back. A good example of this are RSS files on most weblogs these days. They query the news database and generate an XML document that you can use to syndicate their headlines. Here is Slashdot's.
XML is bad like Democracy is bad. It's just better than the alternatives.
.xls. Without ever looking at our system's BOM files before I wrote a program that read the .xls and built a proper XML BOM file our system could read. If our system wasn't using XML, who knows how long it would have taken me to figure out the intricacies of a proprietary file format.
I had a problem at work when we switched from AutoCAD to Solidworks. Our manufacturing software couldn't read the new BOM files, which were Excel's
I don't want to miss Six Feet Under. Hopefully they'll show Children of Dune again.
"There's a direct correlation here to the telephone companies; It's so much more efficient to have all network and routing done by one central switch than to put some sort of router in each home..."
People don't get lung cancer from everyone's home router. If you can concentrate your air pollution away from where people want to go (the complete opposite of what auto pollution does), you can increase the quality of life for people.
The thing about Grimace Testicles... you'd think they'd be big and purple. You couldn't be more wrong.
I was in McDonalds the other day and the standard menus above the cashiers were replaced by hi def plasma screens with the menus printed on them. They also had ads running for their various food items. It looked fantastic, although I try not to eat there on principle.
It would be great if someone hacked into their wi-fi network and change the menu items to include more exotic items:
French Fries $2.49
Chicken Nuggets $3.99
Grimace Testicles $1.99
I think bandwidth costs have actually come down a little bit in the last year.
Not to sound like a commercial, but ipowerweb's features aren't too bad either. PHP, Perl, MySQL, daily generated stats, etc.
"The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer"
I host my site at ipowerweb and their rates are $7.95/month for 30GB of traffic. That's about $0.27 per GB of data, not $1 as you claim. If your other figures are accurate, you can have 1000 daily visitors on a video blog for $96 a year.
Digging out my car two weeks ago wasn't fun enough.
Dumb, Dumb, Dumb...
From Google's Trademark Lawyer:
"Our brand is very important to us, and as I'm sure you'll understand, we want to make sure that when people use "Google," they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general."
Band-Aids and Kleenex have been milking this name recognition forever. If you're trying to build a brand synonymous with "searching," what the hell else would you want to happen?
P.S. Mr. McFedries, feel free to include "washizu" in your dictionary as "to completely satisfied in the bedroom."
Most people I know use it in the Philadelphia area. On many roads the toll booths are unattended and you're just supposed to throw your change in (AC-Expressway is like this in many places).
Also, the battery running out in your actual EZ-Pass can cause errors, but this isn't the fault of the reader. There should be some kind of indicator on the pass itself.
As a third world dictator, the tags had better stay on so I can control production levels and crush subversive activities.
"the same techniques that enable an electronic sensor to record data from an E-ZPass tag or an office door to open for people with chip-equipped cards in their pockets"
I know many who have EZ-Pass (mine was ordered and never came) and it has so many false positives for non-payment it's insane. Along with your fine you get a nice little picture in the mail of your car going through the toll even though they have that car in their EZ-Pass database!
My apartment building uses the electronic key lock with a motion sensor on the inside. I'd say it's broken about 5% of the time, which is a lot if that's where you are every day.
"Patent office does a search (web or otherwise) on prior art, billing the individual/corporation that submits the patent at a standard rate. If no prior art is found, the patent office does not bill. The company is able to challenge any claims to prior art. Each challenge to a claim at prior art costs a certain fee."
You should seriously patent this idea before someone steals it.
Typically these jobs that take weeks instead of hours are assigned to the wrong people, not the wrong language. The right person should figure out the best solution for the problem and tackle the problem correctly. The wrong person will go after it in his favorite language and ignore the best way if it includes any amount of work before he begins coding.
A lot of people here are criticizing the plan as a waste of money, but instead of making a cost vs benefit calculation most seem to be implying no benefits at all.
Anything that gets more information into a poor kid's head sounds like a benefit to me. Even if you only look at improvement in helping a kid with his homework, that's a great benefit right there. I know my childhood would have been a lot different if I had such easy access to information (it wasn't really around until my late teens).
I read most of this while snowed in the other day. I liked some of his ideas, especially about how nerds aren't popular because it takes too much work to be popular, but I wasn't necessarily convinced about any of them. It was filled with anecdotal evidence about his high school experiences and a makes assumptions as if the reader experienced similar social structures. The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it can always be combatted and to go on to make decisions based on that evidence can be wasteful or dangerous.
Popularity is about as subjective as you can get, despite his high school crew's attempts at measuring it via a lunch table scale. Decisions should be made based on an analysis of one case, which lends nicely to a single student having problems who can talk to a parent, teacher, older sibling, etc. If you can't talk to any of those, find someone.
By the way, where on the scale would you be if you sat in the library more than the lunch room?
"Reading the above, I have no idea whether the graphics looked good or bad. Specifically, who's ass are we using as a reference? Jennifer Lopez's? Strom Thurmond's? I need more information!"
Think Strom 3 years ago. Not that he looks any different at 97 than he does now at 100.
"This is completely wrong."
I wouldn't say "completely wrong." If log into Everquest one night, you won't find that someone killed you in your sleep the night before.
I saw Sovereign at E3 2000 and the graphics looked like ass back then. It scaled up from a single tank to an entire planet, though. The game had some neat features, but it didn't seem to solve any of the obvious problems a MM strategy game would have. In most current persistant world games you don't regress if you haven't been logged on in a while. That doesn't work in a strategy game, so what do you do?