They advertise that they are putting this super car stereo in all their cars for free.
...and if you take the car to a mechanic with another manufacturer's radio in it, the mechanic tells you the problem is with the radio. And, the manufacturer occasionally changes the size of the radio mount, so competitor's radios no longer fit.
Psychic Friend Ray: "If you'd like, you can call back tomorrow.
We have a couple of guys here, Steve and Paul, and they 're much better
with computer stuff than I am."
So, the conclusion is that the Psychic Friends may have actually been able to help, whereas MS Tech Support definitely couldn't? Chock one up for the Friends!
A friend of mine has been advocating fishtank computer cases for some time now. He's going to be pissed that someone else thought of it too.
It occurs to me that you'd either need some serious climate control or very heat insensitive fish. Even with a lot of fans, your average 24x7 PC would cook a goldfish.
unmd5sum(x)
do
generate a random file, f
until md5sum(f)=x
This might be slightly lossy for some files, but it runs in O(1) average-time. An md5sum is 128 bits, so the average number of loops will be about 2^127, a constant.
What was it Homer said? "Phfft, facts!? You can use facts to prove anything."
It is, of course, much easier to invert md5sum on a single byte at a time, which is what I originally suggested.
The "Second try" solution proposed in the article is having a checksum server. It seems to me that there's a fundamental legal problem with this.
Suppose the checksum server will return the checksum of any part of the AIM.EXE file, which it would have to do in order to return the information needed by third-party clients. Suppose I write a script to ask for the checksum of the first byte, second byte and so on. I can compare each of these values against the checksums of the 256 distinct 8-bit values and reconstruct the AIM.EXE binary.
So, wouldn't the checksum server be essentially redistributing the binary? It's not literally distributing it, but it's probably close enough to spend a long time dragging through the legal process.
If you're wiring an existing house, I have one word: fishtape (go to your local home improvement big-box and ask). If I was building a house, I'd ask the contractor to put some thick cable conduit in the walls, terminating in key spots. That way, you could fish wires in and out later, with minimal hassle.
The most impressive thing about the new arm is its ability to inchworm across the surface of the station. The station has (will have?) several Power Data Grapple fixtures which either end of the arm can attach to. The arm can attach it's free end to one of the fixtures and then that becomes the fixed end, leaving the arm anchored at another location on the station. Repeat, and the thing can cruise over to the other side of the station.
I'm not sure how this interacts with the hand, though. Maybe the hand is put away somewhere while the arm is moving.
I've given three hours worth of lectures on the history of computing. That's an entirely different scale than an entire course, but I have some idea.
Swing by your library. There will be more books than you care to read on the history of computing. My school's relatively small library has 31 books.
Some ideas that you'll easily find information for in any history of computers book:
"ancient" history: the abacus, slide rule, mechanical adder, etc. I've had success photocopying the two parts of a slide rule onto two seperate overhead transparencies. They can be put on the glass and moved around to illustrate
their use.
middle history: Babbage, Jacquard, Hollerith and contemporeries.
five generations: computer historians have divided up the 20th century into five "generations" of computing. You might organize the course around these.
history of computational theory: when who discovered what algorithm, etc.
Some other suggestions:
History of the Internet: nobody thought that was interesting until recently, so it's not in most books.
History of Games: this will keep them awake. There are a lot of web sites and probably some books.
Computers in the media: Changing movie portrayals of computers. Find a communications prof or grad who can give you pointers.
Finally, talk to your undergrad secretary (or equivalent) and have her put you in contact with textbook publishers. A few quick e-mails that say "I'm looking for a text for a course about..." will land you more books than you know what to do with.
I should have mentioned... the quote "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?" is from Mike Godwin of the EFF. It's part of the title quote on the Freenet home page.
Personally, I would have left out the "of the press" bit, but that's just me. I mean, we're not talking about the freedom of just the press, but the freedom of speech in general.
The thing is, most universities follow a standard curriculum set out the by the ACM.
There are a few versions of this, the most recent completed was Computing Curricula 1991. There is another version in-progress, Computing Curricula 2001. I seem to remember being told that most schools are actually somewhere in between the 1991 curriculum and the previous recommendation, which doesn't seem to be online.
So, the bottom line is that our beef may be with the ACM. This question is well-timed, since the new curriculum is still in development. There are several discussion groups open to the public on the new curriculum proposals.
Also, it depends on how they had their Win2k box set up. Active Directory is a mess and could be
slowing it down along with a bunch of other services that come with it by default that weren't part of
NT.
The article says that the lab worked with MS "for a week" to figure things out and "neither company could fix the problem". I'm no W2k expert, but I'm sure the MS tech that work with major trade publications are. I'm sure they would have thought of turning off extraneous services.
My guess would be that MSSQL7 uses some system calls that are "native" in NT4, but are some kind of backwards-compatible kludge in W2k. If that's the case, it would make perfect sense that MSSQL7 would be slower on W2k, but MSSQL2k would be comparable.
Just for the record, SNO isn't so near Kingston. It's near Sudbury (it is, after all, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory), which is probably a 6 hour drive from Kingston.
Queen's University in Kingston is the "home" of the project in spirit (and administration) only.
Guess which two skills are extremely
important in relation to getting good grades in college? Studying and working hard.
That's not my experience. I have a lot of students in and out of my office every day. I've seen a lot of students who who work really hard and devote every second of their day to their courses and I've seen a lot who understand concepts quickly and have real insight. The latter group seems to get better grades and enjoy their University experience a lot more.
When I hear about people studying for the SATs for half a year, it sounds like cheating to me. I think the universities are more interested in how intelligent a person is, rather than how many facts they can cram into their head and forget the next day.
I'm sure there could be an easy way to implement a "i-don't-want-this-program-to-use-x"...
Emacs does this already. It first checks to see if the $DISPLAY environment variable is set. If so, it behaves like an X app on that display. If not, it behaves like a console app. It's a simple trick that causes Emacs to usually do the right thing.
You can also change the behaviour by using the -nw (no window) or -d (display) switches. If we had a couple of standard switches like these to turn off and on the X-isness of applications, this plan would be entirely workable.
Under X, even though people try to make the skins pretty, the actual UI is anything but clean. Can't we work on cleaning things up, and making the UI more reliable instead of making pretty shiny toys?
I agree. What I want more than anything is for XMMS and Mozilla to look like the rest of my interface.
But, alas, a great deal of effort was put into making these apps "skinable", which means "can look like anything except, everything else on the desktop".
I know, I could probably get or build skins that look exactly like whatever widget set I'm using at the moment, but why should I? My system still gets hit with the overhead of drawing the skin. And, why should I have to hunt around for a skin for XMMS, Mozilla (and any other app that decides to be skinned) every time I change my GTK theme?
And back on topic... The same thing might apply to antialiasing. If it's handled by the video card, then great, but I don't think it is. That means yet more processor and memory overhead just to draw the screen. It's definitely a feature I'd like to be able to turn off--I can read my pixelated screen just fine, thanks.
I had a computer just like this once... no futzing around with the operating system, just turn it on and go...
On my old Apple II, you selected your application by grabbing a disk off your desk, putting it into the machine and turning it on.
There was no selecting an application or any real interaction with the OS. On the other hand, there were no device drivers or multitasking--it was one app at a time that had do do its own device drivers.
I don't intend this to be flamebait... The "put in a floppy and boot" model is quite close to what's suggested in the article. It's also similar to the Window's CD autorun feature.
Does that model make sense for the mythical "average user"? Of course, it doesn't have to be exaclty the same. The "disk" could be something like a PlayStation memory card which just causes the OS to transparently load the desired program. I've heard human computer interaction people discuss something like this, but haven't seen it ever implemented.
I know autorun bugs me, but for most users it's probably a good thing. Shove your Encarta CD into the drive and up pops Encarta--you didn't have to deal with the OS at all.
Still, I don't know what this has to do with Unix underlying OSX. The user interface is pure Apple, right?
Microsoft thinks Linux is doomed, and predicts that many Linux businesses will falter
and fail before the end of the year.
I think Microsoft is doomed because many businesses that make products for Windows will fail before the end of the year.
Honestly, journalists should be forced to pass some kind of critical thinking test before being given a pen.
And while we're talking about critical thinking, does anyone notice anything fishy about the assertion that "MS's number 1 threat will fail by the end of the year" and on the other hand, "What monopoly? We don't know what you're talking about."
I got a good signature on linux-2.4.1.tar.bz2 that I downloaded earlier today. I can't verify the tar.gz signature since I don't have the file.
Certainly their signing isn't totally bad. I'd suggest you try downloading from a different mirror and see if it comes out clean. You might also want to check your gpg version--I have 1.0.4.
Debian users running the stable (Potato) distribution can find a safe version in Debian's security archive. If it's not there already, the following line should be in/etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
Also of interest to the Slashdot crowd: Mindstorms are cheap. It feels sort of vulture-like, but $100 for a Robotics Invention System is pretty good. If you're ordering, balance against the possibility of them going bankrupt before they ship it.
If not at the center, then you have to compensate for the error with matched zooms so that
you don't have, as the viewer, the weird impression of a comet like elliptical motion (not even
as they only cover 270 degrees).
I don't think so...
If the cameras weren't at the same distance, but had the same field of view, the viewer would have the POV of someone quickly running around the sidelines, focussed on a single spot. It might look a little wired, but having a constant field, and getting closer and further would be more like what the eye has to interpret in real life. It would probably be much easier to follow than zooming in and out as you run around the field.
All you'd need is a bunch of cameras with linked and equal amounts of zoom, pointing at the same spot.
Slashdot Mirror
Greg
So, the conclusion is that the Psychic Friends may have actually been able to help, whereas MS Tech Support definitely couldn't? Chock one up for the Friends!
It occurs to me that you'd either need some serious climate control or very heat insensitive fish. Even with a lot of fans, your average 24x7 PC would cook a goldfish.
Greg
The Unix version, at least, has a built-in web interface that you can typically get to at http://localhost:8081/. It's really pretty easy after that.
There's even a DEB, making using Freenet dead easy for Debian users.
This might be slightly lossy for some files, but it runs in O(1) average-time. An md5sum is 128 bits, so the average number of loops will be about 2^127, a constant.
What was it Homer said? "Phfft, facts!? You can use facts to prove anything."
It is, of course, much easier to invert md5sum on a single byte at a time, which is what I originally suggested.
Greg
The "Second try" solution proposed in the article is having a checksum server. It seems to me that there's a fundamental legal problem with this.
Suppose the checksum server will return the checksum of any part of the AIM.EXE file, which it would have to do in order to return the information needed by third-party clients. Suppose I write a script to ask for the checksum of the first byte, second byte and so on. I can compare each of these values against the checksums of the 256 distinct 8-bit values and reconstruct the AIM.EXE binary.
So, wouldn't the checksum server be essentially redistributing the binary? It's not literally distributing it, but it's probably close enough to spend a long time dragging through the legal process.
Greg
If you're wiring an existing house, I have one word: fishtape (go to your local home improvement big-box and ask). If I was building a house, I'd ask the contractor to put some thick cable conduit in the walls, terminating in key spots. That way, you could fish wires in and out later, with minimal hassle.
Greg
The most impressive thing about the new arm is its ability to inchworm across the surface of the station. The station has (will have?) several Power Data Grapple fixtures which either end of the arm can attach to. The arm can attach it's free end to one of the fixtures and then that becomes the fixed end, leaving the arm anchored at another location on the station. Repeat, and the thing can cruise over to the other side of the station.
I'm not sure how this interacts with the hand, though. Maybe the hand is put away somewhere while the arm is moving.
Greg
I've given three hours worth of lectures on the history of computing. That's an entirely different scale than an entire course, but I have some idea.
Swing by your library. There will be more books than you care to read on the history of computing. My school's relatively small library has 31 books.
Some ideas that you'll easily find information for in any history of computers book:
- "ancient" history: the abacus, slide rule, mechanical adder, etc. I've had success photocopying the two parts of a slide rule onto two seperate overhead transparencies. They can be put on the glass and moved around to illustrate
their use.
- middle history: Babbage, Jacquard, Hollerith and contemporeries.
- five generations: computer historians have divided up the 20th century into five "generations" of computing. You might organize the course around these.
- history of computational theory: when who discovered what algorithm, etc.
Some other suggestions:There are several courses out there.
Finally, talk to your undergrad secretary (or equivalent) and have her put you in contact with textbook publishers. A few quick e-mails that say "I'm looking for a text for a course about..." will land you more books than you know what to do with.
Greg
I should have mentioned... the quote "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?" is from Mike Godwin of the EFF. It's part of the title quote on the Freenet home page.
Personally, I would have left out the "of the press" bit, but that's just me. I mean, we're not talking about the freedom of just the press, but the freedom of speech in general.
Paypal membership: free
Donation to Freenet: $20
Never having to answer the question "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?": Priceless.
[I know, it's been done, but I couldn't resist :-) ]
The thing is, most universities follow a standard curriculum set out the by the ACM.
There are a few versions of this, the most recent completed was Computing Curricula 1991. There is another version in-progress, Computing Curricula 2001. I seem to remember being told that most schools are actually somewhere in between the 1991 curriculum and the previous recommendation, which doesn't seem to be online.
So, the bottom line is that our beef may be with the ACM. This question is well-timed, since the new curriculum is still in development. There are several discussion groups open to the public on the new curriculum proposals.
Greg
My guess would be that MSSQL7 uses some system calls that are "native" in NT4, but are some kind of backwards-compatible kludge in W2k. If that's the case, it would make perfect sense that MSSQL7 would be slower on W2k, but MSSQL2k would be comparable.
Just for the record, SNO isn't so near Kingston. It's near Sudbury (it is, after all, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory), which is probably a 6 hour drive from Kingston. Queen's University in Kingston is the "home" of the project in spirit (and administration) only.
It is a cool project, just the same.
That's not my experience. I have a lot of students in and out of my office every day. I've seen a lot of students who who work really hard and devote every second of their day to their courses and I've seen a lot who understand concepts quickly and have real insight. The latter group seems to get better grades and enjoy their University experience a lot more.
When I hear about people studying for the SATs for half a year, it sounds like cheating to me. I think the universities are more interested in how intelligent a person is, rather than how many facts they can cram into their head and forget the next day.
Greg
Emacs does this already. It first checks to see if the $DISPLAY environment variable is set. If so, it behaves like an X app on that display. If not, it behaves like a console app. It's a simple trick that causes Emacs to usually do the right thing.
You can also change the behaviour by using the -nw (no window) or -d (display) switches. If we had a couple of standard switches like these to turn off and on the X-isness of applications, this plan would be entirely workable.
Greg
I agree. What I want more than anything is for XMMS and Mozilla to look like the rest of my interface. But, alas, a great deal of effort was put into making these apps "skinable", which means "can look like anything except, everything else on the desktop".
I know, I could probably get or build skins that look exactly like whatever widget set I'm using at the moment, but why should I? My system still gets hit with the overhead of drawing the skin. And, why should I have to hunt around for a skin for XMMS, Mozilla (and any other app that decides to be skinned) every time I change my GTK theme?
And back on topic... The same thing might apply to antialiasing. If it's handled by the video card, then great, but I don't think it is. That means yet more processor and memory overhead just to draw the screen. It's definitely a feature I'd like to be able to turn off--I can read my pixelated screen just fine, thanks.
Greg
I had a computer just like this once... no futzing around with the operating system, just turn it on and go...
On my old Apple II, you selected your application by grabbing a disk off your desk, putting it into the machine and turning it on. There was no selecting an application or any real interaction with the OS. On the other hand, there were no device drivers or multitasking--it was one app at a time that had do do its own device drivers.
I don't intend this to be flamebait... The "put in a floppy and boot" model is quite close to what's suggested in the article. It's also similar to the Window's CD autorun feature.
Does that model make sense for the mythical "average user"? Of course, it doesn't have to be exaclty the same. The "disk" could be something like a PlayStation memory card which just causes the OS to transparently load the desired program. I've heard human computer interaction people discuss something like this, but haven't seen it ever implemented.
I know autorun bugs me, but for most users it's probably a good thing. Shove your Encarta CD into the drive and up pops Encarta--you didn't have to deal with the OS at all.
Still, I don't know what this has to do with Unix underlying OSX. The user interface is pure Apple, right?
I think Microsoft is doomed because many businesses that make products for Windows will fail before the end of the year.
Honestly, journalists should be forced to pass some kind of critical thinking test before being given a pen.
And while we're talking about critical thinking, does anyone notice anything fishy about the assertion that "MS's number 1 threat will fail by the end of the year" and on the other hand, "What monopoly? We don't know what you're talking about."
Certainly their signing isn't totally bad. I'd suggest you try downloading from a different mirror and see if it comes out clean. You might also want to check your gpg version--I have 1.0.4.
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
Also of interest to the Slashdot crowd: Mindstorms are cheap. It feels sort of vulture-like, but $100 for a Robotics Invention System is pretty good. If you're ordering, balance against the possibility of them going bankrupt before they ship it.
I don't think so...
If the cameras weren't at the same distance, but had the same field of view, the viewer would have the POV of someone quickly running around the sidelines, focussed on a single spot. It might look a little wired, but having a constant field, and getting closer and further would be more like what the eye has to interpret in real life. It would probably be much easier to follow than zooming in and out as you run around the field.
All you'd need is a bunch of cameras with linked and equal amounts of zoom, pointing at the same spot.
Greg
rotten.com's standard response to those who complain about children accessing their site is exactly that: "The net is not a babysitter".
If parents want a machine to raise their children, they should use the old friend television. It's all nice and sanitized for their protection.
I had this idea a while ago. Good thing somebody else had it and actually did something about it.
Now, if I can just find the time to implement my idea for a whole new kind of porn site that will revolutionize the industry...