I mean, please add all the methods possible to discriminate between bots and humans. For instance, if someone replies to a tweet in less than 5 seconds with a 200+ character response, mark it as a potential bot post. Other sorts of controls could be added too that mark potential tweets as sent by bots or automated accounts. With all the tools at Twitter's disposal, it seems that they are explicitly NOT looking for ways to discriminate between bots and humans. This is likely for commercial reasons.
Twitter can be a playground for both bots and humans, but detecting the bots and marking their tweets as such could be a great way to help level the playing field and would help humans understand how the information is really flowing through the site. It doesn't have to be all blue checks and biometrics, but those are good as well.
This result is extremely narrow and does not offer any generality. In the specific problems space the researchers attacked they did not find that quantum computers were better than classical computers. What they state in the paper is something far more specific and thus less powerful. The comparison is between a 2D quantum grid of 1 qubit and 2 qubit gates versus a classical (probabilistic) circuit. They found that in the classical (probabilistic) circuit there is a strong lower bound on the depth of gates required to solve the problem (log n, where n is the size of the input). In the quantum grid case the depth remains constant as the computation is carried out over a 2D quantum grid.
Both Science and other write ups about this result, including this post, seems to paint this result very generally and it simply isn't. It's not an algorithm, the paper does not pit quantum vs classical computers, simply circuits. There is no analysis as to the size of the quantum grid required w.r.t. the size of the input, only the depth of the circuit. Also by leaning on probabilistic classical circuits they move the goalposts into an exotically small portion of the problem space.
The result is rather great, but it is nothing like the media is portraying and it is not a general result at all. Please don't take the above as anything other than media critique and clarification of the results in the paper.
This! A Ton! I get a lot out of scientific conferences for this reason exactly. I go to SIGPLAN conferences to see what is out there. To get a glimpse of what is just now becoming understood in a way that will be applicable to my work in the future. Sometimes, that future is closer than I initially think.
Continuing to expose yourself to new ideas in the field keeps you sharp. Exposure to the creators of libraries and tools can keep you grounded as well. Also, depending on your interests and the presenters sometimes you can find a mentor as well.
I woke up to an awesome email about every game on my wishlist and I just want to give them my damn money! I got into the office a little late and now I'm having to do work instead of drool over a bunch of killer cheap games.
I hope valve hurries up and fixes the problem so they can take my damned money! I guess this will be a productive Friday after all... What yak shaving tasks do I have today?
Except, at least in the US, it is not necessarily cheaper to execute someone that to imprison them for life. Life without parole (LWOP) cases can cost more depending on how long the individual is imprisoned. However, it's really hard to know the true cost of either as there are different knock on costs from each type.
In the LWOP cases if the person receiving the sentence is really young then it will likely cost roughly between $1-$3 million to imprison that person for the rest of their lives. However, in California's recent past it was determined that executions cost about $3 million per execution. Some might argue that California wasn't very efficient at execution, unlike Texas, but the price for executions in Texas is comparable.
It's actually quite difficult to figure out the actual cost, but we do know a few details to help reason through the costs. Due to the legal system in the US we allow those sentenced to death to exhaust all legal appeal options before the execution. This means many more days in court than the LWOP (roughly 5-6 times as many court appearances).
It handles the idea of larger repositories with disconnected parts. You get git versioning of files and the ability to replicate portions of the data at will.
There is at least one outstanding challenge on the internet to recover a drive that has been overwritten just once with zeros. No one has accepted this challenge in over a year. Beyond that we now know that the assumptions that Peter Gutmann made when writing his seminal works in the mid-nineties about data recovery are complete hogwash. Once such assumption is that you know what data it is that you would like to recover. Why would you need to recover the data then if you have perfect knowledge of the data.
A new paper was published in December showing experimental data to back up how possible/impossible it is to recover data from a drive that has been overwritten once with any known pattern. They show that if you try to recover data from overwritten areas your likely hood of data recovery become astronomically low once you start trying to recover more than 32 bits of contiguous data. Add to that the time required to attempt the recovery. With Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) you can scan a disk platter at a speed of 1 byte every 4 minutes. This speed will change over time, but based on the research in this paper that still makes anything more than bit recovery unlikely and would be a huge time sink for anyone with appropriate technology and would most likely yield little useful information.
I recommend anyone in that deals with hard drive decommissioning read this paper.
No one said you can't have a keyboard too. No one said you can't have a regular pointer in conjunction either....
I agree that the most likely uses are kiosks, but I see a great future for these devices in collaborative art, white boarding and interactive programs that don't necessarily require a keyboard to interact with them (fe. drawing, viewing or manipulating images, file browsing/management, etc.). For other apps you can still use the WIMP paradigm and that's fine. I'm sure until we have multitouch 3D holographic interactive interfaces the need for a traditional mouse+keyboard will always be around. I also believe the keyboard will outlive the mouse and any fat interface that is developed without the keyboard in mind is destined to fail.
This patent is completely obvious. GIS existed well before 1999. I graduated High School in '99 and we were doing GIS in the school for 2 years already. GIS databases were already searchable and at least a capable as what we see in google mashups now. And if I remember right several GIS companies were already doing webapps for local communities that had GIS departments.
My city had an online map of the city with searching by addresses, districts, and zones. The Center for Advanced Spacial Technologies at the University of Arkansas already had web interfaces to search and view their geo data.
This is a classic example of a patent where they take something that is already being done widely in industry and say, "that, but with the internet."
Well like all large environments they have a bit of everything. At the stores it's a handful of servers, one of IBM/NCR/HP Unix boxes and a couple windows servers (usually dells).
Back in Bentonville, AR it's about the same. A large variety of proprietary UNIX systems (mostly IBM/HP/NCR), a ton of windows servers, a few mainframes and a proprietary Data Warehousing solution.
Wal-Mart is very multi vendor to get competitive pricing, but to also avoid vendor lock-in. Of course like other companies they still allow Microsoft to lock them in and it seems like that is the only vendor allowed to do this. I think Microsoft banks on that. Microsoft's server business isn't going away anytime soon, mostly due to vendor lock-in solutions they provided to customers.
Wal-Mart is a very large company and many people have a say in their IT infrastructure so any half-baked idea that one vendor will come in and take all their server business is ludicrous. It's not in the Wal-Mart culture to allow that.
I never understand the view that good enforcement of a law is a bad thing. Either the law is just, in which case enforcement can not be bad, or the law is unjust, in which case good enforcement will highlight this to a significant proportion of the electorate, ensuring that it is fixed sooner. Except that's not how it works. The more efficient the enforcement the more otherwise honest citizens get wrapped up legal issues. And laws very rarely are ever taken off the books. Instead laws are added ad infinitum. This means that if there were exceptionally efficient means to monitor all laws on the books and catch every infraction damn near everyone in society would be in trouble with the law. And you'd have a police state and you would no longer have the ability to break the law conciously or partake in civil disobedience.
Take this innocuous example, you are stopped at a street light that won't change from Red to Green late some night. There are no other cars around and after waiting for a judicious 10 minutes the light still won't change. Running this light is against the law. You've already waited an inordinate amount of time for this light to change. Do you sit there forever or if after paying careful attention you decide to get on with your travels. If the enforcement was extremely efficient then you'll end up with a ticket and either have to pay it or fight it in court. Either way you've lost and you weren't doing anything wrong waiting for the light to change, but the light clearly would have never changed on its own in a reasonable amount of time (you've already waited 10 minutes).
Like I said the example is trivial, but there are much more complicated examples that involve bad laws and otherwise good people that get tripped up by bad laws and those laws aren't changing anytime soon. See also The War on Drugs.
I have to question how "live" such a system would _actually_ be.
How about currently running programs are still running. Only new processes fail and only if they are dynamically linked. That's pretty live. My databases continued to run, media player, mail apps, web browser, chat windows.... Anything already running continues to run in the scenario I described.
Step 1 would fail after reaching a specific library. Nope. Not as root it wouldn't./bin/rm should be statically linked (should being operative) and even if it isn't it will be loaded all into memory while the process runs. I've deleted my libc before without any interruption. Running subsequent commands was difficult (unless statically linked).
Interestingly enough, with a little planning and having some statically linked binaries around (like busybox) you can actually recover from this live on a linux system. Try removing the equivalent under windows and recovering without a reboot.
Luckily in *nix systems that support the TZ shell variable (all POSIX systems) you have a way to make it behave as you wish irregardless of special timezone file sets. Just set your TZ variable using the long form:
std offset dst [offset],start[/time],end[/time]
Example: EST+5EDT,M4.1.0/2,M10.5.0/2
In the example EST is set to have the normal offset from UTC of 5 hours; since this is west of the prime meridian, the sign is positive. Summer time begins on the first Sunday in April at 2:00am, and ends on the last Sunday in October at 2:00am. The second offsest was omitted because by default it's +1 hour.
Hold on there!!!! Back the train up! Animal rights activists are not environmentalists. They are whack jobs. We're all for animals being treated well, but groups like PETA are just insane. In no way shape or form are they environmentalists.
This very well could be the driest subject, but it can also be quite fascinating. A good approach might be to lead the class with a little background and cover a case or two about how programming IP has been litigated, then launch into the Socratic method.
Once they are attempting to decide for themselves what is acceptable and what isn't you should get a lively discussion. Link it back to music, paintings, books as well as the topic we discuss here the most, programs. If you only pose questions it will spark the debate and you will have to guide the discussion a little, but this could very well turn out to be the most entertaining 75 minutes all semester.
That would have been right if you were talking about CD/DVD specifications which just laid out an on-disc format. However, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD specifications went way beyond that. They also spell out audio codecs, video codecs directory trees, encryption methods and DRM in the spec for the media. Unfortunately the idea the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are just disc specifications is incorrect and a complete shame.
At my work we just started using a wiki for documentation and procedures. It really has changed things for us quite a bit. We are moving over to it incrementally and everyone gets to be part of the process due to the nature of wikis. We are using mediawiki and eventually someone will add moderation features, but until then it's really great for this.
I'd suggest if you are in a position to get a mock up running on your intranet it is definately worth trying out. So far people are enthused about it. It took a while to get everyone involved, but now that they are it is kind of snowballing and just getting better every day. YMMV
It doesn't. It requires the Google Video Player to download any of the pay videos. You can download them by modifying your user-agent, but as of yet I can't get them to display. Their DRM is an intentional corruption of the AVI header. The files appear to only be streamable. I don't have windows so I can't validate whether or not they get saved to your HD through the Google Video Player. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to replace their header with the right header so that normal players can play it.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, please add all the methods possible to discriminate between bots and humans. For instance, if someone replies to a tweet in less than 5 seconds with a 200+ character response, mark it as a potential bot post. Other sorts of controls could be added too that mark potential tweets as sent by bots or automated accounts. With all the tools at Twitter's disposal, it seems that they are explicitly NOT looking for ways to discriminate between bots and humans. This is likely for commercial reasons.
Twitter can be a playground for both bots and humans, but detecting the bots and marking their tweets as such could be a great way to help level the playing field and would help humans understand how the information is really flowing through the site. It doesn't have to be all blue checks and biometrics, but those are good as well.
This result is extremely narrow and does not offer any generality. In the specific problems space the researchers attacked they did not find that quantum computers were better than classical computers. What they state in the paper is something far more specific and thus less powerful. The comparison is between a 2D quantum grid of 1 qubit and 2 qubit gates versus a classical (probabilistic) circuit. They found that in the classical (probabilistic) circuit there is a strong lower bound on the depth of gates required to solve the problem (log n, where n is the size of the input). In the quantum grid case the depth remains constant as the computation is carried out over a 2D quantum grid.
Both Science and other write ups about this result, including this post, seems to paint this result very generally and it simply isn't. It's not an algorithm, the paper does not pit quantum vs classical computers, simply circuits. There is no analysis as to the size of the quantum grid required w.r.t. the size of the input, only the depth of the circuit. Also by leaning on probabilistic classical circuits they move the goalposts into an exotically small portion of the problem space.
The result is rather great, but it is nothing like the media is portraying and it is not a general result at all. Please don't take the above as anything other than media critique and clarification of the results in the paper.
This! A Ton! I get a lot out of scientific conferences for this reason exactly. I go to SIGPLAN conferences to see what is out there. To get a glimpse of what is just now becoming understood in a way that will be applicable to my work in the future. Sometimes, that future is closer than I initially think.
Continuing to expose yourself to new ideas in the field keeps you sharp. Exposure to the creators of libraries and tools can keep you grounded as well. Also, depending on your interests and the presenters sometimes you can find a mentor as well.
I woke up to an awesome email about every game on my wishlist and I just want to give them my damn money! I got into the office a little late and now I'm having to do work instead of drool over a bunch of killer cheap games.
I hope valve hurries up and fixes the problem so they can take my damned money! I guess this will be a productive Friday after all... What yak shaving tasks do I have today?
Try reading it like this, "Google Chrome Warns Begins ...." What a terrible turn of phrase, get it together editors.
Except, at least in the US, it is not necessarily cheaper to execute someone that to imprison them for life. Life without parole (LWOP) cases can cost more depending on how long the individual is imprisoned. However, it's really hard to know the true cost of either as there are different knock on costs from each type.
In the LWOP cases if the person receiving the sentence is really young then it will likely cost roughly between $1-$3 million to imprison that person for the rest of their lives. However, in California's recent past it was determined that executions cost about $3 million per execution. Some might argue that California wasn't very efficient at execution, unlike Texas, but the price for executions in Texas is comparable.
It's actually quite difficult to figure out the actual cost, but we do know a few details to help reason through the costs. Due to the legal system in the US we allow those sentenced to death to exhaust all legal appeal options before the execution. This means many more days in court than the LWOP (roughly 5-6 times as many court appearances).
A quick googling shows some stats (some with deeper links to actual studies):
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty
http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42
http://deathpenalty.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001000
You might want to checkout git-annex: http://git-annex.branchable.com/
It handles the idea of larger repositories with disconnected parts. You get git versioning of files and the ability to replicate portions of the data at will.
That's a trick question, congressmen never go out at night. They're too busy frequenting prostitutes and lobbyists.
Same thing.
There is at least one outstanding challenge on the internet to recover a drive that has been overwritten just once with zeros. No one has accepted this challenge in over a year. Beyond that we now know that the assumptions that Peter Gutmann made when writing his seminal works in the mid-nineties about data recovery are complete hogwash. Once such assumption is that you know what data it is that you would like to recover. Why would you need to recover the data then if you have perfect knowledge of the data.
A new paper was published in December showing experimental data to back up how possible/impossible it is to recover data from a drive that has been overwritten once with any known pattern. They show that if you try to recover data from overwritten areas your likely hood of data recovery become astronomically low once you start trying to recover more than 32 bits of contiguous data. Add to that the time required to attempt the recovery. With Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) you can scan a disk platter at a speed of 1 byte every 4 minutes. This speed will change over time, but based on the research in this paper that still makes anything more than bit recovery unlikely and would be a huge time sink for anyone with appropriate technology and would most likely yield little useful information.
I recommend anyone in that deals with hard drive decommissioning read this paper.
Here's the link to the paper.
And here's a link to the BibTex entry.
No one said you can't have a keyboard too. No one said you can't have a regular pointer in conjunction either....
I agree that the most likely uses are kiosks, but I see a great future for these devices in collaborative art, white boarding and interactive programs that don't necessarily require a keyboard to interact with them (fe. drawing, viewing or manipulating images, file browsing/management, etc.). For other apps you can still use the WIMP paradigm and that's fine. I'm sure until we have multitouch 3D holographic interactive interfaces the need for a traditional mouse+keyboard will always be around. I also believe the keyboard will outlive the mouse and any fat interface that is developed without the keyboard in mind is destined to fail.
This patent is completely obvious. GIS existed well before 1999. I graduated High School in '99 and we were doing GIS in the school for 2 years already. GIS databases were already searchable and at least a capable as what we see in google mashups now. And if I remember right several GIS companies were already doing webapps for local communities that had GIS departments.
My city had an online map of the city with searching by addresses, districts, and zones. The Center for Advanced Spacial Technologies at the University of Arkansas already had web interfaces to search and view their geo data.
This is a classic example of a patent where they take something that is already being done widely in industry and say, "that, but with the internet."
Well like all large environments they have a bit of everything. At the stores it's a handful of servers, one of IBM/NCR/HP Unix boxes and a couple windows servers (usually dells).
Back in Bentonville, AR it's about the same. A large variety of proprietary UNIX systems (mostly IBM/HP/NCR), a ton of windows servers, a few mainframes and a proprietary Data Warehousing solution.
Wal-Mart is very multi vendor to get competitive pricing, but to also avoid vendor lock-in. Of course like other companies they still allow Microsoft to lock them in and it seems like that is the only vendor allowed to do this. I think Microsoft banks on that. Microsoft's server business isn't going away anytime soon, mostly due to vendor lock-in solutions they provided to customers.
Wal-Mart is a very large company and many people have a say in their IT infrastructure so any half-baked idea that one vendor will come in and take all their server business is ludicrous. It's not in the Wal-Mart culture to allow that.
Take this innocuous example, you are stopped at a street light that won't change from Red to Green late some night. There are no other cars around and after waiting for a judicious 10 minutes the light still won't change. Running this light is against the law. You've already waited an inordinate amount of time for this light to change. Do you sit there forever or if after paying careful attention you decide to get on with your travels. If the enforcement was extremely efficient then you'll end up with a ticket and either have to pay it or fight it in court. Either way you've lost and you weren't doing anything wrong waiting for the light to change, but the light clearly would have never changed on its own in a reasonable amount of time (you've already waited 10 minutes).
Like I said the example is trivial, but there are much more complicated examples that involve bad laws and otherwise good people that get tripped up by bad laws and those laws aren't changing anytime soon. See also The War on Drugs.
I have to question how "live" such a system would _actually_ be.
How about currently running programs are still running. Only new processes fail and only if they are dynamically linked. That's pretty live. My databases continued to run, media player, mail apps, web browser, chat windows.... Anything already running continues to run in the scenario I described.Interestingly enough, with a little planning and having some statically linked binaries around (like busybox) you can actually recover from this live on a linux system. Try removing the equivalent under windows and recovering without a reboot.
Luckily in *nix systems that support the TZ shell variable (all POSIX systems) you have a way to make it behave as you wish irregardless of special timezone file sets. Just set your TZ variable using the long form:
/ TZ-Variable.html
std offset dst [offset],start[/time],end[/time]
Example: EST+5EDT,M4.1.0/2,M10.5.0/2
In the example EST is set to have the normal offset from UTC of 5 hours; since this is west of the prime meridian, the sign is positive. Summer time begins on the first Sunday in April at 2:00am, and ends on the last Sunday in October at 2:00am. The second offsest was omitted because by default it's +1 hour.
Special thanks to the GNU documentation of the GNU C library: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node
I know this to work on AIX, HP/UX and Linux. Other systems should behave similarly.
No it's very realistic, they must both be friends with John "I get no spam" Dvorak.
Just setup WebDAV and have KOrganizer load it from the WebDAV. It fully supports this and I'll bet so does the OS X Calendar.
Hold on there!!!! Back the train up! Animal rights activists are not environmentalists. They are whack jobs. We're all for animals being treated well, but groups like PETA are just insane. In no way shape or form are they environmentalists.
They should sell this with the slogan, "Be excellent to each other."
This very well could be the driest subject, but it can also be quite fascinating. A good approach might be to lead the class with a little background and cover a case or two about how programming IP has been litigated, then launch into the Socratic method.
Once they are attempting to decide for themselves what is acceptable and what isn't you should get a lively discussion. Link it back to music, paintings, books as well as the topic we discuss here the most, programs. If you only pose questions it will spark the debate and you will have to guide the discussion a little, but this could very well turn out to be the most entertaining 75 minutes all semester.
That would have been right if you were talking about CD/DVD specifications which just laid out an on-disc format. However, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD specifications went way beyond that. They also spell out audio codecs, video codecs directory trees, encryption methods and DRM in the spec for the media. Unfortunately the idea the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are just disc specifications is incorrect and a complete shame.
Seriously! Try KDevelop. It has all the features you mention and works very well. It really is a good alternative to vim+cmdline tools.
At my work we just started using a wiki for documentation and procedures. It really has changed things for us quite a bit. We are moving over to it incrementally and everyone gets to be part of the process due to the nature of wikis. We are using mediawiki and eventually someone will add moderation features, but until then it's really great for this.
I'd suggest if you are in a position to get a mock up running on your intranet it is definately worth trying out. So far people are enthused about it. It took a while to get everyone involved, but now that they are it is kind of snowballing and just getting better every day. YMMV
It doesn't. It requires the Google Video Player to download any of the pay videos. You can download them by modifying your user-agent, but as of yet I can't get them to display. Their DRM is an intentional corruption of the AVI header. The files appear to only be streamable. I don't have windows so I can't validate whether or not they get saved to your HD through the Google Video Player. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to replace their header with the right header so that normal players can play it.