I bought the earlier edition of this book a few years back and can say that I will never again, ever buy a book that had Gundavaram as an author. The book was pure garbage. It contained tons of examples which were little more than whitespace, and the rather favorable review makes me more than hugely suspicious of how much I can really trust/.'s book reviews, given how bad the earlier edition was, and the spectre of affiliate payments.
Most annoyingly, he seemed obsessed with seeing his name in print, so that there were lots of examples - and I mean what seems like several dozen - where his name was gratuitously placed, such as
code with $webmaster="shishir\@bu\.edu", where $webmaster was never referenced later,
where his name was in <ADDRESS> tags, for no apparent reason, except that we get to see his name again,
etc.
At one point I entertained making a "shishir gundavaram sucks" page, detailing every single offence, it drove me so mad.
This book was the single worst O'Reilly book I have ever read, and if I hadn't bought so many good ones in the past, I would probably never so much as pick up another one.
I would be afraid that the addition of two more authors would just mean two more names repeated ad infinitum in every piece of example code. Aaargh! After 3 or 4 years, Just when this book got out from under my skin, there it is.
The article notes that this procedure has been carried out before in the US, with tissue from cadavers. why use a live donor who is going to suffer side-effects later? Could it be purely proof-of-concept, or is it just a coincidence that the donor here happens to be from Mexico, and not the US ?
If anyone knows the rationale for using a live donor, please fill us in. I can imagine there would be some reasons to want to use live donors, but the article just doesn't say.
I've experimented with a variety of webcams in the last month (IBM PC Camera and PC Camera Pro, 3com Home Connect, Creative VideoBlaster III, Ezonics EZ-Cam...) and can say that the rates at which these things grab frames is pretty slow, with no CPU usage. I have to wonder how well they would really function as the front end of a game controller on a machine under heavy load (as when playing Quake). I wonder whether a frame-grabber board might not work better ?
The low frame rate problem would probably be exacerbated when you consider you would probably have to move your head a fairly large distance (at least an inch ? ) for the software to be able to reliably detect movement.
Also, it seems like a camera pointed directly at your head is only going to be able to discriminate between four directions (head up, down, left, right), and wouldn't be able to easily detect (head forward, head back), which might be important directions if you were playing a FPS.
Finally, I wonder how sophisticated the motion detection scheme is ? How would they deal with, e.g. the rotation of your head, which might look to a simple-minded scheme like side-to-side movement ?
Re:Problems with the system
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
>>How much is the going price for a vote?
>Why is that a problem? That can be done now,
The difference is that now, you can certainly contract to sell your vote (though such may not be legal), but if I pay you for your vote, I have no way of verifying that you have voted as I directed, and therefore that I have 'received' the vote I paid for. Hence, at present, any vote-buying scheme is fraught with uncertainty.
Under a scheme where votes are made electronically, with only information such as passcodes and driver's licenses used for authentication, I can verify that I have received the vote I bought for, since I can register the vote myself, or at least know that the vote has already been made.
Re:Problems with the system
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Well, in the case of Florida and Iowa and other states, it wouldn't have cost too much to steal this election. And in general, since the battleground states are pretty much known in advance, all the purchase efforts would be focused there, at minimal cost. Parties would ignore trying to buy e.g. California and try to buy the closely fought states with lots of electoral votes.
Note, you have to wonder how such would skew results in the future. If we accept for the moment the possibility that low-income people may be more likely to vote Democrat, would they be more likely to sell their votes, presumably to the Republicans ? Would net Democratic votes be lost if such were allowed ?
All the hoopla about new TLDs is something I cannot understand. I can't imagine that many desirable domains are going to be made available simply because there are a bunch of new TLDs.
Rather, I expect that all the present holders of domains with any value - real or presumed - will swoop in to claim the corresponding domain in the new TLDs, and if they can't get it in the initial rush they will get it through litigation. So just what exactly will be left ?
Anybody know whether these institutions that are being so lauded happen to block access to porn sites ?
Since I suspect the answer is that at least some of these institutions do block porn, I have to wonder how much they can really be said to be standing up for 'online freedom' at all. They're not standing up for freedom unless they stand up for all freedoms.
Back in the days when I was a happy OS/2 Warp user, I thought it was a great thing that you could run Windows 3.1 applications while running Warp...you could buy Warp with a Windows license or install Windows yourself if you already owned it, and launch Windows as a separate Warp application.
The problem was, the fact that you could run Windows applications totally removed any incentive for developers to port those apps to the Warp environment, so they never were ported. Why port an app to OS/2 if you aknow they can already run it as a Windows application ? Note, this was at a time when there were quite a few OS/2 users and it might well have made business sense to port to OS/2 EVEN IF OS/2 COULD NOT RUN WINDOWS APPS.
So Warp users were stuck with running Windows applications IN Windows (with its attendant instabilities within the Windows session), as well as paying for a Windows license. Meanwhile, Windows users who wanted to run Windows applications but MIGHT have been interested in running Warp really had no reason to do so.
So if you wanted to run an application that ran under Windows, there was never going to be a compelling reason to move to OS/2, since it would never be ported to the OS/2 environment.
My point is, if users are able to run Windows apps within Linux, why would we ever expect developers to provide us with Linux native versions of those apps ? The availablity of a good Windows emulator can only retard Linux's viability as a desktop OS for the masses in the long run.
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Most annoyingly, he seemed obsessed with seeing his name in print, so that there were lots of examples - and I mean what seems like several dozen - where his name was gratuitously placed, such as
code with $webmaster="shishir\@bu\.edu", where $webmaster was never referenced later,
where his name was in <ADDRESS> tags, for no apparent reason, except that we get to see his name again,
etc.
At one point I entertained making a "shishir gundavaram sucks" page, detailing every single offence, it drove me so mad.
This book was the single worst O'Reilly book I have ever read, and if I hadn't bought so many good ones in the past, I would probably never so much as pick up another one.
I would be afraid that the addition of two more authors would just mean two more names repeated ad infinitum in every piece of example code. Aaargh! After 3 or 4 years, Just when this book got out from under my skin, there it is.
The article notes that this procedure has been carried out before in the US, with tissue from cadavers. why use a live donor who is going to suffer side-effects later? Could it be purely proof-of-concept, or is it just a coincidence that the donor here happens to be from Mexico, and not the US ?
If anyone knows the rationale for using a live donor, please fill us in. I can imagine there would be some reasons to want to use live donors, but the article just doesn't say.
The low frame rate problem would probably be exacerbated when you consider you would probably have to move your head a fairly large distance (at least an inch ? ) for the software to be able to reliably detect movement.
Also, it seems like a camera pointed directly at your head is only going to be able to discriminate between four directions (head up, down, left, right), and wouldn't be able to easily detect (head forward, head back), which might be important directions if you were playing a FPS.
Finally, I wonder how sophisticated the motion detection scheme is ? How would they deal with, e.g. the rotation of your head, which might look to a simple-minded scheme like side-to-side movement ?
>Why is that a problem? That can be done now,
The difference is that now, you can certainly contract to sell your vote (though such may not be legal), but if I pay you for your vote, I have no way of verifying that you have voted as I directed, and therefore that I have 'received' the vote I paid for. Hence, at present, any vote-buying scheme is fraught with uncertainty.
Under a scheme where votes are made electronically, with only information such as passcodes and driver's licenses used for authentication, I can verify that I have received the vote I bought for, since I can register the vote myself, or at least know that the vote has already been made.
Note, you have to wonder how such would skew results in the future. If we accept for the moment the possibility that low-income people may be more likely to vote Democrat, would they be more likely to sell their votes, presumably to the Republicans ? Would net Democratic votes be lost if such were allowed ?
Rather, I expect that all the present holders of domains with any value - real or presumed - will swoop in to claim the corresponding domain in the new TLDs, and if they can't get it in the initial rush they will get it through litigation. So just what exactly will be left ?
Good to hear this. I wonder if this means that's the end of the Enigma posts on /. for a while ? Nah, doubt it.
Microsoft trades on the NASDAQ. Microsoft stock is also, however, a component of the Dow.
Since I suspect the answer is that at least some of these institutions do block porn, I have to wonder how much they can really be said to be standing up for 'online freedom' at all. They're not standing up for freedom unless they stand up for all freedoms.
Back in the days when I was a happy OS/2 Warp user, I thought it was a great thing that you could run Windows 3.1 applications while running Warp...you could buy Warp with a Windows license or install Windows yourself if you already owned it, and launch Windows as a separate Warp application. The problem was, the fact that you could run Windows applications totally removed any incentive for developers to port those apps to the Warp environment, so they never were ported. Why port an app to OS/2 if you aknow they can already run it as a Windows application ? Note, this was at a time when there were quite a few OS/2 users and it might well have made business sense to port to OS/2 EVEN IF OS/2 COULD NOT RUN WINDOWS APPS. So Warp users were stuck with running Windows applications IN Windows (with its attendant instabilities within the Windows session), as well as paying for a Windows license. Meanwhile, Windows users who wanted to run Windows applications but MIGHT have been interested in running Warp really had no reason to do so. So if you wanted to run an application that ran under Windows, there was never going to be a compelling reason to move to OS/2, since it would never be ported to the OS/2 environment. My point is, if users are able to run Windows apps within Linux, why would we ever expect developers to provide us with Linux native versions of those apps ? The availablity of a good Windows emulator can only retard Linux's viability as a desktop OS for the masses in the long run.