"Heisenbug as originally defined--and I was there when it happened--are bugs in which clearly the behavior of the system is incorrect, and when you try to look to see why it's incorrect, the problem goes away.
This is a really cool article, but it was especially fun to see the heisenbug mention. Years ago, some fellow CS people and myself conjectured a similar phenomenon that seemed to manifest once in a while, in which a computer malfunction goes away after one "proves" that there's no cause for the error to exist.
Here's a list of heisenbug anecdotes, but note that some of these submissions aren't strictly heisenbugs.
For things like the commodore audio chip you can't get exactly the same sounds without the real hardware. But for SNES I think that zsnes + roms + alsa does a pretty faithful rendition of the sound. And if I fiddle with the sound options you could argue that however unfaithful the sound becomes, it is actually superior in quality to that of just an SNES.
That's one thing the SNES did have over the Genesis. The sound quality was vastly superior. I remember the "echoy" cave noises in super mario world, that was something else.
I agree on all counts. I have a soft spot for the SNES's defining sound (Actraiser in stereo really cemented it for me), but the Commodore's SID is just on a whole other level. Occasionally a piece of hardware--be it audio, film, video, or whatever--is released that has such a unique character and artistic potential that it outlives its generation. Personally, I think the SidStation is the quintessence of reborn game audio hardware.
But in the world of synths every piece of gear has its nuances, and even the dookie sound chip in the MD/Genesis could be refabbed with an interface that liberates it and affords it a special niche all its own.
Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops.
Like it or not, in-camera editing is an important, standard capability, without which videographers would oftentimes find themselves at a loss. It may not be the ideal way to edit film and video, but the results can be superb.
Since lots of people are linking to books on Amazon, it seems a good time to mention a useful trick mention in O'Reilly's Amazon Hacks: you can link to Amazon products in a much friendlier way, like so:
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/059600542
Where the numeric parameter is the product's ASIN (which, for most books, is also the ISBN). This hack is also detailed on Oreilly.com.
nothing really new.... you can buy hp desktops with mandrake for a while already.
If you had read the article, you would've seen this:
"In the past, HP shipped Linux desktops from Mandrakesoft SA and Turbolinux Inc. Those programs will be phased out, and the Novell product will become HP's Linux desktop offering."
Most of the Mandrake and Turbolinux sales went to Asia and (to a lesser extent) Europe, and not all HP hardware was Linux-certified. The Novell program extends to workstations, desktops, and laptops. HP is also taking more steps to address demand in the US market. I bought an HP Pavilion notebook less than a year ago, and all sales people explicitly told me that Linux was not an option.
The Novell program also gives Linux customers another indemnification protection option as an alternative to HP's.
I would really like to know how much of a savings is available to customers who choose Novell Linux Desktop over Windows XP Home Edition. I resold the OEM copy of XP that came with the Pavilion, so if there's more than a US$75 price difference, it would be a win-win situation.
Does anyone today look at the available technologies, and actually choose MySQL over PostgreSQL? I mean, assuming they aren't already using any database, and they don't have any requirements that would force them to MySQL (like a PHB saying, "But I've HEARD of MySQL! What's this Postgres crap?")... why would anyone choose MySQL?
This has come up more than once in previous discussions. Reasons include: web hosts not supporting PostgreSQL, technology unfamiliarity with ORDBMS's relative scarcity of graphical PostgreSQL clients, and (the illusion of) a bigger grassroots support base for MySQL, to name a few.
Anyway, why wasn't parent modded Off Topic?
Amount of water in urine
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Urine is almost entirely water, with a little bit of other substances dissolved in it. I doubt it's ever more than 5% solutes by weight, in 95% water.
Close. As one would expect, it's variable, but urine can be up to about 96% water. When you drink an abundance of water, your kidneys are free to pass more diluted urine. When body water is at a premium, the kidneys conserve water by passing concentrated urine, which looks darker and more opaque. Completely transparent urine is sign that you're drinking enough water.
One change I've noticed is that XML and related technologies are getting bigger and bigger, and it's redefining what it means to be a web application developer. I feel like my skill set is being spread thinner than pâte.
Other than that, it's the same old situation:
1. Employers seeking ridiculously diverse skill sets. What do you want, a software developer with ten years experience, or a GIS specialist with database skills? Pick ONE!
2. Employers requiring experience or expertise in obscure software, but who are unwilling to train. (We're smart; we can learn your industry-specific database front-end for god's sake!)
3. Shops with a depressing preference for Microsoft and IBM languages and software. LAMP jobs and their ilk are comparitively scarce, and therefore highly competitive.
4. HR people who don't know what they want/need. The other day someone posted a "need" for a C# developer with more than five years experience.
So employers are feeling a crunch from the H1 issue. Fine, I'll take that underpaid position! Where is it? We've talked about this before, and I understand that employers are trying to thin the pool by posting stringent (or ideal) requirements, but I think it's getting out of hand and alienating worthy applicants in the process.
As for the relocation bit, I don't buy it. I would welcome the change to relocate almost anywhere in the world for a decent job. I would appreciate a system that makes it easier for employers willing to hire from a remote job pool to find job seekers who are serious about relocating. Monster's system is just too limited.
"why is there such ridicule directed towards those that consider themselves fans? It seems unique even among sci-fi franchises"
The nerds will always attract ridicule from the less well informed (read ignorant)....
That's funny, here I thought it was because it was the franchise most likely to inspire morbidly obese men to don skin-tight clothing and prostheses.
But seriously, I would say that a fairly specific image of the nerdy "trekkie" has been part of our collective consciousness for almost as long as the original series has been a fixture in popular culture. The same can't be said of the fanbase of Star Wars, Doctor Who, Tolkien's works, roleplaying games, or other immersive universes likely to inspire emulation; there just isn't a visual archetype for people to latch on to.
ATI however, does make a HDTV card, but the problem with it is it only does broadcast free to air type HD, which is basically non existant in my area.
Since free-to-air decoders are all we're likely to see for awhile, it's probably best to offload decryption to your set-top receiver.
Therefore, even though pcHDTV has no more stock of the HD-3000, and none are available on eBay, it's worth exploring. HDTV input support may be limited to RF, but one can circumvent this problem with nominal quality loss by using a (semi-)pro HDTV scan converter. Maybe this one is affordable? This one is probably much cheaper, but I don't know anything about it.
Using a scan converter is a sub-optimal solution, but other than being useful gear in general, but it does allow you to get over both the adapter and decoder stumbling blocks.
Quasi-related side note: as a PC-to-TV solution, scan converters have substantially better output than TV-out cards.
Personal skill at art is something that is teachable and can be learned. Objects look the way they do because of where they are in relation to the viewer and what their dimensions are. Similarly light has rules which you can learn if you are to duplicate the illusion of light in a 2d representation like a drawing. Textures also have rules and so on. It's all about drawing what you see and not what you think is there. Sure there are people who have this ability from early on but the rest of us can learn very quickly.
Math is also teachable, but that doesn't mean that everyone has a mathematician inside them.
Your viewpoint seems to be heavily influenced by Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which presumes as a basic tenet that drawing is teachable. Perhaps your mistake is then making the leap that "skill at art" is teachable. While the book offers encouragement to those who (think they) can't draw, it does not address the not-so-encouraging point that spatial intelligence can't really be taught (but maybe simulated). In the visual arts, observation requires more than just the sense of sight, and even the vital criteria of awareness, sensitivity, presence of mind, and technical ability don't inherently translate to the ability to transcode your sensory input into something personal, meaningful, powerful, and coherent; the ability to do so is "skill at art".
A great deal more can said about this, but in essence I must respectfully disagree with your hypothesis.
As for the question of what non-artists need to build consumable graphic art, lots of people have offered useful nuggets of advice, but I would add: learn some basic color theory, and appreciate the value of understatement.
I'm not so sure I agree. Over the past three years I've done a considerable amount of work in the adult web industry (yes, actual work of the non-fun variety). The most professional hosts that allow adult sites aren't exclusively "adult hosts". Actually, many adult hosts are terribly unreliable and/or unprofessional, and few of them offer managed hosting, which is what this person needs.
That said, there are a number of extremely reliable, professional managed hosting companies that attract a lot of adult paysite owners. Rackspace Managed Hosting in Texas is one of them; Netgroup Data Center in Denmark is another. (They don't come cheap.)
But this person seems also to need to know how to implement the software side as well, and I can't say for sure whether even a managed hosting company is going to be able to pick up all the slack. Maybe it's time to call IBM...
For those who don't know, VST (Virtual Studio Technology) is a plug-in architecture engineered by Steinberg Media Technologies. VST plug-ins aren't limited simply to sound filters, but allow users to expand their host applications with elaborate third-party instruments that do things like, say, simulate a grand piano. Many regard it as superior to the competing DirectX-based plug-in system.
It's hard to overestimate the importance of VST instrument support in Linux-based audio applications. Many musicians depend heavily on specific VST instruments, and wouldn't dream of migrating without them. Also, VST allows for so many new possibilities with your host application, it would multiply Wired's potential capabilities tremendously, and would be tantamount to porting dozens of applications to Linux.
Since Windows has a long-standing reputation for latency problems in MIDI timing (especially with budget hardware), I can see how a new version of Wired with VST support could compel some Windows users to switch.
I think the first fractal discovered should be... the Golden Ratio. It may not be derived from the same mathmatics, but the end result is the same
Although fractals are self-similar, a self-similar pattern isn't necessarily fractal. Golden spirals/rectangles/triangles aren't fractal because they can be described using classical geometry.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Doesn't the Time Warner half want to push hi-bandwidth content through to its AOL subscribers? It's much more difficult to do this via 56k. I really don't know much about the merger other than it's not doing so well. But it seems like the two sides aren't really talking.
On the contrary, I think that with the merger AOL Broadband is in some ways redundant. Without entering into the discussion of whether online services themselves are unnecessary/dying, I'd like to point out that Quantum Link, AOL's predecessor, lasted for a very long time with a very small customer base, but was eventually phased out when AOL's next-generation service was firmly entrenched.
Considering some of AOL-TW's related holdings, I believe the next incarnation will be commercial Internet service with special "premium" content coming from web portals, and more content control via bundled adware and the like.
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text.... Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess
Although your concerns about user interface are well-taken, you seem to be thinking about this strictly in terms of hyperlinks as presented by web browsers, which is a rather limited view. Behaviors could be user-defined, hidden, and abstracted in virtually endless ways.
For example, even now double-clicking any word in the Opera web browser activates a context-sensitive menu with such options as Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Search, Translate, etc.
Personally I'd be curious to look at the difference in his brain activity when he is dealing with one of his specialities as opposed to when he is trying to find a spoon.
Well, the CNN article is characteristically light on details, but it says the tests will include MRI and "computerized tomography" (i.e., a PET scan). The PET scan can be used for examining things like flow of blood and oxygen, as well as which parts of the brain are utilized for a given task. Unfortunately, even though PET research can focus on a specific "task", it can't really be used for monitoring tasks that last very long.
I think I would actually be more interested in EEG test results. One can monitor EEG during longer tasks, but I'm especially interested in what kind of "zone" Peek is in when he's consuming information. Certain states of consciousness or "arousal levels" are conducive to super-learning, but are ill-suited to other tasks.
Btw, if you're interested in what Peek looks like, check this page from CSU Fresno's University Journal.
there comes a time when you really can['t] bilk your customers anymore than you already do, or they will go someplace else.
As if the prices weren't high enough, I was pretty well deterred by the fact that bestbuy.com doesn't accept Best Buy gift cards. There's something to keep in mind over the next couple of months...
Yes, you did misinterpret the message. Eric Raymond was a former Perl programmer, and is now a Python programmer. He was saying that Python's native-code-binding facility is superior than Perl's XS, and it would benefit Perl to adopt it.
Thanks for mentioning that. You are absolutely right, and shortly after I posted the message I stuck my foot in my mouth when I saw to my horror that I had gotten it totally backwards and maligned Eric Raymond in the process!! Another casualty of the rush to post while the story is hot.
"Perl XS is acknowledged to be a nasty mess. My guess is the Perl guys would drop it like a hot rock for our [Python's] stuff --
that would be as clear a win for them as co-opting Perl-style regexps was for us." [emphasis added]
Maybe I misinterpreted ESR's intended message, but it would be disappointing if hypercompetition prevented Perl's already-influential regex extensions from exerting a positive influence on other platforms. Raymond seems to imply that the Python team only grudgingly included support for Perl-style regex. I understand that developement teams in similar niches each want to make a big splash in the industry, hopefully Python's great increase in popularity has softened the survivalist attitude that seems to characterize this Raymond quote from Python-Dev. Evolving regex can benefit everyone.
Note to those ready to mod me Troll/Flamebait: I'm not trying to pick on Python, I just happened to be acquainted with this candid quote.
Slashdot Mirror
"Heisenbug as originally defined--and I was there when it happened--are bugs in which clearly the behavior of the system is incorrect, and when you try to look to see why it's incorrect, the problem goes away.
This is a really cool article, but it was especially fun to see the heisenbug mention. Years ago, some fellow CS people and myself conjectured a similar phenomenon that seemed to manifest once in a while, in which a computer malfunction goes away after one "proves" that there's no cause for the error to exist.
Here's a list of heisenbug anecdotes, but note that some of these submissions aren't strictly heisenbugs.
How could that possibly go wrong ?
Put very simply: it
just can't!
For things like the commodore audio chip you can't get exactly the same sounds without the real hardware. But for SNES I think that zsnes + roms + alsa does a pretty faithful rendition of the sound. And if I fiddle with the sound options you could argue that however unfaithful the sound becomes, it is actually superior in quality to that of just an SNES.
That's one thing the SNES did have over the Genesis. The sound quality was vastly superior. I remember the "echoy" cave noises in super mario world, that was something else.
I agree on all counts. I have a soft spot for the SNES's defining sound (Actraiser in stereo really cemented it for me), but the Commodore's SID is just on a whole other level. Occasionally a piece of hardware--be it audio, film, video, or whatever--is released that has such a unique character and artistic potential that it outlives its generation. Personally, I think the SidStation is the quintessence of reborn game audio hardware.
But in the world of synths every piece of gear has its nuances, and even the dookie sound chip in the MD/Genesis could be refabbed with an interface that liberates it and affords it a special niche all its own.
Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops.
Like it or not, in-camera editing is an important, standard capability, without which videographers would oftentimes find themselves at a loss. It may not be the ideal way to edit film and video, but the results can be superb.
Since lots of people are linking to books on Amazon, it seems a good time to mention a useful trick mention in O'Reilly's Amazon Hacks: you can link to Amazon products in a much friendlier way, like so:
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/059600542
Where the numeric parameter is the product's ASIN (which, for most books, is also the ISBN). This hack is also detailed on Oreilly.com.
The Story About Ping
Hmm, looks like O'Reilly used a different cover artist for that one.
If you had read the article, you would've seen this: Most of the Mandrake and Turbolinux sales went to Asia and (to a lesser extent) Europe, and not all HP hardware was Linux-certified. The Novell program extends to workstations, desktops, and laptops. HP is also taking more steps to address demand in the US market. I bought an HP Pavilion notebook less than a year ago, and all sales people explicitly told me that Linux was not an option.
The Novell program also gives Linux customers another indemnification protection option as an alternative to HP's.
I would really like to know how much of a savings is available to customers who choose Novell Linux Desktop over Windows XP Home Edition. I resold the OEM copy of XP that came with the Pavilion, so if there's more than a US$75 price difference, it would be a win-win situation.
Does anyone today look at the available technologies, and actually choose MySQL over PostgreSQL? I mean, assuming they aren't already using any database, and they don't have any requirements that would force them to MySQL (like a PHB saying, "But I've HEARD of MySQL! What's this Postgres crap?")... why would anyone choose MySQL?
This has come up more than once in previous discussions. Reasons include: web hosts not supporting PostgreSQL, technology unfamiliarity with ORDBMS's relative scarcity of graphical PostgreSQL clients, and (the illusion of) a bigger grassroots support base for MySQL, to name a few.
Anyway, why wasn't parent modded Off Topic?
Urine is almost entirely water, with a little bit of other substances dissolved in it. I doubt it's ever more than 5% solutes by weight, in 95% water.
Close. As one would expect, it's variable, but urine can be up to about 96% water. When you drink an abundance of water, your kidneys are free to pass more diluted urine. When body water is at a premium, the kidneys conserve water by passing concentrated urine, which looks darker and more opaque. Completely transparent urine is sign that you're drinking enough water.
One change I've noticed is that XML and related technologies are getting bigger and bigger, and it's redefining what it means to be a web application developer. I feel like my skill set is being spread thinner than pâte.
Other than that, it's the same old situation:
1. Employers seeking ridiculously diverse skill sets. What do you want, a software developer with ten years experience, or a GIS specialist with database skills? Pick ONE!
2. Employers requiring experience or expertise in obscure software, but who are unwilling to train. (We're smart; we can learn your industry-specific database front-end for god's sake!)
3. Shops with a depressing preference for Microsoft and IBM languages and software. LAMP jobs and their ilk are comparitively scarce, and therefore highly competitive.
4. HR people who don't know what they want/need. The other day someone posted a "need" for a C# developer with more than five years experience.
So employers are feeling a crunch from the H1 issue. Fine, I'll take that underpaid position! Where is it? We've talked about this before, and I understand that employers are trying to thin the pool by posting stringent (or ideal) requirements, but I think it's getting out of hand and alienating worthy applicants in the process.
As for the relocation bit, I don't buy it. I would welcome the change to relocate almost anywhere in the world for a decent job. I would appreciate a system that makes it easier for employers willing to hire from a remote job pool to find job seekers who are serious about relocating. Monster's system is just too limited.
Okay, I'll bite. From what film is this?
"why is there such ridicule directed towards those that consider themselves fans? It seems unique even among sci-fi franchises"
The nerds will always attract ridicule from the less well informed (read ignorant)....
That's funny, here I thought it was because it was the franchise most likely to inspire morbidly obese men to don skin-tight clothing and prostheses.
But seriously, I would say that a fairly specific image of the nerdy "trekkie" has been part of our collective consciousness for almost as long as the original series has been a fixture in popular culture. The same can't be said of the fanbase of Star Wars, Doctor Who, Tolkien's works, roleplaying games, or other immersive universes likely to inspire emulation; there just isn't a visual archetype for people to latch on to.
ATI however, does make a HDTV card, but the problem with it is it only does broadcast free to air type HD, which is basically non existant in my area.
Since free-to-air decoders are all we're likely to see for awhile, it's probably best to offload decryption to your set-top receiver.
Therefore, even though pcHDTV has no more stock of the HD-3000, and none are available on eBay, it's worth exploring. HDTV input support may be limited to RF, but one can circumvent this problem with nominal quality loss by using a (semi-)pro HDTV scan converter. Maybe this one is affordable? This one is probably much cheaper, but I don't know anything about it.
Using a scan converter is a sub-optimal solution, but other than being useful gear in general, but it does allow you to get over both the adapter and decoder stumbling blocks.
Quasi-related side note: as a PC-to-TV solution, scan converters have substantially better output than TV-out cards.
That's funny, I thought Microsoft had indemnified its customers against IP threats?
That's true, they did. Which means that even if Microsoft sues itself, I'll be in the clear!
Personal skill at art is something that is teachable and can be learned. Objects look the way they do because of where they are in relation to the viewer and what their dimensions are. Similarly light has rules which you can learn if you are to duplicate the illusion of light in a 2d representation like a drawing. Textures also have rules and so on. It's all about drawing what you see and not what you think is there. Sure there are people who have this ability from early on but the rest of us can learn very quickly.
Math is also teachable, but that doesn't mean that everyone has a mathematician inside them.
Your viewpoint seems to be heavily influenced by Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which presumes as a basic tenet that drawing is teachable. Perhaps your mistake is then making the leap that "skill at art" is teachable. While the book offers encouragement to those who (think they) can't draw, it does not address the not-so-encouraging point that spatial intelligence can't really be taught (but maybe simulated). In the visual arts, observation requires more than just the sense of sight, and even the vital criteria of awareness, sensitivity, presence of mind, and technical ability don't inherently translate to the ability to transcode your sensory input into something personal, meaningful, powerful, and coherent; the ability to do so is "skill at art".
A great deal more can said about this, but in essence I must respectfully disagree with your hypothesis.
As for the question of what non-artists need to build consumable graphic art, lots of people have offered useful nuggets of advice, but I would add: learn some basic color theory, and appreciate the value of understatement.
I'm not so sure I agree. Over the past three years I've done a considerable amount of work in the adult web industry (yes, actual work of the non-fun variety). The most professional hosts that allow adult sites aren't exclusively "adult hosts". Actually, many adult hosts are terribly unreliable and/or unprofessional, and few of them offer managed hosting, which is what this person needs.
That said, there are a number of extremely reliable, professional managed hosting companies that attract a lot of adult paysite owners. Rackspace Managed Hosting in Texas is one of them; Netgroup Data Center in Denmark is another. (They don't come cheap.)
But this person seems also to need to know how to implement the software side as well, and I can't say for sure whether even a managed hosting company is going to be able to pick up all the slack. Maybe it's time to call IBM...
For those who don't know, VST (Virtual Studio Technology) is a plug-in architecture engineered by Steinberg Media Technologies. VST plug-ins aren't limited simply to sound filters, but allow users to expand their host applications with elaborate third-party instruments that do things like, say, simulate a grand piano. Many regard it as superior to the competing DirectX-based plug-in system.
It's hard to overestimate the importance of VST instrument support in Linux-based audio applications. Many musicians depend heavily on specific VST instruments, and wouldn't dream of migrating without them. Also, VST allows for so many new possibilities with your host application, it would multiply Wired's potential capabilities tremendously, and would be tantamount to porting dozens of applications to Linux.
Since Windows has a long-standing reputation for latency problems in MIDI timing (especially with budget hardware), I can see how a new version of Wired with VST support could compel some Windows users to switch.
I think the first fractal discovered should be... the Golden Ratio. It may not be derived from the same mathmatics, but the end result is the same
Although fractals are self-similar, a self-similar pattern isn't necessarily fractal. Golden spirals/rectangles/triangles aren't fractal because they can be described using classical geometry.
For a detailed breakdown of such distinctions, see Manfred Schroeder's Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Doesn't the Time Warner half want to push hi-bandwidth content through to its AOL subscribers? It's much more difficult to do this via 56k. I really don't know much about the merger other than it's not doing so well. But it seems like the two sides aren't really talking.
On the contrary, I think that with the merger AOL Broadband is in some ways redundant. Without entering into the discussion of whether online services themselves are unnecessary/dying, I'd like to point out that Quantum Link, AOL's predecessor, lasted for a very long time with a very small customer base, but was eventually phased out when AOL's next-generation service was firmly entrenched.
Considering some of AOL-TW's related holdings, I believe the next incarnation will be commercial Internet service with special "premium" content coming from web portals, and more content control via bundled adware and the like.
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text ....
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess
Although your concerns about user interface are well-taken, you seem to be thinking about this strictly in terms of hyperlinks as presented by web browsers, which is a rather limited view. Behaviors could be user-defined, hidden, and abstracted in virtually endless ways.
For example, even now double-clicking any word in the Opera web browser activates a context-sensitive menu with such options as Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Search, Translate, etc.
Personally I'd be curious to look at the difference in his brain activity when he is dealing with one of his specialities as opposed to when he is trying to find a spoon.
Well, the CNN article is characteristically light on details, but it says the tests will include MRI and "computerized tomography" (i.e., a PET scan). The PET scan can be used for examining things like flow of blood and oxygen, as well as which parts of the brain are utilized for a given task. Unfortunately, even though PET research can focus on a specific "task", it can't really be used for monitoring tasks that last very long.
I think I would actually be more interested in EEG test results. One can monitor EEG during longer tasks, but I'm especially interested in what kind of "zone" Peek is in when he's consuming information. Certain states of consciousness or "arousal levels" are conducive to super-learning, but are ill-suited to other tasks.
Btw, if you're interested in what Peek looks like, check this page from CSU Fresno's University Journal.
Watch out, the main link consistently crashed Firefox 1.0/win32 (and PR-1). Opera 7 works ok.
there comes a time when you really can['t] bilk your customers anymore than you already do, or they will go someplace else.
As if the prices weren't high enough, I was pretty well deterred by the fact that bestbuy.com doesn't accept Best Buy gift cards. There's something to keep in mind over the next couple of months...
Yes, you did misinterpret the message. Eric Raymond was a former Perl programmer, and is now a Python programmer. He was saying that Python's native-code-binding facility is superior than Perl's XS, and it would benefit Perl to adopt it.
Thanks for mentioning that. You are absolutely right, and shortly after I posted the message I stuck my foot in my mouth when I saw to my horror that I had gotten it totally backwards and maligned Eric Raymond in the process!! Another casualty of the rush to post while the story is hot.
Note to those ready to mod me Troll/Flamebait: I'm not trying to pick on Python, I just happened to be acquainted with this candid quote.