I remember those days well. I had home dial-up at 2400 baud, but it was metered and expensive, and I could only afford 20 hours a month.
Then I discovered that my old university's library catalog had a BBS dial-in interface for anybody with a valid student number (easily skimmed from numerous sources on campus). Buried in the catalog system was a primitive gateway to the library's gopher pages, and while it wouldn't let you enter an arbitrary URI, I was able to find the right sequence of links to me to any gopher site on the net.
Then I found an http-gopher gateway that gave me primitive access to the web. From there I found an nttp-http gateway that gave me access to USENET, including all the binary groups. Jackpot!
I've been wondering how they'd approach this technically
Ditto. A very simple approach would be to do it using DNS. The ISPs just have to create false DNS records for the banned domains and that would prevent most users from accessing them. There are ways around it, but I can't say that they're a lot easier than using one of the already-mentioned proxy or anonymizing services.
How bout this then. Hide advanced functions by default. Allow advanced users to toggle this if they want.
For less advanced users provide a google-like search function which will display possible matches, allow the user to access the function with a click, and give them the option of permanantly adding it to the menu/toolbar.
Simple UI. No hunting through menus and tabs to find what you want. UI evolves as user learns new functions.
It's like the old adage: "Linux is only free if your time isn't worth anything."
I don't know if Windows MCE can do this, but MythTV has this neat playback feature where you can watch shows with the audio and video sped up, but the audio stays at a normal tone instead of sounding like chipmunks (I guess it reduces the pauses between speech). It's great for slower-moving sporting events.
Between that and auto-skipping commercials, I figure my Myth system has saved me far more time than it's initial set-up cost me. Something to consider.
I agree with mismanaged, but if by "force fed" you are suggesting poor content, then I have to take issue with that. For my money, the CBC has produced some excellent excellent series in recent years (as well as distributed some fine British shows). However they've also screwed up their scheduling and all too often cancelled them.
The problem with the CBC is that they focus so much on sports and specialty programming, that the series they air get squeezed in like an afterthought. Only the CBC would take a hit show called "Monday Report" and move it to a different day for its second season.
We had the suits from a major client fly in for a visit, and to help impress them, I was asked to set up an LCD monitor in the server room with lots of flashy bling-bling monitoring software running. After playing around with a few packages, and finding nothing that came close - I had a cunning idea. I installed XMMS and a bunch of visualisation plugins, resulting in a computer that did nothing but "monitor" Avril Lavigne music all day. It looked very impressive, and nobody even noticed that its ethernet cable wasn't connected to anything.
How many times has your favorite WYSIWYG editor added a page to your report that makes it go over the page limit, minutes before a critical submission deadline?
Hold it, are you saying it is easy to enforce page limits in Latex? I would love to know how. I had to abandon Latex years ago because of that very problem. For example, preparing a press release that HAS to fit on a single page because it is going out by fax to 120 companies, or doing a 12-page document that has 12 sections, each of which HAS to fit entirely on its own page.
Doing this in WYSIWYG is relatively quick and easy - adjust fonts, adjust leading, edit some text - bang I'm done. In Latex it was a nightmare of slow and tedious tweaking, running and rerunning latex over and over and over until I finally got something that both fit and looked good doing it.
rsync is nice - I use it all the time - but it's painfully slow and stupid when it comes to dealing with moved or renamed files and directories. Try renaming a 650MB iso, and then watch rsync blindly recopy the file across the network even though it already exists at both ends.
Unison borrows from the rsync algorithms, but is much more intelligent, can be run GUI or console, and is cross-platform. I highly recommend it.
Yes of course it would. In any test you care to use and at any reasonable p value. It would be significant by many orders of magnitude.
However, if you really wanted to challenge my math, you should have pointed out that the probabilty of a successful guess over the course of the 25 cards is not 0.2 because it is sampling without replacement. There are 25 cards with five sets of five patterns, which is different from, say, rolling a five-sided dice 25 times. With the cards, each pattern must appear five times, no more, no less, and the guesser can use that information to improve their overall chances. This didn't occur to me till the next day.
This reduces the sample space from 5^25 down to 25!/(5!^5). That's a reduction of around 480. The probability doesn't change by that much however, unless we're talking about getting all 25 correct. In the range of 13 hits out of 25 it's probably around a factor of 20 (the combinatorics get pretty nasty - I expect it would be easier to just code up a Monte Carlo simulation).
With three runs of 25, everything gets cubed. So in the end there's around four orders of magnitude drop in the odds. Combine that with a class size of around 50, and the billion-to-one is down to around 2500 to 1. And if the OP was stretching the truth a little, and considering that there may be several Slashdot posters who have run similar experiments, the p-value could be down to something that could be dismissed as dumb luck.
Umm, the odds against any one person scoring 36 or better out of 75, where random chance dictates 20% success, is around 20 million to one. That's worst case, as the kid allegedly scored between 12-15 on three runs. If we assume he averaged 13, then the odds are well over a billion to one. The size of the class wasn't given, but this would be a statistically significant result regardless.
Just because some NFL timekeeper up in a booth somewhere stops a clock doesn't stop time from happening. Players use that "non-playing" time to catch their breath, recover from injury, take up position, adjust their equipment, plan the next play, and get themselves psyched, while coaches use the time to plan, analyse, communicate, etc. The time doesn't stop contributing to the game just because some arbitrary timekeeping convention calls for a countdown clock to be paused occasionally.
And it's not as if this convention is terribly logical or consistant. How does it go? the clock stops on an incomplete pass or if the ball goes out of play but not otherwise, except after the two minute warning. Or is it the other way around? Either way, it's arbitrary nonsense. Real time is the only fair measuring stick.
A goal in soccer is much harder to obtain than a touchdown in American football.
Interestingly enough, no. On average, in one hour of soccer (real time) you are likely to see just as many goals as you are likely to see touchdowns in one hour of American football (real time). That's including normal stoppages, but excluding the breaks between halves/quarters. The numbers are astonishingly close, or at least they were that last time I ran them, which admittedly was many years ago.
The reason there is more scoring in American football is that the games last much longer.
I use Windows once in a blue moon. The last time was last week. New landlady's Win 2K, she turned it on, we waited for it to finish booting, she closed her MS chat client, I clicked on control panel, and it froze. I waited several minutes, gave it the three finger salute, got a blue screen and it was totally hung. Had to hard reset.
Not XP I admit, but it's a pretty sad state of affairs when control panel hangs a freshly booted system.
The high-quality quicktime version plays fine for me in mplayer under Gentoo, and the download was very fast. The codec is reported as 'Sorenson Video 3' Maybe you just have older software.
I agree, but to be fair, Xubuntu is pretty new to the scene, and doesn't even have its own install CD yet. Heck, I'd never heard of it till now, and just three or four months ago I was seriously researching lightweight distros, and in particular looking for an ubuntu-based one.
I don't think it's fair to compare the speed of a fresh install of Gentoo with an old, clogged-up copy of XP.
I think it's perfectly fair. I've worked with old linux systems, and haven't seen a one that ever got clogged and slow with age. If that's a characteristic of Windows, then it should be taken into account.
Sorry, but any OS that needs to be reinstalled every few years just to keep it responsive, has serious problems.
I was looking to pick up a cheap notebook last year, and my brother-in-law said I could have his old 400MHz Celeron Toshiba (one of the first generation with DVD). He had long since retired it, as Windows was running too slow and the computer tech he took it to said it was too outdated and couldn't be used for anything.
I put Gentoo and fluxbox on it (cross-compiling the binaries on my desktop - I am not a moron), opera, abiword, gnumeric, mplayer, and even the MythTV frontend, so I can watch shows in bed. It runs really quite snappy, and seems more responsive than my Dad's 1.2GHz celeron running XP.
My brother-in-law is quite suprised that I've been able to breath new life into a computer he was told was a junker. He meanwhile has a 1GHz PIII notebook that he is thinking of again replacing because Windows runs too slow.
That's right: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, not even information
To clarify, this is believed to be true locally, but not necessarily globally. As spacetime bends, so too do the rules, and with certain exotic dynamic spacetimes it is in principle possible to cover vast distances faster than light, without ever actually travelling faster than light to a local observer.
And of course this all assumes the belief that reality must always follow the laws of science. I can assert that I am rational, but is there really any reason to believe that reality itself must always be rational too? That seems like wishful anthropomorphising to me.
Actually, no he didn't. That was a widely repeated misquote. What Joss said to the reporter was that the movie provided closure to the main story arcs that were introduced in the series. The reporter then sensationaly played it up as if Joss was finished the Firefly 'verse. Joss has always maintained that he has plenty more stories to tell in 'verse and will jump at any opportunity to do so.
Interesting. I see that's kind of a newer feature, which may explain why I didn't see it when I read through the ipod owners manual a while back. Thanks for the info.
I can see the appeal of the ipod, it's a quality device, but I still like my Muvo. It does exactly what I need for music playback (and I love the voice recording and built-in USB thumb drive).
Different strokes for different folks, but for my purposes, the ipod is functionally useless. I use my mp3 player (a Creative Muvo) primarily for listening to freshly downloaded music that I've never heard before. So it's an absolute must that I be able to quickly and easily delete songs I don't like while listening to them (and without having to look at the device). That's why I got the Muvo.
My rule of thumb is: new unproven music on the Muvo, good music on my computer, while the very best gets burned to CD for my car. The core idea is that I don't want the music on my computer to be a distraction when I'm working. So nothing so bad I have to stop work and skip past or delete a tune. Screening new music is best done when I'm out and about and away from my computer, and so I want an mp3 player that lets me do that.
This approach, and the Muvo, work very well for me, so I'm posting this message in case there are others who might like to do the same.
Odd thing is that the submitter was simply quoting the original article, yet the article had the correct spelling. I can excuse a submitter for not being able to read and not being able to spell - I don't expect such skills on slashdot. But not being able to handle a simple copy and paste? Come on!
Slashdot Mirror
I remember those days well. I had home dial-up at 2400 baud, but it was metered and expensive, and I could only afford 20 hours a month.
Then I discovered that my old university's library catalog had a BBS dial-in interface for anybody with a valid student number (easily skimmed from numerous sources on campus). Buried in the catalog system was a primitive gateway to the library's gopher pages, and while it wouldn't let you enter an arbitrary URI, I was able to find the right sequence of links to me to any gopher site on the net.
Then I found an http-gopher gateway that gave me primitive access to the web. From there I found an nttp-http gateway that gave me access to USENET, including all the binary groups. Jackpot!
Man, I downloaded a lot of free porn that summer.
How bout this then. Hide advanced functions by default. Allow advanced users to toggle this if they want.
For less advanced users provide a google-like search function which will display possible matches, allow the user to access the function with a click, and give them the option of permanantly adding it to the menu/toolbar.
Simple UI. No hunting through menus and tabs to find what you want. UI evolves as user learns new functions.
I don't know if Windows MCE can do this, but MythTV has this neat playback feature where you can watch shows with the audio and video sped up, but the audio stays at a normal tone instead of sounding like chipmunks (I guess it reduces the pauses between speech). It's great for slower-moving sporting events.
Between that and auto-skipping commercials, I figure my Myth system has saved me far more time than it's initial set-up cost me. Something to consider.
I agree with mismanaged, but if by "force fed" you are suggesting poor content, then I have to take issue with that. For my money, the CBC has produced some excellent excellent series in recent years (as well as distributed some fine British shows). However they've also screwed up their scheduling and all too often cancelled them.
The problem with the CBC is that they focus so much on sports and specialty programming, that the series they air get squeezed in like an afterthought. Only the CBC would take a hit show called "Monday Report" and move it to a different day for its second season.
We had the suits from a major client fly in for a visit, and to help impress them, I was asked to set up an LCD monitor in the server room with lots of flashy bling-bling monitoring software running. After playing around with a few packages, and finding nothing that came close - I had a cunning idea. I installed XMMS and a bunch of visualisation plugins, resulting in a computer that did nothing but "monitor" Avril Lavigne music all day. It looked very impressive, and nobody even noticed that its ethernet cable wasn't connected to anything.
Hold it, are you saying it is easy to enforce page limits in Latex? I would love to know how. I had to abandon Latex years ago because of that very problem. For example, preparing a press release that HAS to fit on a single page because it is going out by fax to 120 companies, or doing a 12-page document that has 12 sections, each of which HAS to fit entirely on its own page.
Doing this in WYSIWYG is relatively quick and easy - adjust fonts, adjust leading, edit some text - bang I'm done. In Latex it was a nightmare of slow and tedious tweaking, running and rerunning latex over and over and over until I finally got something that both fit and looked good doing it.
rsync is nice - I use it all the time - but it's painfully slow and stupid when it comes to dealing with moved or renamed files and directories. Try renaming a 650MB iso, and then watch rsync blindly recopy the file across the network even though it already exists at both ends.
Unison borrows from the rsync algorithms, but is much more intelligent, can be run GUI or console, and is cross-platform. I highly recommend it.
I like this tossing a salad idea as punishment. It might help the kid turn over a new leaf. (ducks)
However, if you really wanted to challenge my math, you should have pointed out that the probabilty of a successful guess over the course of the 25 cards is not 0.2 because it is sampling without replacement. There are 25 cards with five sets of five patterns, which is different from, say, rolling a five-sided dice 25 times. With the cards, each pattern must appear five times, no more, no less, and the guesser can use that information to improve their overall chances. This didn't occur to me till the next day.
This reduces the sample space from 5^25 down to 25!/(5!^5). That's a reduction of around 480. The probability doesn't change by that much however, unless we're talking about getting all 25 correct. In the range of 13 hits out of 25 it's probably around a factor of 20 (the combinatorics get pretty nasty - I expect it would be easier to just code up a Monte Carlo simulation).
With three runs of 25, everything gets cubed. So in the end there's around four orders of magnitude drop in the odds. Combine that with a class size of around 50, and the billion-to-one is down to around 2500 to 1. And if the OP was stretching the truth a little, and considering that there may be several Slashdot posters who have run similar experiments, the p-value could be down to something that could be dismissed as dumb luck.
Or not.
Umm, the odds against any one person scoring 36 or better out of 75, where random chance dictates 20% success, is around 20 million to one. That's worst case, as the kid allegedly scored between 12-15 on three runs. If we assume he averaged 13, then the odds are well over a billion to one. The size of the class wasn't given, but this would be a statistically significant result regardless.
And it's not as if this convention is terribly logical or consistant. How does it go? the clock stops on an incomplete pass or if the ball goes out of play but not otherwise, except after the two minute warning. Or is it the other way around? Either way, it's arbitrary nonsense. Real time is the only fair measuring stick.
The reason there is more scoring in American football is that the games last much longer.
I use Windows once in a blue moon. The last time was last week. New landlady's Win 2K, she turned it on, we waited for it to finish booting, she closed her MS chat client, I clicked on control panel, and it froze. I waited several minutes, gave it the three finger salute, got a blue screen and it was totally hung. Had to hard reset.
Not XP I admit, but it's a pretty sad state of affairs when control panel hangs a freshly booted system.
4.5) When I can watch it on linux on my 1920x1280 monitor :-)
The high-quality quicktime version plays fine for me in mplayer under Gentoo, and the download was very fast. The codec is reported as 'Sorenson Video 3' Maybe you just have older software.
I agree, but to be fair, Xubuntu is pretty new to the scene, and doesn't even have its own install CD yet. Heck, I'd never heard of it till now, and just three or four months ago I was seriously researching lightweight distros, and in particular looking for an ubuntu-based one.
Sorry, but any OS that needs to be reinstalled every few years just to keep it responsive, has serious problems.
I put Gentoo and fluxbox on it (cross-compiling the binaries on my desktop - I am not a moron), opera, abiword, gnumeric, mplayer, and even the MythTV frontend, so I can watch shows in bed. It runs really quite snappy, and seems more responsive than my Dad's 1.2GHz celeron running XP.
My brother-in-law is quite suprised that I've been able to breath new life into a computer he was told was a junker. He meanwhile has a 1GHz PIII notebook that he is thinking of again replacing because Windows runs too slow.
And of course this all assumes the belief that reality must always follow the laws of science. I can assert that I am rational, but is there really any reason to believe that reality itself must always be rational too? That seems like wishful anthropomorphising to me.
Actually, no he didn't. That was a widely repeated misquote. What Joss said to the reporter was that the movie provided closure to the main story arcs that were introduced in the series. The reporter then sensationaly played it up as if Joss was finished the Firefly 'verse. Joss has always maintained that he has plenty more stories to tell in 'verse and will jump at any opportunity to do so.
Sure, but these particular movies are only 140K, 200K, and 300K, which is smaller than many screenshots.
I can see the appeal of the ipod, it's a quality device, but I still like my Muvo. It does exactly what I need for music playback (and I love the voice recording and built-in USB thumb drive).
Different strokes for different folks, but for my purposes, the ipod is functionally useless. I use my mp3 player (a Creative Muvo) primarily for listening to freshly downloaded music that I've never heard before. So it's an absolute must that I be able to quickly and easily delete songs I don't like while listening to them (and without having to look at the device). That's why I got the Muvo.
My rule of thumb is: new unproven music on the Muvo, good music on my computer, while the very best gets burned to CD for my car. The core idea is that I don't want the music on my computer to be a distraction when I'm working. So nothing so bad I have to stop work and skip past or delete a tune. Screening new music is best done when I'm out and about and away from my computer, and so I want an mp3 player that lets me do that.
This approach, and the Muvo, work very well for me, so I'm posting this message in case there are others who might like to do the same.
Odd thing is that the submitter was simply quoting the original article, yet the article had the correct spelling. I can excuse a submitter for not being able to read and not being able to spell - I don't expect such skills on slashdot. But not being able to handle a simple copy and paste? Come on!