Cool stuff. Emphasis here was on the Exploding aspect. The Photography was a bit of an afterthought - otherwise they'd have put a sheet below & behind the objects!
I just went through the same thing. I bought a 12" Powerbook. My first Mac ever.
I switched from a 12" Sony Vaio (running Win2K). The form factor and weight are the same. But the Powerbook has a DVD and CD-RW drive combo built-in, as well as 802.11g, Firewire, and I also use the built-in bluetooth to sync with my Palm Tungsten. And of course, it runs UNIX with a decent GUI on top.
I've had the machine a little over a week. I'm hooked.
Agreed. The blog is wrong. In a former life I built products to do web analysis based on HTTP packet sniffing. Windows machines do a lot of stupid things at the network level but they DON'T do this.
Just to re-verify, I tested it after reading the article. Nope, IE plays by the rules here.
Just like you have reverb, chorus and delay in your audio editor, you can have Tri-X, T-MAX, Agfa PAN APX etc in your photo editor. One example is Convert to B/W Pro.
From looking at the graphs, it's clear that Kazaa and Gnutella are alive and well at Boulder. Do I read the top graph correctly that the bulk of the traffic is "other" or are those numbers supposed to be the totals?
> Did you tape the police arresting an opposition leader? Sorry, that content is not authorized by the Copright Central Authority, and will be deleted at once.
CNN needs to have an 'upload video' submission box on their web site. In fact, every news outlet should. If only it were easier to dump video directly from the Wal*Mart-bought camcorders into something that could be encoded/compressed and uploaded quickly. I don't think we're there yet.
The wired article doesn't make it clear if all P2P activity is banned or just movies and music. I suspect from an administrative standpoint they'll shut down the whole P2P thing rather than check to see what is being shared, and if you have legal right to distribute it (e.g. photos from last weekend's kegger).
It also doesn't say if intranet P2P is OK, or if they are just forbidding P2P to/from outside the university.
Of course the USC network admins know this directive is foolish. File sharing happens via IRC, FTP, HTTP, IM and many other forms, straight client-client as well as through various tunnels and gateways between P2P networks. It's not likely that they want to become police, either.
This directive serves the university only two ways (ok maybe three).
1) It gets the RIAA off their backs for a while.
2) It keeps the clueless from using P2P networks - only the clueful will know how to still share files at will, and they are less likely to get caught and spell trouble for the University.
3) It reduces the load on their network.
All three are temporary gains but they must think that's better than nothing. Once again we see somebody attacking the symptom (P2P) rather than the problem (stealing copyrighted works).
Are you sure you want to go down this line of reasoning? You are trying to use an objective measure to validate a subjective thing.
When one hears a song for the first time, most people don't suspend judgement until they can research how much studying the performer has done before they decide if they like the song or not.
[Do you not use a software package unless you know it was coded in machine code with object-oriented design, because that's the only thing that meets your subjective qualifications for a good software engineer? Should they also make sure not to re-use any code that others have developed?]
All means of expression are valid. Some means might not appeal to you for many reasons. You may be looking for a specific kind of talent (e.g. years of study). So be it; that's your right, but it doesn't make the expression less valid.
It's art. Art is personal. Art makes you think. it makes you happy, and it makes you mad.
To the RIAA it's also product. Product is commercial. Product makes you money.
Complain about the commercial quality of the product but don't complain about the "talent" of the performer. They are different things.
Unlikely that the current software under development can detect speech, nor that it would even try to. Speech recognition technologies would be a better way to sample speech.
Anyway, aside from the telephone, it's not often that spoken expressions like you mentioned are recorded, encoded and sent to the world where the gummint can 'spy' on your words.
At least not yet. Why not start a conspiracy theory that the US Government is pushing for widespread adoption of broadband and wireless technologies so that more people will buy webcams and microphones to carry around with them everywhere they go, broadcasting everything they see, so that The Man can keep an eye on you?
(reminds me of an old SF novel, but I can't remember which one.)
I'd love to hear the mix. Somebody must have caught the Solid Steel show and taped it.
Obviously somebody did, and put it on a CD for Dave Marsh and probably others. But for those of us not yet of the music legend that he is (said with all reverence), we have to snarf a bootleg copy from our local indie record shop or we search online.
My thinking as well. Last spring I did the research on a new PC, building from scratch vs. buying retail. I figured (after about a day of research) that I could save $200 if I built it myself.. assuming my time was worth nothing. I bought retail.
Who actually originated that saying? I've found it on a bunch of web sites, attributed to different people, but can't find the definitive quote or author.
> The first big worm ever (the morris worm) was for *NIX.
This may be true but I hope it's not an attempt to illustrate a difference between Windows and Unix. In 1988 when Morris hit, Windows didn't know what TCP/IP was. (no kids, I'm not making this up)
I agree that you don't get security from one thing. The Morris worm provided some very significant lessons, which the software development community has been free to ignore since:
1. A networked world has people as well as errant services that will abuse the network. Don't enable services and features out of the box; allow people to decide what services they want to run given the risk involved.
2. Check your input string lengths.
3. Encourage "good" passwords.
4. Provide logging and audit tools, so people can know when something changes, and how it changed.
Alas, the software development community still doesn't get it -- not fully anyway. There's still a flight to features mindset, vs. building for quality. This is not entirely the fault of the software development community -- end users want features, and it's traditionally been hard to sell security as a feature.
In the 70's it was widely reported that 60% of all software engineering costs went into maintenance efforts. In the 90's the figure had gone to 85%. I suspect it's even higher now because of networked security issues.
I have one that has three grooves on one side. Can't remember the LP's title since it's boxed up someplace, but the artists were Gion Giorno, William S Burroughs and Laurie Anderson, each who had their own 'groove'. You never knew what you'd be listening to when you put the disc on.
I'd like to see this on one of the monster hotels in Las Vegas. This seems like something they'd even enjoy hosting. Treasure Island faces a lot of the strip.. hmm...
The accounts are also interesting when you note the times it has taken to crunch a million numbers. John Walker took three years on his Sun 3. 4-5 years later it took two months on the hardware available at the time. According to the milestone reports on the 196 page, it takes about a week now (on a uniprocessor P4 @ 1.8Ghz).
The code may be different but its the order of magnitude difference in the run times that's significant.
This effort is interesting for its hack value, but it seems to me that 196 isn't special so much as a "Lychrel" Number but as an input to the formula. That is, a prime number clearly has a unique and specific mathematical property, but 196 is just.. 196.
I propose a different formula. Take a number, multiply it by the reverse of itself (instead of adding it) and then, oh, subtract the original number plus its reverse, and repeat until you have, hmm... the length of any substring of the resulting digits that are numerically ascending or adjacently equivalent is a prime number. Bonus points if there is more than once sequence in the result that is a prime number.
This is a made-up-while-typing-in-the-slashdot-comment-box problem, yet you could have whole web sites dedicated to the search for these 'special' numbers. But are they really 'special' numbers?
BTW, I searched the site and Google but didn't find any indication of *why* the name Lychrel was chosen, only the blackboard entry where they were first named.
Yes it's been used before, but this grasroots buzz thang got into a lot of people's heads recently with the publication of the book _The Tipping Point_. The book described, in a number of ways, how big changes come from a series of small events. One of the examples was about buzz around shoes - the inner-city kids wanted 'em because they were cheap (because nobody else wanted them); because so many kidz bought 'em they became kinda hip; fashion designers saw them in clubs/bars and started dresing their models in them; magazine editors saw the models on runways and in ads, and started doing stories on them, etc.
I'm giving the simplistic version. _The Tipping Point_ is not just about marketing buzz, but the book did well enough that I think a lot of marketers want to use the "tipping point" principles for their product -- and that starts with buzz creation. If it works, expect to see more of it.
I'm only replying to this because it's marked as informative, even though there's a bunch of errors in it. The only one I'll point out is:
Discussing 'bool':
> a 1-byte long int, that allows a 1-byte value
> to be stored (technicaly this value could be
> 0 to 9, I'm not sure if negatives are allowed).
I don't know what you mean by "0 to 9" but any 8-bit storage type can hold eight bits. The values can be 0-255 if one of the bits is not used as a sign bit, otherwise -127 to 127 is allowed.
Type 'bool' is not in the original K&R C, by the way. Waaaaay back before ANSI C, people knew that 'char' meant '8 bits' and that was that - not that it held a printable character. These days, the kidz are overloading the *semantics* of the type with the *storage size* of the type. It's kinda like the purist "HTML as document structure" vs the "HTML as document layout" folks, but I digress.
> The other, not-as-clean-but-quick-and-simple,
> solution is to bump the variable holding the
> time to a signed long int.
That's not a solution at all. There's a reason time_t is *signed*. It's so that dates before 1970 can be represented.
Slashdot Mirror
Omitting Bill Joy over some of these characters was a mistake (Eric Raymond? Riighht) but overall it was a good list.
Cool stuff. Emphasis here was on the Exploding aspect. The Photography was a bit of an afterthought - otherwise they'd have put a sheet below & behind the objects!
No idea on the graphics, I'm not a game player so my demands are pretty light.
I just went through the same thing. I bought a 12" Powerbook. My first Mac ever.
I switched from a 12" Sony Vaio (running Win2K). The form factor and weight are the same. But the Powerbook has a DVD and CD-RW drive combo built-in, as well as 802.11g, Firewire, and I also use the built-in bluetooth to sync with my Palm Tungsten. And of course, it runs UNIX with a decent GUI on top.
I've had the machine a little over a week. I'm hooked.
Agreed. The blog is wrong. In a former life I built products to do web analysis based on HTTP packet sniffing. Windows machines do a lot of stupid things at the network level but they DON'T do this.
Just to re-verify, I tested it after reading the article. Nope, IE plays by the rules here.
Just like you have reverb, chorus and delay in your audio editor, you can have Tri-X, T-MAX, Agfa PAN APX etc in your photo editor. One example is Convert to B/W Pro.
Great graphs, and a nice plug for FlowScan
From looking at the graphs, it's clear that Kazaa and Gnutella are alive and well at Boulder. Do I read the top graph correctly that the bulk of the traffic is "other" or are those numbers supposed to be the totals?
> Did you tape the police arresting an opposition leader? Sorry, that content is not authorized by the Copright Central Authority, and will be deleted at once.
CNN needs to have an 'upload video' submission box on their web site. In fact, every news outlet should. If only it were easier to dump video directly from the Wal*Mart-bought camcorders into something that could be encoded/compressed and uploaded quickly. I don't think we're there yet.
The wired article doesn't make it clear if all P2P activity is banned or just movies and music. I suspect from an administrative standpoint they'll shut down the whole P2P thing rather than check to see what is being shared, and if you have legal right to distribute it (e.g. photos from last weekend's kegger).
It also doesn't say if intranet P2P is OK, or if they are just forbidding P2P to/from outside the university.
Of course the USC network admins know this directive is foolish. File sharing happens via IRC, FTP, HTTP, IM and many other forms, straight client-client as well as through various tunnels and gateways between P2P networks. It's not likely that they want to become police, either.
This directive serves the university only two ways (ok maybe three).
1) It gets the RIAA off their backs for a while.
2) It keeps the clueless from using P2P networks - only the clueful will know how to still share files at will, and they are less likely to get caught and spell trouble for the University.
3) It reduces the load on their network.
All three are temporary gains but they must think that's better than nothing. Once again we see somebody attacking the symptom (P2P) rather than the problem (stealing copyrighted works).
Are you sure you want to go down this line of reasoning? You are trying to use an objective measure to validate a subjective thing.
When one hears a song for the first time, most people don't suspend judgement until they can research how much studying the performer has done before they decide if they like the song or not.
[Do you not use a software package unless you know it was coded in machine code with object-oriented design, because that's the only thing that meets your subjective qualifications for a good software engineer? Should they also make sure not to re-use any code that others have developed?]
All means of expression are valid. Some means might not appeal to you for many reasons. You may be looking for a specific kind of talent (e.g. years of study). So be it; that's your right, but it doesn't make the expression less valid.
It's art. Art is personal. Art makes you think. it makes you happy, and it makes you mad.
To the RIAA it's also product. Product is commercial. Product makes you money.
Complain about the commercial quality of the product but don't complain about the "talent" of the performer. They are different things.
Unlikely that the current software under development can detect speech, nor that it would even try to. Speech recognition technologies would be a better way to sample speech.
Anyway, aside from the telephone, it's not often that spoken expressions like you mentioned are recorded, encoded and sent to the world where the gummint can 'spy' on your words.
At least not yet. Why not start a conspiracy theory that the US Government is pushing for widespread adoption of broadband and wireless technologies so that more people will buy webcams and microphones to carry around with them everywhere they go, broadcasting everything they see, so that The Man can keep an eye on you?
(reminds me of an old SF novel, but I can't remember which one.)
I'd love to hear the mix. Somebody must have caught the Solid Steel show and taped it.
Obviously somebody did, and put it on a CD for Dave Marsh and probably others. But for those of us not yet of the music legend that he is (said with all reverence), we have to snarf a bootleg copy from our local indie record shop or we search online.
> since there's not a "search" at Slashdot
You must be using an alternate universe version of Slashdot. I use the search box (at the bottom of the screen) all the time.
> manipulating SIN waves directly
OK now you're talking about the pr0n industry.
My thinking as well. Last spring I did the research on a new PC, building from scratch vs. buying retail. I figured (after about a day of research) that I could save $200 if I built it myself .. assuming my time was worth nothing. I bought retail.
Who actually originated that saying? I've found it on a bunch of web sites, attributed to different people, but can't find the definitive quote or author.
> The first big worm ever (the morris worm) was for *NIX.
This may be true but I hope it's not an attempt to illustrate a difference between Windows and Unix. In 1988 when Morris hit, Windows didn't know what TCP/IP was. (no kids, I'm not making this up)
I agree that you don't get security from one thing. The Morris worm provided some very significant lessons, which the software development community has been free to ignore since:
1. A networked world has people as well as errant services that will abuse the network. Don't enable services and features out of the box; allow people to decide what services they want to run given the risk involved.
2. Check your input string lengths.
3. Encourage "good" passwords.
4. Provide logging and audit tools, so people can know when something changes, and how it changed.
Alas, the software development community still doesn't get it -- not fully anyway. There's still a flight to features mindset, vs. building for quality. This is not entirely the fault of the software development community -- end users want features, and it's traditionally been hard to sell security as a feature.
In the 70's it was widely reported that 60% of all software engineering costs went into maintenance efforts. In the 90's the figure had gone to 85%. I suspect it's even higher now because of networked security issues.
Arrgh, no moderator points when ya want 'em! Mod the parent up! Funny *and* insightful in one post.
I have one that has three grooves on one side. Can't remember the LP's title since it's boxed up someplace, but the artists were Gion Giorno, William S Burroughs and Laurie Anderson, each who had their own 'groove'. You never knew what you'd be listening to when you put the disc on.
I'd like to see this on one of the monster hotels in Las Vegas. This seems like something they'd even enjoy hosting. Treasure Island faces a lot of the strip .. hmm ...
The accounts are also interesting when you note the times it has taken to crunch a million numbers. John Walker took three years on his Sun 3. 4-5 years later it took two months on the hardware available at the time. According to the milestone reports on the 196 page, it takes about a week now (on a uniprocessor P4 @ 1.8Ghz).
The code may be different but its the order of magnitude difference in the run times that's significant.
> Additionally, most Slashdot readers run Linux.
Really? I don't want an OS flame war but wonder how you knew this.
This effort is interesting for its hack value, but it seems to me that 196 isn't special so much as a "Lychrel" Number but as an input to the formula. That is, a prime number clearly has a unique and specific mathematical property, but 196 is just .. 196.
... the length of any substring of the resulting digits that are numerically ascending or adjacently equivalent is a prime number. Bonus points if there is more than once sequence in the result that is a prime number.
I propose a different formula. Take a number, multiply it by the reverse of itself (instead of adding it) and then, oh, subtract the original number plus its reverse, and repeat until you have, hmm
This is a made-up-while-typing-in-the-slashdot-comment-box problem, yet you could have whole web sites dedicated to the search for these 'special' numbers. But are they really 'special' numbers?
BTW, I searched the site and Google but didn't find any indication of *why* the name Lychrel was chosen, only the blackboard entry where they were first named.
Yes it's been used before, but this grasroots buzz thang got into a lot of people's heads recently with the publication of the book _The Tipping Point_. The book described, in a number of ways, how big changes come from a series of small events. One of the examples was about buzz around shoes - the inner-city kids wanted 'em because they were cheap (because nobody else wanted them); because so many kidz bought 'em they became kinda hip; fashion designers saw them in clubs/bars and started dresing their models in them; magazine editors saw the models on runways and in ads, and started doing stories on them, etc.
I'm giving the simplistic version. _The Tipping Point_ is not just about marketing buzz, but the book did well enough that I think a lot of marketers want to use the "tipping point" principles for their product -- and that starts with buzz creation. If it works, expect to see more of it.
discarded hot-dogs and stale twinkies.
I didn't think Twinkies got stale.
I'm only replying to this because it's marked as informative, even though there's a bunch of errors in it. The only one I'll point out is:
Discussing 'bool':
> a 1-byte long int, that allows a 1-byte value
> to be stored (technicaly this value could be
> 0 to 9, I'm not sure if negatives are allowed).
I don't know what you mean by "0 to 9" but any 8-bit storage type can hold eight bits. The values can be 0-255 if one of the bits is not used as a sign bit, otherwise -127 to 127 is allowed.
Type 'bool' is not in the original K&R C, by the way. Waaaaay back before ANSI C, people knew that 'char' meant '8 bits' and that was that - not that it held a printable character. These days, the kidz are overloading the *semantics* of the type with the *storage size* of the type. It's kinda like the purist "HTML as document structure" vs the "HTML as document layout" folks, but I digress.
> The other, not-as-clean-but-quick-and-simple,
> solution is to bump the variable holding the
> time to a signed long int.
That's not a solution at all. There's a reason time_t is *signed*. It's so that dates before 1970 can be represented.