it makes sense to not be able to get in (imagine the theft possibilities..just cut the power and have a ball..) but being able to get out. Most door locks on public buildings work that way, electronic or not.
big iron box mainframes are still sold because clusters of smaller machines don't have the sheer transactional IO that some jobs require. Financial services come to mind. Not much CPU power is required (mainly just some simple math), but when you need to reliably and quickly update millions (or billions) of small independent records, you need serious IO channels to and from memory, a huge disk-buffering system and dedicated hardware to maintaining transaction integrity. All that is better done in a big box where the IO channels are short runs (and in fact, may be all but impossible to do it any other way)
Clustering work well on big CPU intensive jobs that can be parallelized and you're generally doing more CPU work than IO.
I oft referenced that ASCII table well into the late 90s:)
I learned the majority of basic programming just by following the hyperlinks in the help file. Almost every function came with a useful example program.
The whole help system in q/quickbasic was very well done. You could point and click on a function and bring up its help entry IIRC.
apparently you can get a high from huffing freon. a couple of years ago some kids sucked all the freon out of my A/C. So while i'm sure its not *good* for you, it won't kill you.
I seem to remember some old 1940s era promotional movies showing the inventor of freon inhaling it to show its non-toxicity also.
human eyes are indeed much more green aware. the reason for this is evolutionary. More of the sun's visible light emitted is in the yellow-green wavelengths than any other wavelength. Also a reason why plants tend to be green to green yellow.
In fact, the shade that is the most visible is the one used on airport fire trucks, and for that very reason.
They scan each and every word in each and every message, assigning a score based on the probability of those words matching spam probabilities.
The only difference between that and what gmail does is at the same time gmail runs the word through an inverted index of advertisers, picking one out every now and then to be displayed - on the side, in a tiny text ad that most people wont notice.
they come in just as any other message into gmail's system. And since *all* of my spam comes from those addresses, 50% of it is still being filtered correctly.
i got it a few days ago. It is a cool service, but is it the best thing since sliced bread? nope.
I don't see why people think gmail's spam filter is all that great - so far (and this may be due to beta issues, a lack of training etc) its allowed about 50% of spam to my account through. I've got a couple spam infested accounts forwarding to gmail to test this out.
as for the ads, on most messages they're not even there and when they are they're very small and placed to the side of the page like google's search engine text ads. I don't even notice them. So its not like they're inserted into your mail really. And at least google doesn't attach "get your hotmail address now!" to the bottom of every outgoing email.
So while it is cool (the best feature is the seamless conversations), it's not going to be for everyone, or cause a mass exodus from existing mail services.
but not on every message. Interestingly, messages that once have had ads usually always will so its not like they come and go. But other messages don't trigger them.
Using the text of an entire message for ads requires a bit more computing than just a search query, so maybe they're trying to keep those down while in beta.
They're about as good as the ones for the regular search engine. I'm looking at a conversation i'd been having about jobs and internships and the ads it displayed were related to those.
I have a gmail account. I set some other email accounts of mine to forward to it, a couple of which are heavy spam attractors (200 a day or so).
At the moment, gmail's spam filter isn't all that great allowing maybe 50% through. I figure this is probably because their filter hasn't had enough training yet, not enough users etc. And they make it easy to report the spam by just checking off the messages and clicking "Report As Spam".
So I'm not too bummed, but don't get your hopes up on gmail saving the world from spammers.
The 'boom' is a continuous shockwave that occurs as long as the vehicle is at supersonic velocities. This is why these planes have generally not been allowed to fly at supersonic speeds over occupied land.
Basically there would be a violent rumble on the ground over the entire length of the plane's flight corridor. The idea is to reduce or remove entirely the shockwave coming off the vehicle surfaces.
much like today, there were regulations in water extending out a set distance from shores. Just how far out depended on who you asked.
But there were still international waters (like today) that nobody owns and have little in the way of law. Space is like that, and the air between orbit and ground is like the border waters.
First, few computers draw their power supply's rating. Their recommendations for that is when the card is being heavily used on an assumed fully loaded PC with a bunch of extra peripherals. Your PC is NOT drawing 450 watts *all the time* (or even part of the time, usually) when you have a 450 watt power supply.
Second, if you can figure out a way to significantly reduce the power required by chips while maintaining performance, you will be fabulously wealthy and revolutionize the world of computing. Power draw is a HUGE concern. Remember that the vast majority of computers sold these days are actually in battery powered devices (all your cell phones, pdas, calculators etc have processors in them now)
your isp doesnt have a *personal* spam filter for you. That would be a waste of time. New users don't want to receive tons of spam until they've trained their own personal filter. There is one global mail filter that identifies and marks spam, for all users.
College has innumerable benefits in making you a better human being that you won't get a chance to see at any other point in your life. Where else can you follow a class in operating systems design with one on architecture (the building kind) and then a deep discussion on the way the mind works?
The best class I ever took was one on autonomous robotics. Getting robots to work in the real world is an extremely difficult task and computers do NOT go well with it. The computer is happy in its provable sandbox world where there are only Completely Right and Completely Wrongs. In robotics whatever you get to work on paper in theory won't work right when you try to make it happen. You have to be *creative*. You have to approach a problem with a very open mind and a tolerance for *failure*. And you have to have a truly gifted insight for problem solving. The issues aren't ones of bad programming or design, but usually much deeper and rooted in the uncertainty's of the real world. The best people i've found for working on these issues tend to be those with artistic experience and lots of hands-on mechanical abilities because they intuitively 'know' the real world and how the system can react in it better than the guy who's just programmed in his sandbox all his life. There are millions of unaccountable variables that hinder autonomous robotics and you need to be able to pick out and deal with the ones you feel will matter the most. There's no procedure for this, its highly instinctive and creative experience based.
Its been said the best tool to give all AI (and robotics) students is a brick to hit themselves in the head with now and then. I think every CS student should take such a class to force them to think creatively. They'll be better people for it.
There's simply little glory in writing a nice manual.
We monkeys are impressed by flashy, impressive looking (even if functionally vapid) things. This is why there may be 10 million screen savers or fancy looking mp3 players - but nary a decent accounting package.
Why? Because who wants to write things like accounting software in their sparetime for no pay? Could you go to your mailing list collegues and say "i sure did optimize the hell out of that accounts receivable sub-menu, whew!" Even though something like this would greatly increase the ownership value among business users and stimulate uptake.
Even things like home office software have little glory - hence the most viable and *useful* packages like staroffice are sponsored by corporations actually paying people to work on them.
I'm presuming that every single responsible mail server admin backs up their users' email repository in case the disk fails. In the case of POP3 the messages are deleted off the server after download, but still would likely exist on some nightly backup somewhere.
And certainly any IMAP server would have multiple copies on tape...
Most artists today throw together a bunch of random songs in no particular order KNOWING that today's audience will be listening to individual tracks in a club, on the radio, or on 'random shuffle' on their player; Or they don't put that much thought into it at all.
Please. And all that symbolism in The Scarlet Letter is just made up by english majors.
Most musicians who make music for the artistic side of it put thought into the order of tracks on the album. For example, its common for old jazz albums to be re-released with previously unreleased tracks and other outtakes - but those will always come after the original album, which is presented in unaltered order.
Not everyone is interested in producing easily digestible radio-friendly length tunes that fit on any compilation album...
Floppy disks are slowly being eliminated because it's very hard to make floppies backward compatible and because no new software comes out on floppies.
I don't know what you mean by making floppies 'backward compatible', but you are correct about no software coming out on floppies. The same will apply to CDs before long.
It seems that 680MB is enough for most software packages and operating systems these days, so they continue to stick around years after their introduction and are only recently starting to be replaced by DVDs on some larger software packages.
At one time 1.4 MB per floppy disk was more than enough too. I can't tell you the last time I bought a software package that *didnt* have more than one CD. The production costs of those add up quickly - why use multiple physical media when you can cram it all on one high density disc?
Furthermore, music comes out on CDs and will probably continue to do so until there arises a very good reason to switch to something better, and given the happiness of most people with CD quality, there is no good reason to "upgrade" from the CD.
SuperAudio CDs are making in-roads in the hi fidelity field (back in the 80s, the CD occupied this spot). DVD-Audio shows some promise as well due to the fact you can use DVD hardware to play/make it. As more CD drive manufacturers retool to build DVD players, they will push for this so they can retire old, costly CD manufacturing equipment.
Finally, new optical standards continue to support CDs as the baseline. You've already got the caddy thing, the motor, and the laser arm thingy (technical terms). It's not that hard to throw a laser and detector for a CD on there too.
CD as the 'baseline'? What?
The laser wavelength regular CDs use doesn't work with higher density optical media (ie, DVDs and future media). At the moment dual-use machines include 2 lasers and assundry hardware to manage the reads and data transfer for both media types. "easy" or not, extra hardware = extra cost. A floppy drive probably costs a wholesale PC builder $3. Few people need floppies anymore so those few dollars are saved - and accrued - into massive savings. The same rules apply to commodity hardware manufacturers of optical media drives.
15 years ago PCs often came with 2 floppy drives - 5.25 and 3.5 for the very reasons you mentioned above. Most older software came on 5.25 disks, fit on them just fine and so on. 10 years ago virtually no new PC sold included the 5.25" bay.
I bet by 2015, the CD will be viewed as we view the old audio tapes of the day.
Slashdot Mirror
it makes sense to not be able to get in (imagine the theft possibilities..just cut the power and have a ball..) but being able to get out. Most door locks on public buildings work that way, electronic or not.
big iron box mainframes are still sold because clusters of smaller machines don't have the sheer transactional IO that some jobs require. Financial services come to mind. Not much CPU power is required (mainly just some simple math), but when you need to reliably and quickly update millions (or billions) of small independent records, you need serious IO channels to and from memory, a huge disk-buffering system and dedicated hardware to maintaining transaction integrity. All that is better done in a big box where the IO channels are short runs (and in fact, may be all but impossible to do it any other way)
Clustering work well on big CPU intensive jobs that can be parallelized and you're generally doing more CPU work than IO.
I oft referenced that ASCII table well into the late 90s :)
I learned the majority of basic programming just by following the hyperlinks in the help file. Almost every function came with a useful example program.
The whole help system in q/quickbasic was very well done. You could point and click on a function and bring up its help entry IIRC.
apparently you can get a high from huffing freon. a couple of years ago some kids sucked all the freon out of my A/C. So while i'm sure its not *good* for you, it won't kill you.
I seem to remember some old 1940s era promotional movies showing the inventor of freon inhaling it to show its non-toxicity also.
human eyes are indeed much more green aware. the reason for this is evolutionary. More of the sun's visible light emitted is in the yellow-green wavelengths than any other wavelength. Also a reason why plants tend to be green to green yellow.
In fact, the shade that is the most visible is the one used on airport fire trucks, and for that very reason.
They scan each and every word in each and every message, assigning a score based on the probability of those words matching spam probabilities.
The only difference between that and what gmail does is at the same time gmail runs the word through an inverted index of advertisers, picking one out every now and then to be displayed - on the side, in a tiny text ad that most people wont notice.
they come in just as any other message into gmail's system. And since *all* of my spam comes from those addresses, 50% of it is still being filtered correctly.
The only people I think who care about the ad thing is the paranoid (and frankly, ignorant) few on slashdot and the media FUDmongers who court them.
How do you think a spam filter works? It 'reads' every single word in your e-mail. Any e-mail service employing one is 'reading' your mail.
If the other players are going to take anything from this, its that they'll start targetting ads to your email content as well.
they don't do that. At least not now, i suppose its possible once gmail goes open to the public it could though.
i got it a few days ago. It is a cool service, but is it the best thing since sliced bread? nope.
I don't see why people think gmail's spam filter is all that great - so far (and this may be due to beta issues, a lack of training etc) its allowed about 50% of spam to my account through. I've got a couple spam infested accounts forwarding to gmail to test this out.
as for the ads, on most messages they're not even there and when they are they're very small and placed to the side of the page like google's search engine text ads. I don't even notice them. So its not like they're inserted into your mail really. And at least google doesn't attach "get your hotmail address now!" to the bottom of every outgoing email.
So while it is cool (the best feature is the seamless conversations), it's not going to be for everyone, or cause a mass exodus from existing mail services.
but not on every message. Interestingly, messages that once have had ads usually always will so its not like they come and go. But other messages don't trigger them.
Using the text of an entire message for ads requires a bit more computing than just a search query, so maybe they're trying to keep those down while in beta.
They're about as good as the ones for the regular search engine. I'm looking at a conversation i'd been having about jobs and internships and the ads it displayed were related to those.
How large message bodies can be I'm not sure, but I would assume they're also 10 mb. Perhaps the message total (text + attachment) is 10 mb.
I have a gmail account. I set some other email accounts of mine to forward to it, a couple of which are heavy spam attractors (200 a day or so).
At the moment, gmail's spam filter isn't all that great allowing maybe 50% through. I figure this is probably because their filter hasn't had enough training yet, not enough users etc. And they make it easy to report the spam by just checking off the messages and clicking "Report As Spam".
So I'm not too bummed, but don't get your hopes up on gmail saving the world from spammers.
The 'boom' is a continuous shockwave that occurs as long as the vehicle is at supersonic velocities. This is why these planes have generally not been allowed to fly at supersonic speeds over occupied land.
Basically there would be a violent rumble on the ground over the entire length of the plane's flight corridor. The idea is to reduce or remove entirely the shockwave coming off the vehicle surfaces.
much like today, there were regulations in water extending out a set distance from shores. Just how far out depended on who you asked.
But there were still international waters (like today) that nobody owns and have little in the way of law. Space is like that, and the air between orbit and ground is like the border waters.
there is no regulation of orbit.
There is, however, regulation of the air between the ground and orbit.
Which is what the FAA regulates. Launching potentially dangerous vehicles through said air falls under their purvue of regulation.
the aiming mirrors in the laser are extremely exotic heavy materials and expensive and function in a air tight clean-room environment.
A missile flying through the air isn't going to be covered with that kind of material and it would be marred pretty quickly...
First, few computers draw their power supply's rating. Their recommendations for that is when the card is being heavily used on an assumed fully loaded PC with a bunch of extra peripherals. Your PC is NOT drawing 450 watts *all the time* (or even part of the time, usually) when you have a 450 watt power supply.
Second, if you can figure out a way to significantly reduce the power required by chips while maintaining performance, you will be fabulously wealthy and revolutionize the world of computing. Power draw is a HUGE concern. Remember that the vast majority of computers sold these days are actually in battery powered devices (all your cell phones, pdas, calculators etc have processors in them now)
your isp doesnt have a *personal* spam filter for you. That would be a waste of time. New users don't want to receive tons of spam until they've trained their own personal filter. There is one global mail filter that identifies and marks spam, for all users.
College has innumerable benefits in making you a better human being that you won't get a chance to see at any other point in your life. Where else can you follow a class in operating systems design with one on architecture (the building kind) and then a deep discussion on the way the mind works?
The best class I ever took was one on autonomous robotics. Getting robots to work in the real world is an extremely difficult task and computers do NOT go well with it. The computer is happy in its provable sandbox world where there are only Completely Right and Completely Wrongs. In robotics whatever you get to work on paper in theory won't work right when you try to make it happen. You have to be *creative*. You have to approach a problem with a very open mind and a tolerance for *failure*. And you have to have a truly gifted insight for problem solving. The issues aren't ones of bad programming or design, but usually much deeper and rooted in the uncertainty's of the real world. The best people i've found for working on these issues tend to be those with artistic experience and lots of hands-on mechanical abilities because they intuitively 'know' the real world and how the system can react in it better than the guy who's just programmed in his sandbox all his life. There are millions of unaccountable variables that hinder autonomous robotics and you need to be able to pick out and deal with the ones you feel will matter the most. There's no procedure for this, its highly instinctive and creative experience based.
Its been said the best tool to give all AI (and robotics) students is a brick to hit themselves in the head with now and then. I think every CS student should take such a class to force them to think creatively. They'll be better people for it.
well it *is* 4/20 after all...
There's simply little glory in writing a nice manual.
We monkeys are impressed by flashy, impressive looking (even if functionally vapid) things. This is why there may be 10 million screen savers or fancy looking mp3 players - but nary a decent accounting package.
Why? Because who wants to write things like accounting software in their sparetime for no pay? Could you go to your mailing list collegues and say "i sure did optimize the hell out of that accounts receivable sub-menu, whew!" Even though something like this would greatly increase the ownership value among business users and stimulate uptake.
Even things like home office software have little glory - hence the most viable and *useful* packages like staroffice are sponsored by corporations actually paying people to work on them.
And certainly any IMAP server would have multiple copies on tape...
Most artists today throw together a bunch of random songs in no particular order KNOWING that today's audience will be listening to individual tracks in a club, on the radio, or on 'random shuffle' on their player; Or they don't put that much thought into it at all.
Please. And all that symbolism in The Scarlet Letter is just made up by english majors.
Most musicians who make music for the artistic side of it put thought into the order of tracks on the album. For example, its common for old jazz albums to be re-released with previously unreleased tracks and other outtakes - but those will always come after the original album, which is presented in unaltered order.
Not everyone is interested in producing easily digestible radio-friendly length tunes that fit on any compilation album...
Floppy disks are slowly being eliminated because it's very hard to make floppies backward compatible and because no new software comes out on floppies.
I don't know what you mean by making floppies 'backward compatible', but you are correct about no software coming out on floppies. The same will apply to CDs before long.
It seems that 680MB is enough for most software packages and operating systems these days, so they continue to stick around years after their introduction and are only recently starting to be replaced by DVDs on some larger software packages.
At one time 1.4 MB per floppy disk was more than enough too. I can't tell you the last time I bought a software package that *didnt* have more than one CD. The production costs of those add up quickly - why use multiple physical media when you can cram it all on one high density disc?
Furthermore, music comes out on CDs and will probably continue to do so until there arises a very good reason to switch to something better, and given the happiness of most people with CD quality, there is no good reason to "upgrade" from the CD.
SuperAudio CDs are making in-roads in the hi fidelity field (back in the 80s, the CD occupied this spot). DVD-Audio shows some promise as well due to the fact you can use DVD hardware to play/make it. As more CD drive manufacturers retool to build DVD players, they will push for this so they can retire old, costly CD manufacturing equipment.
Finally, new optical standards continue to support CDs as the baseline. You've already got the caddy thing, the motor, and the laser arm thingy (technical terms). It's not that hard to throw a laser and detector for a CD on there too.
CD as the 'baseline'? What?
The laser wavelength regular CDs use doesn't work with higher density optical media (ie, DVDs and future media). At the moment dual-use machines include 2 lasers and assundry hardware to manage the reads and data transfer for both media types. "easy" or not, extra hardware = extra cost. A floppy drive probably costs a wholesale PC builder $3. Few people need floppies anymore so those few dollars are saved - and accrued - into massive savings. The same rules apply to commodity hardware manufacturers of optical media drives.
15 years ago PCs often came with 2 floppy drives - 5.25 and 3.5 for the very reasons you mentioned above. Most older software came on 5.25 disks, fit on them just fine and so on. 10 years ago virtually no new PC sold included the 5.25" bay.
I bet by 2015, the CD will be viewed as we view the old audio tapes of the day.