MS Research produces quality research, and I suspect many of the patents get issued there. Of course MS engineering is notorious for not being able to capitalize/monetize the work that MSR does.
I have a friend that's a patent lawyer with an ms in cs that has handled both Amazon and Microsoft patent filings. He's told me that Amazon's tend to be pure crap, but MS's are actually pretty good. That said, Amazon's distributed systems work is actually so supposed to be pretty good, but they rarely publish on it.
Well if Kucinich would actually have some real proposals rather than simply spouting sophmoric hippie clap-trap like creating a "Department of Peace" (whatever that means), then perhaps he'd have better traction.
To be clear, the US isn't a Democracy. It's a Republic. That means once the people are in office, they can do pretty much what they want regardless of what 'the people' want. So after the public election, it's all up to the elected as to what happens next. There is no ability for 'the people' to vote for an individual law or any such thing. You clearly do not have any idea what the definition of "democracy" is.
A "democracy" is a form of government where the people govern. That is, the government derives its power from the people. The people vote and majority rules.
A ""republic" is a form of government where the leader of the government is not a monarch.
The terms you are wanting are "direct democracy" and "representative democracy." These terms have existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years. All of these terms are taught and defined in an elementary school social studies class. I suggest you retake one.
When it comes down to it, no one really cares about proofs. Proofs are very long. Proofs are very terse. If I want the proof, I"ll look up the real article from whatever journal or proceedings it was published in. Wikipedia is for quick overviews of subjects. Not for detailed technical discussions. It's an encyclopedia, not a science journal.
Then giving the quality of the math articles on Wikipedia, I can't imagine this would make the articles better. What I mean is, that while the articles are never wrong (or at least obviously wrong), they're always way like 10 times harder to understand they have to be. Seriously. Any undergraduate math book is way clearer.
Bingo about the drug war. Rolling Stone had a pretty good article on the state of the drug war.
As far as why so much money is spent on security forces, the answer is simple. It's not some grand conspiracy to declare martial law, turn soverignty over to the UN, make Americans dig their own graves in Oklahoma, and then machine gun them to death. It's exactly what Eisenhower warned us of some 46 years ago. It's the Military Industrial Complex. There's no grand conspiracy to oppress the American public, it's just good ol' bilking the government. You've got companies telling the politicians to purchase the latest and greatest technology. The politicians do it, because of the selfish reason of wanting the companies to finance their campaigns, and the altruistic reason that these systems are so spread out, that many congressional districts are connected to the systems (either through factories or military bases), and finally don't care about the cost, since they just spend money regardless if they have it or not. (Thanks to not having a balance budget amendment.) History is replete with examples of weapons systems that just wouldn't die, even after Pentgon stated that they didn't want them. Congressmen that play ball with the companies, are then rewarded upon retirement from congress with a lucrative lobbying positions.
Have you ever read Eisenhower speeches at the end of his presidency? They're damning, and unfortunately ring just as true today as they did some 50 years ago. This the work of the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about. Ike was no peacenik, but he wasn't some blind hawk either. His Cross of Iron speech lays out in stark terms just what the Cold War would cost (and unfortunately what the MI still costs us today). ("Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.") He wasn't saying the Cold War wasn't worth this cost, he made it clear that Soviet threat was real in 1950s and 60s and had to be opposed, but it was an unfortunate cost to pay. Now with the Cold War over, and no peer militaries, it makes you wonder why we still have a budget larger than the next 14 countries combined, and over 8 times our closest rival, China. I'm not saying that we should cut back funding so much that military goes into a fair fight – if the US military is ever in a fair fight, something is gone dreadfully wrong – but just how unbalanced do we really need? At some point there's diminishing returns.
The difference between a competent and an incompetent programmer is that an incompetent programmer thinks his/her crap code is the best, while a a competent programmer knows that his/her code is crap.
Sure this is funny, but there's an underlying truth to this. Someone that knows what he/she is doing, knows all the ways the code could fail and all the the checks and exceptions that should be there that is isn't, and how the assumptions of the underlying algorithm may not be strictly guaranteed, and is just waiting for the code to break. Someone that doesn't know what his/she is doing thinks everything is great since it passed his/her incomplete unit test. Or to put it another way: Ignorance is bliss.
Right-o. Too many people don't comment their code at all. I've spent a day before just commenting other people's code, just so that I could begin to know where the bug was. Don't make me figure out what your for-loop is doing. Just tell me. You want your code to be as clear as possible, and comments make the complex clear, and the obvious more obvious -- which is good, because it's obvious that what is obvious to one is not always obvious to another.;)
You're being sarcastic, but lack of real data is a hinderance. In information retrieval, data sets with real users is hard to get. You need real user data because that's how you evaluate if your algorithm is any good at helping real people find things. People are noisy. People do dumb things. People aren't optimal! Heuristics for mimicking user behavior can work for something this, but ultimately you have to test against real user data. Otherwise your optimizing your system for a user that doesn't exist.
It is indeed unthinkable, because the GPL is not a contract. Wrong. Totally and completely wrong. The GPL is a license. A license is a contract. That's the law. Your entire argument falls apart because your basic premise is so utterly and completely wrong.
Is the netflix rating system a "I liked this movie and want to see more like it" system or a "This movie was brilliant and I would highly recommend it too everyone else" type of rating system? It's both. The system allows users to say how much they preferred a movie. This can then be used to predict what movies a user will prefer in the future. If an unseen movie is preferred by users that have expressed preferences similar to yours, then it will be recommended to you.
But your question about what the semantics of a rating are is good one. The answer is, we don't really know, and it doesn't really matter from a practical standpoint. People like things of "high quality" whatever that means. "The Godfather" is high quality movie, but then again so is "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". They're very different, but they're both "high quality" (whatever that means) for their respected genres, but I wouldn't necessarily say "If you loved The Godfather, you'll love Harold and Kumar!"
People also rate movies differently. There are users that on a five point scale, only use 5 and 1. Then there are others that rate everything between 4 and 2. And then there's other that rate everything between 5 and 3, and so on. You can't just compare the ratings directly among the users. You have to scale them.
Take me for example. Right now, I'm rating the music on my ipod. (I don't know why, I just am.) I decided 1 is for absolute crap (e.g. pretty anything by Diamanda Galas. I highly recommend her cover of the Hank Williams classic, "I'm So Lonesome, I Could Cry." Everyone should hear that at least once.) and 5 is for "my blowing sublimity" (e.g. Massive Attack's A Prayer for England) If I just like it or dislike it, 4 or 2. Things I'm a bit ambivalent about 3. Sounded simple. Nice good rules. But now after rating a few hundred songs, I've realized that there are several things that are more like 3.5 or 2.5. I like the song, but not as much as the other songs rated 4, but more than other songs rated 3. What do I do? Push the songs I definitely like up to 5, and rate this song 4? But what about the songs that are truly special? Where do I rate "Smells Like Teen Spirit?" Originally it was mind-blowing, but over the years it's mind-blowing ability has passed. It's still a good, and very influential song, but given what exists now, it's not as standout as it was before.
Because of all of this, I'm starting to like simple three state ratings. Thumbs up, thumbs down, or no rating. It removes the guess work, and the paradox of choice.
RAID is most definitely about reliability and recoverability as well as availability. It all depends on the level you choose. Your argument that multiple disks increases your likelihood of failure is trumped by one simple fact: how do you know that the single drive you buy for the job will be more reliable than the one next to it? Obviously you know nothing about fault tolerance. The mean time between failure is always lower than the least reliable component. In the best case, the MTBF for a system is no better than the 1/nth the MTBF of a single component, assuming n components. It's been called the "airplane rule," since airplanes with two engines have twice as many engine problems as a airplanes with one engine.
Stop. Just stop. Stop posting on slashdot. Read something about fault tolerance, anything really. Get a clue, then comeback when you have read more than some post by some clueless guy on some forum about how to build the "The Ultimate Gaming Rig!!11!!!!1eleventy-one!!!1!!111."
You can't, and that's why using at least something like RAID1 is a smart way to go. When one drive fails, your data doesn't all go with that one drive. I've seen drives from batches fail literally within a couple of days of each other. Allow me to paraphrase a song we'll get sick of in a few weeks: Although it's been said, many times, many ways... RAID IS NOT A BACKUP!!!!!
I've had a RAID 5 fail. A drive failed. Yanked the bad drive, and started the rebuild. The replacement drive failed during the rebuild, along with another drive. Bad luck. That's why you should use drives from different batches, and back up your RAID.
RAID is there so that when a drive fails, you can still chug along until you replace the drives. It does very little to protect your data, because once one drive goes, the others will follow soon enough, but hopefully, not all at once.
As for the botched MBR, boot an MS-DOS or even a FreeDOS boot disk and do a fdisk/mbr. That should fix it This is something that annoys me. To clear an MBR you have to boot into DOS! I'm sorry. This is just incredibly lame. 15 years ago this was lame, but whatever. But now? Linux still doesn't have a way to clear the MBR? Why hasn't linux fdisk been hacked to do this yet?
Not at all. The argument is "Delay all the packets you want, just don't forge packets." Of course I suspect the net will be comcast simply setting QoS values so extreme you'll get a single packet a day.
You know what movies people like, and which ones they don't. Compare the movies together, and you can tell that the only reason someone likes these movies is because the have macintosh in them. Anyway, people HATE giving feedback. No one likes filling out a questionnaire. It takes way too long. You suggested a drop down. That only allows a user to pick a single reason. What if they like a movie for multiple reasons? What if they like the stars, but like the plot more? Shouldn't you capture that? Ideally, sure, but people hate giving feedback, so you can't.
That's because Gehry has every been associated with the brutalist and neobrutalists movements. (Seriously. That's what it's called.) He's all into swooping curves and shiny metal skins. Brutalism is all about giant slabs of featureless concrete. It's ironic that the brutalist movmement invokes thoughts of totalitarianism and prisons, as it was founded by a utopian movement!
[sarcasm] B-b-b-b-b-bbut it's getting better! If you want the external API stablized, maybe you should stop working on your own project and stablize the API yourself. You have the code, why don't you fix it? The people are VOLUNTEERS! Show some respect and stop being so arrogant. [sarcasm]
After thirteen years of that crap, I switched to macs.
Slashdot Mirror
Gondor needs help.
MS Research produces quality research, and I suspect many of the patents get issued there. Of course MS engineering is notorious for not being able to capitalize/monetize the work that MSR does.
I have a friend that's a patent lawyer with an ms in cs that has handled both Amazon and Microsoft patent filings. He's told me that Amazon's tend to be pure crap, but MS's are actually pretty good. That said, Amazon's distributed systems work is actually so supposed to be pretty good, but they rarely publish on it.
The athletes don't have to go the drug dealers. The drug dealers can make house calls.
To quote Patton: The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
touche.
Well if Kucinich would actually have some real proposals rather than simply spouting sophmoric hippie clap-trap like creating a "Department of Peace" (whatever that means), then perhaps he'd have better traction.
Quote the prophet Jeramatic:
1001000 10000101 10101000 10100101 01110111 01110010 10101010 10101010 10111110 10001011 10100010 11101002
A "democracy" is a form of government where the people govern. That is, the government derives its power from the people. The people vote and majority rules.
A ""republic" is a form of government where the leader of the government is not a monarch.
The terms you are wanting are "direct democracy" and "representative democracy." These terms have existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years. All of these terms are taught and defined in an elementary school social studies class. I suggest you retake one.
When it comes down to it, no one really cares about proofs. Proofs are very long. Proofs are very terse. If I want the proof, I"ll look up the real article from whatever journal or proceedings it was published in. Wikipedia is for quick overviews of subjects. Not for detailed technical discussions. It's an encyclopedia, not a science journal.
Then giving the quality of the math articles on Wikipedia, I can't imagine this would make the articles better. What I mean is, that while the articles are never wrong (or at least obviously wrong), they're always way like 10 times harder to understand they have to be. Seriously. Any undergraduate math book is way clearer.
Bingo about the drug war. Rolling Stone had a pretty good article on the state of the drug war.
As far as why so much money is spent on security forces, the answer is simple. It's not some grand conspiracy to declare martial law, turn soverignty over to the UN, make Americans dig their own graves in Oklahoma, and then machine gun them to death. It's exactly what Eisenhower warned us of some 46 years ago. It's the Military Industrial Complex. There's no grand conspiracy to oppress the American public, it's just good ol' bilking the government. You've got companies telling the politicians to purchase the latest and greatest technology. The politicians do it, because of the selfish reason of wanting the companies to finance their campaigns, and the altruistic reason that these systems are so spread out, that many congressional districts are connected to the systems (either through factories or military bases), and finally don't care about the cost, since they just spend money regardless if they have it or not. (Thanks to not having a balance budget amendment.) History is replete with examples of weapons systems that just wouldn't die, even after Pentgon stated that they didn't want them. Congressmen that play ball with the companies, are then rewarded upon retirement from congress with a lucrative lobbying positions.
Have you ever read Eisenhower speeches at the end of his presidency? They're damning, and unfortunately ring just as true today as they did some 50 years ago. This the work of the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about. Ike was no peacenik, but he wasn't some blind hawk either. His Cross of Iron speech lays out in stark terms just what the Cold War would cost (and unfortunately what the MI still costs us today). ("Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.") He wasn't saying the Cold War wasn't worth this cost, he made it clear that Soviet threat was real in 1950s and 60s and had to be opposed, but it was an unfortunate cost to pay. Now with the Cold War over, and no peer militaries, it makes you wonder why we still have a budget larger than the next 14 countries combined, and over 8 times our closest rival, China. I'm not saying that we should cut back funding so much that military goes into a fair fight – if the US military is ever in a fair fight, something is gone dreadfully wrong – but just how unbalanced do we really need? At some point there's diminishing returns.
You're wrong about Illnois.
The difference between a competent and an incompetent programmer is that an incompetent programmer thinks his/her crap code is the best, while a a competent programmer knows that his/her code is crap.
Sure this is funny, but there's an underlying truth to this. Someone that knows what he/she is doing, knows all the ways the code could fail and all the the checks and exceptions that should be there that is isn't, and how the assumptions of the underlying algorithm may not be strictly guaranteed, and is just waiting for the code to break. Someone that doesn't know what his/she is doing thinks everything is great since it passed his/her incomplete unit test. Or to put it another way: Ignorance is bliss.
Right-o. Too many people don't comment their code at all. I've spent a day before just commenting other people's code, just so that I could begin to know where the bug was. Don't make me figure out what your for-loop is doing. Just tell me. You want your code to be as clear as possible, and comments make the complex clear, and the obvious more obvious -- which is good, because it's obvious that what is obvious to one is not always obvious to another. ;)
I'm gonna fuck all y'all! WOOOOO!!!!! :)
You're being sarcastic, but lack of real data is a hinderance. In information retrieval, data sets with real users is hard to get. You need real user data because that's how you evaluate if your algorithm is any good at helping real people find things. People are noisy. People do dumb things. People aren't optimal! Heuristics for mimicking user behavior can work for something this, but ultimately you have to test against real user data. Otherwise your optimizing your system for a user that doesn't exist.
But your question about what the semantics of a rating are is good one. The answer is, we don't really know, and it doesn't really matter from a practical standpoint. People like things of "high quality" whatever that means. "The Godfather" is high quality movie, but then again so is "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". They're very different, but they're both "high quality" (whatever that means) for their respected genres, but I wouldn't necessarily say "If you loved The Godfather, you'll love Harold and Kumar!"
People also rate movies differently. There are users that on a five point scale, only use 5 and 1. Then there are others that rate everything between 4 and 2. And then there's other that rate everything between 5 and 3, and so on. You can't just compare the ratings directly among the users. You have to scale them.
Take me for example. Right now, I'm rating the music on my ipod. (I don't know why, I just am.) I decided 1 is for absolute crap (e.g. pretty anything by Diamanda Galas. I highly recommend her cover of the Hank Williams classic, "I'm So Lonesome, I Could Cry." Everyone should hear that at least once.) and 5 is for "my blowing sublimity" (e.g. Massive Attack's A Prayer for England) If I just like it or dislike it, 4 or 2. Things I'm a bit ambivalent about 3. Sounded simple. Nice good rules. But now after rating a few hundred songs, I've realized that there are several things that are more like 3.5 or 2.5. I like the song, but not as much as the other songs rated 4, but more than other songs rated 3. What do I do? Push the songs I definitely like up to 5, and rate this song 4? But what about the songs that are truly special? Where do I rate "Smells Like Teen Spirit?" Originally it was mind-blowing, but over the years it's mind-blowing ability has passed. It's still a good, and very influential song, but given what exists now, it's not as standout as it was before.
Because of all of this, I'm starting to like simple three state ratings. Thumbs up, thumbs down, or no rating. It removes the guess work, and the paradox of choice.
Stop. Just stop. Stop posting on slashdot. Read something about fault tolerance, anything really. Get a clue, then comeback when you have read more than some post by some clueless guy on some forum about how to build the "The Ultimate Gaming Rig!!11!!!!1eleventy-one!!!1!!111." You can't, and that's why using at least something like RAID1 is a smart way to go. When one drive fails, your data doesn't all go with that one drive. I've seen drives from batches fail literally within a couple of days of each other. Allow me to paraphrase a song we'll get sick of in a few weeks: Although it's been said, many times, many ways... RAID IS NOT A BACKUP!!!!!
I've had a RAID 5 fail. A drive failed. Yanked the bad drive, and started the rebuild. The replacement drive failed during the rebuild, along with another drive. Bad luck. That's why you should use drives from different batches, and back up your RAID.
RAID is there so that when a drive fails, you can still chug along until you replace the drives. It does very little to protect your data, because once one drive goes, the others will follow soon enough, but hopefully, not all at once.
What the hell, man? What the hell?
Not at all. The argument is "Delay all the packets you want, just don't forge packets." Of course I suspect the net will be comcast simply setting QoS values so extreme you'll get a single packet a day.
You know what movies people like, and which ones they don't. Compare the movies together, and you can tell that the only reason someone likes these movies is because the have macintosh in them. Anyway, people HATE giving feedback. No one likes filling out a questionnaire. It takes way too long. You suggested a drop down. That only allows a user to pick a single reason. What if they like a movie for multiple reasons? What if they like the stars, but like the plot more? Shouldn't you capture that? Ideally, sure, but people hate giving feedback, so you can't.
That's because Gehry has every been associated with the brutalist and neobrutalists movements. (Seriously. That's what it's called.) He's all into swooping curves and shiny metal skins. Brutalism is all about giant slabs of featureless concrete. It's ironic that the brutalist movmement invokes thoughts of totalitarianism and prisons, as it was founded by a utopian movement!
In war, the law falls silent.
-- Cicero.
The fact that GWOT is a complete political fabrication is besides the point. It's the justification.
[sarcasm]
B-b-b-b-b-bbut it's getting better! If you want the external API stablized, maybe you should stop working on your own project and stablize the API yourself. You have the code, why don't you fix it? The people are VOLUNTEERS! Show some respect and stop being so arrogant.
[sarcasm]
After thirteen years of that crap, I switched to macs.
The software is the same. This different licenses (and price points) for different territories is bullshit.