I reload the page more often when I see that knowing there is another story coming.
I think a lot of people do. Sure, reloading more often means more bandwidth, but it also means more ad impressions, since you're not a subscriber. And probably that's a net win for them, even factoring in folks with adblockers.
I haven't used ADA, but I understand that it is somewhat designed for self-documenting code, and that as a result you are hemmed in on all sides by language rules. (ADA fans please comment here.)
I used Ada for my second semester of Data Structures in college. All that I really remember about it was that the code was really hard to get to compile. But once you got it to compile, it usually worked as intended.
The design of the language moves a lot of logic errors into the realm of compiler errors. Which was nice for learning, but might be annoying once you were experienced enough to avoid the logic errors on your own because you'd presumably still be having to go through the syntactic rigor without as much benefit.
Is it possible to have a little button attached to the story description so that subscribed users seeing the article via "The Mysterious Future" can tag it as a dupe to report it to the editors before it goes live?
You could restrict it to subscribed users with a certain amount of karma maybe, and require a URL for the earlier story to make it easier to verify.
As a high school teacher who also has his grades online (though using a custom application I've written), I agree.
The electronic gradebook they are having you use is broken. It is a reality of grading that sometimes grades change after they are assessed, teachers get behind on grading, etc.
In my (somewhat considered) opinion, there are three "must-haves" for any gradebook program that automatically posts grades for outside viewing:
Security must be good. No storing passwords in the clear, no easily-guessable logins or passwords, fascist logging of failed login attempts, etc.
The program must have an option to "commit" the current grades for outside viewing. Viewers see not the current state of the gradebook, but the state the last time grades were committed.
The program must show the date when grades were last committed, so viewers know if the grades shown are accurate as of today or three weeks ago.
If the solution your district has chosen doesn't have these things, you have my sympathy.
This pretty much nails it, here. Signal 11 said something on Slashdot a couple of years ago regarding this that I saved:
"Let's face it: the life of a geek is boring. We spend all day in front of our computers checking our e-mail, coding, and sitting on our duff doing 'nothing'. At least to the untrained eye. On the molecular level, however, we are quite busy."
Couldn't have said it better myself. It's just hard to make this profession look interesting on the big screen.
Well, some of the most pure fun games I've played are obscure titles like these.
I completely agree. The game I've spent the most time on in the last five years is not Half-Life, Diablo II or Unreal Tournament (all three of which I own). Rather it's Elastomania. It's a silly little side-scrolling platform game on a motorcycle, with passable graphics and cheesy sound effects. It's even difficult to learn the controls. But once you do, look out. I've been addicted for five years. Best $10 I ever spent. (By the way, it requires DirectX 7 or higher. Haven't tried it on WineX.)
The people I feel sorry for are the ones who truly believe they should actually *resist* lifting a finger until somebody forks them some cash. (Ie, people that believe that a contribution isn't really a contribution unless you make money from it.)
I teach students computer science. One thing I tell them all the time is, "once you finish high school, don't ever take a job you wouldn't do for free."
Now, sometimes this just ain't possible, and you got to get food on the table somehow, but if more people did this it'd cure a lot of society's ills. And people forget that they can lower their standard of living. I recently visited Haiti. We had no electricity and no running water most of the time. And you know what? It wasn't that bad. Most Haitians live on less than $400 USD per year. You'd be amazed what you can do with a deck of cards, some paper, some dice, a few friends. Or read a book, for goodness' sake. Screw the X-Box.
Let's look at the folks who make the big bucks: MDs and lawyers. They have associations which act as gate keepers (AMA and ABA). If you don't get permission from the AMA, you won't practice medicine.
True, but this isn't always the case. Public school teachers (at least in the state of Texas) also must be licensed through their professional organization after completing approved coursework and certification exams. Somehow I think it'll be a few years before my salary is comparable with the average doctor or lawyer. Too bad we don't get to directly charge our clients for our services.
Education insurance, anyone? You pay in monthly so just in case you do something stupid, you're covered. The insurance company will provide a teacher free of charge (or maybe with a $10 copay, depending on your plan) to show you why what you did was dumb and how to avoid it in the future.
What you have to do is to touch LC_COLLATE env-var and set it to be C, not en_US as probably RedHat set it (if not set, it inherits from LANG and others). That way you get ASCII sorting back.
Holy crap. You, my friend, are much appreciated. You learn something new every day.
It seems clear to me that the command line is superior to gui in terms of speed and efficiency for knowledgable users. What I'd like to see now is a set of tools (and shell) without such a drastic learning curve and also without loosing the power that unix has.
There's a delicate balance here. To change command-line switches or return codes potentially affects thousands of shell scripts which depend on the current behavior. To do so also would probably reduce the productivity of the thousands of unix gurus who already have all command-line options for various tools committed to memory. And that's not to be done lightly. To paraphrase the old quote, "Unix is user-friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are."
Now admittedly, I'd like it if every command-line util in the world supported "--version". But I wouldn't go so far as to standardize on "-v" or "-V" for the same thing, since that's used for various different things for various tools.
As an example of this, I'm bummed that someone (RedHat apparently) changed the default sorting order for "ls". Used to, things were sorted by ASCII value, which meant dotfiles were first, then files starting with a capital letter (like Makefile or README), and then finally regular, lowercase file names. In recent releases of RedHat, things are now case-insensitively sorted and include dotfiles in with the regular files (e.g. ".zebra" is now listed between "zartan.tar.bz2" and "zephyr.txt"). This annoys me to no end.
Eventually I was able to determine that adding -v restores the historic sort order (among other things), and so I made it the default. Nothing in the documentation hints that "sort by version" also does an ASCII sort, whereas normal sorting does not.
Anyway, mastering the unix command-line is a long road, and you continue to gain power for years and years. It does take a while.
Maybe a solution would be to make an environment variable called USERLEVEL=novice, which makes the switches more standardized but breaks backwards compatibility. Or a command-line switch called --novice which does the same thing.
From the NYT article on the beneficial health effects of moderate alcohol consumption:
Moderate drinking can help prevent strokes, amputated limbs and dementia.
I'm sorry, for a second there I thought that said... AMPUTATED LIMBS?!? I'd think the correlation between alcohol consumption and severed limbs would run the other direction. I mean, I grew up in white-trash East Texas and an informal study of most of my classmates seemed to indicate that those who had the highest alcohol consumption also tended to accidentally lose or damage appendages. Whereas I, who drank virtually none, still have... um... "all the parts God gave me."
The CD is a "dead" media, it's not something that magically comes to life and starts transmitting information.
You know, that's just what I used to tell people about email. Remember the
Good Times "virus"? I don't know how many emails I sent to people in the mid-nineties explaining to them that emails were just text and weren't "executed" in any way and thus were incapable of harming your computer. Just like (as my example went at the time) no audio CD, no matter how malicious, could contain instructions that could break your CD player.
Well, guess what? Now everyone* uses an email client that defaults to executing, without notification, code embedded in received emails. By changing the rules, they made a liar out of me in less than six years (the "Good Times" hoax first appeared in December of 1994; the "Love Letter" email worm appeared in May of 2000).
And in five or ten years, who knows? Maybe everyone* will be running CD player applications that default to "facilitating said information gathering and transmission".
You and I know better, and this doesn't personally affect us. But that doesn't change the fact that the
estimated economic impact of the Love Bug was over $8 billion. Mind you, this is from something I thought was patently impossible a few years earlier.
A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders.
Yet another example of something cyberpunk author William Gibson envisioned many years ago. Quoting the first four paragraphs of his second novel, Count Zero, published in 1986:
They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Dehli, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up to him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon like to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International in that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.
About ten years ago, I had a band that was called Slamhound for a little while, until we found out that the name was already taken by an L.A. glam-rock band. Ouch!
You are correct. "God's Signature", the string of 500x500 mostly zeroes, definitely appears within the infinite digits of full-blown pi. In fact, it does so many times.
I just worry when people who don't understand the difference between really big numbers and infinity try to apply similar logic to real-world events. They'll say, "Oh, an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce Hamlet! Well, the universe is very big and has been around a very long time, so it seems probable that X would eventually happen by sheer chance."
Quoting from the Monkeys article linked in one of the parent posts,
even if we assume "17 billion galaxies, each containing 17 billion habitable planets, each planet with 17 billion monkeys each typing away [on a simplified typewriter containing only 32 keys] and producing one line per second for 17 billion years, the chances are 99.999999999995% that the phrase 'TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION.' will not appear in the output."
You see, for most X, the probabilities are so slim as to be miraculous. I just hate seeing normally intelligent people who know something about infinity unwittingly believing that such miraculous things are probable while at the same time calling others naive or gullible for believing different miraculous things.
I can't use the a priori probability of that particular combination to prove that it's "impossible" for this to have happened merely by chance.
Yes, but if something has occurred, I think it's reasonable to look at the relative a priori probabilities of all potential causes to see which one is most likely to be the actual cause. Sometimes the percentages greatly favor one cause over another, and sometimes all causes seem equally (un)likely, and you get to use some other method to disambiguate (e.g. personal preference).
You still don't get it. If in fact pi is normal (and the evidence leans this way now), it is in fact *certain* that a 500x500 string of mostly zeros occurs in it somewhere.
Actually I do get it, I just didn't express myself accurately. What I meant was that that 500x500 string of mostly zeroes is staggeringly unlikely to occur in the first trillion digits. In fact, using one of the pi digit searches out there, I was able to determine that even a string of just eight zeroes in a row never occurs in the first 100 million digits, and neither does my ten-digit phone number. And increasing the number of digits to 1.25 trillion only increases the odds by a factor of twelve or so, I think.
In fact, even the string "8479326669" (ASCII digits of "TO BE") never occurs in the first 100 million digits. Yes, all of Hamlet in ASCII would show up if we had enough digits, but it'd probably take more digits than there are particles in the universe and probably take longer than the expected age of the universe to find it using a linear search, even accounting for Moore's law.
My point is, it's unfathomable just how unlikely things can be. Do read The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare if you haven't. It's quite good, even (gasp!) despite its pro-God stance.
The scary thing is that I knew the next three digits are "419" off the top of my head. The reassuring thing is that I don't know any more digits than that.
In fact, I have this theory that the number of digits of pi you have memorized is inversely proportional to your chances of getting a date. I'm so screwed....
Chances are that if you look long and hard enough, widening your parameters for what's acceptable enough, you will find something.
Granted. Though a lot of people go from there into assuming that certain things are much more probable than they actually are. For example, though I haven't looked through the digits of pi itself, I feel pretty confident that no 500x500 string of mostly zeros occurs. In fact, the chances of it doing so are so astronomically slim that it would be easier to believe that an intelligent designer had put it there than that it occurred by chance.
The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare is one of my favorite articles to point intelligent readers to that believe that whole infinite number of monkeys typing would eventually produce Hamlet idea.
Sure, here and there a rabid OSS person will show it to all of their friends, and that's a Good Thing.
Exactly. And it all depends on how many "friends" you have. I teach computer science and webmastering at a largish high school near the "Silicon Hills" of Austin, TX. I've got over 100 students in my classes. And there are over 2000 in the school.
You can bet as soon as I get the ISO downloaded ("ETA: 14:27") I'm going to burn a dozen copies or so and make them available to my students. Especially if I encourage them to burn copies for their friends, too. There's a "healthy" warez scene at my school, so they know how to do that, at least.
My students influence their less-technical friends, influence their less-technical parents who will then influence their coworkers, and will soon influence their classmates when they go to college. It all starts somewhere.
This is the same reason I keep copies of the latest RedHat on hand which I loan out for students to copy/install. I collect a $5 "ransom", which they get back if they return the CD.
And as Apple learned in the 80s and Microsoft knows right now, making cheap products available to computer students can grow up a generation of people who may pirate now, but will probably pay for your product when they grow up and start getting paid.
You're trolling (or just making a joke), but I'll reply anyway.
The number of computer-based courses in the high school I work at is staggering, and blows away the single "Computer Math" that was offered in my own school merely ten years ago:
three years of Computer Science in C++/Java
two years of digital graphics/animation (3D modeling in 3DSMAX)
two years of CAD (using AutoCAD)
three years of Applications (MS Office, Access)
a year of webmastering (using Linux, Apache, PHP, mySQL)
a year of web design (using Macromedia products)
three years of circuit design (EE)
Not the mention the standard desktop publishing done in journalism classes (newspaper and yearbook). In my district, kids can get A+ certified, Novell certified, and more in high school classes. Amazing.
I mentioned this in the book review of God's Debris about a year ago, but it bears repeating here.
Over a year ago I paid for and downloaded the DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook version of Scott Adams' interesting God's Debris. I paid $5 for it.
I also downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the ebook. I liked the book, but hated the proprietary, Windows-only "reader" application. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as.PGMs. Then I booted into Linux and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up. Overall, this took me about five hours.
Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted.OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version; I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.
I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now if I want to read the book again.
No one seems to get up in arms when Redhat enhances "ls" to make it more friendly for their users...
Actually I was pretty ticked when I installed whatever version of RedHat they changed that in (7.2?) and 'ls -a' didn't sort by ASCII value.
I don't want my files to be in alphabetical-only order. I want dotfiles first, then UPPERCASE, then lowercase. At the time I poked around in the docs for quite some time and finally figured out some switch that seemed to make it work "properly", but when I upgraded to 7.3 it broke again and I haven't been up to hunting again.
Though to be fair, I do like the color-coded directory contents, so if that was RedHat's idea way back, then I guess we're even.
If PCs did lose out to consoles as the de-facto gaming platform, then that'd be one less barrier the average Joe would have to running Linux as their primary desktop OS. Aren't games still the number one reason people dual-boot?
Slashdot Mirror
I reload the page more often when I see that knowing there is another story coming.
I think a lot of people do. Sure, reloading more often means more bandwidth, but it also means more ad impressions, since you're not a subscriber. And probably that's a net win for them, even factoring in folks with adblockers.
I haven't used ADA, but I understand that it is somewhat designed for self-documenting code, and that as a result you are hemmed in on all sides by language rules. (ADA fans please comment here.)
I used Ada for my second semester of Data Structures in college. All that I really remember about it was that the code was really hard to get to compile. But once you got it to compile, it usually worked as intended.
The design of the language moves a lot of logic errors into the realm of compiler errors. Which was nice for learning, but might be annoying once you were experienced enough to avoid the logic errors on your own because you'd presumably still be having to go through the syntactic rigor without as much benefit.
Is it possible to have a little button attached to the story description so that subscribed users seeing the article via "The Mysterious Future" can tag it as a dupe to report it to the editors before it goes live?
You could restrict it to subscribed users with a certain amount of karma maybe, and require a URL for the earlier story to make it easier to verify.
Just a thought.
As a high school teacher who also has his grades online (though using a custom application I've written), I agree.
The electronic gradebook they are having you use is broken. It is a reality of grading that sometimes grades change after they are assessed, teachers get behind on grading, etc.
In my (somewhat considered) opinion, there are three "must-haves" for any gradebook program that automatically posts grades for outside viewing:
If the solution your district has chosen doesn't have these things, you have my sympathy.
This pretty much nails it, here. Signal 11 said something on Slashdot a couple of years ago regarding this that I saved:
Couldn't have said it better myself. It's just hard to make this profession look interesting on the big screen.
Well, some of the most pure fun games I've played are obscure titles like these.
I completely agree. The game I've spent the most time on in the last five years is not Half-Life, Diablo II or Unreal Tournament (all three of which I own). Rather it's Elastomania. It's a silly little side-scrolling platform game on a motorcycle, with passable graphics and cheesy sound effects. It's even difficult to learn the controls. But once you do, look out. I've been addicted for five years. Best $10 I ever spent. (By the way, it requires DirectX 7 or higher. Haven't tried it on WineX.)
The people I feel sorry for are the ones who truly believe they should actually *resist* lifting a finger until somebody forks them some cash. (Ie, people that believe that a contribution isn't really a contribution unless you make money from it.)
I teach students computer science. One thing I tell them all the time is, "once you finish high school, don't ever take a job you wouldn't do for free."
Now, sometimes this just ain't possible, and you got to get food on the table somehow, but if more people did this it'd cure a lot of society's ills. And people forget that they can lower their standard of living. I recently visited Haiti. We had no electricity and no running water most of the time. And you know what? It wasn't that bad. Most Haitians live on less than $400 USD per year. You'd be amazed what you can do with a deck of cards, some paper, some dice, a few friends. Or read a book, for goodness' sake. Screw the X-Box.
Let's look at the folks who make the big bucks: MDs and lawyers. They have associations which act as gate keepers (AMA and ABA). If you don't get permission from the AMA, you won't practice medicine.
True, but this isn't always the case. Public school teachers (at least in the state of Texas) also must be licensed through their professional organization after completing approved coursework and certification exams. Somehow I think it'll be a few years before my salary is comparable with the average doctor or lawyer. Too bad we don't get to directly charge our clients for our services.
Education insurance, anyone? You pay in monthly so just in case you do something stupid, you're covered. The insurance company will provide a teacher free of charge (or maybe with a $10 copay, depending on your plan) to show you why what you did was dumb and how to avoid it in the future.
What you have to do is to touch LC_COLLATE env-var and set it to be C, not en_US as probably RedHat set it (if not set, it inherits from LANG and others). That way you get ASCII sorting back.
Holy crap. You, my friend, are much appreciated. You learn something new every day.
It seems clear to me that the command line is superior to gui in terms of speed and efficiency for knowledgable users. What I'd like to see now is a set of tools (and shell) without such a drastic learning curve and also without loosing the power that unix has.
There's a delicate balance here. To change command-line switches or return codes potentially affects thousands of shell scripts which depend on the current behavior. To do so also would probably reduce the productivity of the thousands of unix gurus who already have all command-line options for various tools committed to memory. And that's not to be done lightly. To paraphrase the old quote, "Unix is user-friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are."
Now admittedly, I'd like it if every command-line util in the world supported "--version". But I wouldn't go so far as to standardize on "-v" or "-V" for the same thing, since that's used for various different things for various tools.
As an example of this, I'm bummed that someone (RedHat apparently) changed the default sorting order for "ls". Used to, things were sorted by ASCII value, which meant dotfiles were first, then files starting with a capital letter (like Makefile or README), and then finally regular, lowercase file names. In recent releases of RedHat, things are now case-insensitively sorted and include dotfiles in with the regular files (e.g. ".zebra" is now listed between "zartan.tar.bz2" and "zephyr.txt"). This annoys me to no end.
Eventually I was able to determine that adding -v restores the historic sort order (among other things), and so I made it the default. Nothing in the documentation hints that "sort by version" also does an ASCII sort, whereas normal sorting does not.
Anyway, mastering the unix command-line is a long road, and you continue to gain power for years and years. It does take a while.
Maybe a solution would be to make an environment variable called USERLEVEL=novice, which makes the switches more standardized but breaks backwards compatibility. Or a command-line switch called --novice which does the same thing.
From the NYT article on the beneficial health effects of moderate alcohol consumption:
Moderate drinking can help prevent strokes, amputated limbs and dementia.
I'm sorry, for a second there I thought that said... AMPUTATED LIMBS?!? I'd think the correlation between alcohol consumption and severed limbs would run the other direction. I mean, I grew up in white-trash East Texas and an informal study of most of my classmates seemed to indicate that those who had the highest alcohol consumption also tended to accidentally lose or damage appendages. Whereas I, who drank virtually none, still have... um... "all the parts God gave me."
The CD is a "dead" media, it's not something that magically comes to life and starts transmitting information.
You know, that's just what I used to tell people about email. Remember the Good Times "virus"? I don't know how many emails I sent to people in the mid-nineties explaining to them that emails were just text and weren't "executed" in any way and thus were incapable of harming your computer. Just like (as my example went at the time) no audio CD, no matter how malicious, could contain instructions that could break your CD player.
Well, guess what? Now everyone* uses an email client that defaults to executing, without notification, code embedded in received emails. By changing the rules, they made a liar out of me in less than six years (the "Good Times" hoax first appeared in December of 1994; the "Love Letter" email worm appeared in May of 2000).
And in five or ten years, who knows? Maybe everyone* will be running CD player applications that default to "facilitating said information gathering and transmission".
You and I know better, and this doesn't personally affect us. But that doesn't change the fact that the estimated economic impact of the Love Bug was over $8 billion. Mind you, this is from something I thought was patently impossible a few years earlier.
Never say never.
* not everyone
A targeted anti-personnel mine comes to mind. Could be useful for taking out enemy commanders.
Yet another example of something cyberpunk author William Gibson envisioned many years ago. Quoting the first four paragraphs of his second novel, Count Zero, published in 1986:
About ten years ago, I had a band that was called Slamhound for a little while, until we found out that the name was already taken by an L.A. glam-rock band. Ouch!
It's in the Mozilla nightly builds, though I have no idea if it's in 1.2.1
Yeah, it's in 1.2.1. Just load up tabs for all the pages you want, then go to Edit | Preferences | Navigator and click "Use Current Group".
You are correct. "God's Signature", the string of 500x500 mostly zeroes, definitely appears within the infinite digits of full-blown pi. In fact, it does so many times.
I just worry when people who don't understand the difference between really big numbers and infinity try to apply similar logic to real-world events. They'll say, "Oh, an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce Hamlet! Well, the universe is very big and has been around a very long time, so it seems probable that X would eventually happen by sheer chance."
Quoting from the Monkeys article linked in one of the parent posts, even if we assume "17 billion galaxies, each containing 17 billion habitable planets, each planet with 17 billion monkeys each typing away [on a simplified typewriter containing only 32 keys] and producing one line per second for 17 billion years, the chances are 99.999999999995% that the phrase 'TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION.' will not appear in the output."
You see, for most X, the probabilities are so slim as to be miraculous. I just hate seeing normally intelligent people who know something about infinity unwittingly believing that such miraculous things are probable while at the same time calling others naive or gullible for believing different miraculous things.
I can't use the a priori probability of that particular combination to prove that it's "impossible" for this to have happened merely by chance.
Yes, but if something has occurred, I think it's reasonable to look at the relative a priori probabilities of all potential causes to see which one is most likely to be the actual cause. Sometimes the percentages greatly favor one cause over another, and sometimes all causes seem equally (un)likely, and you get to use some other method to disambiguate (e.g. personal preference).
That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. Sound like you two aren't dating anymore... what's her phone number?
You still don't get it. If in fact pi is normal (and the evidence leans this way now), it is in fact *certain* that a 500x500 string of mostly zeros occurs in it somewhere.
Actually I do get it, I just didn't express myself accurately. What I meant was that that 500x500 string of mostly zeroes is staggeringly unlikely to occur in the first trillion digits. In fact, using one of the pi digit searches out there, I was able to determine that even a string of just eight zeroes in a row never occurs in the first 100 million digits, and neither does my ten-digit phone number. And increasing the number of digits to 1.25 trillion only increases the odds by a factor of twelve or so, I think.
In fact, even the string "8479326669" (ASCII digits of "TO BE") never occurs in the first 100 million digits. Yes, all of Hamlet in ASCII would show up if we had enough digits, but it'd probably take more digits than there are particles in the universe and probably take longer than the expected age of the universe to find it using a linear search, even accounting for Moore's law.
My point is, it's unfathomable just how unlikely things can be. Do read The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare if you haven't. It's quite good, even (gasp!) despite its pro-God stance.
The scary thing is that I knew the next three digits are "419" off the top of my head. The reassuring thing is that I don't know any more digits than that.
In fact, I have this theory that the number of digits of pi you have memorized is inversely proportional to your chances of getting a date. I'm so screwed....
Chances are that if you look long and hard enough, widening your parameters for what's acceptable enough, you will find something.
Granted. Though a lot of people go from there into assuming that certain things are much more probable than they actually are. For example, though I haven't looked through the digits of pi itself, I feel pretty confident that no 500x500 string of mostly zeros occurs. In fact, the chances of it doing so are so astronomically slim that it would be easier to believe that an intelligent designer had put it there than that it occurred by chance.
The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare is one of my favorite articles to point intelligent readers to that believe that whole infinite number of monkeys typing would eventually produce Hamlet idea.
Sure, here and there a rabid OSS person will show it to all of their friends, and that's a Good Thing.
Exactly. And it all depends on how many "friends" you have. I teach computer science and webmastering at a largish high school near the "Silicon Hills" of Austin, TX. I've got over 100 students in my classes. And there are over 2000 in the school.
You can bet as soon as I get the ISO downloaded ("ETA: 14:27") I'm going to burn a dozen copies or so and make them available to my students. Especially if I encourage them to burn copies for their friends, too. There's a "healthy" warez scene at my school, so they know how to do that, at least.
My students influence their less-technical friends, influence their less-technical parents who will then influence their coworkers, and will soon influence their classmates when they go to college. It all starts somewhere.
This is the same reason I keep copies of the latest RedHat on hand which I loan out for students to copy/install. I collect a $5 "ransom", which they get back if they return the CD.
And as Apple learned in the 80s and Microsoft knows right now, making cheap products available to computer students can grow up a generation of people who may pirate now, but will probably pay for your product when they grow up and start getting paid.
You're trolling (or just making a joke), but I'll reply anyway.
The number of computer-based courses in the high school I work at is staggering, and blows away the single "Computer Math" that was offered in my own school merely ten years ago:
Not the mention the standard desktop publishing done in journalism classes (newspaper and yearbook). In my district, kids can get A+ certified, Novell certified, and more in high school classes. Amazing.
I mentioned this in the book review of God's Debris about a year ago, but it bears repeating here.
Over a year ago I paid for and downloaded the DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook version of Scott Adams' interesting God's Debris. I paid $5 for it.
I also downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the ebook. I liked the book, but hated the proprietary, Windows-only "reader" application. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as .PGMs. Then I booted into Linux and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up. Overall, this took me about five hours.
Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted .OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version; I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.
I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now if I want to read the book again.
The moral of the story is: there's always a way.
No one seems to get up in arms when Redhat enhances "ls" to make it more friendly for their users...
Actually I was pretty ticked when I installed whatever version of RedHat they changed that in (7.2?) and 'ls -a' didn't sort by ASCII value.
I don't want my files to be in alphabetical-only order. I want dotfiles first, then UPPERCASE, then lowercase. At the time I poked around in the docs for quite some time and finally figured out some switch that seemed to make it work "properly", but when I upgraded to 7.3 it broke again and I haven't been up to hunting again.
Though to be fair, I do like the color-coded directory contents, so if that was RedHat's idea way back, then I guess we're even.
If PCs did lose out to consoles as the de-facto gaming platform, then that'd be one less barrier the average Joe would have to running Linux as their primary desktop OS. Aren't games still the number one reason people dual-boot?