Classifieds... ebay is slamming trading post from what I can see. Google engineers could program a trading post in a few hours... with everything free and listed int he google search engine... would crash the business plan of Trading post anyway.
Directory listings... would be handy to have... for yellow pages could just ask businesses to list for free... who wouldn't take that up! Put a bit of effort in and you have smashed half the value of yellow pages to businesses without decreasing yellow pages costs. goodbye profits!
mapping... just need the maps... street-directory.com.au has better maps anyway.
citysearch... does that make money?
Why would google go and buy something that will probably go broke in a couple of years, or at least loose 90% of its profits!
The task in question is ai hard or near enought to! The only way to tell if the "Gates" in the previous example is single or plural is to understand the context and figure out which it applies to. This requires either understanding, an awful lot of human intervention, or an awful lot of sample text to trawl through... none of which is easy in any way, shape or form!
I remember back in 2000 I was in Malaysia and a hotel there had the wired version... i.e. plug in computer, try to surf anywhere or pop email from anywhere and you get redirected to a page to agree to pay 20RM for a day's access, charged to your room.
The system was done by an Australian Company iirc. (And hence probably dated from prior to 2000)
You could use usb or ethernet for that one. Adding wireless as another option is clearly trivial! Perhaps that company is the one with the original patent?
I moved into a brand new home 3 years ago and did the landscaping and watering system myself.
I'm in Sydney, so the above comment on water restrictions applies!
7 X10 Universal modules and a few relays mean I have x10 control of up to 64 zones (42 of them currently in use!) all computer controlled of course.
The system works well and being able to sh/perl script everything has had many advantages, mainly due to the adaptability. 1) I adapted one zone to do automated water changes on my (large) aquarium 2) When I got my weatherstation (la crosse2310), which connects to my computer, I sh programmed the system to keep track of the dampness in each area of the garden (based on temp,wind and rain) and only water what needs watering when it needs it. 3) When we got our 9000l rainwater tank and a pump for it, the computer keeps an estimate of how full the tank is and uses tank verses Sydney town water however I program it (i.e. use tank water whenever available). 4) When our first set of water restictions came in (we are in drought in Sydney) of no sprinklers between 8am and 8pm, a couple of lines of shell scripting sorted that out! 5) When the second round of restricitions came in (no sprinklers anytime) a couple more lines of shell script meant that the sprinklers were only watered by tank water and the drippers by town water. 6) When the next round of restrictions come in in a few weeks (maybe only drippers allowed and only on a full moon, only between 5am and 8am, and only within 2 days of when the australian cricket team wins a game... or something like that... they're keeping it a secret), I'll be ready;) 7) Another zone fills the fish pond as appropriate (computer estimates evaporation from the weather station). 8) It allows the easy use of a heap of zones (42 and counting). This means that each zone is very targetted and you don't have to water one area of the garden just because some other area is too dry! 9) With an X10 remote I can controll the system from the loungeroom or the garden. 10) My (geekier) friends like to see a demo of the system, each zone operating for 5 seconds! 11) It operates itself when I go on holidays, or have the flu, or are busy at work, or don't feel like going outside to handwater in the dark at the only legal time.
As for the lawn itself, we made sure it was less than 25% of the garden, and use a drought resistant buffalo that doesn't particularly mind going brown in a drought and coming back when it rains. Now we just need the robotic lawn mower and we'll be set!
Equivalently, but perhaps more simply, note that the prime factorization of n includes 2^m where...
n 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 m 0 1 0 2 0 1 0 3
i.e. the same sequence offset by one. It is easy to see why they are equivalent. This sequence comes up often... the one I listed above and the two that you listed are the most common ones that I had found so far.
Voyager Point is a new suburb of Sydney (and not a great distance out compared to some suburbs), with hundreds of new homes full of young couples, where each home is worth a bare minimum of AU$400k. The perfect market! Yet not an inch of fibre in sight! Oh, and adsl isn't available either, anywhere in the suburb. More satelite dishes than any suburb I've seen is oz.
Perhaps they (the telcos) seem to have given up on new fibre broadband.
Five years ago I came upon 3 (then old) labtam CT300 X terminal... Nice machine, 21 inch monitor etcetera. As time goes on the server that they are based on has moved up from a 486 to a pentium 200 (adequate, given enough ram), and will probably soon move up furthur.
The remarkable thing is, without significant administration, and no spare parts, they are ALL still working (made in about '91 remember) and in use. No software upgrades have come out since the comany stopped making them about 7 years ago, yet they run the latest mozilla, kde etc as fast as the server! Just upgrade the werver and the rest works like magic! (unforuntately enlightenment doesn't work very efficiently as it uses some new fangled x extensions, that are only 5-10 years old.)
Maybe there is something in this new fangled Network Computer (or hyper new innovative.NET idea) after all.
Maybe the zero administration, low maintanence claims are true, you just need these!
It actually started with the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Co), the government owned channel as a show called "towards 2000". Then as 2000 approached and it got popular, Channel 7 (a commercial channel) bought the rights. It also changed its name to "beyond 2000" (but kept mainly the same team of reporters).
IT gradually turned more mainstream and more engineering and less "science", so I lost interest. IT kept going for a few years, but I haven't seen it on comercial TV here for a while.
I can still remember an '85 vintage (odd) story on mobile telephones, back when they were bigger than bricks, and filled half the boot (truck) of a car. They reckoned that "by the year 2000" (their favorite phrase in towards 2000) they would be small enough to fit in your pocket and that most people would have them. Noone really believed them! (They also made a lot of incorrect claims).
I think it would be great to run that first series again, just for the comedy value.
If the ordering of the guessers is predetermined, but each player gets to hear each other players guess, you can get it right 7/8 of the time.
(I.e. the only information that is passed around is person 1s guess to 2 and 3, and 2s guess to 3.)
person 1) if 2 & 3 are red, guess blue, otherwise pass.
person 2) if person 1 guessed, then pass.
otherwise if person 3 is red, guess blue (100% chance)
else pass
person 3) if anyone has guessed then pass,
else guess blue (100% chance)
the only time this fails is RRR...
thus 7/8. This is the best possible (as for any information to happen, there must be a case where person 1 guesses, and hence at least a 1/8 chance of failure.
There are more than security reasons for not running as root, however.
I know that, while running as a user, on several occasions I have made a typo in a command / typed something into a wrong window / accidently pasted a heap of text into a shell terminal / just got confused / whatever... that would have been disasterous if I were running as root.
The fact that it started spewing permission denied when what I wanted it to do didn't have such a problem tips me off to a potential problem.
Another advantage is that (if you set up the server for http) you can walk into any internet cafe in the world, type in a url, and read your email in your favorite email reader. You can happily ignore this "you can only read email if you use hotmail or something similar" junk you see at many internet cafes/access points. I don't htink most internet cafe operators woudl know what X is, let alone have an X server running! They probably only have windows telnet as well!
But just think, Australia could create a whole industry selling (tons upon tons of) genuine pieces of MIR just like we did with skylab all those years ago.
IIRC from tonights news, at the press conference, Professor Fels described DVDCA as an international cartel. In Australia, Professor Fels is viewed in very high regard by both the public and the media (who allways utilize him to help nail the bad guys in the current affairs shows). The news report was totally one-sided in support of this action (well, are there two sides?). I wonder if they can bring DeCSS into this (forcing consumers to buy unnessecary expensive software to play dvds on their computer (in trying to stop free alternatives))?
They are specially great on steep slopes...
(when the grass stip is long and narrow, so you can't go accross the slope)
A power mower is more difficult to push up the hill...
The Reel mower controlls its own speed going down!
My parents bought a reel mower after the first time I tried to mow the lawn with a power mower.
I started downhill, gravity was stonger than me and dragged me along a little way before I fell off. The mower went onto the road, then down the road a couple of hundred meters, marrowly missing a couple of cars! (before crashing into the curb)
Unless the child has an incredibly high emotional age your still dealing with...
Me tinks most prodiogys no spell lik that!
(change your to you're)
No actually, I know a few such people. Some are great spellers, and some are hopeless... the bad spellers are those who were good at maths and were accelerated before they could spell (like me to some extent, though I was only accelerated one year).
IMHO most prodigies have great memory and concept-understanding skills and are very keen to learn but aren't quite to the same level in problem solving... sure they are better than 99 percent of the population, but the best problem solvers are actually (usually) those with a bad memory (derive their formulae every time). IMHO this is why most of the top thinkers start off being great at school, but not fantastic.
4b) The linux version was $10 more expensive and available about a month later in my neck of the woods... quake fans want their quake 3 as soon as it is released, and they don't want to pay $10 extra when they have a permenant internet connection and the linux download downloads in no time.
5) (at least originally) If you buy the linux version, you can only play on linux. If you buy the windows version, you can play on linux and you can play on windows (and its $10 cheaper). What would the average linux user buy?
I've done this thrice in the last couple of months, including 2 where the net connection is via modem.
The basic rule of thumb is that you can keep your/home, but redo the rest. (Just keep a backup of/etc for configuration issues that some later, and of course your/var/spool/mail).
I personally find the best thing other than apt in debian is that it makes good use of a large hdd.
IF you have a fast internet connection, have a look at the recent auto-apt (if you try to use a file that is in something that you haven't got installed... it automatically downloads and installs it for you.
Have a look at all of the non-RedHat packages you currently have, and see that almost all of them are already somewhere in debian (other than kde-like ones which you just have another sources.list (i.e. apt-get) entry). This makes upgrading to debian much easier... after an intall, just type in apt-get (list of all the programs you like) and come back in the morning.
I guess that doing transferring each of my machines to debian was about a 6 hour process, BUT (due to technical local network difficulties) had to install slink first before upgrading to potato, and had to recompile kernel each time. Unless you have anything tricky (like need to recompile kernel) it may take you as little as 3 hours (including installing lots of programs that with redhat you used to have to search for).ymmv
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of some much better reasons...
Search engine... already got one.
Classifieds... ebay is slamming trading post from what I can see. Google engineers could program a trading post in a few hours... with everything free and listed int he google search engine... would crash the business plan of Trading post anyway.
Directory listings... would be handy to have... for yellow pages could just ask businesses to list for free... who wouldn't take that up!
Put a bit of effort in and you have smashed half the value of yellow pages to businesses without decreasing yellow pages costs. goodbye profits!
mapping... just need the maps... street-directory.com.au has better maps anyway.
citysearch... does that make money?
Why would google go and buy something that will probably go broke in a couple of years, or at least loose 90% of its profits!
Mod parent up!
The task in question is ai hard or near enought to! The only way to tell if the "Gates" in the previous example is single or plural is to understand the context and figure out which it applies to. This requires either understanding, an awful lot of human intervention, or an awful lot of sample text to trawl through... none of which is easy in any way, shape or form!
My parents keep having two of http://www.reptilia.org/care_sheets/Lizards/csheet s_liz_austwater.htm turning up in their backyard (Sydney, Australia). They are about a meter long.
I remember back in 2000 I was in Malaysia and a hotel there had the wired version... i.e. plug in computer, try to surf anywhere or pop email from anywhere and you get redirected to a page to agree to pay 20RM for a day's access, charged to your room.
The system was done by an Australian Company iirc.
(And hence probably dated from prior to 2000)
You could use usb or ethernet for that one. Adding wireless as another option is clearly trivial! Perhaps that company is the one with the original patent?
I moved into a brand new home 3 years ago and did the landscaping and watering system myself.
;)
I'm in Sydney, so the above comment on water restrictions applies!
7 X10 Universal modules and a few relays mean I have x10 control of up to 64 zones (42 of them currently in use!) all computer controlled of course.
The system works well and being able to sh/perl script everything has had many advantages, mainly due to the adaptability.
1) I adapted one zone to do automated water changes on my (large) aquarium
2) When I got my weatherstation (la crosse2310), which connects to my computer, I sh programmed the system to keep track of the dampness in each area of the garden (based on temp,wind and rain) and only water what needs watering when it needs it.
3) When we got our 9000l rainwater tank and a pump for it, the computer keeps an estimate of how full the tank is and uses tank verses Sydney town water however I program it (i.e. use tank water whenever available).
4) When our first set of water restictions came in (we are in drought in Sydney) of no sprinklers between 8am and 8pm, a couple of lines of shell scripting sorted that out!
5) When the second round of restricitions came in (no sprinklers anytime) a couple more lines of shell script meant that the sprinklers were only watered by tank water and the drippers by town water.
6) When the next round of restrictions come in in a few weeks (maybe only drippers allowed and only on a full moon, only between 5am and 8am, and only within 2 days of when the australian cricket team wins a game... or something like that... they're keeping it a secret), I'll be ready
7) Another zone fills the fish pond as appropriate (computer estimates evaporation from the weather station).
8) It allows the easy use of a heap of zones (42 and counting). This means that each zone is very targetted and you don't have to water one area of the garden just because some other area is too dry!
9) With an X10 remote I can controll the system from the loungeroom or the garden.
10) My (geekier) friends like to see a demo of the system, each zone operating for 5 seconds!
11) It operates itself when I go on holidays, or have the flu, or are busy at work, or don't feel like going outside to handwater in the dark at the only legal time.
As for the lawn itself, we made sure it was less than 25% of the garden, and use a drought resistant buffalo that doesn't particularly mind going brown in a drought and coming back when it rains. Now we just need the robotic lawn mower and we'll be set!
Equivalently, but perhaps more simply, note that the prime factorization of n includes 2^m where...
n 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
m 0 1 0 2 0 1 0 3
i.e. the same sequence offset by one. It is easy to see why they are equivalent. This sequence comes up often... the one I listed above and the two that you listed are the most common ones that I had found so far.
even better, how about 2 ipaqs or zaurus with 802.11 cards!
Or for extra points, DeCSS.
The tech isn't allways there...
Voyager Point is a new suburb of Sydney (and not a great distance out compared to some suburbs), with hundreds of new homes full of young couples, where each home is worth a bare minimum of AU$400k. The perfect market! Yet not an inch of fibre in sight! Oh, and adsl isn't available either, anywhere in the suburb. More satelite dishes than any suburb I've seen is oz.
Perhaps they (the telcos) seem to have given up on new fibre broadband.
another similar tip to the parent...
Some telcos (eg telstra) offer "half price second telephone lines" which actually consist of a digital line to the home, and a "splitter" in the home.
My pppd uptimes went from 3day averages to over 30day averages on my 56k. Well worth it (in a country where local calls are untimed but not free)!
Five years ago I came upon 3 (then old) labtam CT300 X terminal... Nice machine, 21 inch monitor etcetera. As time goes on the server that they are based on has moved up from a 486 to a pentium 200 (adequate, given enough ram), and will probably soon move up furthur.
.NET idea) after all.
The remarkable thing is, without significant administration, and no spare parts, they are ALL still working (made in about '91 remember) and in use. No software upgrades have come out since the comany stopped making them about 7 years ago, yet they run the latest mozilla, kde etc as fast as the server! Just upgrade the werver and the rest works like magic! (unforuntately enlightenment doesn't work very efficiently as it uses some new fangled x extensions, that are only 5-10 years old.)
Maybe there is something in this new fangled Network Computer (or hyper new innovative
Maybe the zero administration, low maintanence claims are true, you just need these!
It actually started with the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Co), the government owned channel as a show called "towards 2000". Then as 2000 approached and it got popular, Channel 7 (a commercial channel) bought the rights. It also changed its name to "beyond 2000" (but kept mainly the same team of reporters).
IT gradually turned more mainstream and more engineering and less "science", so I lost interest. IT kept going for a few years, but I haven't seen it on comercial TV here for a while.
I can still remember an '85 vintage (odd) story on mobile telephones, back when they were bigger than bricks, and filled half the boot (truck) of a car. They reckoned that "by the year 2000" (their favorite phrase in towards 2000) they would be small enough to fit in your pocket and that most people would have them. Noone really believed them! (They also made a lot of incorrect claims).
I think it would be great to run that first series again, just for the comedy value.
If the ordering of the guessers is predetermined, but each player gets to hear each other players guess, you can get it right 7/8 of the time.
(I.e. the only information that is passed around is person 1s guess to 2 and 3, and 2s guess to 3.)
person 1) if 2 & 3 are red, guess blue, otherwise pass.
person 2) if person 1 guessed, then pass.
otherwise if person 3 is red, guess blue (100% chance)
else pass
person 3) if anyone has guessed then pass,
else guess blue (100% chance)
the only time this fails is RRR...
thus 7/8. This is the best possible (as for any information to happen, there must be a case where person 1 guesses, and hence at least a 1/8 chance of failure.
There are more than security reasons for not running as root, however.
I know that, while running as a user, on several occasions I have made a typo in a command / typed something into a wrong window / accidently pasted a heap of text into a shell terminal / just got confused / whatever... that would have been disasterous if I were running as root.
The fact that it started spewing permission denied when what I wanted it to do didn't have such a problem tips me off to a potential problem.
Another advantage is that (if you set up the server for http) you can walk into any internet cafe in the world, type in a url, and read your email in your favorite email reader. You can happily ignore this "you can only read email if you use hotmail or something similar" junk you see at many internet cafes/access points. I don't htink most internet cafe operators woudl know what X is, let alone have an X server running! They probably only have windows telnet as well!
never underestimate the geek power...
Who do your non-geeks speak to when they are thinking of buying a computer/digital camera/hdd?
That's right! YOU!
I bought a kodak digital camera partly because they supported gphoto, and now all my windows-using friends have them because I do!
average age of napster user: 17 years old, median 24
I agree, that stat just has to be bogus.
Just think about it...
median=24 implies at least half the users are 24+
and assuming that no users 24, means the rest are very young)
i.e. 50% of users are 24 years old!!!
I'd say that someone is either very confused or telling mistruths.
But just think, Australia could create a whole industry selling (tons upon tons of) genuine pieces of MIR just like we did with skylab all those years ago.
Tv out on a g450 doesn't currently work and should hopefully be fixed in future versions of the driver.
IIRC from tonights news, at the press conference, Professor Fels described DVDCA as an international cartel. In Australia, Professor Fels is viewed in very high regard by both the public and the media (who allways utilize him to help nail the bad guys in the current affairs shows). The news report was totally one-sided in support of this action (well, are there two sides?). I wonder if they can bring DeCSS into this (forcing consumers to buy unnessecary expensive software to play dvds on their computer (in trying to stop free alternatives))?
They are specially great on steep slopes...
(when the grass stip is long and narrow, so you can't go accross the slope)
A power mower is more difficult to push up the hill...
The Reel mower controlls its own speed going down!
My parents bought a reel mower after the first time I tried to mow the lawn with a power mower.
I started downhill, gravity was stonger than me and dragged me along a little way before I fell off. The mower went onto the road, then down the road a couple of hundred meters, marrowly missing a couple of cars! (before crashing into the curb)
Like a compiler (e.g. gcc)
;)
If you don't have a compiler, it is very difficult to download the c source of a compiler and compile it!
(Then again, maybe newbie computer users should be forced to learn this the hard way
Me tinks most prodiogys no spell lik that! (change your to you're)
No actually, I know a few such people. Some are great spellers, and some are hopeless... the bad spellers are those who were good at maths and were accelerated before they could spell (like me to some extent, though I was only accelerated one year). IMHO most prodigies have great memory and concept-understanding skills and are very keen to learn but aren't quite to the same level in problem solving... sure they are better than 99 percent of the population, but the best problem solvers are actually (usually) those with a bad memory (derive their formulae every time). IMHO this is why most of the top thinkers start off being great at school, but not fantastic.
4b) The linux version was $10 more expensive and available about a month later in my neck of the woods... quake fans want their quake 3 as soon as it is released, and they don't want to pay $10 extra when they have a permenant internet connection and the linux download downloads in no time.
5) (at least originally) If you buy the linux version, you can only play on linux. If you buy the windows version, you can play on linux and you can play on windows (and its $10 cheaper). What would the average linux user buy?
I've done this thrice in the last couple of months, including 2 where the net connection is via modem.
/home, but redo the rest. (Just keep a backup of /etc for configuration issues that some later, and of course your /var/spool/mail).
The basic rule of thumb is that you can keep your
I personally find the best thing other than apt in debian is that it makes good use of a large hdd.
IF you have a fast internet connection, have a look at the recent auto-apt (if you try to use a file that is in something that you haven't got installed... it automatically downloads and installs it for you.
Have a look at all of the non-RedHat packages you currently have, and see that almost all of them are already somewhere in debian (other than kde-like ones which you just have another sources.list (i.e. apt-get) entry). This makes upgrading to debian much easier... after an intall, just type in apt-get (list of all the programs you like) and come back in the morning.
I guess that doing transferring each of my machines to debian was about a 6 hour process, BUT (due to technical local network difficulties) had to install slink first before upgrading to potato, and had to recompile kernel each time. Unless you have anything tricky (like need to recompile kernel) it may take you as little as 3 hours (including installing lots of programs that with redhat you used to have to search for).ymmv