Huh? 10% tip in Australia? I don't know where you've been eating, but allow me to assure you that most of Australia's restaurants haven't caught onto that particular fad.
I go to restaurants pretty regularly in Perth and Adelaide, and occasionally in Melbourne. In all my years of dining in Australia, I can't say I've ever been in a situation where a tip has been expected, or even automatically itemized on a bill at the end of the night. In fact, its only in the last few years that I've started to see an entry on the credit card slip for a tip. I also travel fairly frequently to the US, so I know what happens when you don't tip someone who is expecting it, or don't tip as much as they were expecting.
Please, for the love of god, can we keep Australian dining tip-free. Just charge a price for a meal and be done with it. If you are disappointed with the service, tell the owner, and/or don't come back. Let the owner worry about firing bad staff, or raising prices if they need to pay more to get good staff. When I go to a restaurant, I want to eat - not spend the desert course trying to work out how the soup that was $8 on the menu ended up costing me $15 because I forgot to factor in the tip and individually calculated sales taxes from the federal, state, county, and city.
Russ %-)
Re:, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Anything But The Gri
on
The Ultimate MMORPG
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Kill the exponential power curve: What kills 99% of most MMORPG content? The power curve.
Can't agree more with this one. Interestingly enough, it's also true of pen & paper RPG's.
One of the reasons I always preferred games like Shadowrun over D&D (ignoring genre differences) was the combat/leveling system. Shadowrun wasn't unique - other games had similar systems.
In D&D, your hit points just keep increasing as you level up. A level 1 warrior didn't stand a chance against a level 20 warrior, no matter how many lucky rolls you got. When you only have 10 hit points and a 1d6 short sword, a gentle breeze can kill you; what chance do you have against an opponent with 200 hit points, 3 attacks per round, with a weapon that does 1d12+5?
Shadowrun acknowledges that this is not how the world is. Every human is pretty much the same - hit them on the leg with a sword, and the leg will be damaged. Hit it hard enough, and it will fall off. What makes the difference is experience - an experienced warrior will know how to use a sword to make sure that the sword hits well (or conversely, to deflect the blow). Therefore, everyone had a set, small number of hit points. Lose 1, and you are lightly wounded. Lose 3, and you have a bad injury that is probably affecting your ability to fight. Lose 5 and you're in a come. 7 and you're dead. (might be off with the exact numbers here; it's been a while). And two minor wounds don't equal a major wound - none of this 'pecked to death by ducks' stuff that D&D promotes.
Development of experience became extremely important. Experience (plus a little luck) was what determined whether your attack defeated their defence. Experience could become very specific - you could develop experience in the use of a class of weapon, or skill in a specific type of weapon, or in the use of a particular instance of weapon; the more specific your experience, the better the bonuses, but the harder it is to get the experience, and the greater the penalties at using a different weapon. You could get a bonus if you aimed your weapon, at the cost of the time it took to aim.
As a result, a level 1 player could reasonably attack a level 20 player with expectation of victory if they were feeling lucky, or if they were clever about their attack (eg sneaking, sniping, etc). One hit can be fatal, if applied correctly and not defended.
This approach to hit points/power also helps to encourage non-combat alternatives to gaming. When you have a hundred hit points, going into battle becomes 'just one of those things'. If you lose a few hit points, who cares. If things start looking bad, then you run away. And since you have so many hit points, you have plenty of time to make that decision. However, if a single lucky/experienced shot can kill you, you start looking at alternatives to battle, unless you are certain you can win, or you are certain you are much better than your opponent.
The simple 'level up, get hit points, become invincible' rules of D&D seem to be adhered to by all the MMORPGs that I have seen. I can't wait until game developers learn from the lessons that old pen & paper guys learned years ago.
I've got to admit, the NLSU2 is a nifty little unit. Even if you're not modding it like this guy, there's lots of potential - you can install your own server daemons onto it (for example, the Twonkyvision UPnP media server can be installed on the device so you can serve media files without having your PC running).
But why USB2 ports? If you buy the NLSU2 as a home file server, you've then got to buy 2 USB drive bays, and have 3 slots on your power board - probably 5, because the NLSU2 and the USB drive enclosures will all have wall wart transformers and need the extra space between them. And then you have to work out how to organize 3 devices on your desk - and one of them is designed to stand upright.
The same device, but with onboard PATA/SATA interface rather USB would be fantastic. Is anyone out there manufacturing a similar device (i.e., ~$200, zero/web admin), but with 2 (or more) 3.5" drive bays and an [PS]ATA interface in it?
SiteBar is the most powerful, and yet simple, bookmark manager out there. (I know because I started the project and handed it off to a brilliant programmer!)
Based on what you've said, you may well be right. What you described in your posting is something I've been thinking about for while; if someone else has developed it already, great!
However, before you get to carried away with your own magnificence, you might want to tell your 'brilliant programmer' friend to work on the website a bit.
From my visit to sitebar.org, I'd be hard pressed to tell you what Sitebar actually does. There's no FAQ or "What is Sitebar?" in the page contents list. The bulk of the home page is dedicated to telling me all about the wonderful new features in v3.3 and the availability of professional hosting, and the ability to get access to "Athena" and "Biju"'s bookmarks (whoever they are). The users documentation is apparently "coming soon".
The most detail I could find was the 2 line advertising-esque tagline under the main page title, and the "Main Features" sidebar (what a concept - Main features, reduced to a bullet list under the page index), which reduces the core description of sitebar to "Bookmark import/export".
The 5 line description that you have posted on Slashdot is a better description than anything I could find easily on the sitebar homepage. Based on what I found out from the webpage, there's no chance I'd be installing it. Based on the description from your post, it might be worth a try.
Oh - and as a side note - nothing makes me say "bullshit" faster than a product that declares itself to be the most powerful in the world. Ever notice how Google doesn't ever call itself the most powerful or best search engine in the world? It just is - and people recognise it as such. Self-granted accolates sound false, and are. Putting "we're the best" on the top of everything you do is a sure-fire way to come off looking like a professional wanker, hopelessly naive, or both.
So - the warranty claims are paid for out of that great big bucket of money in the sky? Not in your life.
Ever wonder why products with a 3 year warranty cost more than products with 1 year warranty? It's rarely because of higher manufacturing costs. It's because manufacturers are factoring the increased likelyhood of failure into their sale price.
When little f*cknuckles like the grandparent decide it's fun to start breaking hardware for no particular reason, the cost of their vandalism isn't magically disappeared - the manufacturer says "Well, these widgets seem to break quite a bit, so we'd better up the price to cover our losses on warranty claims". As a result, MY hardware becomes more expensive.
I for one (and the parent for another) resent having to pay more for OUR hardware so some little f*cking ingrate can bust up his school's hardware on a whim.
Why on earth would you want to ask Mitch Kapor this question?
Mitch Kapor started Lotus in 1982; he was Director until 1987, at which point he ceased to have anything to do with Lotus. Notes was brought to market in 1989. The only connection Kapor has with Notes is the relationship between Notes and Agenda, a stillborn product that Kapor was involved with.
Lotus was sold to IBM in 1995. Nowadays, Lotus is little more than a brand name of the IBM software group.
If you have a beef with Lotus or Notes, have the courtesy to complain to the right person. Whinge to IBM, not Mitch Kapor.
And if you think porting to a new platform "is not too much work", then I can tell you have never written any commercial grade client software. Java or no, cross platform support is NEVER just a matter of a recompile.
And if the movie would be on tv at the same time as on dvd, would you still buy the dvd ?
Yes.
I buy the DVD instead of watching on TV because:
I don't want to have the directors carefully prepared narative flow broken up with an advert for "new improved brillo pads"
I want to choose when the movie plays, when it starts, and when it pauses
I don't want to have to watch the censored, pan-and-scanned 'modified for TV' version of the movie.
If they're any good, I want to watch the bonus extras on the DVD. For example, the extras on the 12 Monkeys and LOTR DVD's are almost as good as the movies themselves.
Personally, I think the Finglonger is a slightly more likely commercial product in the near term (or at least the "next 5 years" near term that desktop fusion researchers always seem fond of, but are incapable of meeting).
Yeah - he can make a nuclear reactor from a couple of coconuts and a palm leaf... but he can't work out how to make the one thing that would be useful - a freakin' BOAT!:-)
On the subject of wedding photos and copyright, try meeting the photographer half way.
When I got married earlier this year, I found a photographer who would sell me what he called a "digital negatives" package - he gave us 4 CD's with all the original 6 megapixel images, with unlimited rights to reproduce for personal use.
Strictly, the photographer retains copyright on the photos, and we are not allowed to use the photos for commercial or competition purposes, but we can take the photos to any lab in the world and get as many copies as we want for Grandma (which, at the end of the day, is all you really want).
As far as cost - this worked out at around AU$1000 (about US$650) for a 1PM-6PM session, covering a pre-wedding, wedding and post-wedding shoots. We didn't get anything but the CD's - no complimentary prints or album. Essentially we were just paying for his time and equipment.
Not all photographers will be as acommodating (some are downright pricks), but it's probably worth asking for something less than complete copyright.
For the record - we used Robert Reeves, a Perth, Western Australia based photographer. He's a really nice guy, and did a great job with our photos. I can't recommend him highly enough.
An old, but good poem, originally published in the New Yorker, that makes mention of Dr Teller. RIP. --
Perils of Modern Living - Harold P. Furth
Well up above the tropostrata There is a region stark and stellar Where, on a streak of anti-matter Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.
Remote from Fusion's origin, He lived unguessed and unawares With all his antikith and kin, And kept macassars[1] on his chairs.
One morning, idling by the sea, He spied a tin of monstrous girth That bore three letters: A. E. C.[2] Out stepped a visitor from Earth.
Then, shouting gladly o'er the sands, Met two who in their alien ways Were like as gentils. Their right hands Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.
-- [1]. Macassar oil was a popular hair dressing in the 19th century, named after the Indonesian port where the oil purportedly came from. An "antimacassar" is the decorative fabric used on chairs or sofas to protect the upholstery.
[2]. AEC=Atomic Energy Commission, now replaced by DOE=Department of Energy. The AEC (like the DOE today) funded most of the National Laboratories, including Teller's Livermore Laboratory.
Its not that you shouldn't have a choice. It's that the choice isn't worth having in the first place.
MPlayer uses Yet Another Widget Toolkit, custom built for MPlayer, and used by exactly 1 application - mplayer. There is no reuse of this toolkit between other applications.
I might be able to accept this lack of reuse if there was a genuine reason for it - if mplayer had some unique UI requirements - but can you name one single feature that Mplayer's widget toolkit provides that isn't available in the GTK+/Gnome widget toolkit, or could be added to that toolkit with minimal effort, adding a feature that could be used by other developers?
GTK+ is themeable - if you want all your buttons to look like they are covered in yak vomit - you can do that.
If you use Glade right, you can customize the layout of your user interface, reorganising the layout of your control buttons.
GTK+ provides every manner of widget, control, and display, and can be easily extended to provide additional controls and displays.
So - all the mplayer team has succeeded in doing is spending a whole lot of effort duplicating features that are available elsewhere. Then they have to support this code - find and fix bugs, answer questions about how to write extensions/themes, document the whole thing...
And before you say "Oh, but you could make a GTK+ theme for Mplayer" - yes, I could. But that would mean YET MORE development effort, and a constant struggle to make not just the look, but the FEEL consistent with the rest of my desktop. This means that not only do buttons look right (including being the right size and shape), but they behave the same way to mouse clicks, keyboard shortcuts, mouseovers. Emulation of this kind of behaviour is VERY rarely done well. A lot easier to just use the right tool to begin with.
Although the comparison I give here is GTK+/Gnome centric, but I believe similar facilities exist in KDE as well.
Yes - every developer has the right to choose their own toolkit, and choose to implement their own if they wish. It just seems that every single multimedia application developer (mplayer, xine, xmms...) seems to think that they know how to make widget toolkits better than everybody else... particularly ironic given that they seem to suck at building them so badly. I can't think of a single "themeable UI" application that doesn't have major usability issues that frustrate the jeebies out of me every time I'm forced to use it.
How expensive are austrailian wines in austrialia?
Getting off topic here, but you didn't have an email address to take this conversation offline...
Wine in AU is dirt cheap, compared to the US. I just got back from the US (Philadelphia), and I was amazed at the exorbitant price asked for wine. Most wine sold in Australia tends to be domestic - we have such an abundance that we have little need to import.
You can get drinkable red paint thinner at a liquor store for about A$10, a respectable drinker for about A$16, a very respectable red for A$22, and excellent cellarable quality wine for A$30 - thats about $6, $10, $13, $18 in US$. Prices are a little higher in restaurants, sometimes a little lower at the cellar door of the winery.
You can also spend a lot more (or a lot less) than that on a bottle if you want to (Penfolds Grange on the top end, Burronga Ridge gallon-o-goon on the other):-)
As for exchange rates, $A1 = $US 0.66, or thereabouts at the moment.
These guys seem european, however, as there's no references to shrimps on barbies, or Fosters.
Three minor problems:
1) What the US calls a shrimp, Australians call a prawn.
2) Australians, on the whole, don't put prawns on a barbie. Barbies are Snaggers and Chop territory.
3) Nobody - and I mean Nobody - drinks Fosters. Seriously. An Australian psycopath wanting to perform torture wouldn't force his victim to drink Fosters.
So, the only role played by the phrase "Pass the fosters, throw a shrimp on the barbie" is to identify an american who wants to sound Aw-stralian.
What is the approximate training time of a Bayesian filter?
How long is a piece of string?:-) It depends on the inference algorithm in use and the size of the traning set (both in terms of the number of training exemplars, and the number of features per exemplar).
However, as a guideline - I just trained the SpamBayes filter on my Outlook mail box; approx 400 spam messages, 1000 ham messages, and the filter was trained in about a minute. This is on a PIII-800.
So far, I'm pretty impressed with the performance of SpamBayes - The contents of my spam folder is all rated >97% probability; the highest rating on a ham message is 11% - and that was a mass mailed RedHat Network update alert.
To understand why broadband access has only 2% take up, you have to realise that as a result of their daft hardware policies, Telstra can't provide ADSL to a large proportion of their customer base.
I live in a brand new residential development, 20 minutes from the centre of Perth (a state capital, population ~1mill). I cannot get ADSL. Why? Am I too far from the exchange? No - because sitting between me and the exchange is a RIM - a multiplexer that makes ADSL non-viable.
I could understand if I was an unusual case, but the thing is, EVERY new residential development in Australia that was built in the last 10 years has the SAME PROBLEM. There are multimillion dollar harbourside developments in the middle of Sydney that have the same problem.
When I complained to Telstra (Jan 2003), I was informed that they were "surprised" at the rate of uptake of ADSL. They are apparently looking at options to get around RIMs, but their current solution will only provide ADSL for 10% of the people attached to a RIM.
However, fact remains that in an attempt to save pennies, Telstra put in cheap infrastructure in newly developed areas (areas which, to my mind, would seem to match well with their target demographic for ADSL - middle class, technologically aware, disposable income), and a large portion of the population is screwed as a result. I'm damned if I can understand how the hell they couldn't forsee the importance of broadband 10 years ago...
Public law enforcement will never be able to deny crime in any way as long as the people continue not to fear the punishment.
At no point in recorded history has "fear of punishment" proven an effective mechanism for encouraging public order.
For example - During the late 1700's in England, relatively minor property offences (stealing a loaf of bread, for instance) were met with strict punishment - execution, or transportation to Australia. Yet strangely, people kept stealing bread.
Why was that? Are people stupid? Do people not value life? No - they stole bread because they were starving, and it was die by starvation, or maybe die at the hand of the state IF they were caught. This put an increasing impetus on not getting caught, not on obeying the law. History is able to furnish any number of other examples.
People don't break the law because they have no fear of the punishment. They break the law because personal circumstance requires it (e.g., need food, must steal), because they don't respect the law itself (e.g., sharing music isn't stealing), or because they are insane.
In none of these cases is harsh penalty ever going to be an effective deterrent. The only real solution is to solve the circumstance (e.g., do something to remove poverty as a cause of crime), fix the law, or treat/protect the insane from themselves.
Russ %-)
Re:now that you mention it [netcraft]
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not saying netcraft is wrong, but keep in mind that the Netcraft survey is based on a guess. They probe the web server in expected (and unexpected) ways to see what kind of responses/error messages they get to queries, and categorize based on those responses.
Its entirely possible that Netcraft is wrong - any of the following is possible: - Netcraft have no profile for SCO, and so it guesses that unknown Unix = Linux - Netcraft has an ID for SCO, but SCO run a heavily modded server which looks more like Linux for some reason - SCO is actually running linux on their website
Can anyone confirm any of these points? Anyone know of a website that actually runs on SCO that we can use as a baseline for comparison?
The EPA has a direct responsiblity for this disaster.
Yeah. And they eat babies too.
Nice try at a "EPA Kills Astronauts" causality, but no.
The EPA required NASA to use materials that will prevent Ozone depletion.
NASA chose a foam. The chosen foam had some problems on STS-87. NASA tested it.
NASA continued to use the same foam.
If you want to play the blame game (and I have to say that IMHO, it's a particularly nonproductive game in this case unless you can point at a single individual who personally ignored evidence, or loosened a bolt, etc) NASA is the one with the responsibility here. The only thing the EPA is directly responsible for is instigating the change in foam. You could claim an indirect responsibility for enforcing a change, but the EPA didn't tell them which foam to use. NASA is the one directly responsible for selecting, testing and using the new foam. If NASA was concerned about safety, they had the option of halting launches until the issue was resolved.
Sh*t happens. Sometimes, Really Unpleasant Sh*t happens. Using the emotional effect of the occurence of unpleasant sh*t as a way to lend credibility for an argument belittles us all.
If you want to pick on the EPA, pick on them for something they actually did, not for something that happened as a result of something that happened as a result of something they did. By your logic, JFK is directly responsible for the death of the Columbia astronauts because he encouraged the rapid development of the space program.
Yes - horses are an introduced species in the US, Australia, NZ, and other places. However, for the most part, they are controlled and domesticated, and therefore pose no real threat to the environment.
However, free ranging horses cause all sort of environmental havoc. There a many free herds of brumbies (Aus. term for wild horses) in the Snowy Mountains and far north of Australia - and as a result, there are horse culling operations that fly around, shooting and baiting the herds.
It's not the fact that animals are ugly or little that makes them deserving of extermination, it is the fact that they are feral. They are out of control, and exterminating a natural balanced ecosystem. In the case of Campbell island, the rats exterminated dozens of unique and beautiful species of birds. If a herd of horses had done the same thing (and they are capable of it), they would be a target for extermination, too.
Depends on what they used as a poison. The interesting thing about places like Australia and New Zealand is that we have lots of plants that have naturally occurring toxins to which native animals are immune.
For example; In Western Australia, a large number of plants produce a substance called 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) in their leaves, berries, etc. Native animals, after millenia of exposure to this toxin, are immune to its effects - they munch away on it happily.
However - if you feed 1080 to a cat/fox/other introduced feral mammal, they drop dead real fast. As a result, 1080 is used extensively in feral animal control programs throughout Australia and New Zealand.
1080 is naturally occurring, biodegradable and therefore non-accumulative, so it has minimal long term effect on the native environment, other than the irradication of introduced animals and a restoration of the native population.
If you want more info, there is a really good (PDF) document from the Western Australian Agriculture department here.
Can anyone shed more light on how exactly this works?
1) The article mentions putting the ballon up 1.5k, and tethering it, yet it apparently remains static in strong breeze. The photo didn't seem to show any thrusters or reaction control devices, so how do they plan on keeping the thing steady? Are there lots of tethers in all directions? Or is "steady" a relative term, and the balloon can float around on the end of one tether without affecting service?
2) They say they only need 18 to cover the whole of Britain, in 2000 sqm chunks; this may be geographically true, but how many users get access within that chunk? The same area would have 2000 Mobile phone base stations, yet these easily get maxxed out if too many people want to make a call. The balloon approach dramatically reduces the number of base stations. How does the ballon handle 2000 times as many simultaneous bidirectional signals and not get maxxed out?
Slashdot Mirror
In Australia the typical tip is 10-15%.
Huh? 10% tip in Australia? I don't know where you've been eating, but allow me to assure you that most of Australia's restaurants haven't caught onto that particular fad.
I go to restaurants pretty regularly in Perth and Adelaide, and occasionally in Melbourne. In all my years of dining in Australia, I can't say I've ever been in a situation where a tip has been expected, or even automatically itemized on a bill at the end of the night. In fact, its only in the last few years that I've started to see an entry on the credit card slip for a tip. I also travel fairly frequently to the US, so I know what happens when you don't tip someone who is expecting it, or don't tip as much as they were expecting.
Please, for the love of god, can we keep Australian dining tip-free. Just charge a price for a meal and be done with it. If you are disappointed with the service, tell the owner, and/or don't come back. Let the owner worry about firing bad staff, or raising prices if they need to pay more to get good staff. When I go to a restaurant, I want to eat - not spend the desert course trying to work out how the soup that was $8 on the menu ended up costing me $15 because I forgot to factor in the tip and individually calculated sales taxes from the federal, state, county, and city.
Russ %-)
Kill the exponential power curve: What kills 99% of most MMORPG content? The power curve.
Can't agree more with this one. Interestingly enough, it's also true of pen & paper RPG's.
One of the reasons I always preferred games like Shadowrun over D&D (ignoring genre differences) was the combat/leveling system. Shadowrun wasn't unique - other games had similar systems.
In D&D, your hit points just keep increasing as you level up. A level 1 warrior didn't stand a chance against a level 20 warrior, no matter how many lucky rolls you got. When you only have 10 hit points and a 1d6 short sword, a gentle breeze can kill you; what chance do you have against an opponent with 200 hit points, 3 attacks per round, with a weapon that does 1d12+5?
Shadowrun acknowledges that this is not how the world is. Every human is pretty much the same - hit them on the leg with a sword, and the leg will be damaged. Hit it hard enough, and it will fall off. What makes the difference is experience - an experienced warrior will know how to use a sword to make sure that the sword hits well (or conversely, to deflect the blow). Therefore, everyone had a set, small number of hit points. Lose 1, and you are lightly wounded. Lose 3, and you have a bad injury that is probably affecting your ability to fight. Lose 5 and you're in a come. 7 and you're dead. (might be off with the exact numbers here; it's been a while). And two minor wounds don't equal a major wound - none of this 'pecked to death by ducks' stuff that D&D promotes.
Development of experience became extremely important. Experience (plus a little luck) was what determined whether your attack defeated their defence. Experience could become very specific - you could develop experience in the use of a class of weapon, or skill in a specific type of weapon, or in the use of a particular instance of weapon; the more specific your experience, the better the bonuses, but the harder it is to get the experience, and the greater the penalties at using a different weapon. You could get a bonus if you aimed your weapon, at the cost of the time it took to aim.
As a result, a level 1 player could reasonably attack a level 20 player with expectation of victory if they were feeling lucky, or if they were clever about their attack (eg sneaking, sniping, etc). One hit can be fatal, if applied correctly and not defended.
This approach to hit points/power also helps to encourage non-combat alternatives to gaming. When you have a hundred hit points, going into battle becomes 'just one of those things'. If you lose a few hit points, who cares. If things start looking bad, then you run away. And since you have so many hit points, you have plenty of time to make that decision. However, if a single lucky/experienced shot can kill you, you start looking at alternatives to battle, unless you are certain you can win, or you are certain you are much better than your opponent.
The simple 'level up, get hit points, become invincible' rules of D&D seem to be adhered to by all the MMORPGs that I have seen. I can't wait until game developers learn from the lessons that old pen & paper guys learned years ago.
Russ %-)
I've got to admit, the NLSU2 is a nifty little unit. Even if you're not modding it like this guy, there's lots of potential - you can install your own server daemons onto it (for example, the Twonkyvision UPnP media server can be installed on the device so you can serve media files without having your PC running).
But why USB2 ports? If you buy the NLSU2 as a home file server, you've then got to buy 2 USB drive bays, and have 3 slots on your power board - probably 5, because the NLSU2 and the USB drive enclosures will all have wall wart transformers and need the extra space between them. And then you have to work out how to organize 3 devices on your desk - and one of them is designed to stand upright.
The same device, but with onboard PATA/SATA interface rather USB would be fantastic. Is anyone out there manufacturing a similar device (i.e., ~$200, zero/web admin), but with 2 (or more) 3.5" drive bays and an [PS]ATA interface in it?
Russ %-)
Aw crap. I thought I heard a whooshing noise. Now I know it me completely missing the point. :-)
Russ %-)
You haven't been listening too closely then...
:-)
It's Vogonity, not Vulcanity
Russ %-)
SiteBar is the most powerful, and yet simple, bookmark manager out there. (I know because I started the project and handed it off to a brilliant programmer!)
:-)
Based on what you've said, you may well be right. What you described in your posting is something I've been thinking about for while; if someone else has developed it already, great!
However, before you get to carried away with your own magnificence, you might want to tell your 'brilliant programmer' friend to work on the website a bit.
From my visit to sitebar.org, I'd be hard pressed to tell you what Sitebar actually does. There's no FAQ or "What is Sitebar?" in the page contents list. The bulk of the home page is dedicated to telling me all about the wonderful new features in v3.3 and the availability of professional hosting, and the ability to get access to "Athena" and "Biju"'s bookmarks (whoever they are). The users documentation is apparently "coming soon".
The most detail I could find was the 2 line advertising-esque tagline under the main page title, and the "Main Features" sidebar (what a concept - Main features, reduced to a bullet list under the page index), which reduces the core description of sitebar to "Bookmark import/export".
The 5 line description that you have posted on Slashdot is a better description than anything I could find easily on the sitebar homepage. Based on what I found out from the webpage, there's no chance I'd be installing it. Based on the description from your post, it might be worth a try.
Oh - and as a side note - nothing makes me say "bullshit" faster than a product that declares itself to be the most powerful in the world. Ever notice how Google doesn't ever call itself the most powerful or best search engine in the world? It just is - and people recognise it as such. Self-granted accolates sound false, and are. Putting "we're the best" on the top of everything you do is a sure-fire way to come off looking like a professional wanker, hopelessly naive, or both.
Just a few helpful suggestions...
Russ %-)
So - the warranty claims are paid for out of that great big bucket of money in the sky? Not in your life.
Ever wonder why products with a 3 year warranty cost more than products with 1 year warranty? It's rarely because of higher manufacturing costs. It's because manufacturers are factoring the increased likelyhood of failure into their sale price.
When little f*cknuckles like the grandparent decide it's fun to start breaking hardware for no particular reason, the cost of their vandalism isn't magically disappeared - the manufacturer says "Well, these widgets seem to break quite a bit, so we'd better up the price to cover our losses on warranty claims". As a result, MY hardware becomes more expensive.
I for one (and the parent for another) resent having to pay more for OUR hardware so some little f*cking ingrate can bust up his school's hardware on a whim.
Russ %-)
Why on earth would you want to ask Mitch Kapor this question?
Mitch Kapor started Lotus in 1982; he was Director until 1987, at which point he ceased to have anything to do with Lotus. Notes was brought to market in 1989. The only connection Kapor has with Notes is the relationship between Notes and Agenda, a stillborn product that Kapor was involved with.
Lotus was sold to IBM in 1995. Nowadays, Lotus is little more than a brand name of the IBM software group.
If you have a beef with Lotus or Notes, have the courtesy to complain to the right person. Whinge to IBM, not Mitch Kapor.
And if you think porting to a new platform "is not too much work", then I can tell you have never written any commercial grade client software. Java or no, cross platform support is NEVER just a matter of a recompile.
Russ %-)
Yes.
I buy the DVD instead of watching on TV because:
Russ %-)
And yes, it's the same Farnsworth that invented the TV
As opposed to the Farnsworth that is ON TV...
Personally, I think the Finglonger is a slightly more likely commercial product in the near term (or at least the "next 5 years" near term that desktop fusion researchers always seem fond of, but are incapable of meeting).
Russ %-)
Yeah - he can make a nuclear reactor from a couple of coconuts and a palm leaf... but he can't work out how to make the one thing that would be useful - a freakin' BOAT! :-)
Russ %-)
On the subject of wedding photos and copyright, try meeting the photographer half way.
When I got married earlier this year, I found a photographer who would sell me what he called a "digital negatives" package - he gave us 4 CD's with all the original 6 megapixel images, with unlimited rights to reproduce for personal use.
Strictly, the photographer retains copyright on the photos, and we are not allowed to use the photos for commercial or competition purposes, but we can take the photos to any lab in the world and get as many copies as we want for Grandma (which, at the end of the day, is all you really want).
As far as cost - this worked out at around AU$1000 (about US$650) for a 1PM-6PM session, covering a pre-wedding, wedding and post-wedding shoots. We didn't get anything but the CD's - no complimentary prints or album. Essentially we were just paying for his time and equipment.
Not all photographers will be as acommodating (some are downright pricks), but it's probably worth asking for something less than complete copyright.
For the record - we used Robert Reeves, a Perth, Western Australia based photographer. He's a really nice guy, and did a great job with our photos. I can't recommend him highly enough.
Russ %-)
Jaguar... Panther...
Am I the only one that is amused by the similarities between the product naming schemes of Atari and Apple?
Russ Magee %-)
An old, but good poem, originally published in the New Yorker, that makes mention of Dr Teller. RIP.
--
Perils of Modern Living - Harold P. Furth
Well up above the tropostrata
There is a region stark and stellar
Where, on a streak of anti-matter
Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.
Remote from Fusion's origin,
He lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars[1] on his chairs.
One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.[2]
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.
Then, shouting gladly o'er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as gentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.
--
[1]. Macassar oil was a popular hair dressing in the 19th century, named after the Indonesian port where the oil purportedly came from. An "antimacassar" is the decorative fabric used on chairs or sofas to protect the upholstery.
[2]. AEC=Atomic Energy Commission, now replaced by DOE=Department of Energy. The AEC (like the DOE today) funded most of the National Laboratories, including Teller's Livermore Laboratory.
Its not that you shouldn't have a choice. It's that the choice isn't worth having in the first place.
MPlayer uses Yet Another Widget Toolkit, custom built for MPlayer, and used by exactly 1 application - mplayer. There is no reuse of this toolkit between other applications.
I might be able to accept this lack of reuse if there was a genuine reason for it - if mplayer had some unique UI requirements - but can you name one single feature that Mplayer's widget toolkit provides that isn't available in the GTK+/Gnome widget toolkit, or could be added to that toolkit with minimal effort, adding a feature that could be used by other developers?
GTK+ is themeable - if you want all your buttons to look like they are covered in yak vomit - you can do that.
If you use Glade right, you can customize the layout of your user interface, reorganising the layout of your control buttons.
GTK+ provides every manner of widget, control, and display, and can be easily extended to provide additional controls and displays.
So - all the mplayer team has succeeded in doing is spending a whole lot of effort duplicating features that are available elsewhere. Then they have to support this code - find and fix bugs, answer questions about how to write extensions/themes, document the whole thing...
And before you say "Oh, but you could make a GTK+ theme for Mplayer" - yes, I could. But that would mean YET MORE development effort, and a constant struggle to make not just the look, but the FEEL consistent with the rest of my desktop. This means that not only do buttons look right (including being the right size and shape), but they behave the same way to mouse clicks, keyboard shortcuts, mouseovers. Emulation of this kind of behaviour is VERY rarely done well. A lot easier to just use the right tool to begin with.
Although the comparison I give here is GTK+/Gnome centric, but I believe similar facilities exist in KDE as well.
Yes - every developer has the right to choose their own toolkit, and choose to implement their own if they wish. It just seems that every single multimedia application developer (mplayer, xine, xmms...) seems to think that they know how to make widget toolkits better than everybody else... particularly ironic given that they seem to suck at building them so badly. I can't think of a single "themeable UI" application that doesn't have major usability issues that frustrate the jeebies out of me every time I'm forced to use it.
Russ %-)
How expensive are austrailian wines in austrialia?
:-)
Getting off topic here, but you didn't have an email address to take this conversation offline...
Wine in AU is dirt cheap, compared to the US. I just got back from the US (Philadelphia), and I was amazed at the exorbitant price asked for wine. Most wine sold in Australia tends to be domestic - we have such an abundance that we have little need to import.
You can get drinkable red paint thinner at a liquor store for about A$10, a respectable drinker for about A$16, a very respectable red for A$22, and excellent cellarable quality wine for A$30 - thats about $6, $10, $13, $18 in US$. Prices are a little higher in restaurants, sometimes a little lower at the cellar door of the winery.
You can also spend a lot more (or a lot less) than that on a bottle if you want to (Penfolds Grange on the top end, Burronga Ridge gallon-o-goon on the other)
As for exchange rates, $A1 = $US 0.66, or thereabouts at the moment.
Russ %-)
These guys seem european, however, as there's no references to shrimps on barbies, or Fosters.
Three minor problems:
1) What the US calls a shrimp, Australians call a prawn.
2) Australians, on the whole, don't put prawns on a barbie. Barbies are Snaggers and Chop territory.
3) Nobody - and I mean Nobody - drinks Fosters. Seriously. An Australian psycopath wanting to perform torture wouldn't force his victim to drink Fosters.
So, the only role played by the phrase "Pass the fosters, throw a shrimp on the barbie" is to identify an american who wants to sound Aw-stralian.
Russ %-)
What is the approximate training time of a Bayesian filter?
:-) It depends on the inference algorithm in use and the size of the traning set (both in terms of the number of training exemplars, and the number of features per exemplar).
How long is a piece of string?
However, as a guideline - I just trained the SpamBayes filter on my Outlook mail box; approx 400 spam messages, 1000 ham messages, and the filter was trained in about a minute. This is on a PIII-800.
So far, I'm pretty impressed with the performance of SpamBayes - The contents of my spam folder is all rated >97% probability; the highest rating on a ham message is 11% - and that was a mass mailed RedHat Network update alert.
Russ %-)
To understand why broadband access has only 2% take up, you have to realise that as a result of their daft hardware policies, Telstra can't provide ADSL to a large proportion of their customer base.
I live in a brand new residential development, 20 minutes from the centre of Perth (a state capital, population ~1mill). I cannot get ADSL. Why? Am I too far from the exchange? No - because sitting between me and the exchange is a RIM - a multiplexer that makes ADSL non-viable.
I could understand if I was an unusual case, but the thing is, EVERY new residential development in Australia that was built in the last 10 years has the SAME PROBLEM. There are multimillion dollar harbourside developments in the middle of Sydney that have the same problem.
When I complained to Telstra (Jan 2003), I was informed that they were "surprised" at the rate of uptake of ADSL. They are apparently looking at options to get around RIMs, but their current solution will only provide ADSL for 10% of the people attached to a RIM.
However, fact remains that in an attempt to save pennies, Telstra put in cheap infrastructure in newly developed areas (areas which, to my mind, would seem to match well with their target demographic for ADSL - middle class, technologically aware, disposable income), and a large portion of the population is screwed as a result. I'm damned if I can understand how the hell they couldn't forsee the importance of broadband 10 years ago...
Russ %-)
Public law enforcement will never be able to deny crime in any way as long as the people continue not to fear the punishment.
At no point in recorded history has "fear of punishment" proven an effective mechanism for encouraging public order.
For example - During the late 1700's in England, relatively minor property offences (stealing a loaf of bread, for instance) were met with strict punishment - execution, or transportation to Australia. Yet strangely, people kept stealing bread.
Why was that? Are people stupid? Do people not value life? No - they stole bread because they were starving, and it was die by starvation, or maybe die at the hand of the state IF they were caught. This put an increasing impetus on not getting caught, not on obeying the law. History is able to furnish any number of other examples.
People don't break the law because they have no fear of the punishment. They break the law because personal circumstance requires it (e.g., need food, must steal), because they don't respect the law itself (e.g., sharing music isn't stealing), or because they are insane.
In none of these cases is harsh penalty ever going to be an effective deterrent. The only real solution is to solve the circumstance (e.g., do something to remove poverty as a cause of crime), fix the law, or treat/protect the insane from themselves.
Russ %-)
I'm not saying netcraft is wrong, but keep in mind that the Netcraft survey is based on a guess. They probe the web server in expected (and unexpected) ways to see what kind of responses/error messages they get to queries, and categorize based on those responses.
Its entirely possible that Netcraft is wrong - any of the following is possible:
- Netcraft have no profile for SCO, and so it guesses that unknown Unix = Linux
- Netcraft has an ID for SCO, but SCO run a heavily modded server which looks more like Linux for some reason
- SCO is actually running linux on their website
Can anyone confirm any of these points? Anyone know of a website that actually runs on SCO that we can use as a baseline for comparison?
Russ %-)
Yeah. And they eat babies too.
Nice try at a "EPA Kills Astronauts" causality, but no.
If you want to play the blame game (and I have to say that IMHO, it's a particularly nonproductive game in this case unless you can point at a single individual who personally ignored evidence, or loosened a bolt, etc) NASA is the one with the responsibility here. The only thing the EPA is directly responsible for is instigating the change in foam. You could claim an indirect responsibility for enforcing a change, but the EPA didn't tell them which foam to use. NASA is the one directly responsible for selecting, testing and using the new foam. If NASA was concerned about safety, they had the option of halting launches until the issue was resolved.
Sh*t happens. Sometimes, Really Unpleasant Sh*t happens. Using the emotional effect of the occurence of unpleasant sh*t as a way to lend credibility for an argument belittles us all.
If you want to pick on the EPA, pick on them for something they actually did, not for something that happened as a result of something that happened as a result of something they did. By your logic, JFK is directly responsible for the death of the Columbia astronauts because he encouraged the rapid development of the space program.
Russ %-)
Yes - horses are an introduced species in the US, Australia, NZ, and other places. However, for the most part, they are controlled and domesticated, and therefore pose no real threat to the environment.
However, free ranging horses cause all sort of environmental havoc. There a many free herds of brumbies (Aus. term for wild horses) in the Snowy Mountains and far north of Australia - and as a result, there are horse culling operations that fly around, shooting and baiting the herds.
It's not the fact that animals are ugly or little that makes them deserving of extermination, it is the fact that they are feral. They are out of control, and exterminating a natural balanced ecosystem. In the case of Campbell island, the rats exterminated dozens of unique and beautiful species of birds. If a herd of horses had done the same thing (and they are capable of it), they would be a target for extermination, too.
Russ %-)
Depends on what they used as a poison. The interesting thing about places like Australia and New Zealand is that we have lots of plants that have naturally occurring toxins to which native animals are immune.
For example; In Western Australia, a large number of plants produce a substance called 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) in their leaves, berries, etc. Native animals, after millenia of exposure to this toxin, are immune to its effects - they munch away on it happily.
However - if you feed 1080 to a cat/fox/other introduced feral mammal, they drop dead real fast. As a result, 1080 is used extensively in feral animal control programs throughout Australia and New Zealand.
1080 is naturally occurring, biodegradable and therefore non-accumulative, so it has minimal long term effect on the native environment, other than the irradication of introduced animals and a restoration of the native population.
If you want more info, there is a really good (PDF) document from the Western Australian Agriculture department here.
Russ %-)
Can anyone shed more light on how exactly this works?
1) The article mentions putting the ballon up 1.5k, and tethering it, yet it apparently remains static in strong breeze. The photo didn't seem to show any thrusters or reaction control devices, so how do they plan on keeping the thing steady? Are there lots of tethers in all directions? Or is "steady" a relative term, and the balloon can float around on the end of one tether without affecting service?
2) They say they only need 18 to cover the whole of Britain, in 2000 sqm chunks; this may be geographically true, but how many users get access within that chunk? The same area would have 2000 Mobile phone base stations, yet these easily get maxxed out if too many people want to make a call. The balloon approach dramatically reduces the number of base stations. How does the ballon handle 2000 times as many simultaneous bidirectional signals and not get maxxed out?
Russ %-)