I have a ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT as well, primarily for digital photography editing, webpage graphic design, and gaming and I know that the little button for switching to 3x and 4x brightness can make a significant difference in contrast ratio and how white the white is and how black the black is. I wonder if you are currently on the 3x setting (which indicates it's the best for graphics/gaming whenever you switch to that mode), or if you're just using the standard view to compare to the LCD? I know the "normal" brightness setting can keep things a little dark on the P95f+. (But having it on the "normal" setting is easier on the eyeballs when viewing a Word, Excel, or other business type of document with lots of white background to it.)
BTW, my ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT has been a real pleasure for gaming and graphics stuff. I think I'd have a hard time adapting to an LCD monitor now because of how nice this monitor is.
Taco, you've experienced what I like to call "poor customer service." For instance, just the other day I was calling the lighting company that is installing all the light fixtures in the house I'm currently building, and after numerous requests to get something changed (because they're idiots and can't seem to get my change-orders right), I got this response: "OK, can you hold on one minute?" - "Sure", I say to the receptionist for the 3rd time that day. About a minute goes by and all of the sudden a guy's voice says "What can I help you with?"... "Who are you?" I say - I _thought_ I was talking to the girl receptionist, and now some dude is on the line. "I was told there was a manager call." he says. So now I get it: the receptionist just transferred me up the line without giving me the courtesy to even tell me she was doing so, which to someone like me who has already had real problems getting the order right with this company only served to aggravate me more.
I can see both sides of the argument for why you posted this article to Slashdot, and why it should be on a personal blog. I can also see both sides of the argument as to why you should or should not be allowed to have a handle in a game like WoW with a prefix of 'Cmdr'. Unfortunately, all these types of issues matter little when the primary issue is just poor customer service. Blizzard has always been bad with strong arming their most loyal customers like any other overly powerful company in an industry, *cough* Microsoft *cough*, and that's a shame, but get used to it.
I side with you though about online identities regardless of what type of company or service it is: I've been using 'cavemanf16' for the past ten years as well, and I'd hate to be forced to give it up just to be allowed to play in an online video game over some draconian measures to try and force the game to be a more pure "RPG" than other games. The game is what I make of it, not just what Blizzard tells me I can make of it. Otherwise, I'm just not going to enjoy it.
Yes, it is true, and I was assuming that the base rate of "invalid URL's" is unknown, so the worst case scenario is to expect 10% of ALL URL's to be invalid. That would be a rather large volume of invalid URL's at this point in time (yes I know, another assumption), but it does yield a 99.98% success rate in detecting a minimum of 1 bad URL out of a random 2500 per month checked. (out of 1 million total URL's received per month) My math makes sense. I'm not sure where you came up with yours.
Yes it's true that checking 2500 random URL's when absolutely every single one is valid would still give you a "0% invalid" result, but you would ALSO still only be about 99.98% sure that all 1 million URL's received that month were indeed valid since you did NOT check all 1 million. Obviously the more you check, the more sure you get about how many invalid URL's you have per million units checked. You're confusing statistics with semantics. No, I can't say with absolute certainty that every single URL is invalid by checking only 2500, but I also won't waste nearly the amount of system resources as someone who would be checking every single URL. Fast, cheap, quality - pick two. I pick fast quality. (It costs some amount of money to implement the quality checking code and have it run on the server each month)
Even 1 in 10 would be overkill. From TinyURL's website:
"Making long URLs useable! More than 11 million of them. Over 200 million hits/month."
Let's assume that 11 million items = roughly 1 million items submitted each month. 'Spot-checking' only 2500 submitted URL's per month would get you within 99.98% accuracy of finding false URL's. In other terms: if you spot check 2500 URL's per month, you will catch at least one invalid URL each month, 99.98% of the time. That's hardly a noteworthy load on a server that's serving up 200M+ page hits per month, and I don't doubt they will indeed implement such a feature now that NanoURL has been released. What I do find quite interesting is how one (or many) smart people could use these types of wild ideas to continue to circumvent security measures in the future, and potentially no authority would be the wiser. But of course we should still check people's shoes for bombs before they board a plane.:-/
I hate replying to my own post, but I just thought of this facet of computing that I'd like to add:
Modern computers are just glorified watches. They're so intricately complex and microscopic watches, that to our perception, some of what they are capable of doing somehow makes them "mysterious" and therefore a "computer." And some people think that one day "artificial intelligence" will attain sentience and be able to "think" on its own. But I say that ultimately this is impossible. At some level, that machine with the very complex programming and equipment is still only a very very VERY sophisticated watch at its core. To a human, yes, it may on the surface appear to be "thinking" as it talks to you, listens to you, and is able to carry on an "intelligent" discussion with you. But it IS fully explainable. It may take you hundreds or thousands of years to explain each and every action of the machine, but it is understandable and will never make an "irrational decision." Each and every action will be built upon some defined, pre-programmed, mechanical, fully logical "next step."
As I always say to people when I'm trying to repair their PC: "It's only a machine, there is an explanation for each and every action, but I don't always have the knowledge about how to repair every problem without causing other problems."
The modern computer is regulated to "do stuff" each clock cycle, which, since we have harnessed electrons to do the ticking instead of gears, happens very very rapidly. As I write this post, it's as if millions of different microscopic "clock hands" (flowing electrons) are doing certain things. Typing on this keyboard is like moving the second hand 360 degrees (which advances the minute hand and ultimately the hour hand), only doing it lots and lots of different directions, with much more complex behavior of "what happens when such and such happens."
So yes, I'd still call it a very basic computer. A watch IS a very basic computer. So basic it's "understandable" by just looking at it. The modern computer is so complex, and tiny, that you can't understand it just by looking at it. That's the only difference: size!
LOL! Yes, I understand the difficulties judges are faced with in interpreting the law at times, or at upholding it, etc. You do make a good point about "online book searching" being more analogous(sp?) to performing web searches in relation to Google's project. I guess I was looking more long-term, when Google (or some company) decides they want to archive something on the order of the Library of Congress online, in full, searchable, digitized, readable format. That's when more than just geeks will start rallying against more of these profit protecting middleman "associations" in the private sector who try to squash long-term human advancement for a short-term profit in a limited sector. (musicians, book writers, movie makers)
Great point. And it doesn't always work as perfectly as my first post may have made it sound. Getting the latest CD or DVD release (and even some of the more popular stuff) can put you on a waiting list of a year (no joke!) at times. Although it's not perfect, waiting a year for the latest Britney Spears CD or the "Titannic" DVD isn't necessarily something most of us will lose sleep over.
And yes, I do purchase certain media items (books, movies, and CD's) because I "cherish" the ability to own a physical copy of that item. Yes, I could duplicate each item with varying degrees of technical know-how and/or expense to myself, but sometimes it's just worth it to me to own an "original" version. Laws currently grant copyright profitability, not God. In fact, a benevolent god would be against such "hording" of resources based solely on one's human capabilities. I find it funny that so many people feel so entitled to what they have in this life. (Including myself, I can be horribly selfish sometimes!)
No, I know other city library systems like ours exist, certainly, but ours was apparently recognized recently as the best. (it's been recognized in the past as excellent too) Plus, I know of other smaller city's (Toledo, OH - smaller, but it is a city) that do not have such linkage amongst their libraries. Google may not have all their legal ducks in a row, so to speak, but my library lets me borrow software, DVD's, and CD's, and unless the manufacturer put copy-protection measures on that media itself it's pretty darn easy to duplicate that material to my own "personal" collection. Yes, it's definitely more costly to duplicate that material in print form, but I suppose Google's work is based on the fact that they can upsell products and services through their advertising engine as people read through printed works as well. Personally, I'd find it an excellent service to provide me with local dealers, maps to those dealers, and product pricing all in one place as I read through a "how to re-wire your home", "how to build a raised planting bed", or any myriad of other digitized books on such subjects. How cool would it be to read through a "digital security best practices" book and automatically be shown advertisements off to one side of the different vendors offering products to solve some of those problems? I know I'd appreciate it!
These associations of book publishers should be careful with what they do, or they could quickly find themselves in the position of the RIAA and MPAA amongst far more people than just geeks. I'd wager every single person I know has been to our city's library system at least once in their lifetime. (Columbus, OH) And I'd also be willing to bet that should the courts be stupid enough to allow this to spill over eventually to the library's that there would be a lot of people pissed that they might cripple our city's library system which happens to be the best one in the nation because there are about 30+ library's "linked together" across the city. In other words, I can go to my local library building (or even online: http://www.cml.lib.oh.us/) and reserve just about any DVD, CD, book, or magazine that I could ever want. It's like a physical version of Kazaa, eDonkey, or any other P2P system, except all the content IS stored on the central "server". (The library drives trucks of books around all over the city, transporting them from one location to another based on patron requests)
So, how is Google any different, except that it's potentially more massive, EVEN faster than the library system I'm used to, and available to even more people?? It's just an extension of the concept that's been around in my city in "snail-mail" form for quite a while now. Keep it up and they're liable to piss off a vast majority of the population of the US if the laws about copyrights keep getting extended further and further away from the original intent of copyright law.
No, this isn't my most well-though-out post ever, but I wanted to highlight this facet of the debate over Google's LIbrary Project.
I've read most of the +5 comments here, and everyone is overcomplicating this issue, save a few of you. I have seen this happen in my own company and heard about it happening in friend's companies as well, particularly in the "customer service" or "tech support" call center departments. What happens is that the world around us changes and changes and changes, and the paid developers don't have the time or need to develop "mini-apps" to make certain work-arounds easier for the customer service people that talk to actual, real, live, external customers all day to make a living. So one or a few different enterprising individuals hack together a web page of contact info, or a really simple PHP website that can auto-generate a particular type of e-mail response to the most frequent customer complaints, or throw together an Access database with a bit of behind the scenes code to track evolving issues more accurately. I know this happens because I have done it myself, on more than one occassion in more than one job role at my current company. It's just a fact of being a worker in the trenches of a large company.
So, how does this answer the question posed by this "Ask Slashdot"? Well, the answer is that because these two friends are the workers-in-the-trenches types, they're NOT going to be able to steer their manager clear of releasing a half-baked software package or app or webpage or whatever it is to the entire company's "customer service" departments. What they CAN do, as only a few other people have mentioned, is take credit for it on their resume. This isn't cheating, it's not lying, it's just good business sense. Don't be mad at me or the few other Slashdotter's who suggest this approach. We're not being weasly, and it's not wasted effort. Finish the app (hopefully in the time established by the manager - who obviously needs to now look good since he/she jumped the gun and told all their peers what "their people" were gonna do by a certain date), claim the success of deploying it nationwide when you hadn't even expected it to do anything more than help yourself, and then start sending your resume out for those entry-level programmer/analyst job positions. No, they're not being paid NOW for this work, but this WILL show initiative, drive to get a project done on a timeline, and the ability to "think outside the box" in a job, and to another employer this is the kind of person they'd want working with and for them. They don't want the jaded and cynical type of person on their team. They want the person who is enthusiastic about their work, but also smart enough to realize when they've exceeded their job requirements enough to go looking for a new job.
Tell your friends to remain upbeat, claim this as a major victory on their part, and then find a new and better job. Yes, their current manager sounds like quite the asshat, but that's no reason to retaliate in kind.
Other examples of where they've done things incredibly right include hanging a pig carcass from a hook on a pivot and shooting it with various guns to prove that no, taking a gunshot does not make you fly back and do cartwheels
But you have to admit, turning on "enhanced" physics in CS:S and DOD:S is perhaps the most hilarious good times I've had in a while... and yes, I'm married.
I would like to mention this has a dual-edged sword quality to it too - human nature. Yes, we will always find ways around opressive totalitarian control, but that's why we'll never, ever have a utopia. No one will be able to live within such "utopian" perfection. We're not used to it, and our nature is to rebel, not to conform. (even at great expense - even death - to our own person)
Ah, but you forget: the Internet, while made much easier to access content available via it's protocols by DNS root level servers, is NOT a singular entity. A previous poster pointed out, "66.25.34.100 forever!" (or whatever the slashdot IP address actually is) You see, this is all just a really silly flame war amongst a bunch of unknowledgeable people known as "Big Brother" in a sense. They think they can usurp, control, horde, and generally make themselves great by controlling the "Intarwebs", but they ultimately cannot. Yes, it would make it harder on individuals as stupid as the politicians are to access content on the Internet by segregating DNS root servers, yes it would potentially screw up the ability of businesses to operate via the Internet worldwide, and yes it would become a gigantically severe pain in the ass. But it won't destroy the Internet.
The design of the Internet (redundancy through an engineered lack of central control), as well as Open Source Software (which is basically engineered via legal documents to provide the same kind of redundancy from a legal standpoint) is such that no one entity, ruler, country, or megalomaniac can ever totally have control over it ALL! Yes, companies like Microsoft can be very monopolistic and controlling of what they've created, but they can't horde it ALL for themselves... ever. The Linux source code is out there, so is Open Office, Apache, and all the code that makes network cards work. As much as any entity would love to stuff this stuff back into their own box, they can't. Far too many "commoners" have complete, unfettered access to every little bit of it.
So yes, countries can turn "the Internet" as we now know it into one gigantic pain-in-the-ass mess of a system, but only for a time. There will be too many commoners that are unhappy with such control now that will QUICKLY find ways around such control mechanisms. Countries will be forced to find a happy medium that we all can agree on. Much as the RIAA has found the happy medium that many people like the musicians they (the RIAA) back and are willing to pay $0.99/song for different songs here and there, but REFUSE (at times) to go purchase the entire CD for just the one song that they want.
Some of us are still humming along on our AGP 4x/8x AMD64 mobo's with plenty of RAM to spare. Where are the new graphics cards for us?!?! nVidia and ATI are in some damn war over their latest, greatest PCI Express cards while they pay little attention to providing cards built for AGP card slots. This, quite frankly, sucks. I'm not a freak about buying every new graphics card that comes out, but it's getting to the point where it's about time to upgrade (so I can enjoy more features of HL2's DoD:Source HDL tweaks) and you simply can'tbuy an nVidia 7800 card for an AGP slot. If I'm going to spend twice as much on a video card than any processor I've purchased in the last 5 years, it better be the best I can get right now so that it lasts me for a long time to come, but alas, no such card is made for my mobo! Where's the love, graphics card companies?
IT admins everywhere with a few shiny new "Google 2U OS" boxes on the network serving up core desktop office apps to the entire office of several thousand people will surely be jumping for joy in 5-10 years. No more hell-desk, no more Windows reimaging that takes hours, far fewer virii to deal with in the workplace. We will welcome our Google overlords with open arms... until they make so much money and have so much political clout that they begin bending government to their own will. And then, like the thousands of years of history before us, we will rebel and proclaim that we never saw it coming, they're evil, they're the bane of the technology industry, etc.
Let's just keep it in perspective. Open Source is the big revolution, and what is working wonders in the technology world today - not Google. Google is a company, and right now Google knows exactly how to serve and please its customers. Let's hope they continue that trend, but everyone fails eventually -- even a mega-billion dollar company.
You can also buy metal grill "filters" for fans that don't need to be changed all the time, but still promote the collection of dust on the outside of the grill, not the inside of the PC. This strategy has worked well with one of my computers. I also would suggest sucking air in/out from different locations of the case. Multiple air pathways (with more going out than coming in) will help keep dust from accumulating in the majority of spots in the case.
Spreadsheet? Wrong! OK, I love OpenOffice 2.0 beta, but Calc is a hopelessly worthless piece of junk for anyone doing any serious analysis or report creation using spreadsheets. And yes, people, a SQL report looks like utter shit compared to a chart with bright colors for the executives your reports go out to in the end. "DataPilot" is not something some college kid can just sit down and code in a couple of evenings, and it shows from how useless and difficult to use it is in OpenOffice compared to Excel's PivotTables and PivotCharts.
If only I had time to help make some massive improvements to DataPilot I would, but I simply don't right now. And I would feel like helping because DataPilot sucks, and they need some business analysts with programming abilities to show them what kind of power really needs to be there for people like me to fully switch to OOo2 or SO8.
This sort of bell-curve grading system *would* make perfect sense if it was a uniform or at least well-understood concept in our society, but it's not. On Slashdot we ridicule and bemoan the idiotic HR people who write up job descriptions for people with 20+ years of WindowsXP expereince, 20+ years of Java experience, (the list goes on and on), and will toss resume's in the circular filing cabinet for anything less than those "requirements" which we all know are completely impossible to fulfill. And yet the sad fact is that real, live people hire other real, live people and want the best. That's all well, good, and natural to want the best working with and/or for you, but in America that means having a MINIMUM 3.5GPA from a "top-tier engineering school", or whatever. To make matters worse, most slashdotters went to high school and consistently scored high in all there classes. Anything less than a 3.5 in any one HS class could doom you to not getting into MIT. So the HS' inflate the grades based on the PTA board's whining that more money isn't coming into their district to prove that more and more of their students are going to better and better colleges after HS. But there's no feedback loop in this equation from HS to college to work world and back again. Each "stage" of development is completely insulated from the others from direct feedback.
So I, like so many others went off to college thinking "Hey, I'm pretty smart!", and then we are utterly dejected when finding out that we are only pulling 45% scores on tests in that engineering course we thought we'd be so good at. (Because like it or not, we're USED to getting a 90% or BETTER on tests and expect that kind of performance out of ourselves at the college level.) And those wonderful bell curve grading systems usually aren't shown to you, the student. So while 45% might actually be in the 70-80th percentile of the class (meaning you're doing much better than most everyone else in the class), you are just left to hope and pray that 45% is 'somewhere in the middle' and that you won't fail the class in the end.
I blame lack of accountability between HS - college - work world for the poor performance of America's engineering programs. The foreigners coming here for the engineering programs and jobs HAVE a direct feedback mechanism -> a signficantly better life than where they came from! So they work their asses off to make sure they get that life, while us natives waste our time trying to make sense of the multi-faceted failures of the American educational system.
Oh, but I do get it, and I'm far lazier than that. You see, if he has say... 5 different passwords... fine, that works great. But if he has... say 40... like I do, then there comes a time where you can't even remember the password to that one system that you hardly ever use, but still need to update the password periodically due to system admin's annoying tendency for "security.";)
So it's not just about generating random passwords for systems. It's about remembering which passwords go to which systems, and what the passwords are. (And when you're not allowed to use any of the last 12 passwords, and you are forced to update your passwords on that system every month, trying to remember the right one becomes quite the task. That's why I resorted to using an encrypted spreadsheet to store all that info.)
Re:Better than post-it notes
on
Too Many Passwords
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Damn, that's way too much work! (And what about me and my 30-40 passwords... that's a BIG piece of paper!) Just GPG one file full of passwords, and remember your GPG key.
I read the article, and it's clearly some sort of shitty spam website to begin with. If you read through the entire article, you will find that there are 3 pages, with pages 2 and 3 being mostly the same thing regurgitated from the first page. On top of that, it's clear that they didn't run the article through a spell checker, and the grammar is clearly not right in several places. It's a reseller site or some shit like that, and it looks like one of those news aggregator websites that appears legit to Google's search engine, but in reality is just there to try and generate some ad-click revenues for the spammers running it. Guess the slashdot "editors" got wise to the spammer/submitter's tricks and yanked the article for once.
Now if only they would do that for all the Roland Piquepalle "articles"...
I have tried numerous programs on Linux to manage my finances, and like you used to use Quicken on Windows.
When I tried to switch over to Linux as my primary desktop, I found that there are options out there, but they're just not as polished *looking* as Quicken is for the average finance/budget tracking user like myself. So, let me offer up what I've tried, and you can figure something out for yourself:
jGnash - A weird name for a finance program, but I used it for a short time and it did an alright job... and that was approximately a year ago. The project looks to be in active development still, so you may want to at least give it a try. It did QIF imports alright as well, and although it's written in Java it seemed to be coded pretty well.
GnuCash - Well known in the Linux world with a long history. I tried it out but never really got the hang of it due to the somewhat clunky and difficult to understand UI. The engine behind this program seems to work great, but much like Gnome, it takes some getting used to the UI.
Moneydance - Also has a long history, is coded in Java, and tries to compete with Quicken, but I didn't like the reports in this program. Also seemed a bit sluggish on Windows because it was coded in Java, but that was a pre-2005 release version, so the new one might be better. Unfortunately, from the look of their webpage the reports haven't changed at all, which was my biggest beef with this program.
Or try Wine because it appears that Quicken and QuickBooks run under it OK. Haven't tried this out personally, and this would mean keeping around your dual-boot setup most likely, but it might solve your dilemma.
As for the gaming aspect - it's the only reason that I have to stick around with Windows. I love to play CS:S, Civ3, Morrowind, and easily install/uninstall new video games, and Windows is simply easier and less hassle to do that in than any distro of Linux is right now. When I finish college (which also is a pain 'cause they use VisualC++ and other Windows crap that I still need Windows for) I'll probably more seriously consider buying Cedega (from TransGaming) to allow me to continue playing the games I love.
P.S. Using Linux as my primary workstation taught me that Linux based desktop software is HIGHLY "tweakable", and as such is also highly prone to disaster. (I'm the type that never reads the manual: disaster then ensues.) If you're going to do your finances on a Linux desktop setup, buy a DVD burner and MAKE SYSTEM BACKUPS nightly!!
Not to mention that this has proven to be a difficult-to-attain goal, even on as small of an "OS" as the OS on Microsoft's XBox. BIOS is supposed to be that secure domain of low-level operating system (it turns on all the hardware after all, hence, it's operating a system) that cannot be "hacked." But it has been, time and again! For simple tasks like browsing the web, sure, a read-only type of system makes sense - to a degree. But as soon as an exploit is found to manipulate the read-only OS into erasing your data on your read/write drive(s) you can be sure cracker/hackers will be doing it!
Slashdot Mirror
I have a ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT as well, primarily for digital photography editing, webpage graphic design, and gaming and I know that the little button for switching to 3x and 4x brightness can make a significant difference in contrast ratio and how white the white is and how black the black is. I wonder if you are currently on the 3x setting (which indicates it's the best for graphics/gaming whenever you switch to that mode), or if you're just using the standard view to compare to the LCD? I know the "normal" brightness setting can keep things a little dark on the P95f+. (But having it on the "normal" setting is easier on the eyeballs when viewing a Word, Excel, or other business type of document with lots of white background to it.)
BTW, my ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT has been a real pleasure for gaming and graphics stuff. I think I'd have a hard time adapting to an LCD monitor now because of how nice this monitor is.
Taco, you've experienced what I like to call "poor customer service." For instance, just the other day I was calling the lighting company that is installing all the light fixtures in the house I'm currently building, and after numerous requests to get something changed (because they're idiots and can't seem to get my change-orders right), I got this response: "OK, can you hold on one minute?" - "Sure", I say to the receptionist for the 3rd time that day. About a minute goes by and all of the sudden a guy's voice says "What can I help you with?" ... "Who are you?" I say - I _thought_ I was talking to the girl receptionist, and now some dude is on the line. "I was told there was a manager call." he says. So now I get it: the receptionist just transferred me up the line without giving me the courtesy to even tell me she was doing so, which to someone like me who has already had real problems getting the order right with this company only served to aggravate me more.
I can see both sides of the argument for why you posted this article to Slashdot, and why it should be on a personal blog. I can also see both sides of the argument as to why you should or should not be allowed to have a handle in a game like WoW with a prefix of 'Cmdr'. Unfortunately, all these types of issues matter little when the primary issue is just poor customer service. Blizzard has always been bad with strong arming their most loyal customers like any other overly powerful company in an industry, *cough* Microsoft *cough*, and that's a shame, but get used to it.
I side with you though about online identities regardless of what type of company or service it is: I've been using 'cavemanf16' for the past ten years as well, and I'd hate to be forced to give it up just to be allowed to play in an online video game over some draconian measures to try and force the game to be a more pure "RPG" than other games. The game is what I make of it, not just what Blizzard tells me I can make of it. Otherwise, I'm just not going to enjoy it.
Yes, it is true, and I was assuming that the base rate of "invalid URL's" is unknown, so the worst case scenario is to expect 10% of ALL URL's to be invalid. That would be a rather large volume of invalid URL's at this point in time (yes I know, another assumption), but it does yield a 99.98% success rate in detecting a minimum of 1 bad URL out of a random 2500 per month checked. (out of 1 million total URL's received per month) My math makes sense. I'm not sure where you came up with yours.
Yes it's true that checking 2500 random URL's when absolutely every single one is valid would still give you a "0% invalid" result, but you would ALSO still only be about 99.98% sure that all 1 million URL's received that month were indeed valid since you did NOT check all 1 million. Obviously the more you check, the more sure you get about how many invalid URL's you have per million units checked. You're confusing statistics with semantics. No, I can't say with absolute certainty that every single URL is invalid by checking only 2500, but I also won't waste nearly the amount of system resources as someone who would be checking every single URL. Fast, cheap, quality - pick two. I pick fast quality. (It costs some amount of money to implement the quality checking code and have it run on the server each month)
Even 1 in 10 would be overkill. From TinyURL's website:
:-/
"Making long URLs useable! More than 11 million of them. Over 200 million hits/month."
Let's assume that 11 million items = roughly 1 million items submitted each month. 'Spot-checking' only 2500 submitted URL's per month would get you within 99.98% accuracy of finding false URL's. In other terms: if you spot check 2500 URL's per month, you will catch at least one invalid URL each month, 99.98% of the time. That's hardly a noteworthy load on a server that's serving up 200M+ page hits per month, and I don't doubt they will indeed implement such a feature now that NanoURL has been released. What I do find quite interesting is how one (or many) smart people could use these types of wild ideas to continue to circumvent security measures in the future, and potentially no authority would be the wiser. But of course we should still check people's shoes for bombs before they board a plane.
I hate replying to my own post, but I just thought of this facet of computing that I'd like to add:
Modern computers are just glorified watches. They're so intricately complex and microscopic watches, that to our perception, some of what they are capable of doing somehow makes them "mysterious" and therefore a "computer." And some people think that one day "artificial intelligence" will attain sentience and be able to "think" on its own. But I say that ultimately this is impossible. At some level, that machine with the very complex programming and equipment is still only a very very VERY sophisticated watch at its core. To a human, yes, it may on the surface appear to be "thinking" as it talks to you, listens to you, and is able to carry on an "intelligent" discussion with you. But it IS fully explainable. It may take you hundreds or thousands of years to explain each and every action of the machine, but it is understandable and will never make an "irrational decision." Each and every action will be built upon some defined, pre-programmed, mechanical, fully logical "next step."
As I always say to people when I'm trying to repair their PC: "It's only a machine, there is an explanation for each and every action, but I don't always have the knowledge about how to repair every problem without causing other problems."
The modern computer is regulated to "do stuff" each clock cycle, which, since we have harnessed electrons to do the ticking instead of gears, happens very very rapidly. As I write this post, it's as if millions of different microscopic "clock hands" (flowing electrons) are doing certain things. Typing on this keyboard is like moving the second hand 360 degrees (which advances the minute hand and ultimately the hour hand), only doing it lots and lots of different directions, with much more complex behavior of "what happens when such and such happens."
So yes, I'd still call it a very basic computer. A watch IS a very basic computer. So basic it's "understandable" by just looking at it. The modern computer is so complex, and tiny, that you can't understand it just by looking at it. That's the only difference: size!
LOL! Yes, I understand the difficulties judges are faced with in interpreting the law at times, or at upholding it, etc. You do make a good point about "online book searching" being more analogous(sp?) to performing web searches in relation to Google's project. I guess I was looking more long-term, when Google (or some company) decides they want to archive something on the order of the Library of Congress online, in full, searchable, digitized, readable format. That's when more than just geeks will start rallying against more of these profit protecting middleman "associations" in the private sector who try to squash long-term human advancement for a short-term profit in a limited sector. (musicians, book writers, movie makers)
Great point. And it doesn't always work as perfectly as my first post may have made it sound. Getting the latest CD or DVD release (and even some of the more popular stuff) can put you on a waiting list of a year (no joke!) at times. Although it's not perfect, waiting a year for the latest Britney Spears CD or the "Titannic" DVD isn't necessarily something most of us will lose sleep over.
And yes, I do purchase certain media items (books, movies, and CD's) because I "cherish" the ability to own a physical copy of that item. Yes, I could duplicate each item with varying degrees of technical know-how and/or expense to myself, but sometimes it's just worth it to me to own an "original" version. Laws currently grant copyright profitability, not God. In fact, a benevolent god would be against such "hording" of resources based solely on one's human capabilities. I find it funny that so many people feel so entitled to what they have in this life. (Including myself, I can be horribly selfish sometimes!)
No, I know other city library systems like ours exist, certainly, but ours was apparently recognized recently as the best. (it's been recognized in the past as excellent too) Plus, I know of other smaller city's (Toledo, OH - smaller, but it is a city) that do not have such linkage amongst their libraries. Google may not have all their legal ducks in a row, so to speak, but my library lets me borrow software, DVD's, and CD's, and unless the manufacturer put copy-protection measures on that media itself it's pretty darn easy to duplicate that material to my own "personal" collection. Yes, it's definitely more costly to duplicate that material in print form, but I suppose Google's work is based on the fact that they can upsell products and services through their advertising engine as people read through printed works as well. Personally, I'd find it an excellent service to provide me with local dealers, maps to those dealers, and product pricing all in one place as I read through a "how to re-wire your home", "how to build a raised planting bed", or any myriad of other digitized books on such subjects. How cool would it be to read through a "digital security best practices" book and automatically be shown advertisements off to one side of the different vendors offering products to solve some of those problems? I know I'd appreciate it!
These associations of book publishers should be careful with what they do, or they could quickly find themselves in the position of the RIAA and MPAA amongst far more people than just geeks. I'd wager every single person I know has been to our city's library system at least once in their lifetime. (Columbus, OH) And I'd also be willing to bet that should the courts be stupid enough to allow this to spill over eventually to the library's that there would be a lot of people pissed that they might cripple our city's library system which happens to be the best one in the nation because there are about 30+ library's "linked together" across the city. In other words, I can go to my local library building (or even online: http://www.cml.lib.oh.us/) and reserve just about any DVD, CD, book, or magazine that I could ever want. It's like a physical version of Kazaa, eDonkey, or any other P2P system, except all the content IS stored on the central "server". (The library drives trucks of books around all over the city, transporting them from one location to another based on patron requests)
So, how is Google any different, except that it's potentially more massive, EVEN faster than the library system I'm used to, and available to even more people?? It's just an extension of the concept that's been around in my city in "snail-mail" form for quite a while now. Keep it up and they're liable to piss off a vast majority of the population of the US if the laws about copyrights keep getting extended further and further away from the original intent of copyright law.
No, this isn't my most well-though-out post ever, but I wanted to highlight this facet of the debate over Google's LIbrary Project.
I've read most of the +5 comments here, and everyone is overcomplicating this issue, save a few of you. I have seen this happen in my own company and heard about it happening in friend's companies as well, particularly in the "customer service" or "tech support" call center departments. What happens is that the world around us changes and changes and changes, and the paid developers don't have the time or need to develop "mini-apps" to make certain work-arounds easier for the customer service people that talk to actual, real, live, external customers all day to make a living. So one or a few different enterprising individuals hack together a web page of contact info, or a really simple PHP website that can auto-generate a particular type of e-mail response to the most frequent customer complaints, or throw together an Access database with a bit of behind the scenes code to track evolving issues more accurately. I know this happens because I have done it myself, on more than one occassion in more than one job role at my current company. It's just a fact of being a worker in the trenches of a large company.
So, how does this answer the question posed by this "Ask Slashdot"? Well, the answer is that because these two friends are the workers-in-the-trenches types, they're NOT going to be able to steer their manager clear of releasing a half-baked software package or app or webpage or whatever it is to the entire company's "customer service" departments. What they CAN do, as only a few other people have mentioned, is take credit for it on their resume. This isn't cheating, it's not lying, it's just good business sense. Don't be mad at me or the few other Slashdotter's who suggest this approach. We're not being weasly, and it's not wasted effort. Finish the app (hopefully in the time established by the manager - who obviously needs to now look good since he/she jumped the gun and told all their peers what "their people" were gonna do by a certain date), claim the success of deploying it nationwide when you hadn't even expected it to do anything more than help yourself, and then start sending your resume out for those entry-level programmer/analyst job positions. No, they're not being paid NOW for this work, but this WILL show initiative, drive to get a project done on a timeline, and the ability to "think outside the box" in a job, and to another employer this is the kind of person they'd want working with and for them. They don't want the jaded and cynical type of person on their team. They want the person who is enthusiastic about their work, but also smart enough to realize when they've exceeded their job requirements enough to go looking for a new job.
Tell your friends to remain upbeat, claim this as a major victory on their part, and then find a new and better job. Yes, their current manager sounds like quite the asshat, but that's no reason to retaliate in kind.
But you have to admit, turning on "enhanced" physics in CS:S and DOD:S is perhaps the most hilarious good times I've had in a while... and yes, I'm married.
I would like to mention this has a dual-edged sword quality to it too - human nature. Yes, we will always find ways around opressive totalitarian control, but that's why we'll never, ever have a utopia. No one will be able to live within such "utopian" perfection. We're not used to it, and our nature is to rebel, not to conform. (even at great expense - even death - to our own person)
Ah, but you forget: the Internet, while made much easier to access content available via it's protocols by DNS root level servers, is NOT a singular entity. A previous poster pointed out, "66.25.34.100 forever!" (or whatever the slashdot IP address actually is) You see, this is all just a really silly flame war amongst a bunch of unknowledgeable people known as "Big Brother" in a sense. They think they can usurp, control, horde, and generally make themselves great by controlling the "Intarwebs", but they ultimately cannot. Yes, it would make it harder on individuals as stupid as the politicians are to access content on the Internet by segregating DNS root servers, yes it would potentially screw up the ability of businesses to operate via the Internet worldwide, and yes it would become a gigantically severe pain in the ass. But it won't destroy the Internet.
The design of the Internet (redundancy through an engineered lack of central control), as well as Open Source Software (which is basically engineered via legal documents to provide the same kind of redundancy from a legal standpoint) is such that no one entity, ruler, country, or megalomaniac can ever totally have control over it ALL! Yes, companies like Microsoft can be very monopolistic and controlling of what they've created, but they can't horde it ALL for themselves... ever. The Linux source code is out there, so is Open Office, Apache, and all the code that makes network cards work. As much as any entity would love to stuff this stuff back into their own box, they can't. Far too many "commoners" have complete, unfettered access to every little bit of it.
So yes, countries can turn "the Internet" as we now know it into one gigantic pain-in-the-ass mess of a system, but only for a time. There will be too many commoners that are unhappy with such control now that will QUICKLY find ways around such control mechanisms. Countries will be forced to find a happy medium that we all can agree on. Much as the RIAA has found the happy medium that many people like the musicians they (the RIAA) back and are willing to pay $0.99/song for different songs here and there, but REFUSE (at times) to go purchase the entire CD for just the one song that they want.
Some of us are still humming along on our AGP 4x/8x AMD64 mobo's with plenty of RAM to spare. Where are the new graphics cards for us?!?! nVidia and ATI are in some damn war over their latest, greatest PCI Express cards while they pay little attention to providing cards built for AGP card slots. This, quite frankly, sucks. I'm not a freak about buying every new graphics card that comes out, but it's getting to the point where it's about time to upgrade (so I can enjoy more features of HL2's DoD:Source HDL tweaks) and you simply can't buy an nVidia 7800 card for an AGP slot. If I'm going to spend twice as much on a video card than any processor I've purchased in the last 5 years, it better be the best I can get right now so that it lasts me for a long time to come, but alas, no such card is made for my mobo! Where's the love, graphics card companies?
What powers Google? A bunch of Linux boxes clustered together. Point proven.
IT admins everywhere with a few shiny new "Google 2U OS" boxes on the network serving up core desktop office apps to the entire office of several thousand people will surely be jumping for joy in 5-10 years. No more hell-desk, no more Windows reimaging that takes hours, far fewer virii to deal with in the workplace. We will welcome our Google overlords with open arms... until they make so much money and have so much political clout that they begin bending government to their own will. And then, like the thousands of years of history before us, we will rebel and proclaim that we never saw it coming, they're evil, they're the bane of the technology industry, etc.
Let's just keep it in perspective. Open Source is the big revolution, and what is working wonders in the technology world today - not Google. Google is a company, and right now Google knows exactly how to serve and please its customers. Let's hope they continue that trend, but everyone fails eventually -- even a mega-billion dollar company.
You can also buy metal grill "filters" for fans that don't need to be changed all the time, but still promote the collection of dust on the outside of the grill, not the inside of the PC. This strategy has worked well with one of my computers. I also would suggest sucking air in/out from different locations of the case. Multiple air pathways (with more going out than coming in) will help keep dust from accumulating in the majority of spots in the case.
Spreadsheet? Wrong! OK, I love OpenOffice 2.0 beta, but Calc is a hopelessly worthless piece of junk for anyone doing any serious analysis or report creation using spreadsheets. And yes, people, a SQL report looks like utter shit compared to a chart with bright colors for the executives your reports go out to in the end. "DataPilot" is not something some college kid can just sit down and code in a couple of evenings, and it shows from how useless and difficult to use it is in OpenOffice compared to Excel's PivotTables and PivotCharts.
If only I had time to help make some massive improvements to DataPilot I would, but I simply don't right now. And I would feel like helping because DataPilot sucks, and they need some business analysts with programming abilities to show them what kind of power really needs to be there for people like me to fully switch to OOo2 or SO8.
This sort of bell-curve grading system *would* make perfect sense if it was a uniform or at least well-understood concept in our society, but it's not. On Slashdot we ridicule and bemoan the idiotic HR people who write up job descriptions for people with 20+ years of WindowsXP expereince, 20+ years of Java experience, (the list goes on and on), and will toss resume's in the circular filing cabinet for anything less than those "requirements" which we all know are completely impossible to fulfill. And yet the sad fact is that real, live people hire other real, live people and want the best. That's all well, good, and natural to want the best working with and/or for you, but in America that means having a MINIMUM 3.5GPA from a "top-tier engineering school", or whatever. To make matters worse, most slashdotters went to high school and consistently scored high in all there classes. Anything less than a 3.5 in any one HS class could doom you to not getting into MIT. So the HS' inflate the grades based on the PTA board's whining that more money isn't coming into their district to prove that more and more of their students are going to better and better colleges after HS. But there's no feedback loop in this equation from HS to college to work world and back again. Each "stage" of development is completely insulated from the others from direct feedback.
So I, like so many others went off to college thinking "Hey, I'm pretty smart!", and then we are utterly dejected when finding out that we are only pulling 45% scores on tests in that engineering course we thought we'd be so good at. (Because like it or not, we're USED to getting a 90% or BETTER on tests and expect that kind of performance out of ourselves at the college level.) And those wonderful bell curve grading systems usually aren't shown to you, the student. So while 45% might actually be in the 70-80th percentile of the class (meaning you're doing much better than most everyone else in the class), you are just left to hope and pray that 45% is 'somewhere in the middle' and that you won't fail the class in the end.
I blame lack of accountability between HS - college - work world for the poor performance of America's engineering programs. The foreigners coming here for the engineering programs and jobs HAVE a direct feedback mechanism -> a signficantly better life than where they came from! So they work their asses off to make sure they get that life, while us natives waste our time trying to make sense of the multi-faceted failures of the American educational system.
Oh, but I do get it, and I'm far lazier than that. You see, if he has say... 5 different passwords... fine, that works great. But if he has... say 40 ... like I do, then there comes a time where you can't even remember the password to that one system that you hardly ever use, but still need to update the password periodically due to system admin's annoying tendency for "security." ;)
So it's not just about generating random passwords for systems. It's about remembering which passwords go to which systems, and what the passwords are. (And when you're not allowed to use any of the last 12 passwords, and you are forced to update your passwords on that system every month, trying to remember the right one becomes quite the task. That's why I resorted to using an encrypted spreadsheet to store all that info.)
Damn, that's way too much work! (And what about me and my 30-40 passwords... that's a BIG piece of paper!) Just GPG one file full of passwords, and remember your GPG key.
I read the article, and it's clearly some sort of shitty spam website to begin with. If you read through the entire article, you will find that there are 3 pages, with pages 2 and 3 being mostly the same thing regurgitated from the first page. On top of that, it's clear that they didn't run the article through a spell checker, and the grammar is clearly not right in several places. It's a reseller site or some shit like that, and it looks like one of those news aggregator websites that appears legit to Google's search engine, but in reality is just there to try and generate some ad-click revenues for the spammers running it. Guess the slashdot "editors" got wise to the spammer/submitter's tricks and yanked the article for once.
Now if only they would do that for all the Roland Piquepalle "articles"...
When I tried to switch over to Linux as my primary desktop, I found that there are options out there, but they're just not as polished *looking* as Quicken is for the average finance/budget tracking user like myself. So, let me offer up what I've tried, and you can figure something out for yourself:
- jGnash - A weird name for a finance program, but I used it for a short time and it did an alright job... and that was approximately a year ago. The project looks to be in active development still, so you may want to at least give it a try. It did QIF imports alright as well, and although it's written in Java it seemed to be coded pretty well.
- GnuCash - Well known in the Linux world with a long history. I tried it out but never really got the hang of it due to the somewhat clunky and difficult to understand UI. The engine behind this program seems to work great, but much like Gnome, it takes some getting used to the UI.
- Moneydance - Also has a long history, is coded in Java, and tries to compete with Quicken, but I didn't like the reports in this program. Also seemed a bit sluggish on Windows because it was coded in Java, but that was a pre-2005 release version, so the new one might be better. Unfortunately, from the look of their webpage the reports haven't changed at all, which was my biggest beef with this program.
- Or try Wine because it appears that Quicken and QuickBooks run under it OK. Haven't tried this out personally, and this would mean keeping around your dual-boot setup most likely, but it might solve your dilemma.
As for the gaming aspect - it's the only reason that I have to stick around with Windows. I love to play CS:S, Civ3, Morrowind, and easily install/uninstall new video games, and Windows is simply easier and less hassle to do that in than any distro of Linux is right now. When I finish college (which also is a pain 'cause they use VisualC++ and other Windows crap that I still need Windows for) I'll probably more seriously consider buying Cedega (from TransGaming) to allow me to continue playing the games I love.P.S. Using Linux as my primary workstation taught me that Linux based desktop software is HIGHLY "tweakable", and as such is also highly prone to disaster. (I'm the type that never reads the manual: disaster then ensues.) If you're going to do your finances on a Linux desktop setup, buy a DVD burner and MAKE SYSTEM BACKUPS nightly!!
Not to mention that this has proven to be a difficult-to-attain goal, even on as small of an "OS" as the OS on Microsoft's XBox. BIOS is supposed to be that secure domain of low-level operating system (it turns on all the hardware after all, hence, it's operating a system) that cannot be "hacked." But it has been, time and again! For simple tasks like browsing the web, sure, a read-only type of system makes sense - to a degree. But as soon as an exploit is found to manipulate the read-only OS into erasing your data on your read/write drive(s) you can be sure cracker/hackers will be doing it!