Try reading the Lostpedia (lostpedia.wikia.com) entries on The Others and Dharma. They don't add any new data, but order and sum it up in a way that makes it seem like there's not much left to explain.
Revolutionary sites like Amazon, Facebook or Twitter are just the ones that made it among hundred others who dissapeared. The same can be said of apps or consumer products. When you look at the whole group its hard to give all the credit to the ones that survived... it looks more like they just happened to be in the lucky spot.
Once companies become big and established it's a rare of them to make a huge bang with a new revolutionary product. Take Google, which is supposed to be the antithesis to stagnant Microsoft... they bought a lot of their products from small lucky companies (e.g. Google Maps, based on Google Earth which was Keyhole before) and their own developments (like Google Desktop, Google Buzz or Google Wave) have often failed to amaze.
Notable exceptions: Apple and Nintendo, among a few others.
Perhaps someone who knows more about stock trading can help me understand:
1) TFA states that someone made an input mistake and sold 16 billon Fortune 500 stocks instead of 16 millon. Did he have that many to sell? How big a player do you have to be to be able to make these type of mistakes.
2) TFA states that at one point shares for some companies dropped to a mere penny and then rebounded. Were people able to take advantage of the sudden drop to sweep and get a fast couple of millons due to the glitch?
And in conclusion: Does the system's inherent frailty allow this type of event to be orchestrated in order to make a big profit, or a new type of terror attack?
I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and have cut cable TV last year... I got rid of my TV set as well.
For a while now I've been using torrents for all my TV viewing needs, even programs available to me in cable. Once my girlfriend cut down her TV watching as well I proposed getting rid of cable and we agreed on removing the TV set as well since my 24'' widescreen LCD computer monitor is up to the task.
My main reasons for watching torrents: ability to watch the programs as soon as they are available and without the normal geographical delay (blame it on Lost, American Idol, and the like), and the possibility of watching at any time of the day (TVR never really caught in Argentina).
To any TV execs reading this: If TV channels gave me all the quality and convenience torrent does (automatically downloaded HD video with no DRM) I'd have no problem watching "official" videos with commercials in them... or even paying a very small amount for them (we have a weak currency in Argentina so even one dollar per episode is borderline steep).
Four years ago when I built my PC I was going to leave the FDD out and enter the future... It was a short-lived idea once I found out I needed a floppy disk with the SATA drivers to install XP.
I agree that protected oral sex sounds pointless, and you'll be pleased to know that young people all around us are mostly having the unprotected kind... and lots of it... which means that the chances of getting a STD from unprotected oral sex are not really that high.
I agree... if you're not satisfied with the default ugliness you can download and apply a number of themes that will raise the ugliness to previously unattainable levels.
Seriously, I tried a lot of themes and most of them make the interface fuzzier and harder to see and operate. Most themes are developed by "pimp my desktop" types and not by UI experts aiming for higher usability with pleasing aesthetics.
IE8 has an IE7 mode for backwards compatibility.... Another alternative is installing some other browser (e.g. Chrome or Firefox) for external sites, and leaving IE6 or IE7 for intranet.
I've never heard of anyone mantaining a version of their site for IE and another for Mozilla Firefox. At most we have IE-specific CSS or Javascript code to work around certain bugs of IE6 and IE7... but that's hardly worth of being called "another version" of the site... more like a patch.
For a site of more than minimum complexity you need a solid code base... and having two different versions of the site goes completely against that purpose. That's why, for any development worth its salt, I don't expect we'll have a Flash and an HTML5 version... more likely there'll be a Flash version, which works almost everywhere (except for iPhones and iPads... but that's not for the sake of supporting HTML5 as a new vibrant standard). Use of HTML5 will probably grow as slowly as any other technology which is not widely supported, as easy and fun to use as it may be.
What may actually happen is that some flash players and libraries might include code that transparently uses HTML5 when available. Like this:
http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody... Still this approach is only useful for very particular applications and libraries, and it still might make testing and developing a little harder.
When someone is away from his home there might still be a spouse or sons living there, someone house-sitting, or on an eventual visit to feed the cat. Parking in front of the house still seems the best option.
Excel is much better for a phone list. It's easier/faster to input data and it offers automatic filtering (you can filter using a list of values for a column, like say filtering by country or city). Excel also has "grouping", similar to the GROUP BY operation in SQL. It's accessed through a wizard in a menu option, no need for formulas.
I'm guessing their farts contain a surprising amount of methane and they singlehandedly double the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, bringing forth the apocalypse while unassumingly chewing grass in the fields.
Standard deviation is useless if you're not working with samples that have a normal distribution.
Why? No. You can measure the standard deviation of any distribution, normal or not. And it is what it is, independent of distribution, it tells you how much you should expect samples to deviate from the average.
Every game I've ever seen from Gameloft had absolutely no concept of gameplay... some actually as far as not being games at all, just something that resembles a game. Granted, I didn't see the NFL game...... but just having 3D, playbooks and accurate rosters says nothing of the quality of the game as a game.
GameLoft produces games which look and sound good, but are utter and absolute pieces of [poop]. Comparing cell phone games to console games is like pretending that internet fan fiction competes with normal books.
Linux doesn't have OLE, but they're still messing with implementing Bonobo, kpart, etc to re-create basically the same idea.
Plus, OpenOffice.org has it's own component system (UNO) which is very similar to OLE/COM, Mozilla has XUL which is also the same thing and you also have CORBA which is akin to DCOM (which is distributed OLE/COM). Components are not inherently less secure than normal applications... and even better, you have more granular control over their use (separate permissions for use, activation, instantiation, etc.)
It was ActiveX that gave a bad name to COM, but not because it's bad in itself, but rather because it was a poor idea to integrate it to web pages in the way it was done.
Once upon a time I tried iTunes, hated it and uninstalled it. Then the Apple Updater tried to install it every time an update for Safari was available (I keep Safari up to date because I use it to test web sites I develop) and I diligently unchecked it every time and told it to ignore the update... that was until iTunes 9 which I accidentally forgot to uncheck and ended up installing. I went "what the heck, I'll give it another go" but went to WMP and made it the default player for MP3s, WAVs, etc.... Then when iTunes 9.0.1 came out I updated it (just for security purpouses) and it configured itself once again as default handler for MP3s and other sound files.
In the revised advisory, Microsoft explained why it won't patch Windows XP, the world's most popular operating system. "By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability,
Microsoft has been selling Windows XP SP2 and SP3 for some time now. I really wouldn't expect them patching plain old XP.
There are ways to measure lies in a survey. I'm not an expert, but when I took a statistics class it was explained, and as well as I remember:
- Instead of the 1.000 surveyed people separate a smaller group, say 100. - Assume the last digit of their telephone numbers are uniformly distributed - Ask them something along the lines of: "If you lied about file sharing or if the last digit of your phone number is an even number say YES, if not say NO"
If nobody lied you should get something close to 50% YES and 50% NO... but if the result is different you can assume it's because some of them lied (although you don't know which).... Doing this kind of test you can approximate the percentage of people that would lie to the question.
If the same had been done here in Argentina it would have been completely understandable. Only in recent years we've started seeing more black people in Buenos Aires, and they're still very rare (they're very common in Uruguay, just across the pond... but it's said that argentine black people were killed in the war against Paraguay). Putting a black person in an ad is as representative of argentine people as putting an albino.
On the other hand we have a very large asian community. Mostly Korean and Chinese, AFAIK.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I was able to see all demos with Chrome just by following that link.
Try reading the Lostpedia (lostpedia.wikia.com) entries on The Others and Dharma. They don't add any new data, but order and sum it up in a way that makes it seem like there's not much left to explain.
Who is good at predictions?
Revolutionary sites like Amazon, Facebook or Twitter are just the ones that made it among hundred others who dissapeared. The same can be said of apps or consumer products. When you look at the whole group its hard to give all the credit to the ones that survived... it looks more like they just happened to be in the lucky spot.
Once companies become big and established it's a rare of them to make a huge bang with a new revolutionary product. Take Google, which is supposed to be the antithesis to stagnant Microsoft... they bought a lot of their products from small lucky companies (e.g. Google Maps, based on Google Earth which was Keyhole before) and their own developments (like Google Desktop, Google Buzz or Google Wave) have often failed to amaze.
Notable exceptions: Apple and Nintendo, among a few others.
Perhaps someone who knows more about stock trading can help me understand:
1) TFA states that someone made an input mistake and sold 16 billon Fortune 500 stocks instead of 16 millon. Did he have that many to sell? How big a player do you have to be to be able to make these type of mistakes.
2) TFA states that at one point shares for some companies dropped to a mere penny and then rebounded. Were people able to take advantage of the sudden drop to sweep and get a fast couple of millons due to the glitch?
And in conclusion: Does the system's inherent frailty allow this type of event to be orchestrated in order to make a big profit, or a new type of terror attack?
I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and have cut cable TV last year... I got rid of my TV set as well.
For a while now I've been using torrents for all my TV viewing needs, even programs available to me in cable. Once my girlfriend cut down her TV watching as well I proposed getting rid of cable and we agreed on removing the TV set as well since my 24'' widescreen LCD computer monitor is up to the task.
My main reasons for watching torrents: ability to watch the programs as soon as they are available and without the normal geographical delay (blame it on Lost, American Idol, and the like), and the possibility of watching at any time of the day (TVR never really caught in Argentina).
To any TV execs reading this: If TV channels gave me all the quality and convenience torrent does (automatically downloaded HD video with no DRM) I'd have no problem watching "official" videos with commercials in them... or even paying a very small amount for them (we have a weak currency in Argentina so even one dollar per episode is borderline steep).
For the price of one tape writer you can buy like 40 floppy disk drivers... so you can backup in parallel and cut the time a lot.
Four years ago when I built my PC I was going to leave the FDD out and enter the future... It was a short-lived idea once I found out I needed a floppy disk with the SATA drivers to install XP.
The San Francisco City Clinic has a very handy table that describes the risks of each type of unprotected sex:
http://www.sfcityclinic.org/stdbasics/stdchart.asp
I agree that protected oral sex sounds pointless, and you'll be pleased to know that young people all around us are mostly having the unprotected kind... and lots of it... which means that the chances of getting a STD from unprotected oral sex are not really that high.
I agree... if you're not satisfied with the default ugliness you can download and apply a number of themes that will raise the ugliness to previously unattainable levels.
Seriously, I tried a lot of themes and most of them make the interface fuzzier and harder to see and operate. Most themes are developed by "pimp my desktop" types and not by UI experts aiming for higher usability with pleasing aesthetics.
IE8 has an IE7 mode for backwards compatibility. ... Another alternative is installing some other browser (e.g. Chrome or Firefox) for external sites, and leaving IE6 or IE7 for intranet.
I've never heard of anyone mantaining a version of their site for IE and another for Mozilla Firefox. At most we have IE-specific CSS or Javascript code to work around certain bugs of IE6 and IE7... but that's hardly worth of being called "another version" of the site... more like a patch.
For a site of more than minimum complexity you need a solid code base... and having two different versions of the site goes completely against that purpose. That's why, for any development worth its salt, I don't expect we'll have a Flash and an HTML5 version... more likely there'll be a Flash version, which works almost everywhere (except for iPhones and iPads... but that's not for the sake of supporting HTML5 as a new vibrant standard). Use of HTML5 will probably grow as slowly as any other technology which is not widely supported, as easy and fun to use as it may be.
What may actually happen is that some flash players and libraries might include code that transparently uses HTML5 when available. Like this:
http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody ... Still this approach is only useful for very particular applications and libraries, and it still might make testing and developing a little harder.
When someone is away from his home there might still be a spouse or sons living there, someone house-sitting, or on an eventual visit to feed the cat. Parking in front of the house still seems the best option.
The OP was praising tables on Word over an Excel spreadsheet with no formulas.
Excel is much better for a phone list. It's easier/faster to input data and it offers automatic filtering (you can filter using a list of values for a column, like say filtering by country or city). Excel also has "grouping", similar to the GROUP BY operation in SQL. It's accessed through a wizard in a menu option, no need for formulas.
I'm guessing their farts contain a surprising amount of methane and they singlehandedly double the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, bringing forth the apocalypse while unassumingly chewing grass in the fields.
Standard deviation is useless if you're not working with samples that have a normal distribution.
Why? No. You can measure the standard deviation of any distribution, normal or not. And it is what it is, independent of distribution, it tells you how much you should expect samples to deviate from the average.
Every game I've ever seen from Gameloft had absolutely no concept of gameplay... some actually as far as not being games at all, just something that resembles a game. Granted, I didn't see the NFL game... ... but just having 3D, playbooks and accurate rosters says nothing of the quality of the game as a game.
GameLoft produces games which look and sound good, but are utter and absolute pieces of [poop]. Comparing cell phone games to console games is like pretending that internet fan fiction competes with normal books.
Plus, OpenOffice.org has it's own component system (UNO) which is very similar to OLE/COM, Mozilla has XUL which is also the same thing and you also have CORBA which is akin to DCOM (which is distributed OLE/COM). Components are not inherently less secure than normal applications... and even better, you have more granular control over their use (separate permissions for use, activation, instantiation, etc.)
It was ActiveX that gave a bad name to COM, but not because it's bad in itself, but rather because it was a poor idea to integrate it to web pages in the way it was done.
Once upon a time I tried iTunes, hated it and uninstalled it. Then the Apple Updater tried to install it every time an update for Safari was available (I keep Safari up to date because I use it to test web sites I develop) and I diligently unchecked it every time and told it to ignore the update... that was until iTunes 9 which I accidentally forgot to uncheck and ended up installing. I went "what the heck, I'll give it another go" but went to WMP and made it the default player for MP3s, WAVs, etc. ... Then when iTunes 9.0.1 came out I updated it (just for security purpouses) and it configured itself once again as default handler for MP3s and other sound files.
I really hate Apple at times like this.
From the article:
Microsoft has been selling Windows XP SP2 and SP3 for some time now. I really wouldn't expect them patching plain old XP.
There are ways to measure lies in a survey. I'm not an expert, but when I took a statistics class it was explained, and as well as I remember:
- Instead of the 1.000 surveyed people separate a smaller group, say 100.
- Assume the last digit of their telephone numbers are uniformly distributed
- Ask them something along the lines of: "If you lied about file sharing or if the last digit of your phone number is an even number say YES, if not say NO"
If nobody lied you should get something close to 50% YES and 50% NO... but if the result is different you can assume it's because some of them lied (although you don't know which). ... Doing this kind of test you can approximate the percentage of people that would lie to the question.
If the same had been done here in Argentina it would have been completely understandable. Only in recent years we've started seeing more black people in Buenos Aires, and they're still very rare (they're very common in Uruguay, just across the pond... but it's said that argentine black people were killed in the war against Paraguay). Putting a black person in an ad is as representative of argentine people as putting an albino.
On the other hand we have a very large asian community. Mostly Korean and Chinese, AFAIK.
It's not the same nowadays. He can store the photos in Facebook, where even if they are deleted they'll still be accesible.
Eggs at twelve?
Now I now what comes after news at eleven.