Not always - c.1987 I used to administer & do cross platform development on a PDP 11/34 system (w/ removable 14" disk packs - nothing smells less like "victory" than the smell of a disk crash in the morning) running SCO Unix.
You shouldn't design something, let alone start to implement it, until you fully understand the requirements, both present and anticipated for the future.
Anticipating future requirements comes from experience, and shouldn't be something you should rely on coming from your boss. The result of this anticipation (which eventually comes as second nature) is to deisgn flexibility in from the start, and to choose a modular decomposition that lends itself to the types on enhancement you see fit to allow for easily.
Eventually of course your code base may be asked to do something beyond the level of flexibility you've designed in, at which point you will need to rebase/redesign and refactor the code into something that can grow further. Failure to periodically refactor to maintain a clean design will result in the eventual death of the code base due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Actually I'm personally in favor of a flat dollar (not percentage) tax for everyone, except maybe for a phase in at the lowest level. Flat percentage, or increasing percentage brackets amout to forced philanthropy, which should be a personal choice.
What I object to is this biased characterization of Obama's tax plan as "class warfare" without having the intellectual honesty to admit that ANY tax plan, McCain's included, that fails to treat everyone equally can also be called "class warware" if attaching such labels is your thing. Just because you approve of who benefits under McCain relative to who benefits under Obama doesn't make McCain's tax plan any less "class warware".
ACORN has got nothing to do with actually voting - ACORN is about VOTER REGISTRATION. There's a massive difference.
An ACORN employee might register "Mickey Mouse" and "Mike Hunt" as potential voters, but that doesn't help these fictitious entities actually cast a vote unless they then actually turn up to vote with a photo ID, and if you do have a photo ID then no one should be denying you the ability to register to vote!
The fact is that Obama is waging his campaign on a platform of class warfare.
Obama's tax plan favors the middle class (i.e people making less than 250K a year), which means probably includes you, certainly me, and certainly also "Joe the plumber". Joe's hypothetical about buying the business he works for would in fact be helped by Obama because his taxes right now would be lowered - he can save more towards his dream. If Joe wants to complain about having his (hypothetical) marginal income above 250K taxed at a higher bracket, then why is he not complaining about having a tax CUT before he gets to that level? He just wants to TAKE relative to the status quo, not give back?
Given that the middle class would do better under Obama than McCain, it's just as valid to refer to McCains tax policy as class warfare, except that under MCain it's the middle class that are suffering relative to the wealthy, rather than vice versa.
Personally I perfer the Obama alternative - give me a tax break now while I'm making less than 250K, and I'll gladly repay it via higher taxes should I be fortunate enough to make it to that income level.
I don't think there's too much connection between the rise of Christianity and the fall of the Roman empire. The traditional argument as espoused by Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is essentially that Rome spread itself too thin and became weak due to having to fund an enormous army and continually fight battles on all it's borders; a more recent argument is that instead it was primarily a matter of the barbarians (i.e Germanic/etc tribes surrounding the empire) becoming stronger under constant contact with Rome untik they'd reached the point (together with more porous borders - barbarians settled within the empire, etc) that they were able to topple Rome.
The empire really was in a downward trajectory for a couple hundren years before it fell, not helped by a couple of awful epidemics that eached wiped out a large percentage (maybe 25-30% each time) of the population. The traditional roman religion which held society together was losing favor due to the apparent failure of the gods to protect them from the strife. It probably is true that Christianity was no replacement for the traditional roman religion it in terms of cohesiveness - much more in-fighting among the various factions that existed at that time, but it's probably better to regard the rise of Christianity as more symptomatic of the weakening of the empire (creating a possibility for change)than as a major cause of it.
Except that the acceleration isn't uniform from 0-1000mph.
Per the video, the driver says the top acceleration is about 2.5g (or 0-60 in 1 sec).
I rather liked the stat that it can outrun a handgun bullet. Think about it... the car blasts past you at 1000mph, and just as it's passing you fire a gun in the same direction the car is travelling - and the car stays ahead of the bullet! Holy fuck!!!!
Except that not only is that article clearly labelled as Humor, but more importantly (copying from another poster), WikiPedia does NOT aspire to the truth. WikiPedia's self-stated standard for inclusion is "verfiability" (i.e. you can find the same thing said somewhere else), and explicity not "truth" (i.e. what they are saying is factually correct).
I'm curious what sort of cluster/programming environment you built, and what the alternatives are.
Are the (free) Linux clustering "solutions" just about centralized management, or do any of them provide a more useful software view (in terms of memory, threading, etc) of the hardware than just a bunch of individual machines networked together?
Anyone else remember Novell Btrieve (B-tree based database library)?
The scary thing about Btrieve was that each month the rate of growth of the known/fixed bug list seemed to be increasing, although the product itself seemed pretty stable in our use at least.
For the time being it seems that it's basically Americans that are hosed - those using google.com.
If you login to google.co.uk, or google.ie (Ireland) instead (probably many others too), there are still, for the time being, serving up the old interface.
The iGoogle GMail changes are totally confusing and buggy. When I checked it yesterday, links (or rather http://.../ lines in an e-amil) in the iGoogle "partial GMail" version weren't linkified while in the full GMail they are. I've no idea what they were shooting for with the new IGoogle GMail - you've now got the embedded version as before, as well as the full GMail itself, but now also this bizarre useless maximized version of the embedded version.
Plenty of people are complaining. Look at the comments left for any og the iGoogle themes (not that it's the theme's fault), or how about the petition in my sig (I didn't start it, but I did sign it).
Does anybody know of an alternative to iGoogle where I can aggregate GMail, RSS feeds, and preferably a calendar app?
1) Lenders (esp. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) made these "sub-prime" mortage loans to people who were poor credit risks.
2) These mortages were not held as simple loans between lender and borrower, but instead were sold by the original lender to investment banks who grouped them together and repackaged them as abstract mortage investments, including mortage derivatives (i.e. bets that the underlying mortages will go up/down in value). Derivatives have essentially no inherent value themselves, other than as a way of hedging a risk, or aggressively speculating, and anyways expire worthless after a certain time.
3) AIG (maybe others too - I'm not sure) then sold 3rd party "credit swaps" on these mortage based securities. These credit swaps amount to insurance policies on these mortage securities (one side make a stream of payments, the other promises a payoff if the specified underlying mortage security loses value), and as with derivatives also have no real inherent value other than providing the loss insurance (which is only as good as the creditworthness of the issuer - their ability to pay the insurace if needed).
The whole thing here is an inverted pyramid scheme, with a base of approx $1 Trillion of real property value / mortages supporting a massively top-heavy $62 Trillion of paper bullshit with about as much real value as the letter received by the last person in a "send $1 to everyone on the list, and forward this to your friends" pyramid scam.
What's scary is that the $700B "bailout" figure requested by Paulsen is really a random number pulled out of his ass, and if anything only bears any relation to the underlying $1 Trillion of sub-prime mortages. In really there's also that $62 Trillion of pyramid scheme worthless paper to consider, for which real companies are on the hook for. The asset values, hence lending power, of the companies holding or on the hook for this crap won't be helped much at all by shoring up the underlying mortage values since the two numbers ($1Trillion vs $62 Trillion) are so out of whack.
The Sarbanes-Oxley act that requires companies to "mark to market" applies to ALL assets, so even if the real estate itself was worth what it was when the mortages were written (not at all true), these companies still have to recognise the loss on the mortgage securities and credit swaps.
Re:A pass of the Turing test should be easy....
on
Loebner Talks AI
·
· Score: 1
So maybe Loebner should lower the bar a little. First step should be to see if a chatbot can appear as intelligent as Paris Hilton (or Sarah Palin, if Paris is too tough), then they can work on the human-level intellence later.
Re:A waste of time.
on
Loebner Talks AI
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Not quite sure why one of the most informative posts in this thread, by an AC as it happens, has been modded as flamebait.
I don't think so. On a spectrum of lawsuits from valid (plaintif clearly harmed and has law on his/her side)-iffy-frivalous, one might only expect that a judge/jury would rule suits frivalous that are on the iffy-frivaloue side of the spectrum. Of course you might once in a blue moon get a valid suit thrown out, just as occasionally people get wrongly convicted, but that's invevitable if you're going to be making judgements - sometimes you'll be wrong and people will suffer as a result... Still better than not having a legal system in the first place, or having one where money always wins (big company sues joe six pack and wins not because of the law being on his side, but rather because of the company's better monetary ability to sustain the lawsuit).
The net result of evolution is the shifting of the statistical makeup of the genepool, so to say that evolution is dead is to say that the genepool is no longer changing, which implicity claims that all segments of the global population are reproducing at the same rate, which is trivially false. Birthrates in all societies/genetic sub-populations are in fact very much different, ergo evolution continues.
One could get more abstract and note that the dymanical equations affecting the makeup of the genepool are no doubt decidely non-linear (contain all sorts of feedback paths), and that the solution to these equations, just like the weather, consistes of complex attractors rather than simple fixed solutions. The equations themselves are of course also changing as the nature of the environment and the feedback paths also change. What this means is that the genepool will forever be changing and as always the prime driver of evolution will the environmental changes which effect genetic fitness of those genes that happen to be around at the time... Unless the environment (including things like weather, epidemics, tectonic plate movements, asteroid impacts) stops changing, the result will be not only that the genepool keeps changing, but that it's course also keeps changing.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO's SCO UNIX was x86 based.
Not always - c.1987 I used to administer & do cross platform development on a PDP 11/34 system (w/ removable 14" disk packs - nothing smells less like "victory" than the smell of a disk crash in the morning) running SCO Unix.
You shouldn't design something, let alone start to implement it, until you fully understand the requirements, both present and anticipated for the future.
Anticipating future requirements comes from experience, and shouldn't be something you should rely on coming from your boss. The result of this anticipation (which eventually comes as second nature) is to deisgn flexibility in from the start, and to choose a modular decomposition that lends itself to the types on enhancement you see fit to allow for easily.
Eventually of course your code base may be asked to do something beyond the level of flexibility you've designed in, at which point you will need to rebase/redesign and refactor the code into something that can grow further. Failure to periodically refactor to maintain a clean design will result in the eventual death of the code base due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Actually I'm personally in favor of a flat dollar (not percentage) tax for everyone, except maybe for a phase in at the lowest level. Flat percentage, or increasing percentage brackets amout to forced philanthropy, which should be a personal choice.
What I object to is this biased characterization of Obama's tax plan as "class warfare" without having the intellectual honesty to admit that ANY tax plan, McCain's included, that fails to treat everyone equally can also be called "class warware" if attaching such labels is your thing. Just because you approve of who benefits under McCain relative to who benefits under Obama doesn't make McCain's tax plan any less "class warware".
ACORN has got nothing to do with actually voting - ACORN is about VOTER REGISTRATION. There's a massive difference.
An ACORN employee might register "Mickey Mouse" and "Mike Hunt" as potential voters, but that doesn't help these fictitious entities actually cast a vote unless they then actually turn up to vote with a photo ID, and if you do have a photo ID then no one should be denying you the ability to register to vote!
The fact is that Obama is waging his campaign on a platform of class warfare.
Obama's tax plan favors the middle class (i.e people making less than 250K a year), which means probably includes you, certainly me, and certainly also "Joe the plumber". Joe's hypothetical about buying the business he works for would in fact be helped by Obama because his taxes right now would be lowered - he can save more towards his dream. If Joe wants to complain about having his (hypothetical) marginal income above 250K taxed at a higher bracket, then why is he not complaining about having a tax CUT before he gets to that level? He just wants to TAKE relative to the status quo, not give back?
Given that the middle class would do better under Obama than McCain, it's just as valid to refer to McCains tax policy as class warfare, except that under MCain it's the middle class that are suffering relative to the wealthy, rather than vice versa.
Personally I perfer the Obama alternative - give me a tax break now while I'm making less than 250K, and I'll gladly repay it via higher taxes should I be fortunate enough to make it to that income level.
I don't think there's too much connection between the rise of Christianity and the fall of the Roman empire. The traditional argument as espoused by Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is essentially that Rome spread itself too thin and became weak due to having to fund an enormous army and continually fight battles on all it's borders; a more recent argument is that instead it was primarily a matter of the barbarians (i.e Germanic/etc tribes surrounding the empire) becoming stronger under constant contact with Rome untik they'd reached the point (together with more porous borders - barbarians settled within the empire, etc) that they were able to topple Rome.
http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Roman-Empire-History-Barbarians/dp/0195325419/
The empire really was in a downward trajectory for a couple hundren years before it fell, not helped by a couple of awful epidemics that eached wiped out a large percentage (maybe 25-30% each time) of the population. The traditional roman religion which held society together was losing favor due to the apparent failure of the gods to protect them from the strife. It probably is true that Christianity was no replacement for the traditional roman religion it in terms of cohesiveness - much more in-fighting among the various factions that existed at that time, but it's probably better to regard the rise of Christianity as more symptomatic of the weakening of the empire (creating a possibility for change)than as a major cause of it.
Except that the acceleration isn't uniform from 0-1000mph.
Per the video, the driver says the top acceleration is about 2.5g (or 0-60 in 1 sec).
I rather liked the stat that it can outrun a handgun bullet. Think about it... the car blasts past you at 1000mph, and just as it's passing you fire a gun in the same direction the car is travelling - and the car stays ahead of the bullet! Holy fuck!!!!
If someone's got the cohones to drive this fucker at 1000mph, he's earned the right to call it whatever he hell he wants!
Godspeed, my friend!
Thanks - I wanted to get an idea of what sorts of cluster based tools and approached are available, and that gave me a number of interesting leads!
Except that not only is that article clearly labelled as Humor, but more importantly (copying from another poster), WikiPedia does NOT aspire to the truth. WikiPedia's self-stated standard for inclusion is "verfiability" (i.e. you can find the same thing said somewhere else), and explicity not "truth" (i.e. what they are saying is factually correct).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
Wish I had mod points - that's pretty dismal!
OTOH you'd have to be nuts, even if they DID claim to care about the truth, to accept it as such in any case where it really matters.
I'm curious what sort of cluster/programming environment you built, and what the alternatives are.
Are the (free) Linux clustering "solutions" just about centralized management, or do any of them provide a more useful software view (in terms of memory, threading, etc) of the hardware than just a bunch of individual machines networked together?
Well, almost.
Anyone else remember Novell Btrieve (B-tree based database library)?
The scary thing about Btrieve was that each month the rate of growth of the known/fixed bug list seemed to be increasing, although the product itself seemed pretty stable in our use at least.
For the time being it seems that it's basically Americans that are hosed - those using google.com.
If you login to google.co.uk, or google.ie (Ireland) instead (probably many others too), there are still, for the time being, serving up the old interface.
The iGoogle GMail changes are totally confusing and buggy. When I checked it yesterday, links (or rather http://.../ lines in an e-amil) in the iGoogle "partial GMail" version weren't linkified while in the full GMail they are. I've no idea what they were shooting for with the new IGoogle GMail - you've now got the embedded version as before, as well as the full GMail itself, but now also this bizarre useless maximized version of the embedded version.
Plenty of people are complaining. Look at the comments left for any og the iGoogle themes (not that it's the theme's fault), or how about the petition in my sig (I didn't start it, but I did sign it).
Does anybody know of an alternative to iGoogle where I can aggregate GMail, RSS feeds, and preferably a calendar app?
I guess, not surprisingly, he was just a script kiddie - he downloaded hacks and ran them and thought he was a cool 133t h4x0r.
Doesn't say much for Yahoo if they hadn't protected themselves from known exploits, although I assume they learnt from the lesson.
Unfortunately it's not that simple.
The big picture of what happened here is that:
1) Lenders (esp. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) made these "sub-prime" mortage loans to people who were poor credit risks.
2) These mortages were not held as simple loans between lender and borrower, but instead were sold by the original lender to investment banks who grouped them together and repackaged them as abstract mortage investments, including mortage derivatives (i.e. bets that the underlying mortages will go up/down in value). Derivatives have essentially no inherent value themselves, other than as a way of hedging a risk, or aggressively speculating, and anyways expire worthless after a certain time.
3) AIG (maybe others too - I'm not sure) then sold 3rd party "credit swaps" on these mortage based securities. These credit swaps amount to insurance policies on these mortage securities (one side make a stream of payments, the other promises a payoff if the specified underlying mortage security loses value), and as with derivatives also have no real inherent value other than providing the loss insurance (which is only as good as the creditworthness of the issuer - their ability to pay the insurace if needed).
The whole thing here is an inverted pyramid scheme, with a base of approx $1 Trillion of real property value / mortages supporting a massively top-heavy $62 Trillion of paper bullshit with about as much real value as the letter received by the last person in a "send $1 to everyone on the list, and forward this to your friends" pyramid scam.
What's scary is that the $700B "bailout" figure requested by Paulsen is really a random number pulled out of his ass, and if anything only bears any relation to the underlying $1 Trillion of sub-prime mortages. In really there's also that $62 Trillion of pyramid scheme worthless paper to consider, for which real companies are on the hook for. The asset values, hence lending power, of the companies holding or on the hook for this crap won't be helped much at all by shoring up the underlying mortage values since the two numbers ($1Trillion vs $62 Trillion) are so out of whack.
The Sarbanes-Oxley act that requires companies to "mark to market" applies to ALL assets, so even if the real estate itself was worth what it was when the mortages were written (not at all true), these companies still have to recognise the loss on the mortgage securities and credit swaps.
So maybe Loebner should lower the bar a little. First step should be to see if a chatbot can appear as intelligent as Paris Hilton (or Sarah Palin, if Paris is too tough), then they can work on the human-level intellence later.
Not quite sure why one of the most informative posts in this thread, by an AC as it happens, has been modded as flamebait.
I'll repost the link since it's been buried:
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/index.html
Really! I've had farts that were more interesting, and probably also more relevant to AI.
Since when did Eliza-like chatbots become considered as AI?!
I don't think so. On a spectrum of lawsuits from valid (plaintif clearly harmed and has law on his/her side)-iffy-frivalous, one might only expect that a judge/jury would rule suits frivalous that are on the iffy-frivaloue side of the spectrum. Of course you might once in a blue moon get a valid suit thrown out, just as occasionally people get wrongly convicted, but that's invevitable if you're going to be making judgements - sometimes you'll be wrong and people will suffer as a result... Still better than not having a legal system in the first place, or having one where money always wins (big company sues joe six pack and wins not because of the law being on his side, but rather because of the company's better monetary ability to sustain the lawsuit).
The net result of evolution is the shifting of the statistical makeup of the genepool, so to say that evolution is dead is to say that the genepool is no longer changing, which implicity claims that all segments of the global population are reproducing at the same rate, which is trivially false. Birthrates in all societies/genetic sub-populations are in fact very much different, ergo evolution continues.
One could get more abstract and note that the dymanical equations affecting the makeup of the genepool are no doubt decidely non-linear (contain all sorts of feedback paths), and that the solution to these equations, just like the weather, consistes of complex attractors rather than simple fixed solutions. The equations themselves are of course also changing as the nature of the environment and the feedback paths also change. What this means is that the genepool will forever be changing and as always the prime driver of evolution will the environmental changes which effect genetic fitness of those genes that happen to be around at the time... Unless the environment (including things like weather, epidemics, tectonic plate movements, asteroid impacts) stops changing, the result will be not only that the genepool keeps changing, but that it's course also keeps changing.
Not as much as using logs.
Who would make the more dangerous president:
1) A senile "maverick' who thinks a hockey mom would be america's best defense against bin Laben if he himself croaks
2) A hockey mom who got her first passport last year, and thinks dinosaurs are 6000 years old