You don't have to pay an extra day's worth of interest, so waiting doesn't make any sense. You have the option of either sending in checks or using electronic fund transfers on tax day.
So the one thing I was worried about before getting a Squeezebox was that I wouldn't be able to navigate my MP3 collection easily enough from the remote. But this just wasn't the case, and it turns out don't go to my computer to queue up music as I thought I'd have to before getting the thing. The easiest way to queue up music, assuming you know what you want to listen to, is simply to search for it. If you have any proficiency sending text messages using a cell phone, this will be completely natural to you. You just type a few letters, hit the forward arrow button, then scroll through the list. It does partial string matches, and you can search by album, artist, or song. And then if you just want to browse, you scan through the list; the number pad is active and you can use it to jump to a particular letter if you like. Simple, and it works great and looks nice to boot.
Actually, it looks like it's missing the blue channel from the entire picture for some reason.
That does not explain the color descrepancy. If there were no blue in the larger picture, then there would be no white either! The background would be yellow if there were no blue in the larger image. Also, the blue of the red-white-blue parachute would be black, not green, after taking out the blue.
At one point a few months ago, I think the site admins cranked up the strictness of the banning algorithm, and that certainly made it seem like the main page and section feeds were all being tracked together, with "one per hour" applying to the whole set of feeds. Since then, I changed my reader to read the main feed some number of minutes after the hour every even hour, and to read science and games the same number of minutes after the hour every odd hour, alternating science and games every other odd hour. What a pain. Not wanting to get banned again, I haven't checked to see if this has been changed to something more sensible, i.e. once per hour for any given feed, instead of once per hour for the entire set of feeds.
What should be done is that the RSS client first asks the rss feed server if the feed has changed past a given date/time. If not, no fetch is done. Correct me if this is already the case, but I fear it isn't (most rss feeds are dynamically produced, (perhaps with cached contents) so a simple HTTP poll won't do.)
There are facilities for doing this, e.g. conditional HTTP gets, although as far as I know, they might not be very wide implemented yet, especially on the client side. See, for example, some dude's blog entry on conditional HTTP gets for RSS.
The point is, solutions are out there. Hopefully, as RSS becomes more widely-deployed, people will implement this sort of thing to keep things working smoothly.
I agree that RSS is going to be inundated with ads sometime in the next year or two. That's going to suck.
I have my own headline grabber going, and for many many sites I just scrape links rather than depend on some kind of feed. How do I know which links are to stories? In most cases, it's sufficent to just extract links and check hrefs against regexps. For example, here's a regexp that works for NYT:
\d{4}/\d{2}/\d{2}/.*/\w+.html(\?pagewanted=\S+)?$
I run that on index pages for different paper sections, e.g. http://nytimes.com/pages/world/text/index.html.
In some cases, you want something a little more sophisticated, like the ability to recognize certain tags to enable link grabbing only in certain sections of pages, or the ability to programatically skip a set of tags, like a table or a table row. In any event, the solution I ended up allows me to use a text file to describe the sites I want to scrape, with a section for each site that says how to grab links from that site.
Viewing the feed any more frequently, even by mistake or for just a day or two, bans your RSS reader permanently.
Huh. But you get instantaneous feedback that you are reading too quickly in the form of a link to a page explaining the situation. In my experience, banning is temporary, at least if you heed the warning page. I agree that this is inconvenient (Slashdot is the only site I know that does this kind of thing) but I can see the other side of things also. RSS is a privilege, and it's up to Slashdot to decide how to deploy the technology on its site. If you get the warning, back the fuck off! It's about that simple.
It misses out much of the information from the story.
I dunno, I just click the links I'm interested in, and that gets me straight to the full story. And, at no extra cost, that same page lets me read comments from people like you, and respond to them!!! Woo!
It requires your RSS reader to use the Slash RSS module.
Huh? I read the feed just fine, and I've never heard of "the Slash RSS module." I just use a Perl script that wraps LWP::UserAgent and XML::RSS. What am I missing?
Good in an open office setting?
on
Stolen Laptop Alarms
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if the inspiration for this is stolen laptops in a university setting. More generally, I wonder if this would work well in an open office setting where the public for whatever reason can easily gain access. I work in such a place, and laptops get stolen all the time from people who are lazy, don't lock up, step out "for just one second", and come back to their offices to find their laptops gone. There are usually people around, but nobody notices the theft. If the system is not prone to false positives, then it would have potential where I work.
The article confirms that Lego has been hurting badly. The writing has been on the wall for a while now though. Just look at Lego's product lines over the past 5-10 years. Added: Harry Potter, Star Wars, video games, Bionicle, Sports, Mindstorms. Lost: classic space, castle, pirates. Plus the saddest thing for me, a lack of focus on good Technic sets.
Why so many problems? I think kids expect more from today's toys than just bricks. That's kind of a sad fact that says something about our culture I think. Second, since the expiration of Lego's stud-and-tube patent, there's been competition from Mega Bloks, which are inferior but cheaper. In today's world though, I think it makes sense that many parents choose cheaper rather than better. Another sad fact.
In any event, while I'm unhappy about Mindstorms, I'm happy they're abandoning Harry Potter and the like. They have totally lost their identity by branching out, and I think they really do need to get back to their core business as they're doing now. I wonder though, is it too late already?
There use to be a steady stream of great Technic sets worth getting, but recently good sets have slowed to a trickle, with just one catching my eye recently... 8455 Backhoe. Check it out, it might be one of your last few chances to grab a great Lego set.
I love a good game of Liar's Dice, except we play with our own dice and slightly different rules from the version you can buy.
Number of players: 3 or more. More is better, but only to a limit, since games get longer with more players. We usually play with 5 or 6.
Required equipment: 5 dice per player plus something for each player to hide their dice from the other players. We use opaque disposable plastic cups with the bottoms cut off.
Each player starts with 5 dice. Before actual play starts, players can roll to see who goes first, although so early in the game it doesn't matter all that much who goes first, so it's fine to just have somebody volunteer instead.
At the start of a round, players throw their dice into their cup. Play then moves in a circle, clockwise, with each player either making a bid or challenging the previous bid. Passing is not an option.
When bidding, players are trying to guess how many of a certain die number exist among all the players without exceeding the actual amount. Example bids are "two threes" or "four sixes." Bids always have to increase. That is, each bid must be for a larger die number (and same count) or for a larger count. One way to think of this is as two-digit numbers, count followed by die number. Given a bid of "two threes" (23), "two fours" (24) and "three ones" (31) are increases (24 > 23, 31 > 23) while "one six" (16) and "two ones" (21) are not (16 < 23, 21 < 23).
A player can challenge instead of bidding. In this case, all the dice are revealed and counted. If there are at least as many of the die number stated in the previous bid, then bid is a winning one, and the challenger loses a die. Otherwise the bid is a losing one, and the player who made the bid loses a die. If only one player remains with dice, that player is the winner. Otherwise, the round is over, and next round begins with players rerolling their remaining dice. Bidding starts over with the winner of the challenge making the first bid.
The last thing is that twos are wild and count towards the total when counting up the dice. However, if somebody bids twos, they are no longer wild for that round.
I've found it to be a fun game, and a good mix of luck, strategy, bluffing, and reading other players.
There is a similar version of this game that uses the serial numbers on dollar bills, but that game gets old fast because you can't reroll the serial numbers.
What I do is set my MTA to forward all the mail sent to my domain to my main account.
Many MTAs deliver mail to user-whatever@domain to user@domain. Mine does, I imagine many others' do also. It's similar to what you have going but it works for many users at the same time. I have used it a few times to make throwaway addresses. It makes for a good way to track how mail is reaching you, but I haven't turned up much of anything either. Kind of a variation on the misspelling-your-name trick with snail mail...
The real issue is the amount and care of their prep work before each concert, to make sure the feeds they're capturing are of a high quality. And they should be if they're patched into the same feeds that the concert speakers are getting, since they then get the benefits of the same volume levels and mixing that the concert guys put together.
A little bit of crowd noise in the CD mix would be nice too...:) Always nice to have something to listen to when the people on stage give the audience a chance to sing...
Visit etree.org. The big benefit of lossless compression is it makes for better distribution of live recordings. The short of it is that demanding recordings in a losslessly compressed audio format, along with verification using checksum files, guarantees no loss in fidelity.
There are many alternate live-music trading scenarios which cause a loss in fidelity. Two of the most common: 1) CD Audio->CD Audio copies are not perfect (unless you use a specialized tool like EAC - Exact Audio Copy); 2) trading lossily-compressed audio tends to lead to loss of fidelity through inevitable decompression, writing to CD, reripping, and reencoding.
There is a sign heading west on the 210 freeway before the exit to Caltech that says "Caltech" on one line and "Pasadena City College" on a second line underneath. One year (1991 maybe) a small group of people from Harvey Mudd added parentheses around Pasadena City College...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to pay an extra day's worth of interest, so waiting doesn't make any sense. You have the option of either sending in checks or using electronic fund transfers on tax day.
So the one thing I was worried about before getting a Squeezebox was that I wouldn't be able to navigate my MP3 collection easily enough from the remote. But this just wasn't the case, and it turns out don't go to my computer to queue up music as I thought I'd have to before getting the thing. The easiest way to queue up music, assuming you know what you want to listen to, is simply to search for it. If you have any proficiency sending text messages using a cell phone, this will be completely natural to you. You just type a few letters, hit the forward arrow button, then scroll through the list. It does partial string matches, and you can search by album, artist, or song. And then if you just want to browse, you scan through the list; the number pad is active and you can use it to jump to a particular letter if you like. Simple, and it works great and looks nice to boot.
That does not explain the color descrepancy. If there were no blue in the larger picture, then there would be no white either! The background would be yellow if there were no blue in the larger image. Also, the blue of the red-white-blue parachute would be black, not green, after taking out the blue.
It looks photoshopped to me, but what do I know.
The way I've started looking at this is in terms of Google's biggest competitors.
Google is a verb. ("Just Google it!")
Yahoo wants to be a verb. ("Do you Yahoo?")
Microsoft will never be a verb.
I don't know if that means anything, we'll see.
At one point a few months ago, I think the site admins cranked up the strictness of the banning algorithm, and that certainly made it seem like the main page and section feeds were all being tracked together, with "one per hour" applying to the whole set of feeds. Since then, I changed my reader to read the main feed some number of minutes after the hour every even hour, and to read science and games the same number of minutes after the hour every odd hour, alternating science and games every other odd hour. What a pain. Not wanting to get banned again, I haven't checked to see if this has been changed to something more sensible, i.e. once per hour for any given feed, instead of once per hour for the entire set of feeds.
There are facilities for doing this, e.g. conditional HTTP gets, although as far as I know, they might not be very wide implemented yet, especially on the client side. See, for example, some dude's blog entry on conditional HTTP gets for RSS.
The point is, solutions are out there. Hopefully, as RSS becomes more widely-deployed, people will implement this sort of thing to keep things working smoothly.
I agree that RSS is going to be inundated with ads sometime in the next year or two. That's going to suck.
I have my own headline grabber going, and for many many sites I just scrape links rather than depend on some kind of feed. How do I know which links are to stories? In most cases, it's sufficent to just extract links and check hrefs against regexps. For example, here's a regexp that works for NYT:
I run that on index pages for different paper sections, e.g. http://nytimes.com/pages/world/text/index.html.
In some cases, you want something a little more sophisticated, like the ability to recognize certain tags to enable link grabbing only in certain sections of pages, or the ability to programatically skip a set of tags, like a table or a table row. In any event, the solution I ended up allows me to use a text file to describe the sites I want to scrape, with a section for each site that says how to grab links from that site.
Huh. But you get instantaneous feedback that you are reading too quickly in the form of a link to a page explaining the situation. In my experience, banning is temporary, at least if you heed the warning page. I agree that this is inconvenient (Slashdot is the only site I know that does this kind of thing) but I can see the other side of things also. RSS is a privilege, and it's up to Slashdot to decide how to deploy the technology on its site. If you get the warning, back the fuck off! It's about that simple.
It misses out much of the information from the story.
I dunno, I just click the links I'm interested in, and that gets me straight to the full story. And, at no extra cost, that same page lets me read comments from people like you, and respond to them!!! Woo!
It requires your RSS reader to use the Slash RSS module.
Huh? I read the feed just fine, and I've never heard of "the Slash RSS module." I just use a Perl script that wraps LWP::UserAgent and XML::RSS. What am I missing?
I wonder if the inspiration for this is stolen laptops in a university setting. More generally, I wonder if this would work well in an open office setting where the public for whatever reason can easily gain access. I work in such a place, and laptops get stolen all the time from people who are lazy, don't lock up, step out "for just one second", and come back to their offices to find their laptops gone. There are usually people around, but nobody notices the theft. If the system is not prone to false positives, then it would have potential where I work.
BTW-- damn, I wish I had 1000 DVDs.
Join Netflix, get a pipeline going, and you too could amass a collection of 1000 titles...
Your approach is not unlike Calvin's approach to shoveling show...
The article confirms that Lego has been hurting badly. The writing has been on the wall for a while now though. Just look at Lego's product lines over the past 5-10 years. Added: Harry Potter, Star Wars, video games, Bionicle, Sports, Mindstorms. Lost: classic space, castle, pirates. Plus the saddest thing for me, a lack of focus on good Technic sets.
Why so many problems? I think kids expect more from today's toys than just bricks. That's kind of a sad fact that says something about our culture I think. Second, since the expiration of Lego's stud-and-tube patent, there's been competition from Mega Bloks, which are inferior but cheaper. In today's world though, I think it makes sense that many parents choose cheaper rather than better. Another sad fact.
In any event, while I'm unhappy about Mindstorms, I'm happy they're abandoning Harry Potter and the like. They have totally lost their identity by branching out, and I think they really do need to get back to their core business as they're doing now. I wonder though, is it too late already?
There use to be a steady stream of great Technic sets worth getting, but recently good sets have slowed to a trickle, with just one catching my eye recently... 8455 Backhoe. Check it out, it might be one of your last few chances to grab a great Lego set.
I love a good game of Liar's Dice, except we play with our own dice and slightly different rules from the version you can buy.
Number of players: 3 or more. More is better, but only to a limit, since games get longer with more players. We usually play with 5 or 6.
Required equipment: 5 dice per player plus something for each player to hide their dice from the other players. We use opaque disposable plastic cups with the bottoms cut off.
Each player starts with 5 dice. Before actual play starts, players can roll to see who goes first, although so early in the game it doesn't matter all that much who goes first, so it's fine to just have somebody volunteer instead.
At the start of a round, players throw their dice into their cup. Play then moves in a circle, clockwise, with each player either making a bid or challenging the previous bid. Passing is not an option.
When bidding, players are trying to guess how many of a certain die number exist among all the players without exceeding the actual amount. Example bids are "two threes" or "four sixes." Bids always have to increase. That is, each bid must be for a larger die number (and same count) or for a larger count. One way to think of this is as two-digit numbers, count followed by die number. Given a bid of "two threes" (23), "two fours" (24) and "three ones" (31) are increases (24 > 23, 31 > 23) while "one six" (16) and "two ones" (21) are not (16 < 23, 21 < 23).
A player can challenge instead of bidding. In this case, all the dice are revealed and counted. If there are at least as many of the die number stated in the previous bid, then bid is a winning one, and the challenger loses a die. Otherwise the bid is a losing one, and the player who made the bid loses a die. If only one player remains with dice, that player is the winner. Otherwise, the round is over, and next round begins with players rerolling their remaining dice. Bidding starts over with the winner of the challenge making the first bid.
The last thing is that twos are wild and count towards the total when counting up the dice. However, if somebody bids twos, they are no longer wild for that round.
I've found it to be a fun game, and a good mix of luck, strategy, bluffing, and reading other players.
There is a similar version of this game that uses the serial numbers on dollar bills, but that game gets old fast because you can't reroll the serial numbers.
Supreme Court of the United States.
Many MTAs deliver mail to user-whatever@domain to user@domain. Mine does, I imagine many others' do also. It's similar to what you have going but it works for many users at the same time. I have used it a few times to make throwaway addresses. It makes for a good way to track how mail is reaching you, but I haven't turned up much of anything either. Kind of a variation on the misspelling-your-name trick with snail mail...
A much more useful link: The Main Solar System Model. It includes a map, pictures of the sun and planets, and lots of other info.
When I read the article, it seemed like the interview was missing the questions. That might explain the so-called "literary flaws."
A little bit of crowd noise in the CD mix would be nice too... :) Always nice to have something to listen to when the people on stage give the audience a chance to sing...
Why pay money in the first place?
Many artists already let you record and share their shows. See archive.org. Not instantaneous, but not supporting Clear Channel either...
Visit etree.org. The big benefit of lossless compression is it makes for better distribution of live recordings. The short of it is that demanding recordings in a losslessly compressed audio format, along with verification using checksum files, guarantees no loss in fidelity.
There are many alternate live-music trading scenarios which cause a loss in fidelity. Two of the most common: 1) CD Audio->CD Audio copies are not perfect (unless you use a specialized tool like EAC - Exact Audio Copy); 2) trading lossily-compressed audio tends to lead to loss of fidelity through inevitable decompression, writing to CD, reripping, and reencoding.
Also it would be non-trivial to move data from the spinning laser to the stationary drive housing and computer...
I bet the 802.11 will be configured to only allow one machine to connect to the internet with it.
Loosely related story:
There is a sign heading west on the 210 freeway before the exit to Caltech that says "Caltech" on one line and "Pasadena City College" on a second line underneath. One year (1991 maybe) a small group of people from Harvey Mudd added parentheses around Pasadena City College...
Try The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's actually a four-volume series.
Tee-hee. I bet you don't like the idea of Grand Theft Auto either, huh? Carjacker training tool? Mmmm. Definitely. ***