Well, my newsbot does this already for news articles you've read through it: you can search everything, you can search articles you've read, or articles you've read *and* rated highly. You can also set up "search alerts" that search any new articles and then stick them to your front page (or your personalized RSS feed, or your personalized PDA-optimized page). Check it out.
Mach 10 is a record for powered flight; it is not even close to the record of a man-maned craft; IIRC that goes to the Apollo reentry capsules that routinely hit Mach 27 on re-entry. So the heat problem has been solved for quite a while.
The real problem here is that a scramjet engine is very sensitive to its input (the air coming in) as it only spends literally milliseconds in the combustion chamber. So you have to wonder what aerodynamic tricks the X-43A designers are pulling to smooth that flow before it goes into the intake. Notice the side-view of the aircraft; the belly is smooth and curvy in order to produce many small shocks ahead of the intake and slow down the air as much as possible. A terrific aerodynamic feat, I just have to wonder if it will be reproducible (i.e. stable enought and robust to any aerodynamic event) for a manned aircraft. [Yes, I am an aerodynamicist].
But that's the point of metaclasses, you could overwrite the method lookup functionality once for your metaclass prototype and then enforce that behavior on all of your classes.
Just so that non-Pythonistas don't get the wrong idea: Python doesn't restrict your identation that much: it only restricts you as to the *consistency* of your identation: i.e. if you use a tab for an outer for-loop and then 1 tab and 3 spaces inside that loop for an inner if-then block, that is fine by python; but if you switch to 6 spaces for the inner loop (i.e. no tab for the outer block), you will get a syntax error.
Python doesn't try to enforce a particular style of whitespace, just a consistent one, and I think that any professional programmer comes to appreciate that almost immediately.
Well, it's an interesting experiment, and if it comes up with something neat that can then be rolled into Python, that'd be great. But, out of the list of differences with Py (and Py is my favorite language by far) I only saw one thing that I liked, and that is that integers automatically provide generators so that:
for i in 7:
actually makes sense without having to use range(). Neat idea, but obviously limited (have to start from 0, no stepping) and not a justification for another language. Plus, every one of the other differences was actually a *worse* way to do it...
GN is good, but does it let you program personal searches every time you visit? does it learn the subject you're more interested in and suggest new articles on the front page every day? does it let you add to its news feeds directly? give you personal XML and PDA feeds to take home? let you share your favorite stories with friends (automatically)? No, not yet anyway... until then there is memigo [end of shameless plug]
Any good hotel (4 star and up, and good chain 3 stars) will sign for packages for you; just call the hotel, tell them you have a reservation, and ask how can you send a FedEx package to them for your personal delivery when you check-in. Get the name of the concierge/manager that gives you this information and ask for them by name on any follow-up calls. Give the info to Dell, make sure they put your name and "(Guest)" on the delivery and make it c/o of the person you have the name of, if possible. And don't forget to tip.
I can't imagine a decent NYC hotel not doing this; as a long-time business traveler, it's a perk you expect and is quite common.
Another self-plug: my newsbot extends the same ideas (peer recommendations, collaborative filtering) for news articles: it's a much more powerful way to filter the news than say,/.:-)
Are you aware of Jython (Jython.org) that implements Python in Java, so that you get most (if not all) of the extensive Python standard library in the JVM. Jython is exactly equivalent to Groovy (you can inherit Jython from Java and vice-versa) but is based on a more well-known language...
That means less than you may think...after all Hoover doesn't have a monopoly on vacuum cleaners nor Kleenex has the market cornered on tissues. Google just happened to be the first effective, widely popular search engine just as the Web was becoming effectively mainstream: the switching costs are still essentially zero (just point your browser to a different URL), so any company that can deliver searches better *enough* than Google, can become the new Google. That's even more impressive IMHO...
The site in my sig provides tons of XML. Technically, I agree with you that RSS is way to simple:
The original standard was so lenient (on purpose) that the quality of feeds is inconsistent at best.
RSS also piggy-backs on HTTP for authentication, modifications (304s), etc. This is great in theory, but in practice it has meant that every RSS client author has thrown together their homebrewed RSS client from an HTTP library without doing authentication, modification-checking, gzip compression, charset encodings, etc, etc, etc. It literally would have been preferrable for an HTSP (HyperText Syndication Protocol) to come out, just to force developers to use well-thought-out and well-behaved syndication libraries.
RSS is not NNTP (unfortunately): there is no interactivity, unless you provide additional controls to the subscribers somehow (memigo uses a frame-over) which is not consistent from site to site. Hacks like TrackBack are only half-way measures...
Related to the above: RSS provides meta-data only from the publisher side, NOT the reader side. Well, the vast majority of people are readers, not writers, and their meta-data vanish into clickthrus... sites like memigo try to fix that (by using implict ratings, page-read trackers, etc) but those are still kludges around the underlying technology...
In short, RSS is a good 1.0 technology, gopher waiting for HTTP...
Check out memigo Now! (plug). Memigo can provide you with a customized light-HTML page that links to recommended articles in light formats only (i.e. PDA- or printer-friendly). Much nicer for PDAs or cell phones than a plain RSS feed.
I run an "intelligent" newsbot, memigo. Memigo is a kinda hard to explain; sort of like Google News with TiVo functionality. One of memigo's most popular features are customized XML feeds for pretty much everything: recommended articles, reading and recommending history etc. The site serves thousands and thousands of custom XML feeds a day.
XML syndication is great but there are several drawbacks:
The standards wars: RSS 0.9 vs RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0 vs Atom. As a provider if I want to reach as many people as possible I will have to provide 4 different formats! (RSS 2.0 should be readable by RSS 0.9 readers but you never know).
The bad client implementations: repeat after me: 304 Modified. If you consume XML/RSS, make sure your client supports 304 Modified responses, and provides Last Modified and ETags. Otherwise, you're wasting my bandwidth, and I'll have to ban your customers (which I don't want to do!).
RSS is less two-way than HTML: a lot (not all definitely) of the RSS clients make it hard to interact with the authoring site, much more so than plain HTML and a browser. Fortunately, this is changing.
IMHO, RSS is a good first attempt at a truly automated, interactive Web experience. But the killer apps will have to wait for better technology and infrastructure...
Check out this great Slate article about the failure that is the AH-64. It's an overpriced tank-killer that is much worse than the vastly superior A-10.
To add to that: stealth's biggest enemies are straight edges, so in order to build a stealth helo rotor, you need to sweep the blades back a bit (making them look more like a ceiling fan rotor, only not as wide). That's virtually impossible given today's composite materials ('cause the swept-back blades don't have the rigidity to lift up the helo fuselage) Yes, I was an aero/helo engineer. The Comanche was a white elephant (and the Apache still is, but less so). Good to see it finally die.
Well, the good news is that Yahoo is trying to innovate, which in turn should push Google even further. For example, Yahoo is now linking directly to RSS feeds if you are using RSS-autodiscovery within your page's HTML. That's pretty cool.
I had the same thought some years ago and implemented a similar concept in memigo. Memigo is a newsbot/news aggregator where users can rate articles; memigo is also aware of the context of each article, so implicitly users rate contexts as well. Based on that data, some neat things are doable: Amazon-like collaborative filtering, automated formation of "alike" users, "Interest Alerts", where the newsbot searches for articles with context that you have rated highly in the past, etc. Memigo is pretty experimental (and a one-man, spare-time operation) but it's pretty good, if I may say so and has a few more innovative features I won't get to here; check it out.
OTOH, Windows doesn't have that many remote root exploits either... when you cannot get a shell prompt on a remote Windows machine, installing a bot to do your bidding is the only possible alternative. Linux machines are much more useful targets themselves; thankfully distros have fixed a lot of issues with default installs in the past few years.
It should not be forgotten however that the original Mozilla browser was also a very, very good gopher client (gopher:// URIs); back when they were hardly any HTTP servers around, gopher actually bootstrapped mozilla into more widespread usage...
... so the US-only percentage is probably disproportionately bigger than it should be; in the rest of the world cars have small and narrow blind spots and you can usually see behind the vehicle just fine.
The human spirit is forgiving; nature is not though... this is not about blame: it's about fault: finding the problem and fixing it. It looks like NASA did not learn from Challenger, did not fix their culture and then lost another shuttle.
My point was that the AF would not have denied a reasonable and urgent request for spy satellite pictures (USAF *is* in charge of spy satellites, BTW, not NASA).
As for officers, I have to say, on average, I'd rather work with a military officer than with a middle manager. Officers usually have other ideals in addition to climbing the organization ladder.
Slashdot Mirror
Bayesian needs pre-determined "bins" of data to assign a new piece of information to --that's a limited approach that will break down for news articles or generic Web pages. A combination of context- and collaborative-filtering is a much better approach IMSHO (that's my newsbot, BTW).
Well, my newsbot does this already for news articles you've read through it: you can search everything, you can search articles you've read, or articles you've read *and* rated highly. You can also set up "search alerts" that search any new articles and then stick them to your front page (or your personalized RSS feed, or your personalized PDA-optimized page). Check it out.
Mach 10 is a record for powered flight; it is not even close to the record of a man-maned craft; IIRC that goes to the Apollo reentry capsules that routinely hit Mach 27 on re-entry. So the heat problem has been solved for quite a while.
The real problem here is that a scramjet engine is very sensitive to its input (the air coming in) as it only spends literally milliseconds in the combustion chamber. So you have to wonder what aerodynamic tricks the X-43A designers are pulling to smooth that flow before it goes into the intake. Notice the side-view of the aircraft; the belly is smooth and curvy in order to produce many small shocks ahead of the intake and slow down the air as much as possible. A terrific aerodynamic feat, I just have to wonder if it will be reproducible (i.e. stable enought and robust to any aerodynamic event) for a manned aircraft. [Yes, I am an aerodynamicist].
But that's the point of metaclasses, you could overwrite the method lookup functionality once for your metaclass prototype and then enforce that behavior on all of your classes.
Just so that non-Pythonistas don't get the wrong idea: Python doesn't restrict your identation that much: it only restricts you as to the *consistency* of your identation: i.e. if you use a tab for an outer for-loop and then 1 tab and 3 spaces inside that loop for an inner if-then block, that is fine by python; but if you switch to 6 spaces for the inner loop (i.e. no tab for the outer block), you will get a syntax error.
Python doesn't try to enforce a particular style of whitespace, just a consistent one, and I think that any professional programmer comes to appreciate that almost immediately.
GN is good, but does it let you program personal searches every time you visit? does it learn the subject you're more interested in and suggest new articles on the front page every day? does it let you add to its news feeds directly? give you personal XML and PDA feeds to take home? let you share your favorite stories with friends (automatically)? No, not yet anyway... until then there is memigo [end of shameless plug]
Any good hotel (4 star and up, and good chain 3 stars) will sign for packages for you; just call the hotel, tell them you have a reservation, and ask how can you send a FedEx package to them for your personal delivery when you check-in. Get the name of the concierge/manager that gives you this information and ask for them by name on any follow-up calls. Give the info to Dell, make sure they put your name and "(Guest)" on the delivery and make it c/o of the person you have the name of, if possible. And don't forget to tip.
I can't imagine a decent NYC hotel not doing this; as a long-time business traveler, it's a perk you expect and is quite common.
Another self-plug: my newsbot extends the same ideas (peer recommendations, collaborative filtering) for news articles: it's a much more powerful way to filter the news than say, /. :-)
Are you aware of Jython (Jython.org) that implements Python in Java, so that you get most (if not all) of the extensive Python standard library in the JVM. Jython is exactly equivalent to Groovy (you can inherit Jython from Java and vice-versa) but is based on a more well-known language...
That means less than you may think...after all Hoover doesn't have a monopoly on vacuum cleaners nor Kleenex has the market cornered on tissues. Google just happened to be the first effective, widely popular search engine just as the Web was becoming effectively mainstream: the switching costs are still essentially zero (just point your browser to a different URL), so any company that can deliver searches better *enough* than Google, can become the new Google. That's even more impressive IMHO...
The original standard was so lenient (on purpose) that the quality of feeds is inconsistent at best.
RSS also piggy-backs on HTTP for authentication, modifications (304s), etc. This is great in theory, but in practice it has meant that every RSS client author has thrown together their homebrewed RSS client from an HTTP library without doing authentication, modification-checking, gzip compression, charset encodings, etc, etc, etc. It literally would have been preferrable for an HTSP (HyperText Syndication Protocol) to come out, just to force developers to use well-thought-out and well-behaved syndication libraries.
RSS is not NNTP (unfortunately): there is no interactivity, unless you provide additional controls to the subscribers somehow (memigo uses a frame-over) which is not consistent from site to site. Hacks like TrackBack are only half-way measures...
Related to the above: RSS provides meta-data only from the publisher side, NOT the reader side. Well, the vast majority of people are readers, not writers, and their meta-data vanish into clickthrus... sites like memigo try to fix that (by using implict ratings, page-read trackers, etc) but those are still kludges around the underlying technology...
In short, RSS is a good 1.0 technology, gopher waiting for HTTP...
Check out memigo Now! (plug). Memigo can provide you with a customized light-HTML page that links to recommended articles in light formats only (i.e. PDA- or printer-friendly). Much nicer for PDAs or cell phones than a plain RSS feed.
XML syndication is great but there are several drawbacks:
The standards wars: RSS 0.9 vs RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0 vs Atom. As a provider if I want to reach as many people as possible I will have to provide 4 different formats! (RSS 2.0 should be readable by RSS 0.9 readers but you never know).
The bad client implementations: repeat after me: 304 Modified. If you consume XML/RSS, make sure your client supports 304 Modified responses, and provides Last Modified and ETags. Otherwise, you're wasting my bandwidth, and I'll have to ban your customers (which I don't want to do!).
RSS is less two-way than HTML: a lot (not all definitely) of the RSS clients make it hard to interact with the authoring site, much more so than plain HTML and a browser. Fortunately, this is changing.
IMHO, RSS is a good first attempt at a truly automated, interactive Web experience. But the killer apps will have to wait for better technology and infrastructure...
Check out this great Slate article about the failure that is the AH-64. It's an overpriced tank-killer that is much worse than the vastly superior A-10.
To add to that: stealth's biggest enemies are straight edges, so in order to build a stealth helo rotor, you need to sweep the blades back a bit (making them look more like a ceiling fan rotor, only not as wide). That's virtually impossible given today's composite materials ('cause the swept-back blades don't have the rigidity to lift up the helo fuselage) Yes, I was an aero/helo engineer. The Comanche was a white elephant (and the Apache still is, but less so). Good to see it finally die.
Well, the good news is that Yahoo is trying to innovate, which in turn should push Google even further. For example, Yahoo is now linking directly to RSS feeds if you are using RSS-autodiscovery within your page's HTML. That's pretty cool.
I had the same thought some years ago and implemented a similar concept in memigo. Memigo is a newsbot/news aggregator where users can rate articles; memigo is also aware of the context of each article, so implicitly users rate contexts as well. Based on that data, some neat things are doable: Amazon-like collaborative filtering, automated formation of "alike" users, "Interest Alerts", where the newsbot searches for articles with context that you have rated highly in the past, etc. Memigo is pretty experimental (and a one-man, spare-time operation) but it's pretty good, if I may say so and has a few more innovative features I won't get to here; check it out.
:-)
End of blatant plug
There are other alternatives, such as cutting the budget of Cold War-era military projects that offer no particular value.
OTOH, Windows doesn't have that many remote root exploits either... when you cannot get a shell prompt on a remote Windows machine, installing a bot to do your bidding is the only possible alternative. Linux machines are much more useful targets themselves; thankfully distros have fixed a lot of issues with default installs in the past few years.
It should not be forgotten however that the original Mozilla browser was also a very, very good gopher client (gopher:// URIs); back when they were hardly any HTTP servers around, gopher actually bootstrapped mozilla into more widespread usage...
... so the US-only percentage is probably disproportionately bigger than it should be; in the rest of the world cars have small and narrow blind spots and you can usually see behind the vehicle just fine.
Sorry, everyone keeps forgetting the true #1: TiVo only works in the USA.
The human spirit is forgiving; nature is not though... this is not about blame: it's about fault: finding the problem and fixing it. It looks like NASA did not learn from Challenger, did not fix their culture and then lost another shuttle.
My point was that the AF would not have denied a reasonable and urgent request for spy satellite pictures (USAF *is* in charge of spy satellites, BTW, not NASA).
As for officers, I have to say, on average, I'd rather work with a military officer than with a middle manager. Officers usually have other ideals in addition to climbing the organization ladder.