I'm starting to see the yellow pen brought out on the $20s as well.
But yeah, when I worked as a retail clerk in a video store (15 years gone at this point) you'd have to pass a three-dollar bill to get it rejected by most of the guys I worked with. And then only because they'd come ask me what slot they should file it in.
Sadly, that may be more true than one would like to believe. I work for a startup, the old-fashioned kind where you work hard and make no money. Our lawyers were working on this largely out of the goodness of their hearts (though I certainly hope to pay them some day). But that put me in zero position from which to bully patent attorneys.
Hey, props to the guy, I guess. Sic him on one-click-shopping and maybe the world would be a better place.
In my limited experience, that's not entirely true. I had to fight like crazy with a patent examiner over a patent I obtained.
He did nontrivial outside research in the field, much of it directed by the reference materials I included in the patent. At one point he stated that a particular claim was "obvious" after you've read five different sources in different domains which he only knew about because we referenced all five in the application. None of them were patented.
From the Slashdot "IP is bad" standpoint you'd have to give him credit for the effort. He worked very hard to ensure that my patent was in fact non-obvious and not prior art. You really want a patent examiner that hard.
Except I don't. If patents are being given out like candy, why should I have to fight for mine?
That's as much as you can remember because that's about all it did. And if that's all you can remember about OpenLook, congratulations; those are brain cells freed up that otherwise you'd never get again.
I'm curious as to why you chose to do that. Sitefinder is clearly obnoxious, the ultimate typo-squat. I'm glad ICANN stomped on it.
But it seems like you chose to do additional work, which always runs the risk of breaking something. The Sitefinder service didn't actually damage any of your users, did it? It didn't actually redirect them to any inappropriate sites; it just made suggestions. And in the end, it's unnecessary; ICANN got them to stop it.
You're right that replacing your resolvers and such is a lot of work, and in this case it seemed fairly unnecessary. China has the usual information-control reasons; what were yours?
However, if you believe CORBA was going to be a silver bullet, then you were mistaken. I've never heard anyone say such a thing.
Can I come work for you guys? Because the dipsticks I used to work with were hugely into silver-bullet thinking and CORBA was one of many things that were pushed as silver bullets, along with SGML and "push" technology.
For the most part you should substitute the JCF HashMap and ArrayList, which roughly replace Hashtable and Vector with non-synchronized versions (which add overhead which is frequently unnecessary).
The poster might be referring to the fact that the routines tend to provide Objects instead of strongly-typed objects, which leads to so much casting that I do frequently end up writing specialized collections classes just to avoid the cast. JDK 1.5 (when and if) should have a new collections framework designed to solve that problem.
Which just goes to show that CD prices have absolutely no relationship with marginal costs.
Did you expect them to be? Retail prices in general are set by what the traffic will bear, rather than by marginal costs. Marginal cost sets a lower bound, that's all. Not even that in the presence of a monopoly which chooses to drive a competitor out of business.
Apparently, the various members of the RIAA have decided that the traffic will bear quite a bit. I'd have expected that some major music company hasn't decided to lower its prices to attract more listeners. People will pay for music; Apple's iTunes proves that. The question is: how much are they willing to pay?
The answer is pretty clearly: not $18.99. They've already been convicted of collusion on that score, and I recall an article last week about somebody lowering their prices (Universal?). The question is, will the others follow? And where is the price that people would rather buy than steal? (My guess is that it's around $10, which I think is what Apple charges.)
I'm curious about whether product placement is cost-effective for the advertisers.
The market for advertising-supported web sites crashed because it was possible to get a measure of how effective they were with click-throughs. It's not zero, but it's pretty low, and only a few sites can really support themselves that way.
TV ads, on the other hand, don't have click-through, and it must be hard to measure if they're effective or not. The overall branding effect is even more difficult to measure: what's it worth to a soda company to have people see the products on TV? Does it create that strong an effect?
I'm assured that it does by various marketers, and I've certainly seen places in life where good branding gives you confidence in a product and an unjustifiable but very real preference for it. This is most prominent in big brands: do I really prefer the taste of Coke to Pepsi, or just its advertising? Do I drive a Honda because its ads are less irritating than those for most other cars?
But, as another poster cited, is anybody buying CA products because they see them on TV? Even if there is an effect, is it worth whatever CA is paying for it? Even if it works for Coke, are there enough brands to support the effort that the TV studios make to bother to acquire product placements?
This isn't really the place or time for the age-old language war to break out, so let me just say that I agree with you. A good C++ program, written by a smart C++ programmer, is usually a better program. I consider myself a smart C++ programmer, and I never had memory leaks or crashes in my code.
However, I find that this industry is filled with people who aren't smart, good, diligent programmers, and I prefer Java for working with such people. Time that I don't spend working out crashes due to their memory management is a huge boost to my productivity. That's just my bias; I tend to work on large projects with many people, and I rarely get to pick my team to suit me.
I'm disappointed by the overall poor performance of Java. Another poster pointed out that there was limited time to bang out the program, and I personally consider Java to be faster to program in than C++, especially for larger programs.
Perhaps the size of the task was small enough that C++'s memory difficulties don't occur. If your memory requirements are low enough that you don't need to free memory, you eliminate an important source of wild-goose-chasing that often occur in C++ programs. One crash caused by overzealous memory freeing can waste an infinitude of hours, as can tracking down the source of a memory leak.
Or perhaps the programmers now have enough discipline to free memory always, and only, when it's required.
I guess it should come as no surprise that the winners should be programming in the decidedly non-functional (no pun intended, really) language C++. There are far more C++ programmers out there than Dylan, Haskell, and ML combined, probably by a couple orders of magnitude.
The prizes were awarded based on answer quality, not performance, which takes away one of C++'s natural advantages over functional languages. Still, I'd like to see a breakdown of entry languages.
And it goes up from there. At 25 feet per story (not uncommon for office buildings) you're talking just shy of five million stories. At a more house-like 10 feet per story, it's more like 10 million.
I know you were just joking, but I found that number kind of put it all in perspective for a second.
To quote the conclusion: "Basically, calculator keypad design evolved from cash registers, while telephone keypad design evolved from the rotary dial. Tradition has kept them that way ever since."
I don't believe any touch typist is going to miss the fact that keys are transposed when doing hunt-and-peck. To touch-type you have to know where the keys are pretty well, and if you move keys around it's going to feel strange. Even if a first person gets fooled, I doubt a second person will.
Still, it's a great story, and if it isn't true, it ought to be.
The skeptics don't generally dismiss the observers, but rather the interpreters. To report a disquieting feeling or an unexplained light in the sky is dealing in fact.
To interpret it as the ghost of a great-grandfather or the sign of an alien civilization coming to conduct anal probes is making up unnecessarily elaborate stories, often with a personal motive. Such people deserve to be mocked.
Sometimes the observer is also the interpreter, and those cases are doubly suspicious, since in such cases what facts there are (if any) are easily manipulated to suit the interpretation.
That said, some years ago I let my subscription to Skeptical Inquierer lapse because they often missed the difference themselves. They spent too much time ridiculing pseudoscientists and too little getting to the root.
Any idea what the payback time is? The article cited roughly a thousand dollars per year per signal in saved energy costs.
However, I haven't the vaguest idea what a traffic signal costs. It's a very heavy, durable object designed to sit in all weather and be very, very, VERY reliable. In theory it's just a few bulbs, wires, lenses, and a case, but I'm sure the devil is in the details and they're probably very expensive objects.
But do you hand some corporation money for every game you play?
No, but I know some people who do. You can actually play solitaire for money in Vegas.
Some people like the feel of the risk of winning and losing. I don't, but then, I do like to ride roller coasters. Some people consider me a dope for that.
Some people even get addicted to gambling. It's not so much the chance to get rich they're after as they joy they get from the risk of playing. Not my cup of tea, fortunately.
All of the systems I know involve memorizing a few hit/pass tables (tedious but not terribly hard), counting face and nonface cards (which involves nontrivial concentration), and adjusting the tables accordingly.
There are far more complex systems with better payout, but the simple systems do well enough for your average person to go to Vegas and have an amusing couple of hours, rather than a disappointing 20 minutes.
Your script kiddie analogy is pretty accurate: they're not experts but they're having fun, and to a certain approximation achieving similar results. But to a better approximation it's totally different.
People enjoy games that require just a little bit of skill. Hell, I like to play solitaire, which is a pretty brain-damaged game.
A lot of people enjoy blackjack, and few of them are card counters. They enjoy the game, the casinos enjoy being paid to play it with them, and it works out for nearly everybody.
Except, of course, for the compulsive players and the genuinely stupid. They kind of get screwed. But there's not a heck of a lot I can do for the genuinely stupid.
And except for the fact that the game is kind of busted. Card counting is, from a game-design standpoint, a serious problem. It is, in effect, a different game from the one the casinos want to play. The casinos want a game where a skilled player gets 48% of his money back, and an unskilled player gets less. The game is simply broken by design.
They could fix the game the way they did with poker: the players play each other and the house gets a piece of the pot. That is truly a game of skill. That game works for those who want to play it, but it's too hard for most players (including me).
They have other ways to fiddle with blackjack. In Atlantic City it's hard to find a table where they play straight-up blackjack. They generally play various fancy versions, with the odds tilted in their favor, even if you count.
I wonder if they actually believe that the stock market is really gambling.
Of course, you can play it as gambling, but the core concept of the stock market is capitalistic: money flows from people with money to people with ideas/products, who use it to sell those things and make money, which they pay out as dividends. That's not a bet on a random factor, like gambling. It's an investment. The investment may fail, but in general progress is made. The odds are in your favor, at least if you choose wisely.
Of course, the core idea is too simple, and it gets yucked up in a variety of ways with various hedging strategies and risk management. They don't actually pay dividends; they keep the profits to improve the company. But you can sell the stock to somebody else who wants a share of those (largely theoretical) dividends.
It may sound like funny money, and sometimes it is (when there's no underlying value), but in theory you could stop the stock market merry-go-round, dissolve the companies, distribute the money among the shareholders, and be done. It doesn't actually work that way, since the price includes future earnings and growth, but you get the idea.
I've gone rather offtopic, sadly, so I'll get back to my point. The stock market is not necessarily gambling; the odds are in your favor. Gambing in Vegas is always against you. If it's the poor man's stock market, that's because you will eventually be poor if you play it.
These are games, and some people enjoy the games. Not me, but I have friends who do. Not one of them thinks of it as an an investment.
Actually, most of the dealers I know count cards out of habit. They know the count perfectly well. Dealing is pretty dull, and you have to do something to keep yourself entertained.
But they don't get to use this to shuffle the deck when the counts favor the players. Dealers are locked into a very rigid system (hits on a 16, and maybe on soft 17), and that's where you derive your advantage from. Its not up to the dealer to prevent your counting. At best, he/she will notify the pit boss that somebody's counting.
Generally, houses with one-deck blackjack shuffle more frequently. If they suspect you're counting, they'll shuffle after every hand.
The advantage in card counting comes from your knowledge of cards that have already been played. If they shuffle often, then you have no knowledge, and no advantage.
Thanks. I did a brief Internet search for it before composing my post, but couldn't find it. I was aware of it (through secondary sources) which is why I used the same numbers. But I couldn't trace the original article. Thanks for correcting that oversight.
Slashdot Mirror
I can plainly see that.
I'm starting to see the yellow pen brought out on the $20s as well.
But yeah, when I worked as a retail clerk in a video store (15 years gone at this point) you'd have to pass a three-dollar bill to get it rejected by most of the guys I worked with. And then only because they'd come ask me what slot they should file it in.
Sadly, that may be more true than one would like to believe. I work for a startup, the old-fashioned kind where you work hard and make no money. Our lawyers were working on this largely out of the goodness of their hearts (though I certainly hope to pay them some day). But that put me in zero position from which to bully patent attorneys.
Hey, props to the guy, I guess. Sic him on one-click-shopping and maybe the world would be a better place.
In my limited experience, that's not entirely true. I had to fight like crazy with a patent examiner over a patent I obtained.
He did nontrivial outside research in the field, much of it directed by the reference materials I included in the patent. At one point he stated that a particular claim was "obvious" after you've read five different sources in different domains which he only knew about because we referenced all five in the application. None of them were patented.
From the Slashdot "IP is bad" standpoint you'd have to give him credit for the effort. He worked very hard to ensure that my patent was in fact non-obvious and not prior art. You really want a patent examiner that hard.
Except I don't. If patents are being given out like candy, why should I have to fight for mine?
That's as much as you can remember because that's about all it did. And if that's all you can remember about OpenLook, congratulations; those are brain cells freed up that otherwise you'd never get again.
I'm curious as to why you chose to do that. Sitefinder is clearly obnoxious, the ultimate typo-squat. I'm glad ICANN stomped on it.
But it seems like you chose to do additional work, which always runs the risk of breaking something. The Sitefinder service didn't actually damage any of your users, did it? It didn't actually redirect them to any inappropriate sites; it just made suggestions. And in the end, it's unnecessary; ICANN got them to stop it.
You're right that replacing your resolvers and such is a lot of work, and in this case it seemed fairly unnecessary. China has the usual information-control reasons; what were yours?
However, if you believe CORBA was going to be a silver bullet, then you were mistaken. I've never heard anyone say such a thing.
Can I come work for you guys? Because the dipsticks I used to work with were hugely into silver-bullet thinking and CORBA was one of many things that were pushed as silver bullets, along with SGML and "push" technology.
For the most part you should substitute the JCF HashMap and ArrayList, which roughly replace Hashtable and Vector with non-synchronized versions (which add overhead which is frequently unnecessary).
The poster might be referring to the fact that the routines tend to provide Objects instead of strongly-typed objects, which leads to so much casting that I do frequently end up writing specialized collections classes just to avoid the cast. JDK 1.5 (when and if) should have a new collections framework designed to solve that problem.
Which just goes to show that CD prices have absolutely no relationship with marginal costs.
Did you expect them to be? Retail prices in general are set by what the traffic will bear, rather than by marginal costs. Marginal cost sets a lower bound, that's all. Not even that in the presence of a monopoly which chooses to drive a competitor out of business.
Apparently, the various members of the RIAA have decided that the traffic will bear quite a bit. I'd have expected that some major music company hasn't decided to lower its prices to attract more listeners. People will pay for music; Apple's iTunes proves that. The question is: how much are they willing to pay?
The answer is pretty clearly: not $18.99. They've already been convicted of collusion on that score, and I recall an article last week about somebody lowering their prices (Universal?). The question is, will the others follow? And where is the price that people would rather buy than steal? (My guess is that it's around $10, which I think is what Apple charges.)
I'm curious about whether product placement is cost-effective for the advertisers.
The market for advertising-supported web sites crashed because it was possible to get a measure of how effective they were with click-throughs. It's not zero, but it's pretty low, and only a few sites can really support themselves that way.
TV ads, on the other hand, don't have click-through, and it must be hard to measure if they're effective or not. The overall branding effect is even more difficult to measure: what's it worth to a soda company to have people see the products on TV? Does it create that strong an effect?
I'm assured that it does by various marketers, and I've certainly seen places in life where good branding gives you confidence in a product and an unjustifiable but very real preference for it. This is most prominent in big brands: do I really prefer the taste of Coke to Pepsi, or just its advertising? Do I drive a Honda because its ads are less irritating than those for most other cars?
But, as another poster cited, is anybody buying CA products because they see them on TV? Even if there is an effect, is it worth whatever CA is paying for it? Even if it works for Coke, are there enough brands to support the effort that the TV studios make to bother to acquire product placements?
This isn't really the place or time for the age-old language war to break out, so let me just say that I agree with you. A good C++ program, written by a smart C++ programmer, is usually a better program. I consider myself a smart C++ programmer, and I never had memory leaks or crashes in my code.
However, I find that this industry is filled with people who aren't smart, good, diligent programmers, and I prefer Java for working with such people. Time that I don't spend working out crashes due to their memory management is a huge boost to my productivity. That's just my bias; I tend to work on large projects with many people, and I rarely get to pick my team to suit me.
I'm disappointed by the overall poor performance of Java. Another poster pointed out that there was limited time to bang out the program, and I personally consider Java to be faster to program in than C++, especially for larger programs.
Perhaps the size of the task was small enough that C++'s memory difficulties don't occur. If your memory requirements are low enough that you don't need to free memory, you eliminate an important source of wild-goose-chasing that often occur in C++ programs. One crash caused by overzealous memory freeing can waste an infinitude of hours, as can tracking down the source of a memory leak.
Or perhaps the programmers now have enough discipline to free memory always, and only, when it's required.
I guess it should come as no surprise that the winners should be programming in the decidedly non-functional (no pun intended, really) language C++. There are far more C++ programmers out there than Dylan, Haskell, and ML combined, probably by a couple orders of magnitude.
The prizes were awarded based on answer quality, not performance, which takes away one of C++'s natural advantages over functional languages. Still, I'd like to see a breakdown of entry languages.
And it goes up from there. At 25 feet per story (not uncommon for office buildings) you're talking just shy of five million stories. At a more house-like 10 feet per story, it's more like 10 million.
I know you were just joking, but I found that number kind of put it all in perspective for a second.
The Straight Dope took a crack at the question: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mphonedial.htm l.
To quote the conclusion: "Basically, calculator keypad design evolved from cash registers, while telephone keypad design evolved from the rotary dial. Tradition has kept them that way ever since."
Great story, but I have to call shennanigans.
I don't believe any touch typist is going to miss the fact that keys are transposed when doing hunt-and-peck. To touch-type you have to know where the keys are pretty well, and if you move keys around it's going to feel strange. Even if a first person gets fooled, I doubt a second person will.
Still, it's a great story, and if it isn't true, it ought to be.
The skeptics don't generally dismiss the observers, but rather the interpreters. To report a disquieting feeling or an unexplained light in the sky is dealing in fact.
To interpret it as the ghost of a great-grandfather or the sign of an alien civilization coming to conduct anal probes is making up unnecessarily elaborate stories, often with a personal motive. Such people deserve to be mocked.
Sometimes the observer is also the interpreter, and those cases are doubly suspicious, since in such cases what facts there are (if any) are easily manipulated to suit the interpretation.
That said, some years ago I let my subscription to Skeptical Inquierer lapse because they often missed the difference themselves. They spent too much time ridiculing pseudoscientists and too little getting to the root.
Any idea what the payback time is? The article cited roughly a thousand dollars per year per signal in saved energy costs.
However, I haven't the vaguest idea what a traffic signal costs. It's a very heavy, durable object designed to sit in all weather and be very, very, VERY reliable. In theory it's just a few bulbs, wires, lenses, and a case, but I'm sure the devil is in the details and they're probably very expensive objects.
No, but I know some people who do. You can actually play solitaire for money in Vegas.
Some people like the feel of the risk of winning and losing. I don't, but then, I do like to ride roller coasters. Some people consider me a dope for that.
Some people even get addicted to gambling. It's not so much the chance to get rich they're after as they joy they get from the risk of playing. Not my cup of tea, fortunately.
All of the systems I know involve memorizing a few hit/pass tables (tedious but not terribly hard), counting face and nonface cards (which involves nontrivial concentration), and adjusting the tables accordingly.
There are far more complex systems with better payout, but the simple systems do well enough for your average person to go to Vegas and have an amusing couple of hours, rather than a disappointing 20 minutes.
Your script kiddie analogy is pretty accurate: they're not experts but they're having fun, and to a certain approximation achieving similar results. But to a better approximation it's totally different.
People enjoy games that require just a little bit of skill. Hell, I like to play solitaire, which is a pretty brain-damaged game.
A lot of people enjoy blackjack, and few of them are card counters. They enjoy the game, the casinos enjoy being paid to play it with them, and it works out for nearly everybody.
Except, of course, for the compulsive players and the genuinely stupid. They kind of get screwed. But there's not a heck of a lot I can do for the genuinely stupid.
And except for the fact that the game is kind of busted. Card counting is, from a game-design standpoint, a serious problem. It is, in effect, a different game from the one the casinos want to play. The casinos want a game where a skilled player gets 48% of his money back, and an unskilled player gets less. The game is simply broken by design.
They could fix the game the way they did with poker: the players play each other and the house gets a piece of the pot. That is truly a game of skill. That game works for those who want to play it, but it's too hard for most players (including me).
They have other ways to fiddle with blackjack. In Atlantic City it's hard to find a table where they play straight-up blackjack. They generally play various fancy versions, with the odds tilted in their favor, even if you count.
I wonder if they actually believe that the stock market is really gambling.
Of course, you can play it as gambling, but the core concept of the stock market is capitalistic: money flows from people with money to people with ideas/products, who use it to sell those things and make money, which they pay out as dividends. That's not a bet on a random factor, like gambling. It's an investment. The investment may fail, but in general progress is made. The odds are in your favor, at least if you choose wisely.
Of course, the core idea is too simple, and it gets yucked up in a variety of ways with various hedging strategies and risk management. They don't actually pay dividends; they keep the profits to improve the company. But you can sell the stock to somebody else who wants a share of those (largely theoretical) dividends.
It may sound like funny money, and sometimes it is (when there's no underlying value), but in theory you could stop the stock market merry-go-round, dissolve the companies, distribute the money among the shareholders, and be done. It doesn't actually work that way, since the price includes future earnings and growth, but you get the idea.
I've gone rather offtopic, sadly, so I'll get back to my point. The stock market is not necessarily gambling; the odds are in your favor. Gambing in Vegas is always against you. If it's the poor man's stock market, that's because you will eventually be poor if you play it.
These are games, and some people enjoy the games. Not me, but I have friends who do. Not one of them thinks of it as an an investment.
Actually, most of the dealers I know count cards out of habit. They know the count perfectly well. Dealing is pretty dull, and you have to do something to keep yourself entertained.
But they don't get to use this to shuffle the deck when the counts favor the players. Dealers are locked into a very rigid system (hits on a 16, and maybe on soft 17), and that's where you derive your advantage from. Its not up to the dealer to prevent your counting. At best, he/she will notify the pit boss that somebody's counting.
Generally, houses with one-deck blackjack shuffle more frequently. If they suspect you're counting, they'll shuffle after every hand.
The advantage in card counting comes from your knowledge of cards that have already been played. If they shuffle often, then you have no knowledge, and no advantage.
Thanks. I did a brief Internet search for it before composing my post, but couldn't find it. I was aware of it (through secondary sources) which is why I used the same numbers. But I couldn't trace the original article. Thanks for correcting that oversight.