Take a look at govtrack.us, which parses the Congressional Record into a nice RSS feed by issue, bill, or congressperson. It'd still be nice if Congress provided such a service themselves.
I have no problem haggling with some random person over $5. I would be extremely cautious haggling with my boss over large sums of money. Your experiment might have interesting things to say about $5 negotiations but you'd have a hard time extrapolating to other amounts.
That does raise a good point. For some things, you may just have to say "yes, that's always the answer" just so you don't confuse the students with material that they aren't ready to learn yet. Now that doesn't mean you should say "no, you're wrong" if a student does come up with an interesting challenge, but you could say "well that's more complicated that I would to get into right now."
The government identifies a proper subsidy -- let's say, food. So does it subsidize the *producer*? That is, does it give money to farmers or grocery stores, and tell them to provide food to people who live within a certain geographic area?
Interesting choice of analogy. The government does subsidize farming to an extent. Lots of money down the drain, or rather into the pockets of agribusiness.
Actually, I think "tinny" might be a good description of procedural graphics as they are now. How do you create a formula that looks natural? It can create a decent approximation, but not quite perfect if you look closely. So it's "tinny".
Well, AT&T is offering DSL for $13/mo with 1 year contract, no phone service necessary, but not every area can get it. My family was on dialup for a long time -- not because we couldn't afford cable/DSL, but for the same reason you don't eat at nice restauraunts every day, they didn't need it (of course, *I* really wanted it, but... yeah).
Thi was when it was still $15/mo. They did force us to upgrade to the $17/mo higher speed package after our year was up, but it's still pretty affordable vs dialup. Who knows what they'll do next year though.
The relevant ones are Gem and CPAN. The others have pretty much full control over all the packages on your system.
CPAN breaks if you have non-Perl dependencies, like bindings for libraries. And Python has a *lot* of bindings. On the other hand, key packages like wxPython/wxPerl are usually installed by your distro, which unfortunately fouls up CPAN and Python's easy-setup.
Furthermore, if you have package A that depends on package X v1.5 and package B that depends on package X v2.0, and the packages are incompatible, you end up with some ugly hacks to make sure they can coexist. It's much better with scripting languages where you don't have binary compat problems, but there's no standard way for a package to say what version it wants to use at runtime -- they're designed so you just say "import X" and it works. Solvable but ugly.
Zope has a seriously bad reputation from their 1.x and 2.x days. I don't know if they've reformed enough with 3.x, but Zope is "enterprise-grade" in a very real sense -- huge and complicated.
I do appreciate RoR's marketing skills. They're really reaching out to Java and PHP users -- who I suppose are somewhat easy targets, considering how terrible web programming can be in those languages -- which I don't think the Perl or Python communities really tried to do. Since I'm a Python fan and Python is somewhat of a middle-ground between the looseness of Ruby and the solidness of Java, I'm hoping the Rails marketing brings some people our way:)
The median house price in the Silicon Valley is over $700,000 -- even worse than during the dot-com boom. In some areas, it's well over $1 million. So $250k is downright cheap around here.
Actually, it's much more than just survival in HL1. You really are trying to save the world, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW IT YET at the beginning. That's what's so awesome about the story.
As you play, the ultimate objective gradually unfolds. At the start, you're just trying to get the hell out of there. Then you have to deal with the military. You eventually learn that the scientists are still at work, and they've been putting their own lives at serious risk to try to fix the problem. They were about to launch the rocket with a satellite needed to open the portal to Xen, before they were taken out by the military, so you have to finish the job. Then you eventually make your way to Lambda Core, fix up the reactor, and the scientists are ready to send you to Xen to close the portals from the other side. They tell you that you don't have to do it, but you've come so far and there won't be much of a world left if you fail. Inspiring, eh?
Compare to Half-Life 2: most of the game, your objective is to get from Point A to Point B. Like the first half of the game, you're trying to get to Black Mesa East, and from there you go to Nova Prospekt. Everything that happens along the way tends to be purely incidental. There's no objectives except getting to the next place, except for the part where you shut down the dark energy reactors with Barney and friends -- which is largely so you can get to the Citadel in one piece. And a lot of the running around within levels was shutting off force fields -- how lame is that? Compare that to blowing up the tentacle monster in HL1 or turning on the power to the rails or ordering airstrikes on the Gargantua or any of dozens of other creative puzzles.
I think there's a major plot hole though: how do you raise a computer AI in a simulation without already having AIs to play the other people? Unless the virtual people are controlled by humans, which would be a lot of work.
At least with government records, there's a certain amount of reliability associated with them. Also, if you have a date-of-birth or city or anything to narrow things down, you're less likely to confuse two people with the same name.
On the other hand, suppose you've been good about keeping your name off the web, but there's another person with the same name who has a bad reputation. How's the employer going to know that it's not really you, if there's not enough details to disprove it?
So background checks are one thing; using Google is completely different in terms of reliability.
"Most people avoid Linux because they are totally ignorant and are going with the popular flow no matter how ugly it is. They've jumped on the Windows bandwagon with no regard for what they are missing."
I think that you, as someone not proficient in Linux, should at least appreciate that some things are a pain in the ass to learn, even if there are considerable benefits. Don't be so quick to judge people who haven't adopted your favorite database package or OS or seafood dish.
Nowadays, you can get 5200s for next to nothing. I've seen $0-$30 after rebate from eVGA, the top nVidia board maker. Pretty good, and totally worth it even if you have to throw it out in a year.
Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike
on
No EFI Support for Vista
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· Score: 2, Informative
VMWare Workstation beta has experimental 3D acceleration support. I don't know what performance is like though.
In most cases, in the absence of copyright and patent protection, software would be available over the Internet at zero cost.
If it were available at all. There is definitely justification for copyright law, and that is to ensure that you can sell a work without fear of people ripping off your work. The only problem with copyright is the extend that they've taken it to, such as making it illegal to crack DRM. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with copyright itself though.
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Take a look at govtrack.us, which parses the Congressional Record into a nice RSS feed by issue, bill, or congressperson. It'd still be nice if Congress provided such a service themselves.
I have no problem haggling with some random person over $5. I would be extremely cautious haggling with my boss over large sums of money. Your experiment might have interesting things to say about $5 negotiations but you'd have a hard time extrapolating to other amounts.
That does raise a good point. For some things, you may just have to say "yes, that's always the answer" just so you don't confuse the students with material that they aren't ready to learn yet. Now that doesn't mean you should say "no, you're wrong" if a student does come up with an interesting challenge, but you could say "well that's more complicated that I would to get into right now."
Setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS is playing with fire anyways. You're guaranteed to run into problems if you do that.
The government identifies a proper subsidy -- let's say, food. So does it subsidize the *producer*? That is, does it give money to farmers or grocery stores, and tell them to provide food to people who live within a certain geographic area?
Interesting choice of analogy. The government does subsidize farming to an extent. Lots of money down the drain, or rather into the pockets of agribusiness.
Actually, I think "tinny" might be a good description of procedural graphics as they are now. How do you create a formula that looks natural? It can create a decent approximation, but not quite perfect if you look closely. So it's "tinny".
What about using a SOCKS proxy sitting on port 80?
Well, AT&T is offering DSL for $13/mo with 1 year contract, no phone service necessary, but not every area can get it. My family was on dialup for a long time -- not because we couldn't afford cable/DSL, but for the same reason you don't eat at nice restauraunts every day, they didn't need it (of course, *I* really wanted it, but ... yeah).
Thi was when it was still $15/mo. They did force us to upgrade to the $17/mo higher speed package after our year was up, but it's still pretty affordable vs dialup. Who knows what they'll do next year though.
The relevant ones are Gem and CPAN. The others have pretty much full control over all the packages on your system.
CPAN breaks if you have non-Perl dependencies, like bindings for libraries. And Python has a *lot* of bindings. On the other hand, key packages like wxPython/wxPerl are usually installed by your distro, which unfortunately fouls up CPAN and Python's easy-setup.
Furthermore, if you have package A that depends on package X v1.5 and package B that depends on package X v2.0, and the packages are incompatible, you end up with some ugly hacks to make sure they can coexist. It's much better with scripting languages where you don't have binary compat problems, but there's no standard way for a package to say what version it wants to use at runtime -- they're designed so you just say "import X" and it works. Solvable but ugly.
I find it funny that they spend so much time saying 'don't repeat yourself" :)
Python knows that CPAN is important, but the current efforts are pretty ugly and lacking. Package management is somewhat of a black art.
Zope has a seriously bad reputation from their 1.x and 2.x days. I don't know if they've reformed enough with 3.x, but Zope is "enterprise-grade" in a very real sense -- huge and complicated.
:)
I do appreciate RoR's marketing skills. They're really reaching out to Java and PHP users -- who I suppose are somewhat easy targets, considering how terrible web programming can be in those languages -- which I don't think the Perl or Python communities really tried to do. Since I'm a Python fan and Python is somewhat of a middle-ground between the looseness of Ruby and the solidness of Java, I'm hoping the Rails marketing brings some people our way
The median house price in the Silicon Valley is over $700,000 -- even worse than during the dot-com boom. In some areas, it's well over $1 million. So $250k is downright cheap around here.
Actually, it's much more than just survival in HL1. You really are trying to save the world, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW IT YET at the beginning. That's what's so awesome about the story.
As you play, the ultimate objective gradually unfolds. At the start, you're just trying to get the hell out of there. Then you have to deal with the military. You eventually learn that the scientists are still at work, and they've been putting their own lives at serious risk to try to fix the problem. They were about to launch the rocket with a satellite needed to open the portal to Xen, before they were taken out by the military, so you have to finish the job. Then you eventually make your way to Lambda Core, fix up the reactor, and the scientists are ready to send you to Xen to close the portals from the other side. They tell you that you don't have to do it, but you've come so far and there won't be much of a world left if you fail. Inspiring, eh?
Compare to Half-Life 2: most of the game, your objective is to get from Point A to Point B. Like the first half of the game, you're trying to get to Black Mesa East, and from there you go to Nova Prospekt. Everything that happens along the way tends to be purely incidental. There's no objectives except getting to the next place, except for the part where you shut down the dark energy reactors with Barney and friends -- which is largely so you can get to the Citadel in one piece. And a lot of the running around within levels was shutting off force fields -- how lame is that? Compare that to blowing up the tentacle monster in HL1 or turning on the power to the rails or ordering airstrikes on the Gargantua or any of dozens of other creative puzzles.
I think there's a major plot hole though: how do you raise a computer AI in a simulation without already having AIs to play the other people? Unless the virtual people are controlled by humans, which would be a lot of work.
When you're paying over $23,000 for a computer, a maintainance plan is a damn good idea :)
At least with government records, there's a certain amount of reliability associated with them. Also, if you have a date-of-birth or city or anything to narrow things down, you're less likely to confuse two people with the same name.
On the other hand, suppose you've been good about keeping your name off the web, but there's another person with the same name who has a bad reputation. How's the employer going to know that it's not really you, if there's not enough details to disprove it?
So background checks are one thing; using Google is completely different in terms of reliability.
There's a saying for this:
Microsoft doesn't have to compete. It just waits for its competitors to shoot themselves in the foot and Microsoft wins by default.
A small change:
"Most people avoid Linux because they are totally ignorant and are going with the popular flow no matter how ugly it is. They've jumped on the Windows bandwagon with no regard for what they are missing."
I think that you, as someone not proficient in Linux, should at least appreciate that some things are a pain in the ass to learn, even if there are considerable benefits. Don't be so quick to judge people who haven't adopted your favorite database package or OS or seafood dish.
Nowadays, you can get 5200s for next to nothing. I've seen $0-$30 after rebate from eVGA, the top nVidia board maker. Pretty good, and totally worth it even if you have to throw it out in a year.
VMWare Workstation beta has experimental 3D acceleration support. I don't know what performance is like though.
Maybe the attorneys get credits too! Suddenly, the web is overrun by ads for "Need legal service cheap?" and "Injured by java api manual?"
Bidding prices for the adwords "lawyer" and "class action" jump into the thousands.
The downside is that it's a pain to debug when things go wrong, even with strict(er) checking enabled.
Heh, take a look at this comic.
In most cases, in the absence of copyright and patent protection, software would be available over the Internet at zero cost.
If it were available at all. There is definitely justification for copyright law, and that is to ensure that you can sell a work without fear of people ripping off your work. The only problem with copyright is the extend that they've taken it to, such as making it illegal to crack DRM. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with copyright itself though.
If you're curious, there's another no-temp-space swapping trick using XOR that doesn't clobber anything.