I'm a late-comer; I guess I started reading back in high school after someone emailed my about a link to an article I wrote for CScene about wavelets (actually, it was a rewrite of my high school science fair project). I guess that means I started reading in fall of '07 or summer of '08.
I wonder how many other people have started reading after being linked to.
I also wish I could find that article, but slashdot's search feature doesn't seem to go back far enough.
"So, when you see a gal kick someone across the room, technically, the kicker (or holder of a gun) must fly across the room in the opposite direction - unless she has a back against the wall."
I think the author is confusing conservation of energy with conservation of momentum. In an elastic collision, in which energy is conserved, two people of equal mass will head in opposite directions. In reality, both the kicker and the kickee will absorb some of the energy of the kick, thus resulting in an inelastic collsion.
"For instance, in space the hero shouldn't be able to shout out instructions to the other astronauts from a spot several yards away."
That's what radio transmitters are for, and if you're wearing your helmet, you probably have a radio.
Explosions are what are particularly interesting. You will hear something as particles from the explosion collide with the hull of your ship, but it probably won't sound like an explosion.
Also discussed was specification through tests (that is, if an implementation passes the unit tests for the most commonly used set of ruby applications/libraries, then it is good enough).
We have been using Ruby in a production environment for the last seven years at a company that trades a significant portion of Nasdaq and NYSE-listed securities. We have been using C++ for the performance-critical portions of the system and Ruby for the portions of the system that we want to get out the door more quickly. I won't lie: we've run into more than once case where the Ruby interpreter just wasn't fast enough. However, had we done the initial pass in C++, it could have taken days or weeks longer to develop.
This really is where the power of dynamic languages like Ruby and Python lies -- rapid development followed by benchmarking followed by optimizing the portions of the code that aren't fast enough. We tried doing the same with Java, but the language interoperability wasn't there, nor was the rapid development (at the time JRuby and similar projects were much less mature than it is today).
I should also mention that I was skeptical of this model at first, and in fact it didn't work at first. Ruby has a small learning curve, but there are aspects of our particular application that made integration of Ruby into the system more than a little challenging. Now that we have the framework in place, though, I really like the results and don't want to imagine the system working any other way (with respect to what I've discussed here).
Makes me think of something that happened to my friends and me recently. He lives in an area where people burn trash regularly. We had a fire going, and some of the neighbors called the fire department because of too much smoke. They came by and told us to put the fire out. This, of course, caused more smoke and put more ash in the air than the fire had in the first place. We asked if what we were doing was illegal -- no, nothing illegal about it. We asked if we could build another fire the next day -- sure, that's no problem, just not today.
I'm not sure exactly what the law is on fires, but the point is that people really need to learn how to deal with other people. We would have been happy to put the fire out if we'd just been asked to by the neighbors. Calling the FD was a waste of time and money in our case, and probably the same in the case of the children in the tree. I'd bet these parents are more than capable of disciplining their own children.
Using the search box instead of the address box means you can edit your search later and then do a new search. If the address bar changes (because you clicked on a link), you lose your search text.
Actually, I did find this one email that I did keep around. It came to me a few months after the "virus". I've edited it to protect the guilty and to get around slashdot's junk filter.
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.93.980204183836.17411A-100000@hamlet.u ncg.edu> Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 22:35:21 EST From: <snip> <snip@VM.SC.EDU> Subject: Re: [Fwd: [Fwd: Fw: MICROSOFT WIN98&$1000!!!!! PLEASE READ! YOULL BE GLAD YOUDID! (fwd)]] (fwd)
This one might be legit. But remember what happened the LAST time, OK? Hopefully, this one is real.
ABC
<snip all the silly headers> >>>>>>>X-Sender: <snip>@e4e.oac.uci.edu >>>>>>>X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32) >>>>>>>Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 09:50:51 -0800 >>>>>>>To: <snip> >>>>>>>From: <snip> <snip@uci.edu> >>>>>>>Subject: Fw: MICROSOFT WIN98&$1000!!!!! PLEASE READ! YOULL BE GLAD YOU >>>>>>> DID! >>>>>>> >>>>>>> TO: MASSAOL@aol.com >>>>>>> FROM: GatesBeta@microsoft.com >>>>>>> ATTACH: Tracklog@microsoft.com/Track883432/~TraceActive/On .html >>>>>>> Hello Everyone >>>>>>> And thank you for signing up for my Beta Email Tracking Application >>>>>>>or (BETA) for short. My name is Bill Gates. Here at Microsoft we have >>>>just >>>>>>>compiled an e-mail tracing program that tracks everyone to whom this >>>>>>>message is >>>>>>>forwarded to. It does this through an unique IP (Internet Protocol) >>>address >>>>>>>logbook database. We are experimenting with this and need your help. >>>>>>>Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1000 people >everyone >>>>>>>on the list you will receive $1000 and a copy of Windows98 at my >>>>>>>expense.Enjoy. >>>>>>> Note: Duplicate entries will not be counted. You will be notified >>byemail >>>>>>> with further instructions once this email has reached 1000 people. >>>>>>>Windows98 will not be shipped unitl it has been released to the general >>>>>>>public. >>>>>>> Your friend, >>>>>>> Bill Gates & The Microsoft Development Team. >>>>>>> >>>>>>><snip> >>>>>>>Assistant Dean >>>>>>>School of the Arts >>>>>>>University of California, Irvine >>>>>>>300 Arts >>>>>>>Irvine, CA 92697-2775 >>>>>>>(714) 824-5078 >>>>>>>(714) 824-2450 (fax)
I sure do remember that email. At one point I was receiving about 5-10 of them a day from people I knew. So I got fed up with it and proceeded to do something about it.
First I pulled out all the email addresses from all the copies I had saved (don't you just love it when people forward you stuff with headers nested 30 levels deep?) In total I had thousands of addresses to blind carbon copy. Then I sat down and started to write.
First, I explained the purpose of IVAP (the international virus awareness program*) and gave a brief history. I then explained how the email which was circulating was actually a virus which needed human help to propogate, and by simply opening the email, your computer could be infected. The virus was designed to delete random files on your hard drive, but due to a bug, it never actually removed anything. Disinfecting your computer from the virus was simple: remove all the files in C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, defragment your hard drive, and reboot.
I sent the email off through an anonymous remailer, and within minutes I received half a dozen forwards from both friends and people I barely knew with the forged virus alert. One friend even profusely appologized, saying, "I didn't know!"
A few months later I was sitting down with another friend talking about urban legends and the bill gates email came up. As he explained to me that it was really a virus and he had the instructions for how to get rid of it, all I could do was grin.
There are some things you just wish you'd kept around.
(*) I'm not sure if that's what I actually called the organization, but it really isn't important to the story.
I dunno what y'all are talkin' about sayin' 5kg-8kg ain't portable. That's like half the weight of my ol' Kaypro II. Mus' be some weakling Yankee thing.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx x\ * \ / */x x \ * \ / */ x x \ * \ / */ x x | * | x x / * / \ * \ x x / */ \ * \ x x/ */ \ * \x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I just don't see what so important about plot. Interesting story elements are much more imporant to me. The interaction between Ender and the other kids made this book fun to read.
And the movies with a good plot are usually the least interesting ones. Those are the movies my grandmother sits down and watches for hours. Rocky wasn't a good movie because of its plot; it was good because it gave the audience insight into a character from another world, and because it was fun to see the fictional underdog go toe to toe with the best.
And if you found Ender's Game tedious, try Children of the Mind, where 3/4 of the book is a recap of the first two in the trilogy.
This is a common misconception. While the correct word in this case was "affect", "effect" can be a verb and "affect" can be a noun.
"Effect" as a verb means "to bring about", e.g. "those oddball open source zealots have effected a change in software development that could turn the information superhighway upside-down."
"Affect" as a noun is a term used in psychology to desribe a particular aspect of emotion, e.g. "the open source developers showed excited affect when forced to use commercial off-the-shelf software from leading software manufacturers."
Sure, many users will probably move from linux to osx. The question isn't whether this will happen; it's what kind of users will move. Users that complain and never read the howtos aren't the kind of users the linux community wants anyway.
I think this kind of purging could be good for linux in the long run.
They did the same thing with Windows 95 OSR2. Still really annoying; I already own 64-bit hardware and can't get a 64-bit Windows after the fact without jumping through hoops.
I believe the power supply in my mini-itx case is a 65W unit and is fanless. It looks not unlike a laptop power supply. IIRC the case is a Morex Cubid (not to be confused with the Cubit).
I wonder which cpu and how much memory these things are going to have. Their other mini-itx boxes start at $189 and have no memory, no HD, no flash, and use the cheapest ITX MB that via makes (the EPIA 5000):
So I wonder what they are going to do to cut their prices by $89 and still add RAM and flash memory? I wonder what their costs in producing PCs are currently? Maybe they are going to just make a marginal profit just to get their name out (and surely a lab full of solarlite's would go well with a nice $10K solarpc server).
In addition to being a media player, the draw toward winamp was it skinnability and the availability of plugins for it. People liked seeing all the silly bouncing flying thumping swirly off-the-wall crazy retro tripply twirly blip-bang around-and-around epilepsy-inducing orgasmic smooth gel-glide itchy nifty cool visualizations that the winamp plugin interface gave them. And they loved the EQ and the numerous effects plugins. If people just wanted basic functionality, then WinPlay32 would have been just fine. If people just wanted skins then Sonique would have been more popular. And if they really wanted the fastest most lightweight player out there, they would have used NAD. But the cool thing about winamp is that it did all of these things, and it did them well.
Writing an mp3 player that looks similar to winamp probably isn't that hard. Writing an winamp clone is impossibly difficult, though; to create a player with the same appeal as winamp is a daunting task (remember that much of what made winamp great was its developer community and its ubiquity).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a late-comer; I guess I started reading back in high school after someone emailed my about a link to an article I wrote for CScene about wavelets (actually, it was a rewrite of my high school science fair project). I guess that means I started reading in fall of '07 or summer of '08.
I wonder how many other people have started reading after being linked to.
I also wish I could find that article, but slashdot's search feature doesn't seem to go back far enough.
Post it on "slashdot"
"So, when you see a gal kick someone across the room, technically, the kicker (or holder of a gun) must fly across the room in the opposite direction - unless she has a back against the wall."
I think the author is confusing conservation of energy with conservation of momentum. In an elastic collision, in which energy is conserved, two people of equal mass will head in opposite directions. In reality, both the kicker and the kickee will absorb some of the energy of the kick, thus resulting in an inelastic collsion.
"For instance, in space the hero shouldn't be able to shout out instructions to the other astronauts from a spot several yards away."
That's what radio transmitters are for, and if you're wearing your helmet, you probably have a radio.
Explosions are what are particularly interesting. You will hear something as particles from the explosion collide with the hull of your ship, but it probably won't sound like an explosion.
This was discussed at the Ruby implementor's summit at RubyConf.new(2006), and Charles Nutter has started a ruby spec wiki:
l emntersSummit2006Nov: wiki.rubygarden.org/Ruby/page/show/RubyImplemnters Summit2006Nov&strip=1
http://www.headius.com/rubyspec
Also discussed was specification through tests (that is, if an implementation passes the unit tests for the most commonly used set of ruby applications/libraries, then it is good enough).
For the notes on the summit:
http://wiki.rubygarden.org/Ruby/page/show/RubyImp
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:wylYVnj0RpIJ
We have been using Ruby in a production environment for the last seven years at a company that trades a significant portion of Nasdaq and NYSE-listed securities. We have been using C++ for the performance-critical portions of the system and Ruby for the portions of the system that we want to get out the door more quickly. I won't lie: we've run into more than once case where the Ruby interpreter just wasn't fast enough. However, had we done the initial pass in C++, it could have taken days or weeks longer to develop.
This really is where the power of dynamic languages like Ruby and Python lies -- rapid development followed by benchmarking followed by optimizing the portions of the code that aren't fast enough. We tried doing the same with Java, but the language interoperability wasn't there, nor was the rapid development (at the time JRuby and similar projects were much less mature than it is today).
I should also mention that I was skeptical of this model at first, and in fact it didn't work at first. Ruby has a small learning curve, but there are aspects of our particular application that made integration of Ruby into the system more than a little challenging. Now that we have the framework in place, though, I really like the results and don't want to imagine the system working any other way (with respect to what I've discussed here).
What's the problem with unscientific predictions? Evolutionists and proponents of intelligent design make unscientific claims all the time.
Makes me think of something that happened to my friends and me recently. He lives in an area where people burn trash regularly. We had a fire going, and some of the neighbors called the fire department because of too much smoke. They came by and told us to put the fire out. This, of course, caused more smoke and put more ash in the air than the fire had in the first place. We asked if what we were doing was illegal -- no, nothing illegal about it. We asked if we could build another fire the next day -- sure, that's no problem, just not today.
I'm not sure exactly what the law is on fires, but the point is that people really need to learn how to deal with other people. We would have been happy to put the fire out if we'd just been asked to by the neighbors. Calling the FD was a waste of time and money in our case, and probably the same in the case of the children in the tree. I'd bet these parents are more than capable of disciplining their own children.
Using the search box instead of the address box means you can edit your search later and then do a new search. If the address bar changes (because you clicked on a link), you lose your search text.
Actually, I did find this one email that I did keep around. It came to me a few months after the "virus". I've edited it to protect the guilty and to get around slashdot's junk filter.
u ncg.edu>
n .html
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.93.980204183836.17411A-100000@hamlet.
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 22:35:21 EST
From: <snip> <snip@VM.SC.EDU>
Subject: Re: [Fwd: [Fwd: Fw: MICROSOFT WIN98&$1000!!!!! PLEASE READ!
YOULL BE GLAD YOUDID! (fwd)]] (fwd)
This one might be legit. But remember what happened the LAST time, OK?
Hopefully, this one is real.
ABC
<snip all the silly headers>
>>>>>>>X-Sender: <snip>@e4e.oac.uci.edu
>>>>>>>X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32)
>>>>>>>Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 09:50:51 -0800
>>>>>>>To: <snip>
>>>>>>>From: <snip> <snip@uci.edu>
>>>>>>>Subject: Fw: MICROSOFT WIN98&$1000!!!!! PLEASE READ! YOULL BE GLAD YOU
>>>>>>> DID!
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> TO: MASSAOL@aol.com
>>>>>>> FROM: GatesBeta@microsoft.com
>>>>>>> ATTACH: Tracklog@microsoft.com/Track883432/~TraceActive/O
>>>>>>> Hello Everyone
>>>>>>> And thank you for signing up for my Beta Email Tracking Application
>>>>>>>or (BETA) for short. My name is Bill Gates. Here at Microsoft we have
>>>>just
>>>>>>>compiled an e-mail tracing program that tracks everyone to whom this
>>>>>>>message is
>>>>>>>forwarded to. It does this through an unique IP (Internet Protocol)
>>>address
>>>>>>>logbook database. We are experimenting with this and need your help.
>>>>>>>Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1000 people
>everyone
>>>>>>>on the list you will receive $1000 and a copy of Windows98 at my
>>>>>>>expense.Enjoy.
>>>>>>> Note: Duplicate entries will not be counted. You will be notified
>>byemail
>>>>>>> with further instructions once this email has reached 1000 people.
>>>>>>>Windows98 will not be shipped unitl it has been released to the general
>>>>>>>public.
>>>>>>> Your friend,
>>>>>>> Bill Gates & The Microsoft Development Team.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>><snip>
>>>>>>>Assistant Dean
>>>>>>>School of the Arts
>>>>>>>University of California, Irvine
>>>>>>>300 Arts
>>>>>>>Irvine, CA 92697-2775
>>>>>>>(714) 824-5078
>>>>>>>(714) 824-2450 (fax)
I sure do remember that email. At one point I was receiving about 5-10 of them a day from people I knew. So I got fed up with it and proceeded to do something about it.
First I pulled out all the email addresses from all the copies I had saved (don't you just love it when people forward you stuff with headers nested 30 levels deep?) In total I had thousands of addresses to blind carbon copy. Then I sat down and started to write.
First, I explained the purpose of IVAP (the international virus awareness program*) and gave a brief history. I then explained how the email which was circulating was actually a virus which needed human help to propogate, and by simply opening the email, your computer could be infected. The virus was designed to delete random files on your hard drive, but due to a bug, it never actually removed anything. Disinfecting your computer from the virus was simple: remove all the files in C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, defragment your hard drive, and reboot.
I sent the email off through an anonymous remailer, and within minutes I received half a dozen forwards from both friends and people I barely knew with the forged virus alert. One friend even profusely appologized, saying, "I didn't know!"
A few months later I was sitting down with another friend talking about urban legends and the bill gates email came up. As he explained to me that it was really a virus and he had the instructions for how to get rid of it, all I could do was grin.
There are some things you just wish you'd kept around.
(*) I'm not sure if that's what I actually called the organization, but it really isn't important to the story.
I dunno what y'all are talkin' about sayin' 5kg-8kg ain't portable. That's like half the weight of my ol' Kaypro II. Mus' be some weakling Yankee thing.
/x / x / x / \ * \ x / \ * \x
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
x\ * \ / *
x \ * \ / *
x \ * \ / *
x | * | x
x / * / \ * \ x
x / *
x/ *
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The South shall rise again!
Does that mean we'll be getting screenshots for EG soon?
You missed Seagate buying Conner in 1995.
I just don't see what so important about plot. Interesting story elements are much more imporant to me. The interaction between Ender and the other kids made this book fun to read.
And the movies with a good plot are usually the least interesting ones. Those are the movies my grandmother sits down and watches for hours. Rocky wasn't a good movie because of its plot; it was good because it gave the audience insight into a character from another world, and because it was fun to see the fictional underdog go toe to toe with the best.
And if you found Ender's Game tedious, try Children of the Mind, where 3/4 of the book is a recap of the first two in the trilogy.
If this LGPL'd code is so lame, why does anyone care about it in the first place? :)
This is a common misconception. While the correct word in this case was "affect", "effect" can be a verb and "affect" can be a noun.
"Effect" as a verb means "to bring about", e.g. "those oddball open source zealots have effected a change in software development that could turn the information superhighway upside-down."
"Affect" as a noun is a term used in psychology to desribe a particular aspect of emotion, e.g. "the open source developers showed excited affect when forced to use commercial off-the-shelf software from leading software manufacturers."
This is all I have to say:
i mpsons/haha.mp3
http://www.gotwavs.com/0078546128/MP3S/TV_Shows/S
Actually they are cab files. Unzip won't work; try cabextract instead.
Nice detective work, btw.
Sure, many users will probably move from linux to osx. The question isn't whether this will happen; it's what kind of users will move. Users that complain and never read the howtos aren't the kind of users the linux community wants anyway.
I think this kind of purging could be good for linux in the long run.
They did the same thing with Windows 95 OSR2. Still really annoying; I already own 64-bit hardware and can't get a 64-bit Windows after the fact without jumping through hoops.
I believe the power supply in my mini-itx case is a 65W unit and is fanless. It looks not unlike a laptop power supply. IIRC the case is a Morex Cubid (not to be confused with the Cubit).
Which is a better contraceptive, a Dell or a can of Mountain Dew?
I wonder which cpu and how much memory these things are going to have. Their other mini-itx boxes start at $189 and have no memory, no HD, no flash, and use the cheapest ITX MB that via makes (the EPIA 5000):
. 147.44.194/catalog/index.php?cPath=21
http://www.solarpc.com/compare.html
http://205
So I wonder what they are going to do to cut their prices by $89 and still add RAM and flash memory? I wonder what their costs in producing PCs are currently? Maybe they are going to just make a marginal profit just to get their name out (and surely a lab full of solarlite's would go well with a nice $10K solarpc server).
In addition to being a media player, the draw toward winamp was it skinnability and the availability of plugins for it. People liked seeing all the silly bouncing flying thumping swirly off-the-wall crazy retro tripply twirly blip-bang around-and-around epilepsy-inducing orgasmic smooth gel-glide itchy nifty cool visualizations that the winamp plugin interface gave them. And they loved the EQ and the numerous effects plugins. If people just wanted basic functionality, then WinPlay32 would have been just fine. If people just wanted skins then Sonique would have been more popular. And if they really wanted the fastest most lightweight player out there, they would have used NAD. But the cool thing about winamp is that it did all of these things, and it did them well.
Writing an mp3 player that looks similar to winamp probably isn't that hard. Writing an winamp clone is impossibly difficult, though; to create a player with the same appeal as winamp is a daunting task (remember that much of what made winamp great was its developer community and its ubiquity).
can they be armed with a death ray and a bathroom plunger?