This doesn't explain how Standard and Poor's arrived at the same ratings. One possible explanation is that Moody's code was initially correct but they introduced the "bug" to make sure they were providing the same valuations as S&P.
In any case, it sounds like they found a new scapegoat and they're going to take it for a test ride.
I purchased an n810 recently. The device generally lives up to its promise, I find it very useable around town, but there are a few points that disappoint me when I consider relying on it for a long trip.
The internal GPS is nearly worthless. If you plan to rely on it at all buy an external bluetooth module.
Though the device uses a standard Nokia plug, it can only be charged that way, not through USB.
The included cable only runs the n810 as a USB client. The n810 can run as a host but no one (in the USA anyway) has produced the appropriate adapter to do this.
So there's a ton of promise with this little device but right now you'd have to bring quite the sack of accessories to make it useful on an extended trip.
The only moving component (other than the drives) is a standard size case fan. It's variable speed and completely replaceable though doing so will invalidate the warranty.
One slight frustration is that though the box supports spinning down the hard drives, and it works quite well, the fan will never fully spin down. I believe this is fixable via the web interface but doing so will also invalidate the warranty.
I bought the NV+ a few months ago and it was a great deal. Netgear has since raised the price so it is now in line with most other options on the market. It's definitely a usable product but it may no longer be the best option out there.
It wouldn't be college without at least one class like that.
The bit of TA/instructor irrationality that I had to face came from an intro EE class, building basic logic circuits. The lab bits were based around groups and early in the class I grouped with a few other guys who seemed to know what they were doing. The TA came up and said we couldn't have a group of 4, it had to be a group of 3, so I was forced into a group with 2 other castoffs.
By the following lab one of my group members had dropped the class and the other requested permission from the professor to rejoin her old group. So that left me in a group by myself. I asked the TA if I could rejoin my original group and he said that I needed permission from the professor. The result is that I had to get all the assignments in that lab done by myself while everyone else had a group to help them out; it was a stressful and miserable experience. The next time I saw the professor I asked if I could switch back to my old group and he replied that of course I could.
On a final note, I can understand why an instructor might dissuade students from overloading operators. I've personally given up on it and simply always use named methods so I can clearly state what is happening with the parameters. But if they didn't want you to do that they definitely should have told you ahead of time.
Very much a non-story. Salon covered this yesterday.
But Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, points out that the report does not mention a key fact about Netflix's deal with the Post Office: Rather than waiting for a postal carrier to drop off and pick up mailers at Netflix's distribution centers, the company itself transports the mailers to regional postal centers.
Because Netflix pays for full First Class mail service, which includes picking up and dropping off, Netflix is paying for a service that it is not using -- which Swasey claims amounts to an extra $100 million per year for the Post Office.
Moreover, the report suggests that the Post Office itself bears some of the responsibility for Netflix's mailers.
In 2002, the Postal Service's engineering department determined that the mailers weren't compatible with automated systems. But the Post office's marketing department gave Netflix the go-ahead to use its mailers, and assured the company that it would "not be subject to the nonmachanible surcharge" for "mailpieces that must be handled manually."
I would pay 4$ extra for a DVD that would include the following bonuses:
- One iPod and PSP version video of the movie along with one version in a standard codec.
- One iPod and PSP version video of each episode (if it's something like a Futurama season DVD) along with one version in a standard codec.
- Flac/Wav/lossless version of the songs, if it's a concert DVD.
- No DRM on the ripped stuff.
The thing I've never gotten is why no DVD producers have already adopted this practice. They're all about value-add with piles of special features and such; why not stick an iTunes compatible file on the DVD and throw the iPod logo on there? Apple sold a ton of video iPods and I have to believe that there are consumers who would buy movie A instead of movie B simply because they could also watch A on their iPod.
The sad truth is that while there was probably a period of time when disc manufacturers could have gotten Apple to produce a standard way of delivering DVD video to iTunes, it sounds now like that time has past. Once again Apple is preparing to make money in a segment of the entertainment industry after giving every other company has passed it up.
Now, the Achievement for not dying once may get some people to play it more tactically, but Bioshock was still piss easy on "Hard". The only time I was actually worried about dying in the game (minor spoiler) was when Frank was reducing your maximum possible health. Every other time in the game, it was only a minor setback to get killed since there was a vita chamber every 10 feet (with no cost to use them).
I thought that was a brilliant twist in the game. Most first person shooters are designed to be hard and it's an uphill battle to get to the end. Not so in Bioshock; you start out playing that way but it's eventually revealed that the game's been rigged - you're a living weapon being used by someone else and losing isn't even an option for you.
This new Brass Balls achievement is the perfect answer. The plot remains intact but the challenge is there for anyone who wants to play Bioshock as a traditional FPS.
Please, someone tell me why you can't use this method.
HBO did use this method not too long ago. In my opinion it's a lot more effective than just about any other. HBO doesn't even have to upload anything - they just use custom peers to download a packet from each client they come across in a popular swarm. Then they can just show in court how that piece can be mathematically proven to be part of an episode of their show.
I should point out, to HBO's credit, they haven't yet gone sue happy even though their technique seems much more likely to stand up in court. They're just firing a lot of warning shots.
I've had my doubts about the idea that if you take the average of all the guesses a crowd makes it comes out to be near correct. So last time I was at an event that had a "guess the number of jellybeans and win a prize" contest I asked the organizer for all the stubs at the end of the evening. I went home and punched all the guesses into a spreadsheet.
The mean was in the ballpark but not accurate enough to win the prize. When I took the median I got an answer that was as accurate as the best guess. So in theory if I had sat there with a laptop and watched what people wrote down I could have won the contest.
I'm still not sure this phenomenon has a practical purpose (other than electing officials I guess) but it was an interesting thing to do. I'd be curious to do the same analysis at a very large gathering with hundreds of entries.
I'll skip the horse and buggy metaphor and provide to a short list of ways electronic voting is better than pen/paper:
It requires a smaller number of volunteers. There are places where people aren't tripping over each other to volunteer to work the voting stations or count paper ballots.
It provides a simpler framework for issuing directions in multiple languages.
It prevents voters from selecting multiple options and can warn them if they forget to vote on an issue. Ideally we shouldn't be discarding votes just because someone is careless.
It makes auditing easier and more likely. Recounts with a pen/paper system require a lot of volunteers to sit in an uncomfortable room for many hours. Voting officials would be more likely to order a random recount if it can be done by a couple of guys feeding a machine for two hours.
Long term, it can reduce costs. Grassroots initiatives are currently very expensive and may have to pay their own way to get on a ballot.
Once a decent electronic voting framework is the norm in the industrialized countries it becomes easier to deploy to in the war-torn regions where a large, reliable, and incorrupt volunteer force is not available.
I've been using the Snapgear SG300 for several years now and it handles VPN without difficulties. Private networks can easily be linked with IPSEC and independant computers can be configured to connect with PPTP.
The cheapest solution, with this or any other VPN server, is to simply setup your system to act as a hub and then set everyone else's computers to connect to it with PPTP. Linking together entire networks, while cool, is probably overkill.
It sounds like they're trying to recognize Sun's vision of the future. Put simply, every display is interactive and data can be transitioned from the realm of paper to bits simply by laying pages directly on the display for a few seconds. It's the kinda thing that probably won't work as advertised initially but could open the door to a really, really kickass interface.
in his emails to us, he talked about how he was watching our apartment and described the old apartment i used to work at perfectly.
It doesn't sound like he was too serious about stalking you if he couldn't figure out where you lived. It sounds more like he was some prick who was trying to scare you... and it worked.
I don't mean to be glib but it bothers me how the Internet populace seems to be downright paranoid about the online world learning anything that could threaten them in real life when there are more likely avenues towards bodily harm. Not only is the information for my domain valid but I have a LOC record set. And I still worry more about some random punk putting a brick through my window than a cyberstalker doing it.
The cool thing is that all the photos are searchable by keyword. So during Hurricane Katrina, for example, one could easily browse through Flickr and get a large array of images people had taken of the storm and its afteraffects. Doing a regular Google image search will often return the same published AP pictures over and over. The photos you took and placed on your custom website would likely not rank high enough to be seen.
More than that, I want to see a decent desktop search function from Microsoft. Something so I can enter a few key words and it will search all of my emails and every document on the network that I have access to.
It's a complicated thing to do, especially if you want to return results to the user in less than a second. But Microsoft is in the best possible position to write such software and sell it. They so far seem to prefer the plan where they muck about with a metadata filesystem for the next few years and then be surprised when Google invades their turf with a corporate search engine that actually works.
It's just a shame is all, if they came out with a corporate search engine tomorrow they'd have no trouble at all selling it a week from now. Most companies would easily drop a few grand if it meant they could have Google level search functionality on their own network.
Check out the Canon SD500/550. I bought a 500 and it takes longer to get it out of the case than to boot it up (about a second). It's the best digital camera I've found for casual, vacation style photography.
I played around with the Jumpgate beta and at the time it had what I considered the "worst of all worlds" when it came to piloting their ships. Ships would slow down very quickly at high speeds but then never fully stop when you reached slow speeds. This meant that dogfighting wouldn't really let you strafe your target since your ship would naturally move in whatever direction you were facing - unless you cut your engines which lost you valuable speed. And yet your ships inertia was all too apparent when it came time to dock at a station.
The whole docking minigame was the last straw for me. It was beyond irritating to make an incredibly long run, dodge terribly powered NPCs, and then crash your ship into your destination. And if you screwed up and ran out your fuel then you didn't have braking rockets and crashing became very likely. Forcing the player to manually dock their ships was completely unnecessary; it added nothing to the game play but provided a massive irritation for new players and anyone who let their attention wander.
I take issue with the "product" part of that sentence. I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks. In every other way, the Karma is the superior product. Just like Windows, the iPud wins on better marketing and sexier wrapping paper. *sigh*
I looked at a lot of options when I was trying to come up with a system to play mp3s in my car and I ended up with an iPod. The adapter I bought allows me to plug my iPod into the CD changer controls on my original head unit. I can easily skip around my playlist and the iPod turns off automatically when I put in a CD or switch to radio.
The most valuable asset of the iPod is its interface... not just it's GUI but the little connector that you can plug all manner of things into. The superiority of the iPod is quickly coming from not just what it can do but also what it can be made to do.
I changed out my IP names so they now resolve to something sensible. My email was still seen by Hotmail as spam and on a lark I tried something different: I sent an email from Pine instead of Outlook Express and it went through.
I've tried this a second time. I sent an identical piece of mail from Outlook Express and from Pine, same server, same everything else, and the email from Pine makes it through while the one from Outlook Express is marked as spam. Presumably there's some fuzzy filtering going on because sending from OE at work to Hotmail does through just fine.
I'm still not happy with this situation. I know how to get my email through Hotmail, for now, but there's no guarantee that it will work that way tomorrow or the day after.
The problem is that it's not actually stupid - because it's something that is a very strong predictor for zombie machines, and it's something that the "owners" of the zombies can't change, while legitimate operators frequently can.
It just seems unreliable to assume that a home connection will have the terms "dsl" or "dialup" in the DNS name. But I suppose most indicators of spam are naturally unreliable. I've been meaning to change the reverse lookups for my IPs to something less lame for years now; this is a good reason to do it.
Original submitter here with a general followup response for anyone who cares or perhaps reads this later in the archives.
It looks like their are two general suggestions: route all outgoing mail through my ISP's mailserver and change my DNS records to something more reputable.
I really don't want to follow the first suggestion for a variety of reasons - it mucks up my SPF record, I can't diagnose email problems, and I can't send stupidly large emails. I suppose if all else fails I might try it; if it doesn't work I can always switch back.
The second suggestion is good and one I can probably implement in short order. I think I can talk my ISP into letting me manage my tiny block of IPs or at least changing what they resolve to. Someone pointed out that Hotmail spam script might just be looking for the term "dsl" and blocking based on that. It sounds stupid but in a very plausible way.
Thanks are extended to most everyone who responded. There is certainly a lot of material out there on running one's own mail server but very little about getting past spam filters. I hope that I'm not the only one who found this little discussion useful.
I don't understand why everyone assumes that anyone who Asks Slashdot is an idiot. I have a static IP and as I said, I'm not on any RBLs that I can find.
My email address is listed in the post. I would think that anyone who would bother to reply might also be bothered to do a little probing of their own to see if their reply has merit.
This is the only game I've ever played that I considered "literature". It had a central theme that flowed throughout the story and gave the player lots to think about. Tremendously well written with passages I think about to this day.
A man stands in a path. There is nothing to the left or the right but an old crone stands in front of him. He can't remember anything, not even his own name. "You have used two wishes." the old crone says, "Now give me your last one."
"Tell me who I am!" the man cries.
"Funny" replies the old crone, "That was also your first wish."
The biggest need I have in this realm is for a UPnP media player that runs under linux and can play streams from a Windows server. I'd be happy with one that only supports audio, but so far no dice. I'd like to interface with Real's Rhapsody from a Linux box.
No one seems interested in writing UPnP clients for any operating system. UPnP Media is one of the most exciting things to have happened in the computer audio/video field in a while, I don't know why everyone is ignoring it. I guess everyone who is capable of writing such programs is perfectly happy running XMMS on a beige box and won't care about UPnP until boomboxes that have it are sold at Best Buy.
There seem to be plenty of UPnP servers being developed under Linux, but no clients.
I wish this was the case. I'd pick up a Streamium in a heart beat if there was a good UPnP server that would let me stream video off of my FreeBSD box.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, it sounds like they found a new scapegoat and they're going to take it for a test ride.
I purchased an n810 recently. The device generally lives up to its promise, I find it very useable around town, but there are a few points that disappoint me when I consider relying on it for a long trip.
The internal GPS is nearly worthless. If you plan to rely on it at all buy an external bluetooth module.
Though the device uses a standard Nokia plug, it can only be charged that way, not through USB.
The included cable only runs the n810 as a USB client. The n810 can run as a host but no one (in the USA anyway) has produced the appropriate adapter to do this.
So there's a ton of promise with this little device but right now you'd have to bring quite the sack of accessories to make it useful on an extended trip.
One slight frustration is that though the box supports spinning down the hard drives, and it works quite well, the fan will never fully spin down. I believe this is fixable via the web interface but doing so will also invalidate the warranty.
I bought the NV+ a few months ago and it was a great deal. Netgear has since raised the price so it is now in line with most other options on the market. It's definitely a usable product but it may no longer be the best option out there.
The bit of TA/instructor irrationality that I had to face came from an intro EE class, building basic logic circuits. The lab bits were based around groups and early in the class I grouped with a few other guys who seemed to know what they were doing. The TA came up and said we couldn't have a group of 4, it had to be a group of 3, so I was forced into a group with 2 other castoffs.
By the following lab one of my group members had dropped the class and the other requested permission from the professor to rejoin her old group. So that left me in a group by myself. I asked the TA if I could rejoin my original group and he said that I needed permission from the professor. The result is that I had to get all the assignments in that lab done by myself while everyone else had a group to help them out; it was a stressful and miserable experience. The next time I saw the professor I asked if I could switch back to my old group and he replied that of course I could.
On a final note, I can understand why an instructor might dissuade students from overloading operators. I've personally given up on it and simply always use named methods so I can clearly state what is happening with the parameters. But if they didn't want you to do that they definitely should have told you ahead of time.
But Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, points out that the report does not mention a key fact about Netflix's deal with the Post Office: Rather than waiting for a postal carrier to drop off and pick up mailers at Netflix's distribution centers, the company itself transports the mailers to regional postal centers.
Because Netflix pays for full First Class mail service, which includes picking up and dropping off, Netflix is paying for a service that it is not using -- which Swasey claims amounts to an extra $100 million per year for the Post Office.
Moreover, the report suggests that the Post Office itself bears some of the responsibility for Netflix's mailers.
In 2002, the Postal Service's engineering department determined that the mailers weren't compatible with automated systems. But the Post office's marketing department gave Netflix the go-ahead to use its mailers, and assured the company that it would "not be subject to the nonmachanible surcharge" for "mailpieces that must be handled manually."
- One iPod and PSP version video of the movie along with one version in a standard codec.
- One iPod and PSP version video of each episode (if it's something like a Futurama season DVD) along with one version in a standard codec.
- Flac/Wav/lossless version of the songs, if it's a concert DVD.
- No DRM on the ripped stuff.
The thing I've never gotten is why no DVD producers have already adopted this practice. They're all about value-add with piles of special features and such; why not stick an iTunes compatible file on the DVD and throw the iPod logo on there? Apple sold a ton of video iPods and I have to believe that there are consumers who would buy movie A instead of movie B simply because they could also watch A on their iPod.
The sad truth is that while there was probably a period of time when disc manufacturers could have gotten Apple to produce a standard way of delivering DVD video to iTunes, it sounds now like that time has past. Once again Apple is preparing to make money in a segment of the entertainment industry after giving every other company has passed it up.
I thought that was a brilliant twist in the game. Most first person shooters are designed to be hard and it's an uphill battle to get to the end. Not so in Bioshock; you start out playing that way but it's eventually revealed that the game's been rigged - you're a living weapon being used by someone else and losing isn't even an option for you.
This new Brass Balls achievement is the perfect answer. The plot remains intact but the challenge is there for anyone who wants to play Bioshock as a traditional FPS.
Please, someone tell me why you can't use this method.
HBO did use this method not too long ago. In my opinion it's a lot more effective than just about any other. HBO doesn't even have to upload anything - they just use custom peers to download a packet from each client they come across in a popular swarm. Then they can just show in court how that piece can be mathematically proven to be part of an episode of their show.
I should point out, to HBO's credit, they haven't yet gone sue happy even though their technique seems much more likely to stand up in court. They're just firing a lot of warning shots.
I've had my doubts about the idea that if you take the average of all the guesses a crowd makes it comes out to be near correct. So last time I was at an event that had a "guess the number of jellybeans and win a prize" contest I asked the organizer for all the stubs at the end of the evening. I went home and punched all the guesses into a spreadsheet.
The mean was in the ballpark but not accurate enough to win the prize. When I took the median I got an answer that was as accurate as the best guess. So in theory if I had sat there with a laptop and watched what people wrote down I could have won the contest.
I'm still not sure this phenomenon has a practical purpose (other than electing officials I guess) but it was an interesting thing to do. I'd be curious to do the same analysis at a very large gathering with hundreds of entries.
The cheapest solution, with this or any other VPN server, is to simply setup your system to act as a hub and then set everyone else's computers to connect to it with PPTP. Linking together entire networks, while cool, is probably overkill.
It sounds like they're trying to recognize Sun's vision of the future. Put simply, every display is interactive and data can be transitioned from the realm of paper to bits simply by laying pages directly on the display for a few seconds. It's the kinda thing that probably won't work as advertised initially but could open the door to a really, really kickass interface.
It doesn't sound like he was too serious about stalking you if he couldn't figure out where you lived. It sounds more like he was some prick who was trying to scare you... and it worked.
I don't mean to be glib but it bothers me how the Internet populace seems to be downright paranoid about the online world learning anything that could threaten them in real life when there are more likely avenues towards bodily harm. Not only is the information for my domain valid but I have a LOC record set. And I still worry more about some random punk putting a brick through my window than a cyberstalker doing it.
The cool thing is that all the photos are searchable by keyword. So during Hurricane Katrina, for example, one could easily browse through Flickr and get a large array of images people had taken of the storm and its afteraffects. Doing a regular Google image search will often return the same published AP pictures over and over. The photos you took and placed on your custom website would likely not rank high enough to be seen.
Excellent. A few years ago I ripped the soundtrack myself from the game files and was never satisfied with the results. Thanks for posting that.
It's a complicated thing to do, especially if you want to return results to the user in less than a second. But Microsoft is in the best possible position to write such software and sell it. They so far seem to prefer the plan where they muck about with a metadata filesystem for the next few years and then be surprised when Google invades their turf with a corporate search engine that actually works.
It's just a shame is all, if they came out with a corporate search engine tomorrow they'd have no trouble at all selling it a week from now. Most companies would easily drop a few grand if it meant they could have Google level search functionality on their own network.
Check out the Canon SD500/550. I bought a 500 and it takes longer to get it out of the case than to boot it up (about a second). It's the best digital camera I've found for casual, vacation style photography.
I played around with the Jumpgate beta and at the time it had what I considered the "worst of all worlds" when it came to piloting their ships. Ships would slow down very quickly at high speeds but then never fully stop when you reached slow speeds. This meant that dogfighting wouldn't really let you strafe your target since your ship would naturally move in whatever direction you were facing - unless you cut your engines which lost you valuable speed. And yet your ships inertia was all too apparent when it came time to dock at a station.
The whole docking minigame was the last straw for me. It was beyond irritating to make an incredibly long run, dodge terribly powered NPCs, and then crash your ship into your destination. And if you screwed up and ran out your fuel then you didn't have braking rockets and crashing became very likely. Forcing the player to manually dock their ships was completely unnecessary; it added nothing to the game play but provided a massive irritation for new players and anyone who let their attention wander.
I take issue with the "product" part of that sentence. I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks. In every other way, the Karma is the superior product. Just like Windows, the iPud wins on better marketing and sexier wrapping paper. *sigh*
I looked at a lot of options when I was trying to come up with a system to play mp3s in my car and I ended up with an iPod. The adapter I bought allows me to plug my iPod into the CD changer controls on my original head unit. I can easily skip around my playlist and the iPod turns off automatically when I put in a CD or switch to radio.
The most valuable asset of the iPod is its interface... not just it's GUI but the little connector that you can plug all manner of things into. The superiority of the iPod is quickly coming from not just what it can do but also what it can be made to do.
In case anyone is interested in what I tried...
I changed out my IP names so they now resolve to something sensible. My email was still seen by Hotmail as spam and on a lark I tried something different: I sent an email from Pine instead of Outlook Express and it went through.
I've tried this a second time. I sent an identical piece of mail from Outlook Express and from Pine, same server, same everything else, and the email from Pine makes it through while the one from Outlook Express is marked as spam. Presumably there's some fuzzy filtering going on because sending from OE at work to Hotmail does through just fine.
I'm still not happy with this situation. I know how to get my email through Hotmail, for now, but there's no guarantee that it will work that way tomorrow or the day after.
The problem is that it's not actually stupid - because it's something that is a very strong predictor for zombie machines, and it's something that the "owners" of the zombies can't change, while legitimate operators frequently can.
It just seems unreliable to assume that a home connection will have the terms "dsl" or "dialup" in the DNS name. But I suppose most indicators of spam are naturally unreliable. I've been meaning to change the reverse lookups for my IPs to something less lame for years now; this is a good reason to do it.
Original submitter here with a general followup response for anyone who cares or perhaps reads this later in the archives.
It looks like their are two general suggestions: route all outgoing mail through my ISP's mailserver and change my DNS records to something more reputable.
I really don't want to follow the first suggestion for a variety of reasons - it mucks up my SPF record, I can't diagnose email problems, and I can't send stupidly large emails. I suppose if all else fails I might try it; if it doesn't work I can always switch back.
The second suggestion is good and one I can probably implement in short order. I think I can talk my ISP into letting me manage my tiny block of IPs or at least changing what they resolve to. Someone pointed out that Hotmail spam script might just be looking for the term "dsl" and blocking based on that. It sounds stupid but in a very plausible way.
Thanks are extended to most everyone who responded. There is certainly a lot of material out there on running one's own mail server but very little about getting past spam filters. I hope that I'm not the only one who found this little discussion useful.
My email address is listed in the post. I would think that anyone who would bother to reply might also be bothered to do a little probing of their own to see if their reply has merit.
This is the only game I've ever played that I considered "literature". It had a central theme that flowed throughout the story and gave the player lots to think about. Tremendously well written with passages I think about to this day.
A man stands in a path. There is nothing to the left or the right but an old crone stands in front of him. He can't remember anything, not even his own name. "You have used two wishes." the old crone says, "Now give me your last one."
"Tell me who I am!" the man cries.
"Funny" replies the old crone, "That was also your first wish."
No one seems interested in writing UPnP clients for any operating system. UPnP Media is one of the most exciting things to have happened in the computer audio/video field in a while, I don't know why everyone is ignoring it. I guess everyone who is capable of writing such programs is perfectly happy running XMMS on a beige box and won't care about UPnP until boomboxes that have it are sold at Best Buy.
There seem to be plenty of UPnP servers being developed under Linux, but no clients.
I wish this was the case. I'd pick up a Streamium in a heart beat if there was a good UPnP server that would let me stream video off of my FreeBSD box.