It turns out that probability page takes practically any number as a GET variable, so if you want, you can send a URL to your friends saying there's a 99% chance of impact:
My background: I transferred from California State University Chico, which is more famous as a party school than anything else (although the CS department is semi-decent), to the University of Chicago which is famous for its academic rigor ("where fun comes to die") but has a small CS department.
In my opinion, what matters more isn't the reputation of the program itself, but the quality of the program. As it turns out, the more reputable programs are generally also better programs, but you don't benefit from the reputation as much as you do from the content. Also, even if the program itself isn't particularly reputable (as is the case here), a program at a reputable school generally attracts better students, which contributes significantly to the overall content and experience of your education.
I transferred mostly because the program at my last school was utterly unchallenging, and I was learning little that I didn't already know/could teach myself. Here, I'm constantly being challenged, and am learning about things that I didn't even know existed (i.e. likely couldn't not have taught myself).
Since the industry is generally meritocratic, I'm not depending on the reputation of the university to help me much. But at the end, I'll have a degree having learned much more, and I think that's what counts on the long run.
And yes, experience is key. But a solid background can compliment your experience a great deal.
One thing to keep in mind when you're test using programs like ApacheBench is that laboratory tests don't necessarily simulate real-world scenarios well.
For example, a server hooked up to a "client" on your lan will be able to support a hell of a lot more requests than in the real world. This is because, even if your application responds quickly, your web server process has to stay up to send the output back to the client. In a lab network, this usually takes hardly anytime, while an actual modem user hitting your site might take seconds. One solution for this particular problem is to setup a lightweight proxy server, so that users connecting via slow connections will only hog whatever resources the proxy uses, instead of tying up an entire Apache process.
Anyway, basically what I'm trying to say is, results that AB give you are helpful, but don't put too much faith on it.
It's kind of interesting because there used to be a Sony Store and an Apple Store on Michigan Ave in Chicago. The Michigan Ave Apple Store is one of the busiest Apple Stores in the country. The Sony Store, just a block or two away, has since closed. Interpret that as you will...
In my dorm, everybody put their music into iTunes and turned on sharing so we had some 70,000+ tracks available for streaming on the network. In that kind of environment, I don't think a paid streaming service like the one GWU plans on offering will be appreciated.
I'm not so sure about that. Exactly how fast the blades will be moving depends on the radius, not RPM. In the article, in one place it says the turbines are "15ft high". If that's supposed to mean the turbines have a radius of 15ft, the tip of the blades will be moving at 15ft x pi ~= 47ft/sec ~= 32mph. Later, they talk about "8ft propellers" in which case the tips will be moving at around 17mph. That ought to hurt, although maybe that's slow enough for fish to avoid.
I accidentally ran over my 12" PowerBook G4 with my dad's SUV about a year ago. Believe it or not, other than a crumpled corner (under the hard drive) and a 10 pixel high band of funky colors on the LCD, it survived intact. So I kept using it.
Then this Spring, I fell down the stairs with it, and that gave me a bunch of funky colors on the screen, rendering the LCD useless (I'm guessing it's just a pinched cable). But I'm still using it, to type this post actually, with an external monitor and keyboard.
I wrote a paper about this a few weeks ago, but automatic cryptographic message signing would solve a lot of email related problems (i.e. spam and viruses/worms).
The basic idea I had was that every account would have an associate key-pair, and users would be required to send through an authenticated SMTP server provided by the account issuer. The SMTP server automatically calculates and inserts the signature, which the receiving SMTP server can then veify.
The only problem is that it would require widespread acceptance for it work reliably, and there's significant overhead (in message signing and verification).
I was there yesterday morning (I live right across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry), and remember a few pieces of information that might provide some insight...
The plane they made was an exact replica of the 1903 Wright Flier, and slightly different to the more famous 1904 version. The replica, including the "pilot" weighs around 830lb, but the 4 cynlinder 12-hp engine which maxes at 1200 rpm only has something like 160lb of thrust.
I only stayed to watch the first failed attempt (they said they would have multiple attempts), but it was an exhilirating sight nonetheless. As it accelerated down the tracks, you could almost see it become light on the skids. Just the uncertainty made it more exciting than watching a modern plane take off (which, I think, is pretty exciting enough).
Services like law enforcement, public libraries, roads, etc, generally benefit citizens, however, OSS benefits everyone everywhere. More specifically, a large portion of OSS users are in the US, but there are also many OSS users outside the US. If, for example, the US government started funding Linux development (not that that would ever happen, but let's assume it did), I'm sure some narrow minded congressman (with campaign contributions from a certain large software company in Redmond, Washington) would start asking why the US is funding the development of software that could benefit everybody, including "terrorists".
It's questionable whether some governments act in the best interset of its citizens, but it's out right naiive to expect some governments to do something that would benefit humanity at large.
I'm getting a $2000 stipend from my university to work on my project this summer. All I had to do was write a proposal. I also entered the project to a student research competition and got $200 in prize money ($200 for a 5 page paper and two 10 minute presentations isn't that bad -would've been $500 if I'd gotten 1st place though). Apart from that, I got a $1000 "donation" to add a new feature, about $200 worth in contract work related to the project, and $40 in user donations. On the other hand, I lost a bunch of money through the cafepress shop (see sig).
But this fall, I'll be transferring to a university that's going to cost me a shi*t load of money, and it's going to be difficult for me to justify spending the usual 15-40 hours/week on the project, without some kind of serious funding (which I doubt I'll find).
>The main problem with $.50 songs is that the credit card companies charge a minimum flat fee per transaction,
A few of my friends and I thought about doing what you're talking about. The solution we came up with was to sell credits, and not charge per-song. So people buy 10 credits for $10, but each song might only cost 1 credit. The end result is that they get 10 tacks for $10, and you only pay the fees once. Credits also make it easier to add incentives (like bulk rates, etc).
>AAC is less quality than the original CD in any measurment.
I don't think anyone's arguing with you on that point.
>If you put it on a scale where FM is on one end, and CD is on the other, AAC at 128kb is close to FM than CD.
Have you actually listened to AAC files? I listened to some of the classical/soundtrack samples and they were virtually indistinguishable from CDs. I've listened to FM and CD, and trust me, the actual perceived quality of AAC is much closer to CD than FM.
>
What you are identifying is misuse of an OO language, not an inherent shortcoming in an OO system.
Here's a question: If something is misused or abused in sufficient percentages of cases, couldn't that be considered an "inherent" flaw? For example, if people kept crashing a car because it was designed with the gas and break pedals reversed, you could probably safely assume that it was an inherent design flaw that caused abundant and unneccessary misuse.
>any slackjawed yokel who can hack out 5 lines of perl can say they're a badass programmer.
You're missing one big difference between software and other engineering fields. If some college kid hacked out a modern UNIX-like operating system with preemptive multitasking, memory protection and all the good stuff, you could probably admit that he's a badass programmer. You might admit that some college kid is a badass engineer if he built a plane proof replacement of the WTC, but what are the odds of that happening?
The fact of it is, programmers can prove themselves in ways that engineers can't.
Personally, I don't know why any programmer would want to be called an engineer... I'd definitely prefer being called an artist.
>have access to my email seamlessly whether I boot up in Windows or Linux
One word: webmail.
I've been using my webmail interface as my primary email client for the last 2+ years and haven't looked at stand alone email clients since. My IMAP account has some 80MB worth of email, but even my sent folder with 2300+ messages loads in under 5 seconds from anywhere in the world (although, I should give Courier-IMAP and the Maildir format credit for that). As far as I'm concerned, desktop email clients are slow, inconvinient and obsolete.
>many of the zealots here think they have the "right" to the fruits of any programmer or company's labor, simply because it's trivial to make copies of the original work.
Now that's a wrong take on Open Source if I'd seen one... I think you've been eating too much of Microsoft's FUD. Open Source isn't about leaching, that is, taking advantage of other people's work. It's about collaboration and freedom, and putting quality in front of profit. If, as you suggest, Open Source was successful only because it was cheap, you wouldn't be seeing the kind of high quality software you see today. The Open Source license works only because the Open Source development model works. You can't talk about one without looking at the other. And that's what M$ doesn't understand (at least IMO).
There are many centuries-old buildings in Europe, but then, Europe doesn't have very many earthquakes and such. As a result, many of the oldest buildings seem to be made of stone.
In Japan, on the other hand, there are tons of buildings that are hundreds of years old, _and_ have survived some of the biggest earthquakes, not to mention, a fairly dynamic climate (hot humid summers, cold wet winters). Wooden architecture might not withstand fire, but unless that's a concern, I'm sure there are some lessons to be learned there.
> CS requires that people pay for software, and that is not the direction the economy is headed. Sorry, boys. Unless you know something I don't, proprietary software has been opening more and mo
I disagree (disclaimer: I'm an OSS developer and a CS major). In certain niches, it's true that proprietary software is losing to OSS, but that's still a relatively minor thing when you look at the entire software industry. As computers become more and more widely used in new areas, the number of software that needs to be written grows exponentially. When just about every industry, every field of study, and every man, woman, child, dog and it's fleas have a computer and find out that it can do more than check email, there's going to be a huge demand for stuff that nobody's written yet. Who's going to write all this highly specialized software? In most cases, it's still going to be proprietary software houses. The main difference is that the focus is shifting away from big-iron UNIXes and desktop software, and more towards specialized custom jobs.
Re:Alex should have just waited
on
Half Mast
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· Score: 1
>I'm at the Knicks game with a few friends and some seriously cute women. We have a few drinks, watch a great game, then go back to my place and party a bit more, collapse into ecstasy onto my L-shaped sofa, and crash for 10 hours.
For anyone who cares, I wrote a paper titled Reputation Economy and the Internet. It talks about how reputation acts as a substitute for monetary worth, and also how the system compares to market economies.
If you watch the "speedup" movie, the guy talks about processing speeds equivalent to "100,000 gigs" (not sure if it's GHz or GFLOPS or what though) that sounds aweful fast. The demo shows the thing calculating fractals 35x faster than a PC while consuming only 0.1% of the resources.
Obviously, I have no clue how this thing works other than that its mighty fast. I'm also thinking that with a bunch of these things, cracking RSA might not be so difficult after all.
>If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all'
This reminds me of how doctors in Japan used to not tell patients who were diagnosed with cancer for the same reason. Personally (and I think many people agree) if I have a limited amount of time to live, I'd like to know about it. If I'm going to die, I'd like to at least be able to die without regrets, and I think the people in position of power/knowledge have the responsibility to give us that opportunity.
Although, considering how most people seem to be mortified at the thought of dying, I guess a massive death sentence could screw things up a bit...
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out that probability page takes practically any number as a GET variable, so if you want, you can send a URL to your friends saying there's a 99% chance of impact:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ip?9.9e-01
(They might fix it, so who knows how long the above URL will work...)
My background: I transferred from California State University Chico, which is more famous as a party school than anything else (although the CS department is semi-decent), to the University of Chicago which is famous for its academic rigor ("where fun comes to die") but has a small CS department.
In my opinion, what matters more isn't the reputation of the program itself, but the quality of the program. As it turns out, the more reputable programs are generally also better programs, but you don't benefit from the reputation as much as you do from the content. Also, even if the program itself isn't particularly reputable (as is the case here), a program at a reputable school generally attracts better students, which contributes significantly to the overall content and experience of your education.
I transferred mostly because the program at my last school was utterly unchallenging, and I was learning little that I didn't already know/could teach myself. Here, I'm constantly being challenged, and am learning about things that I didn't even know existed (i.e. likely couldn't not have taught myself).
Since the industry is generally meritocratic, I'm not depending on the reputation of the university to help me much. But at the end, I'll have a degree having learned much more, and I think that's what counts on the long run.
And yes, experience is key. But a solid background can compliment your experience a great deal.
One thing to keep in mind when you're test using programs like ApacheBench is that laboratory tests don't necessarily simulate real-world scenarios well.
For example, a server hooked up to a "client" on your lan will be able to support a hell of a lot more requests than in the real world. This is because, even if your application responds quickly, your web server process has to stay up to send the output back to the client. In a lab network, this usually takes hardly anytime, while an actual modem user hitting your site might take seconds. One solution for this particular problem is to setup a lightweight proxy server, so that users connecting via slow connections will only hog whatever resources the proxy uses, instead of tying up an entire Apache process.
Anyway, basically what I'm trying to say is, results that AB give you are helpful, but don't put too much faith on it.
It's kind of interesting because there used to be a Sony Store and an Apple Store on Michigan Ave in Chicago. The Michigan Ave Apple Store is one of the busiest Apple Stores in the country. The Sony Store, just a block or two away, has since closed. Interpret that as you will...
In my dorm, everybody put their music into iTunes and turned on sharing so we had some 70,000+ tracks available for streaming on the network. In that kind of environment, I don't think a paid streaming service like the one GWU plans on offering will be appreciated.
I'm not so sure about that. Exactly how fast the blades will be moving depends on the radius, not RPM. In the article, in one place it says the turbines are "15ft high". If that's supposed to mean the turbines have a radius of 15ft, the tip of the blades will be moving at 15ft x pi ~= 47ft/sec ~= 32mph. Later, they talk about "8ft propellers" in which case the tips will be moving at around 17mph. That ought to hurt, although maybe that's slow enough for fish to avoid.
I accidentally ran over my 12" PowerBook G4 with my dad's SUV about a year ago. Believe it or not, other than a crumpled corner (under the hard drive) and a 10 pixel high band of funky colors on the LCD, it survived intact.
So I kept using it.
Then this Spring, I fell down the stairs with it, and that gave me a bunch of funky colors on the screen, rendering the LCD useless (I'm guessing it's just a pinched cable). But I'm still using it, to type this post actually, with an external monitor and keyboard.
They say they'll give 1GB of storage space, but that doesn't preclude them from setting limits to attachment sizes and bandwidth usage.
I wrote a paper about this a few weeks ago, but automatic cryptographic message signing would solve a lot of email related problems (i.e. spam and viruses/worms).
The basic idea I had was that every account would have an associate key-pair, and users would be required to send through an authenticated SMTP server provided by the account issuer. The SMTP server automatically calculates and inserts the signature, which the receiving SMTP server can then veify.
The only problem is that it would require widespread acceptance for it work reliably, and there's significant overhead (in message signing and verification).
I was there yesterday morning (I live right across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry), and remember a few pieces of information that might provide some insight...
The plane they made was an exact replica of the 1903 Wright Flier, and slightly different to the more famous 1904 version. The replica, including the "pilot" weighs around 830lb, but the 4 cynlinder 12-hp engine which maxes at 1200 rpm only has something like 160lb of thrust.
I only stayed to watch the first failed attempt (they said they would have multiple attempts), but it was an exhilirating sight nonetheless. As it accelerated down the tracks, you could almost see it become light on the skids. Just the uncertainty made it more exciting than watching a modern plane take off (which, I think, is pretty exciting enough).
Services like law enforcement, public libraries, roads, etc, generally benefit citizens, however, OSS benefits everyone everywhere. More specifically, a large portion of OSS users are in the US, but there are also many OSS users outside the US. If, for example, the US government started funding Linux development (not that that would ever happen, but let's assume it did), I'm sure some narrow minded congressman (with campaign contributions from a certain large software company in Redmond, Washington) would start asking why the US is funding the development of software that could benefit everybody, including "terrorists".
It's questionable whether some governments act in the best interset of its citizens, but it's out right naiive to expect some governments to do something that would benefit humanity at large.
I'm getting a $2000 stipend from my university to work on my project this summer. All I had to do was write a proposal. I also entered the project to a student research competition and got $200 in prize money ($200 for a 5 page paper and two 10 minute presentations isn't that bad -would've been $500 if I'd gotten 1st place though). Apart from that, I got a $1000 "donation" to add a new feature, about $200 worth in contract work related to the project, and $40 in user donations. On the other hand, I lost a bunch of money through the cafepress shop (see sig).
But this fall, I'll be transferring to a university that's going to cost me a shi*t load of money, and it's going to be difficult for me to justify spending the usual 15-40 hours/week on the project, without some kind of serious funding (which I doubt I'll find).
A few of my friends and I thought about doing what you're talking about. The solution we came up with was to sell credits, and not charge per-song. So people buy 10 credits for $10, but each song might only cost 1 credit. The end result is that they get 10 tacks for $10, and you only pay the fees once. Credits also make it easier to add incentives (like bulk rates, etc).
I don't think anyone's arguing with you on that point.
>If you put it on a scale where FM is on one end, and CD is on the other, AAC at 128kb is close to FM than CD.
Have you actually listened to AAC files? I listened to some of the classical/soundtrack samples and they were virtually indistinguishable from CDs. I've listened to FM and CD, and trust me, the actual perceived quality of AAC is much closer to CD than FM.
Here's a question: If something is misused or abused in sufficient percentages of cases, couldn't that be considered an "inherent" flaw? For example, if people kept crashing a car because it was designed with the gas and break pedals reversed, you could probably safely assume that it was an inherent design flaw that caused abundant and unneccessary misuse.
Where did you get that from? According to the QTSS FAQ:
Both QuickTime Streaming Server 4 and Darwin Streaming Server 4 are free, with no per-stream license fees.
So, no, it doesn't seem like licensing fees were the issue.
You're missing one big difference between software and other engineering fields. If some college kid hacked out a modern UNIX-like operating system with preemptive multitasking, memory protection and all the good stuff, you could probably admit that he's a badass programmer. You might admit that some college kid is a badass engineer if he built a plane proof replacement of the WTC, but what are the odds of that happening?
The fact of it is, programmers can prove themselves in ways that engineers can't.
Personally, I don't know why any programmer would want to be called an engineer... I'd definitely prefer being called an artist.
One word: webmail.
I've been using my webmail interface as my primary email client for the last 2+ years and haven't looked at stand alone email clients since. My IMAP account has some 80MB worth of email, but even my sent folder with 2300+ messages loads in under 5 seconds from anywhere in the world (although, I should give Courier-IMAP and the Maildir format credit for that). As far as I'm concerned, desktop email clients are slow, inconvinient and obsolete.
Now that's a wrong take on Open Source if I'd seen one... I think you've been eating too much of Microsoft's FUD. Open Source isn't about leaching, that is, taking advantage of other people's work. It's about collaboration and freedom, and putting quality in front of profit. If, as you suggest, Open Source was successful only because it was cheap, you wouldn't be seeing the kind of high quality software you see today. The Open Source license works only because the Open Source development model works. You can't talk about one without looking at the other. And that's what M$ doesn't understand (at least IMO).
There are many centuries-old buildings in Europe, but then, Europe doesn't have very many earthquakes and such. As a result, many of the oldest buildings seem to be made of stone.
In Japan, on the other hand, there are tons of buildings that are hundreds of years old, _and_ have survived some of the biggest earthquakes, not to mention, a fairly dynamic climate (hot humid summers, cold wet winters). Wooden architecture might not withstand fire, but unless that's a concern, I'm sure there are some lessons to be learned there.
I disagree (disclaimer: I'm an OSS developer and a CS major). In certain niches, it's true that proprietary software is losing to OSS, but that's still a relatively minor thing when you look at the entire software industry. As computers become more and more widely used in new areas, the number of software that needs to be written grows exponentially. When just about every industry, every field of study, and every man, woman, child, dog and it's fleas have a computer and find out that it can do more than check email, there's going to be a huge demand for stuff that nobody's written yet. Who's going to write all this highly specialized software? In most cases, it's still going to be proprietary software houses. The main difference is that the focus is shifting away from big-iron UNIXes and desktop software, and more towards specialized custom jobs.
And that's.... fun?
You must have an odd definition of "fun".
For anyone who cares, I wrote a paper titled Reputation Economy and the Internet. It talks about how reputation acts as a substitute for monetary worth, and also how the system compares to market economies.
http://hummer.larc.nasa.gov/acmbexternal/Personne
If you watch the "speedup" movie, the guy talks about processing speeds equivalent to "100,000 gigs" (not sure if it's GHz or GFLOPS or what though) that sounds aweful fast. The demo shows the thing calculating fractals 35x faster than a PC while consuming only 0.1% of the resources.
Obviously, I have no clue how this thing works other than that its mighty fast. I'm also thinking that with a bunch of these things, cracking RSA might not be so difficult after all.
This reminds me of how doctors in Japan used to not tell patients who were diagnosed with cancer for the same reason. Personally (and I think many people agree) if I have a limited amount of time to live, I'd like to know about it. If I'm going to die, I'd like to at least be able to die without regrets, and I think the people in position of power/knowledge have the responsibility to give us that opportunity.
Although, considering how most people seem to be mortified at the thought of dying, I guess a massive death sentence could screw things up a bit...