You think you're a hardware snob...I won't buy any computer unless I can obtain the full service manual necessary to take everything apart in the case of a failure and the parts to do such a repair are easily available. This means the two laptops around here are a Thinkpad T23 and Lenovo T60 here. For desktops, I build everything myself, not because it's cheaper (you can't beat Dell on raw price) but because I can fix them with completely standard parts at any time.
To be fair here, the author is the guy who invented the whole Chuck Norris meme. So while he's certainly aggregated other people's work, it's also true that this particular style of jokes was kicked off my his original set and the popularity of his earlier Vin Diesel site. Which took more creativity: to kick off the whole thing, or to contribute new facts once it was rolling?
The original Chuck Norris facts site was at http://4q.cc/index.php?pid=top100&person=chuck Note that they also have the Vin Diesel facts, which as documented in the Wikipedia page on Chuck Norris Facts were done before the ones about Chuck. You can also see in the Wayback Machine that the 4q.cc site had their original Chuck facts as of November 5, 2005, and my mail archive says I was forwarding that site to my friends by December 8th.
The http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/ site was registered on December 20, 2005, weeks after this had already become a popular Internet meme. Their site is pretty clearly linked with chucknorris.com - in addition to the shared registration info, there's a link right on the facts site to the main one.
So while it seems true Chuck or someone related to him in a business capacity registered the chucknorrisfacts.com domain to cash in on the popularity of the meme, and it's fair to say someone here is cash hungry, that didn't happen until some time after the original site has already become hugely popular. Saying Chuck made the whole thing up for self-promotion is off base. Now that you've insulted Chuck's manhood, I hope this information helps clarify what you've done wrong during your final few moments on Earth.
The eBook reader format that Oreilly adopts is likely to be my next favorite device, however. How would you like to search every instance of a function across their entire library, at once, on the plane?
While books are relatively small in disk usage terms, I doubt you're going to fit the whole library on an e-book sized device. Maybe a laptop, but I kind of doubt even O'Reilly is "free" enough that they're going to give you their whole library on a laptop with only some DRM to protect it. One dedicated cracker and the whole thing escapes into the wild.
If you take away the "on the plane" requirement, the Safari library subscription already allows you to do the type of search you're envisioning, for about the same price as a typical tech book per month. You can use that interface on any web browser, so you can do what you're requesting on a good cell phone right now.
Hey, I was just about to post something about the same product. The short Unicenter course I ended up at was more of a sales pitch. They were doing this demo of how to use it where the view on the big monitor shows "Your Global IT Staff" drilling down from a geographic view of the world with the network overlaid on it to an individual PC where there's a network card problem. The friend I was with cracked then and starting shouting at the instructor "How can that possibly work? If the damn network card is out how the hell is it reporting the component failure to your NOC?" It was great; we got to leave early.
I thought the submission was quite good. If you don't have the background to follow all the acronyms or understand the implications without having them spoon-fed to you, perhaps you should switch to a site whose motto is more like "News for not-quite-nerds?"
If you think that's bad, try configuring sendmail one day. Mail servers are not exactly known for their user-friendly GUI tools, and I think it's a stretch to extrapolate from that about the state of Linux configuration in general. Using Active Directory compatibility as a benchmark is pretty unfair too, given how hard Microsoft tries to make that difficult for everyone else.
Some people recommend watching the theatrical release first, presumably because they agree with the studio that the film was too hard to follow otherwise. Unfortunately that version also loses much of the atmosphere of the film, as the voice-over added interrupts and masks the music and visual work that you can appreciate better in the director's cut (or this final version). As long as you can follow the plot this final cut should be the best version yet to watch. So as I see it, this turns into a slightly different question: how to lower the risk that you may get annoyed at not knowing what's going on when you watch the movie?
Watching the voice-over version first is one way to do that, but if you like it you really need to turn right around and watch the final one to get the good version. What I suggest instead to those who like reading Science Fiction books anyway is to read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" first, then see the best available version without the voice-over--that will now be this Final Cut version. That way you will know what's going on but won't have your first viewing distracted by the voice-over. The book and movie have many shared elements but plenty of things that are different between the two; both have unique elements worth experiencing, and it's not the case that the book "ruins" the movie or anything.
Being able to extrapolate doesn't eliminate the selection bias that comes from the fact that only people willing to fill out the Nielsen paperwork are submitting results right now.
For tech books, I've already switched to that model. I give Safari $40 a month for their whole library. Since I used to buy more than one book of this type a month, and a typical title costs more than that, I'm way ahead. It's easy enough to print the occasional chapter when I need to, and the big bonus is that I have access to whole library anywhere I have Internet access at, instead of hauling the books around.
Their "DRM" as it were is that all the chapter downloads and printouts have my personal information watermarked in them. Doesn't restrict me one bit, but I'm sure not going to upload them to a warez site or something.
Overall, though, the guys that I have known who have done this sort of stuff have won, though. Not tons, maybe an average of a couple hundred dollars per month at best with the risk of losing thousands
It sounds like a classic case where someone is staying just ahead of Gambler's Ruin--so far. If you don't properly model what happens when you run out of money, there are any number of gambling systems that seem like they work in the short-term, but in reality don't if you run them long enough. The simplest one is the Martingale.
I seem to remember an article in a Dragon magazine about dice and using math to find out if yours had a preference for a particular number...
That's "Be thy die ill-wrought?" in Dragon 78; it's also in the collection "The Dragon Compendium, Volume 1". The article talks about using the chi-square test in order to quantify your dice rolls. A similar article that pushes all the math to your computer is at Are my dice random?.
This is a bit unrealistic. For example, last quarter 62% of all Mac sales were portables. Would all these sales go away if you could run OS X on more generic hardware? Considering there's a growing number of people buying Apple portables that spend a good chunk of their time in Windows, I doubt it; a large number of those buyers wouldn't stop buying Apple hardware even if they could grab some generic PC laptop and possibly get it to run an unsupported OS X build.
The problem with Apple's product line-up is that they have no inexpensive desktop product that makes sense for the "enthusiast" class of PC buyer, the person who wants a computer they can tinker with and expand incrementally. Selling something that those people would buy wouldn't shrink sales because they're not buying anything from Apple right now. In fact, you can make a case that it would grow sales. As someone who fits that category, I can tell you that one of the reasons I don't own a Macbook is because Apple has no desktop solution I'm interested in, which prevents me from making a complete conversion to running OS X. I got one of the hacked Tiger builds running on my assembled from parts PC desktop, but the fact that Apple is downright antagonistic toward such hacks means I don't trust that system to run anything. Were they just to shift their position toward neutral, where I knew that they wouldn't ever actively try to lock me out of running on my generic hardware, that would be enough to get me to buy Leopard for that PC and to strongly consider a Macbook for my new portable as well.
Amen. In fact, just getting many recordings onto vinyl in the first place can require some compression in order to get an LP that a typical stylus can actually track. An interesting article at Mix suggests punching up the loudness on 45 RPM records to improve their popularity was done as far back as the Motown era.
SWT isn't part of Java, and Apple never claimed to support it.
Wrong. Apple has been promoting Eclipse compatibility in OS X since mid-2004, while failing to deliver a fully working product.
It's up to IBM and the Eclipse project to get SWT working on OS X.
If you look through the bug reports I linked to, you'll discover the issues were caused by things like the decisions Apple about the threading model when implementing SWT. It wasn't possible for IBM and the Eclipse project to work around such fundamental problems without getting corrections from Apple.
OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?
It runs fine on both Win32 and Linux, but yes the Mac experience is crappy. Apple likes to brag about their Java support, but the OS X support for the SWT features needed to fully support Eclipse is spotty. Check out how long the infamous SWT_AWT not implemented bug took for them to resolve. That was a showstopper for a variety of Eclipse plug-ins, and it was open from 6/15/2004 to 4/20/2006. Things are better now, but there's still a subset of SWT_AWT not implemented that breaks some tools, like parts of the fairly popular MyEclipse: see SWT_AWT.new_Shell() unimplemented for that dreary mess, which well over a year old now.
While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard aren't comforting either.
I recently finished a long comparison of PostgreSQL and MySQL in the context of mission-critical data that gives a lot more detail on the issues you bring up here.
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You think you're a hardware snob...I won't buy any computer unless I can obtain the full service manual necessary to take everything apart in the case of a failure and the parts to do such a repair are easily available. This means the two laptops around here are a Thinkpad T23 and Lenovo T60 here. For desktops, I build everything myself, not because it's cheaper (you can't beat Dell on raw price) but because I can fix them with completely standard parts at any time.
To be fair here, the author is the guy who invented the whole Chuck Norris meme. So while he's certainly aggregated other people's work, it's also true that this particular style of jokes was kicked off my his original set and the popularity of his earlier Vin Diesel site. Which took more creativity: to kick off the whole thing, or to contribute new facts once it was rolling?
The original Chuck Norris facts site was at http://4q.cc/index.php?pid=top100&person=chuck Note that they also have the Vin Diesel facts, which as documented in the
Wikipedia page on Chuck Norris Facts were done before the ones about Chuck. You can also see in the Wayback Machine that the 4q.cc site had their original Chuck facts as of November 5, 2005, and my mail archive says I was forwarding that site to my friends by December 8th.
The http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/ site was registered on December 20, 2005, weeks after this had already become a popular Internet meme. Their site is pretty clearly linked with chucknorris.com - in addition to the shared registration info, there's a link right on the facts site to the main one.
So while it seems true Chuck or someone related to him in a business capacity registered the chucknorrisfacts.com domain to cash in on the popularity of the meme, and it's fair to say someone here is cash hungry, that didn't happen until some time after the original site has already become hugely popular. Saying Chuck made the whole thing up for self-promotion is off base. Now that you've insulted Chuck's manhood, I hope this information helps clarify what you've done wrong during your final few moments on Earth.
Had they instead tried to release a book based on the
Bruce Schneier Facts, when they tried to print it they'd have discovered the text was encrypted.
Did you miss it when Hell froze earlier this week? It was right before that Duke Nukem Forever trailer came out.
While books are relatively small in disk usage terms, I doubt you're going to fit the whole library on an e-book sized device. Maybe a laptop, but I kind of doubt even O'Reilly is "free" enough that they're going to give you their whole library on a laptop with only some DRM to protect it. One dedicated cracker and the whole thing escapes into the wild.
If you take away the "on the plane" requirement, the Safari library subscription already allows you to do the type of search you're envisioning, for about the same price as a typical tech book per month. You can use that interface on any web browser, so you can do what you're requesting on a good cell phone right now.
Yeah, what's far more important to me than "how fast does this browser run Javascript?" is "how easily does the browser non run Javascript?"
Hey, I was just about to post something about the same product. The short Unicenter course I ended up at was more of a sales pitch. They were doing this demo of how to use it where the view on the big monitor shows "Your Global IT Staff" drilling down from a geographic view of the world with the network overlaid on it to an individual PC where there's a network card problem. The friend I was with cracked then and starting shouting at the instructor "How can that possibly work? If the damn network card is out how the hell is it reporting the component failure to your NOC?" It was great; we got to leave early.
I thought the submission was quite good. If you don't have the background to follow all the acronyms or understand the implications without having them spoon-fed to you, perhaps you should switch to a site whose motto is more like "News for not-quite-nerds?"
Despite having never used Postfix or Dovecot before, in about five minutes of searching, I discovered http://code.softwarefreedom.org/projects/backports/browser/external/standalone/dovecot/current/doc/wiki/LDA.Postfix.txt which led me to http://www.postfix.org/master.5.html where it states a field of "-" requests that the built-in default value be used.. So now not only does God know what it means, so do I and now you.
If you think that's bad, try configuring sendmail one day. Mail servers are not exactly known for their user-friendly GUI tools, and I think it's a stretch to extrapolate from that about the state of Linux configuration in general. Using Active Directory compatibility as a benchmark is pretty unfair too, given how hard Microsoft tries to make that difficult for everyone else.
Some people recommend watching the theatrical release first, presumably because they agree with the studio that the film was too hard to follow otherwise. Unfortunately that version also loses much of the atmosphere of the film, as the voice-over added interrupts and masks the music and visual work that you can appreciate better in the director's cut (or this final version). As long as you can follow the plot this final cut should be the best version yet to watch. So as I see it, this turns into a slightly different question: how to lower the risk that you may get annoyed at not knowing what's going on when you watch the movie?
Watching the voice-over version first is one way to do that, but if you like it you really need to turn right around and watch the final one to get the good version. What I suggest instead to those who like reading Science Fiction books anyway is to read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" first, then see the best available version without the voice-over--that will now be this Final Cut version. That way you will know what's going on but won't have your first viewing distracted by the voice-over. The book and movie have many shared elements but plenty of things that are different between the two; both have unique elements worth experiencing, and it's not the case that the book "ruins" the movie or anything.
Being able to extrapolate doesn't eliminate the selection bias that comes from the fact that only people willing to fill out the Nielsen paperwork are submitting results right now.
For tech books, I've already switched to that model. I give Safari $40 a month for their whole library. Since I used to buy more than one book of this type a month, and a typical title costs more than that, I'm way ahead. It's easy enough to print the occasional chapter when I need to, and the big bonus is that I have access to whole library anywhere I have Internet access at, instead of hauling the books around.
Their "DRM" as it were is that all the chapter downloads and printouts have my personal information watermarked in them. Doesn't restrict me one bit, but I'm sure not going to upload them to a warez site or something.
In the later releases, all the pipes were replaced by cell phones.
Have you heard the music most college kids are listening to nowadays? I wouldn't pay for that crap either.
StupidFilter promises to leverage techniques such as Beyesian filtering
And with that mistake, I'm now filtering out FastSilicon.
And it should also be easy to build a Beowulf cluster of these phones.
Overall, though, the guys that I have known who have done this sort of stuff have won, though. Not tons, maybe an average of a couple hundred dollars per month at best with the risk of losing thousands
It sounds like a classic case where someone is staying just ahead of Gambler's Ruin--so far. If you don't properly model what happens when you run out of money, there are any number of gambling systems that seem like they work in the short-term, but in reality don't if you run them long enough. The simplest one is the Martingale.
I seem to remember an article in a Dragon magazine about dice and using math to find out if yours had a preference for a particular number...
That's "Be thy die ill-wrought?" in Dragon 78; it's also in the collection "The Dragon Compendium, Volume 1". The article talks about using the chi-square test in order to quantify your dice rolls. A similar article that pushes all the math to your computer is at Are my dice random?.
This is a bit unrealistic. For example, last quarter 62% of all Mac sales were portables. Would all these sales go away if you could run OS X on more generic hardware? Considering there's a growing number of people buying Apple portables that spend a good chunk of their time in Windows, I doubt it; a large number of those buyers wouldn't stop buying Apple hardware even if they could grab some generic PC laptop and possibly get it to run an unsupported OS X build.
The problem with Apple's product line-up is that they have no inexpensive desktop product that makes sense for the "enthusiast" class of PC buyer, the person who wants a computer they can tinker with and expand incrementally. Selling something that those people would buy wouldn't shrink sales because they're not buying anything from Apple right now. In fact, you can make a case that it would grow sales. As someone who fits that category, I can tell you that one of the reasons I don't own a Macbook is because Apple has no desktop solution I'm interested in, which prevents me from making a complete conversion to running OS X. I got one of the hacked Tiger builds running on my assembled from parts PC desktop, but the fact that Apple is downright antagonistic toward such hacks means I don't trust that system to run anything. Were they just to shift their position toward neutral, where I knew that they wouldn't ever actively try to lock me out of running on my generic hardware, that would be enough to get me to buy Leopard for that PC and to strongly consider a Macbook for my new portable as well.
Amen. In fact, just getting many recordings onto vinyl in the first place can require some compression in order to get an LP that a typical stylus can actually track. An interesting article at Mix suggests punching up the loudness on 45 RPM records to improve their popularity was done as far back as the Motown era.
SWT isn't part of Java, and Apple never claimed to support it.
Wrong. Apple has been promoting Eclipse compatibility in OS X since mid-2004, while failing to deliver a fully working product.
It's up to IBM and the Eclipse project to get SWT working on OS X.
If you look through the bug reports I linked to, you'll discover the issues were caused by things like the decisions Apple about the threading model when implementing SWT. It wasn't possible for IBM and the Eclipse project to work around such fundamental problems without getting corrections from Apple.
OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?
It runs fine on both Win32 and Linux, but yes the Mac experience is crappy. Apple likes to brag about their Java support, but the OS X support for the SWT features needed to fully support Eclipse is spotty. Check out how long the infamous SWT_AWT not implemented bug took for them to resolve. That was a showstopper for a variety of Eclipse plug-ins, and it was open from 6/15/2004 to 4/20/2006. Things are better now, but there's still a subset of SWT_AWT not implemented that breaks some tools, like parts of the fairly popular MyEclipse: see SWT_AWT.new_Shell() unimplemented for that dreary mess, which well over a year old now.
While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard aren't comforting either.
I recently finished a long comparison of PostgreSQL and MySQL in the context of mission-critical data that gives a lot more detail on the issues you bring up here.
Maybe ABBA's "The Visitors" was the first commercially released CD in the United States
Nope, that was "52nd Street" by Billy Joel.