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User: crisco

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  1. Nevada Test Site on Visiting Every Latitude and Longitude Intersection · · Score: 1

    Heres the only one in Nevada listed as unvisited, although there is a picture and a story...

  2. Re:A map without a key... on Atomic Veterans Speak Out · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hmm, there appears to be an ever so slight resemblance to [a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/vote2000/cbc/ma p.htm"]this map[/a], does that mean that radiation makes you vote republican?

  3. Re:not even close! on GIF Slips Away From Unisys; Your Move, IBM · · Score: 1

    Great idea. The Mozilla ActiveX Control is actively maintained, we just need some easy instructions to embed this on our sites and several problems are fixed.

  4. Re:One word... on Large, Free, and Interesting SQL-ready Datasets? · · Score: 1

    Hasn't Northwind been superceeded by Duwamish or something like that?

  5. Re:Absolutely no way on Zinc Whiskers Cripple Colorado's Computers · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I agree, there's no way anyone running IIS knows what they're talking about.

  6. Multiple versions of IE on one Windows install on A Look at the Newly Released Mozilla Firefox 0.9 · · Score: 1
    Multiple versions of IE.

    Works great for me. I have seen a few reports of some odd CSS issues that don't actually reflect what the browser would do if it were the sole browser on the system but everything I've compared against VirtualPC or the few times I've been able to compare a site against a native install has been accurate.

  7. Baja on Will There Be A Winning Autonomous Robot in 2005? · · Score: 2, Informative
    Depending on the class, the Baja (and other desert races) contestants depend heavily on co-drivers, GPS and proper preparation. They run over the entire course before the race (hence the 'PreRunner' style of trucks) and rely on maps, GPS and the co-driver's experience.

    Motorcyles and the trophy trucks averaged nearly 60 MPH on the last Baja 1000, other classes are slower.

    I wish Rally driving were more popular over here in the US of A, so much more excitement than big ovals.

  8. Re:I am going to do that too on Converting an Open Source Project into a Business? · · Score: 1

    Many successful open source services companies retain closed source utilities or dual licensed products. This raises the barrier of entry to would -be competitors while retaining the benefits of open soucre for the core of their codebase.

  9. Microsoft has at least one patent in this area. on McAfee Granted Far-Reaching Spam-Control Patent · · Score: 3, Informative
    Dating back to December of 2000, Patent # 6,161,130 appears to cover some of the same techniques.
    Abstract

    A technique, specifically a method and apparatus that implements the method, which through a probabilistic classifier (370) and, for a given recipient, detects electronic mail (e-mail) messages, in an incoming message stream, which that recipient is likely to consider "junk". Specifically, the invention discriminates message content for that recipient, through a probabilistic classifier (e.g., a support vector machine) trained on prior content classifications. Through a resulting quantitative probability measure, i.e., an output confidence level, produced by the classifier for each message and subsequently compared against a predefined threshold, that message is classified as either, e.g., spam or legitimate mail, and, e.g., then stored in a corresponding folder (223, 227) for subsequent retrieval by and display to the recipient. Based on the probability measure, the message can alternatively be classified into one of a number of different folders, depicted in a pre-defined visually distinctive manner or simply discarded in its entirety.

    John Graham-Cumming (author of POPFile) has this to say about Microsoft's patent:
    1. POPFile was not designed for the sorting of spam from legitimate mail it is a general email classification system.

    2. I believe the patent to be invalid because of the ifile system being prior art. ifile dates back to at least 1996 while the patent has the date June 23, 1998 on it. The patent does not acknowledge ifile's existence. Evidence of ifile being prior art can be found in the ifile change log http://www.nongnu.org/ifile/ChangeLog and the original README (http://www.nongnu.org/ifile/old/README-0.1A) which shows the date: Released Sat Aug 3 20:49:01 EDT 1996

    3. If Microsoft were to sue me and win I would be happy to pay them every penny that I have made from POPFile ($0.00) :-)

  10. Re:Launch Window for a Blimp? on Blimps... In... Space... · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the clarification. I wish your project success!

  11. Launch Window for a Blimp? on Blimps... In... Space... · · Score: 1
    This struck me as odd:
    The window of opportunity extends from June 7 to 21 at the Pecos County/West Texas Spaceport at Fort Stockton, but the liftoff is dependent on the weather.

    "We actually had the first flight window in February, but we sat there and stared at 30-knot West Texas winds for two weeks, so we're going back in June," Powell said.

    I understand that orbital rocket launches need to happen at specific times to achieve mission goals but isn't this just a case of letting a big ballon float up for a while, do its thing and come down? Couldn't it be done nearly anytime the weather cooperated?

    One guess is licensing and permits, in which case why do we have beauracracy inhibiting innovation? Another might be rental of a hangar to prepare this thing, but that still seems a little odd.

  12. The quote is better: on Shrek 2 How-To · · Score: 1
    Bielenberg admits, "It's certainly difficult when we're 'art directing' fluids, especially when the fluids are interacting with characters."

    Heh. Art directing fluids. Tough Job.

  13. Re:$99 for the cheap fresnel... on Things You Can Do With A Giant Fresnel Lens · · Score: 1

    What if you didn't put the cell at the focal point but used a larger cell and put it 1/3 of the way up towards the lens. You'd still get away with smaller cells but wouldn't heat them up nearly so much. You'd still have to deal with aiming the thing and what not, I wonder if the money saved with a smaller cell would outweigh the disadvantages of an aiming mechanism and the increased complexity.

  14. Any relation to... on Is Windows Losing Ground? · · Score: 1

    ... Keyon.com, a wireless ISP?

  15. Re:Disk Fragmentation on Measuring Fragmentation in HFS+ · · Score: 1

    So true, I was just using a consumer grade capture card to grab some shots off a VHS tape on my buddy's P4 2.4 GHz running XP. With his disk very nearly full it was dropping roughly 10 frames/sec. Cleaning some stuff off it didn't help a bit. After a defrag capture ran beautifully, both uncompressed and compressing to mpeg4 realtime, no dropped frames over the 30 second spot.

  16. Re:False patent on Professor and Student Thwart P2P File Sharing · · Score: 1
    Patent was filed in 2000, so it will have to come down to the month and day it was filed.

    Besides, I didn't know you could get a patent on telling a lie and then inventing lots of extra crap to reinfoce the lie. Thats all this is.

  17. Re:Software developers want less eye candy. on Hardware Manufacturers Making PC Gaming Too Elite? · · Score: 1
    According to what I remember of the hype that led up to the non-release of HL2, it is supposed to play fine on everything back to a 1 GHz processor with a TNT2 class video card. This page seems to support what I remember.

    I'm not sure what the AVault author is whining about, except maybe that he has a choice of upgrading his hardware to see the best eye candy.

  18. Re:RPN for Cluebies? on HP Releases New RPN Scientific Calculator · · Score: 1
    RPN is good because the calculator doesn't disappear off your desk.

    Seriously, I had a HP12C floating around (financial, but I could barely work that part of it) that NEVER disappeared because no one else had a clue how to use it for even the simplest of calculations, even after I offered to show them.

  19. Re:new open source project idea? on WormRadar Node Volunteers Help Graph Attacks · · Score: 1
    I think secruity is the best argument for open sourcing the client or at least making it available for peer review. It is intended to be used on the open internet and it will become a target for the writers of various malware, any buffer overflows or other subtle errors that can be exploited probably will be.

    Even if the author has a great reputation, we all make mistakes at times.

  20. One guy, eight computers on How to Build a Search Engine · · Score: 1
    Did you read the article? Gigablast is one guy with eight computers. He thinks he can approach the size of Google's index (5 billion pages) this year if he invests all of his earnings into hardware and bandwidth. He's also well aware of the search engine spam problem and has built anti abuse features into it.

    Given that, plus the fact that he's spidered my worthless blog, I'm pretty impressed. Definately something to watch.

  21. They could just extend Jabber on Google's Next Steps · · Score: 1
    and call it Gabber.

    instead of saying "uh-oh" everytime you get a message it could play some annoying techno music.

  22. I thought there was one on A Publication Style Guide for Linux? · · Score: 2, Funny

    Plain Text!

  23. Re:PHP + PDF generation on ActivePDF-like Reports w/ Apache? · · Score: 2, Informative

    PHP's PDF Forms support seems centered around Adobe's FDF toolkit. This article and the PHP manual should be enough to get you started, if only for the right search terminology to get you closer to your application.

  24. Re:Darn good question. on Test Driven Development Examples? · · Score: 1

    POPFile is a Perl application that tries to maintain 100% test coverage.

  25. I want the Baby Penguin edition on Knoppix 3.3 Update, 3.4 C't Edition Are Out · · Score: 1

    for my nephews and my friends kids. They already think the Penguin is the coolest thing ever because I turned them on to Tux Paint. Now add some more kids games, deck FireFox out with big buttons, the Flash plugin (yeah I know there are redistribution issues) and links to stuff like pbskids.org and you have a kid friendly distribution that won't let them screw up the computer. Start giving it away and you're brainwashing a whole new generation of penguinistas.