"Plan to throw the first one away."
-- Fred Brooks, _The Mythical Man-Month_
It is, of course, important to understand the reasoning behind the quote. The book, while terribly dated, is still worth reading.
Podcast is the new blog
on
Podcasting
·
· Score: 1
Many individuals and news organizations missed out on the leading edge of "blogging" and have been struggling to catch up. Somebody told them that "podcasting" was the Next Big Thing, and they created their own hype whirlwind.
But hey, if you can have WebTV For Dummies, why not have an entire book about podcasting?
What we need to do now is combine fad buzzwords with fad law-breaking. Henceforth all podcasts must be distributed on p2p networks. If we can figure out how get them inappropriate ESRB ratings we'll trendily offend absolutely everyone.
The "DDOS goons" had a particular target and a particular motivation. Your basic goon will go after "kewl" sites, like whitehouse.gov or yahoo.com. These goons read groklaw, and are passionate about it.
I'm not saying they're not goons. I'm saying they're pro-Linux goons. Your comment about "dominant characteristics" is a fair point though.
What I get from Dvorak's article is that a handful of people are making the rest of the Linux community look bad. The responses I've seen on forums immediately condemn Dvorak -- occasionally missing his attempts at irony -- without stopping to consider whether he has a point. This is exactly the sort of fanaticism he's pointing at.
Initiating DDOS attacks against Sys-Con is "nutty" and indicative of "mob rule". There's nothing rational or reasonable about criminal activity.
His indictment of the Linux Community isn't really fair, but neither is pretending that all is well and Dvorak is viewing a hurricane in a teacup.
To the best of my knowledge, O'Gara has broken ethical and moral standards, but not the law. Some over-enthusiastic Linux activists have broken the law. It's getting hard to find the high ground around here.
If you roll a 20-sided die 10,000 times, a fair die will show each number roughly the same number of times.
It is *possible* that you could roll, say, 5 or 6 every time, but it is *improbable* unless you're biasing your roll or you have a weighted die.
With a sufficient number of iterations, then, one would expect each song in iTunes to be played roughly the same number of times. There will be short-term biases and some variability, but for a good pseudo-random number generator you expect a flat distribution.
What I'm seeing is significantly skewed results that tend to favor songs with higher ratings. The number of iterations is well under 10,000, but may be high enough to be statistically significant.
If the iPod Shuffle uses the same algorithm, the non-random skew is more than a human desire to find patterns, but less than the sinister marketing that some people have suggested. (Which doesn't make much sense anyway, since you already own the music.)
iTunes keeps track of the number of times a song has been played. I put all of my music in, and haven't added a whole lot over the last several months. I usually play a random shuffle of about 250 songs while I work.
You would expect, from a truly random sampling, that all songs would be played roughly the same number of times. However, the play counters in iTunes show that some songs are played 2-3x as often as others.
There does not appear to be any sort of favoritism with respect to particular bands or albums. There does appear to be some correlation with the "my ratings" column. Most of the less-frequently played songs are at 3 stars, while most of the more-frequently played songs are at 4 stars.
(My random shuffle is an automatic playlist generated from all songs rated at 3 stars or higher.)
I suspected that there were other kinds of bias in the iTunes random shuffle, but I convinced myself otherwise. For example, if I started to play a song by Rush, and then tapped the "shuffle" button twice to re-shuffle, it always seemed to have another Rush song in the top 5. After a couple of quick experiments I convinced myself that I just had a lucky streak.
The SoBig.F virus message was much larger than a "we found a virus" letter, because it included a copy of the virus itself. The number of messages bouncing around may have doubled, but the total bandwidth required did not.
However, as the recipient of 300+ messages a day, I for one would be delighted if the virus scanners had an option to Just Shut Up when they find a specific virus. While I don't believe the scanners aggravated the problem -- indeed, by reducing its transmission, they certainly improved matters -- the bogus reject messages were a highly visible and easily avoidable irritant.
FYI... In June 2003 Mitsui Advanced Media was purchased from Mitsui Chemicals by Computer Support Italcard (CSI) of Italy to form MAM-A, Inc.
I'm also a big fan of Mitusi Gold discs. Consumer demand is for incredibly cheap media, which is what they're now getting, with the expected results. The infamous CD-R-eating fungus didn't seem to like to eat "gold" discs, which was another item in its favor for people in tropical climates.
Mitsui, Kodak, Taiyo, Yuden, and TDK were the better ones. (HP, Philips, Sony, Yamaha, and Fuji were usually one of those brands.) Kodak no longer manufactures discs.
Quick summary: higher speeds require a different "write strategy" than slower speeds. Different media formulations are optimized for a particular write strategy, so writing slower than the optimal speed can actually produce inferior results.
The choice of media and recording hardware has to be taken into consideration. In any event, this has relatively little to do with disc deterioration. A disc that's better to begin with won't show the effects of physical deterioration as soon, but if the top lacquer coat isn't as close to air-tight as materials allow, it doesn't matter how you write the disc.
Many people like to recommend exercise, but I've found that a trip to the gym just leaves me tired. Not everyone finds it a "pick-me-up" activity.
My first semester in college, I had a full load of classes (math, physics, CS) and was on the lightweight crew team. Lightweight crew requires getting up at 5:20am and doing a fairly inhuman amount of exercise, plus getting together again every day at about 4pm to something equally unpleasant, plus you were expected to lift weights on your own (which, being one of the tallest and one of the lightest, I desperately needed).
Unfortunately, while I was really into my CS class, I didn't enjoy math (vector differential calculus) or physics. I would stare at my textbook for hours, busily resenting the fact that I had to deal with it. I was often tired and pressed for time because of my extracurricular activities, and I ended up doing very well in CS and somewhat poorly in everything else.
The next semester I went into "bad attitude" mode. I dropped crew, took some empty units to fill out my schedule, and generally compensated for my previous semester by setting out to accomplish as little as possible. I again did exceptionally well in CS, and exceptionally poorly in math and physics.
At the start of the next year, being faced with the loss of a scholarship because of my sub-3.0 GPA, I got focused and did better.
What it comes down to:
- You will be more focused and do better on things you enjoy doing. Sadly, life doesn't let us do just the things we enjoy. However...
- Attitude is half the battle. Not a "seven habits" or "daily affirmations" outlook on life attitude, but your attitude toward the specific subjects you're dealing with. Find a way to make it interesting. Figure out why your professors and TAs decided to make it their life's work. Relate your math or physics to writing video games, or something else that interests you.
- If *nothing* interests you, consider whether you're in the right field of study.
Something I've found that helps me: listen to music, but do it wearing headphones. Play music you've heard many times, and that is fairly "loud". The idea is to neutralize audible input. By playing (say) a Rush compilation disc that I've heard dozens of times, I find that I can better focus in on what I'm doing because my ears don't pick up stuff that distracts me. (Some people can work with a TV or radio on nearby; I'm not one of them. My brain tends to latch on to what I hear.) I find that, if I'm playing a disc I've played several times before, I don't actually hear the music. My brain recognizes the input and discards it as uninteresting.
I prefer the in-the-ear speaker "buds" for this, since it's more effective at blocking out all other sounds.
On some games, e.g. Civ 3 and Wizardry 8, I've experienced repeatable strangeness. Sounds that are louder than others, usually in a fairly jarring way, or the occasional loud click. Not a problem for most games, but very apparent when it does happen.
I initially wasn't going to use onboard audio, but my VIA motherboard and my SB Audigy didn't get along (locked up tight in just about any game after a couple of minutes).
I've had some weirdness with driver updates as well, but compared to the 3.5 tons of junk that Creative likes to install on your machine -- including control panels that don't seem to want to go away, ever -- I can't really complain about brain-damaged driver installs coming through Windows Update.
One of my other machines, an Iwill mini-itx box, actually has left and right reversed on the front panel jack, but that seems to be a matter of on-board cabling rather than a matter of software or hardware.
Planetfall was not Infocom's most difficult game, but it was one of the most affecting.
Specifically, the part where your annoying robot friend Floyd comes stumbling out, mangled, and dies in your arms, having sacrificed himself to help you.
If you played the game, you understand. Most of the text of that sequence appeared on the front cover of an issue of "Softline" magazine.
The format was available from Kodak, known as "CD-PROM", until it was discontinued about four months ago.
The notice of its discontinuation can be found at kodak.com.
The ability to mix recordable and non-recordable data is built into the Orange Book standard. The ODC claim to cleverness (which you can see in the press release) is solely in their manufacturing technology.
With something like Total Recorder, you can play the sound through a "fake" Windows sound driver. Instead of playing sound through the speakers, it puts a pure digital version on the hard drive.
So, unless their DRM software damages the music on the way out, or provides its own set of sound drivers for every known card, you get a clean copy without analog fuzz.
One thing that could screw this up slightly is if they manage to embed your personal key in the output stream as a watermark. If they did that, they could trace ownership back. Of course, if you registered with fake info, it won't do Sony any good anyway.
It's not a "top 67" list, it's just the list of the 67 messages that got through that day. I wanted people to be able to see a sample of what I was getting. (It's all well and good to claim a message is "in an Asian language", but if you haven't seen one before you might not know the difference between it and, say, the message in Russian in the same list.)
I think I see the confusion now. Most of the spam I get is English or another "European" language. This is not surprising, since most (about 2/3rds by the numbers on the page) of the spam is coming from places other than Asia. Of course, sometimes I get spam in Korean from sites in Germany or elsewhere.
To summarize:
- A significant percentage of my spam comes from Asia, but the majority does not.
- Of the spam coming from Asia, only a small percentage is in English. This runs counter to the "97% is American spammers using relays" argument some have presented.
Somebody else asked me whether China or Korea is the source of most of the spam. A quick glance at the block log suggests that most of it is coming from Korea. Curiously, a *lot* of spam, coming from many different sources, refers to URLs hosted by Chinese ISPs. I find that a lot of my URL-complaint messages on SpamCop are going to.cn addresses, for things like "www.generaledu.com" that don't sound Chinese or have anything but English on them. Not really relevant to mail blocking, but sort of interesting nonetheless.
Actually, if you look at the statistics, 79% of the messages the caused me to add an entry to the block list were in an Asian language.
At this moment, the block list has 135 entries, of which 101 were added because of an Asian-language spam. The remaining 34 were almost all in English (one was in French). By that figure, we're down to 75% Asian, which is still terribly high.
Of course, I may not be typical, given that my e-mail address has appeared on sites hosted in different countries. Still, I can't accept the premise that all these sites in Korea are victims. Whether they're trying to spam Americans or just trying to spam at home, they're still sending out lots of spam, and I've seen precious little done to stop them over the course of many months.
In some cases it's not about speed so much as about latency. If you have interrupts that must be serviced within a specific period of time, waiting for a user-mode process to wake up can be problematic.
With the right set of kernel tweaks it can work, but if you're working with (say) an MPEG playback chip that's throwing interrupts constantly and requires lots of hand-holding, putting things into user mode can be a real problem.
You also end up potentially exposing lots of registers to other user-mode processes, since you have to map the full set into user space. For some products this can pose a problem.
Now I know why half the spam in my mailbox is related to kornet.net. It appears the Koreans have taken it upon themselves to compete head-to-head in the great international spam delivery market.
Dropping all of Korea and China off the edge of the e-mail world is sounding better and better. It's bad enough that they're (probably inadvertently) relaying US spam through, but now I'm getting large piles of spam in languages I can't even recognize.
I guess the fact that you don't scroll horizontally on WebTV (1996) eluded the marketing folks at Opera. This reformat-the-page stuff has been happening for years.
The Danger HipTop also has the same feature, and it's even in a cell phone. Oddly enough, two out of three founders were early WebTV employees.
We like to laugh about patenting fire and the wheel, but let's face it: those wacky marketing types can reinvent stuff ten times faster than the USPTO could ever hope to.
Slashdot Mirror
Missionforce bad, but Cyberstorm 2: Corporate Wars was terrible.
"Plan to throw the first one away."
-- Fred Brooks, _The Mythical Man-Month_
It is, of course, important to understand the reasoning behind the quote. The book, while terribly dated, is still worth reading.
Many individuals and news organizations missed out on the leading edge of "blogging" and have been struggling to catch up. Somebody told them that "podcasting" was the Next Big Thing, and they created their own hype whirlwind.
But hey, if you can have WebTV For Dummies, why not have an entire book about podcasting?
What we need to do now is combine fad buzzwords with fad law-breaking. Henceforth all podcasts must be distributed on p2p networks. If we can figure out how get them inappropriate ESRB ratings we'll trendily offend absolutely everyone.
Now we Americans will have to compete against Europeans with technology instead of lawyers.
So close! We almost had them!
The "DDOS goons" had a particular target and a particular motivation. Your basic goon will go after "kewl" sites, like whitehouse.gov or yahoo.com. These goons read groklaw, and are passionate about it.
I'm not saying they're not goons. I'm saying they're pro-Linux goons. Your comment about "dominant characteristics" is a fair point though.
What I get from Dvorak's article is that a handful of people are making the rest of the Linux community look bad. The responses I've seen on forums immediately condemn Dvorak -- occasionally missing his attempts at irony -- without stopping to consider whether he has a point. This is exactly the sort of fanaticism he's pointing at.
I wrote:
"Some over-enthusiastic Linux activists have broken the law".
You wrote:
"you're tarring all opponents of what O'Gara has done".
Please *read* what I write before commenting.
Initiating DDOS attacks against Sys-Con is "nutty" and indicative of "mob rule". There's nothing rational or reasonable about criminal activity.
His indictment of the Linux Community isn't really fair, but neither is pretending that all is well and Dvorak is viewing a hurricane in a teacup.
To the best of my knowledge, O'Gara has broken ethical and moral standards, but not the law. Some over-enthusiastic Linux activists have broken the law. It's getting hard to find the high ground around here.
If you roll a 20-sided die 10,000 times, a fair die will show each number roughly the same number of times.
It is *possible* that you could roll, say, 5 or 6 every time, but it is *improbable* unless you're biasing your roll or you have a weighted die.
With a sufficient number of iterations, then, one would expect each song in iTunes to be played roughly the same number of times. There will be short-term biases and some variability, but for a good pseudo-random number generator you expect a flat distribution.
What I'm seeing is significantly skewed results that tend to favor songs with higher ratings. The number of iterations is well under 10,000, but may be high enough to be statistically significant.
If the iPod Shuffle uses the same algorithm, the non-random skew is more than a human desire to find patterns, but less than the sinister marketing that some people have suggested. (Which doesn't make much sense anyway, since you already own the music.)
iTunes keeps track of the number of times a song has been played. I put all of my music in, and haven't added a whole lot over the last several months. I usually play a random shuffle of about 250 songs while I work.
You would expect, from a truly random sampling, that all songs would be played roughly the same number of times. However, the play counters in iTunes show that some songs are played 2-3x as often as others.
There does not appear to be any sort of favoritism with respect to particular bands or albums. There does appear to be some correlation with the "my ratings" column. Most of the less-frequently played songs are at 3 stars, while most of the more-frequently played songs are at 4 stars.
(My random shuffle is an automatic playlist generated from all songs rated at 3 stars or higher.)
I suspected that there were other kinds of bias in the iTunes random shuffle, but I convinced myself otherwise. For example, if I started to play a song by Rush, and then tapped the "shuffle" button twice to re-shuffle, it always seemed to have another Rush song in the top 5. After a couple of quick experiments I convinced myself that I just had a lucky streak.
The USA has successfully crippled Australian competition before it really got serious.
Now if we could just get India to adopt similar provisions we could stop them dead in their tracks by patenting "offshoring".
The SoBig.F virus message was much larger than a "we found a virus" letter, because it included a copy of the virus itself. The number of messages bouncing around may have doubled, but the total bandwidth required did not.
However, as the recipient of 300+ messages a day, I for one would be delighted if the virus scanners had an option to Just Shut Up when they find a specific virus. While I don't believe the scanners aggravated the problem -- indeed, by reducing its transmission, they certainly improved matters -- the bogus reject messages were a highly visible and easily avoidable irritant.
FYI... In June 2003 Mitsui Advanced Media was purchased from Mitsui Chemicals by Computer Support Italcard (CSI) of Italy to form MAM-A, Inc.
I'm also a big fan of Mitusi Gold discs. Consumer demand is for incredibly cheap media, which is what they're now getting, with the expected results. The infamous CD-R-eating fungus didn't seem to like to eat "gold" discs, which was another item in its favor for people in tropical climates.
Mitsui, Kodak, Taiyo, Yuden, and TDK were the better ones. (HP, Philips, Sony, Yamaha, and Fuji were usually one of those brands.) Kodak no longer manufactures discs.
Does it matter? Yes. Is slower always better? No.
Rather than re-hash this, please see:
In the CD-Recordable FAQ.Quick summary: higher speeds require a different "write strategy" than slower speeds. Different media formulations are optimized for a particular write strategy, so writing slower than the optimal speed can actually produce inferior results.
The choice of media and recording hardware has to be taken into consideration. In any event, this has relatively little to do with disc deterioration. A disc that's better to begin with won't show the effects of physical deterioration as soon, but if the top lacquer coat isn't as close to air-tight as materials allow, it doesn't matter how you write the disc.
Many people like to recommend exercise, but I've found that a trip to the gym just leaves me tired. Not everyone finds it a "pick-me-up" activity.
My first semester in college, I had a full load of classes (math, physics, CS) and was on the lightweight crew team. Lightweight crew requires getting up at 5:20am and doing a fairly inhuman amount of exercise, plus getting together again every day at about 4pm to something equally unpleasant, plus you were expected to lift weights on your own (which, being one of the tallest and one of the lightest, I desperately needed).
Unfortunately, while I was really into my CS class, I didn't enjoy math (vector differential calculus) or physics. I would stare at my textbook for hours, busily resenting the fact that I had to deal with it. I was often tired and pressed for time because of my extracurricular activities, and I ended up doing very well in CS and somewhat poorly in everything else.
The next semester I went into "bad attitude" mode. I dropped crew, took some empty units to fill out my schedule, and generally compensated for my previous semester by setting out to accomplish as little as possible. I again did exceptionally well in CS, and exceptionally poorly in math and physics.
At the start of the next year, being faced with the loss of a scholarship because of my sub-3.0 GPA, I got focused and did better.
What it comes down to:
- You will be more focused and do better on things you enjoy doing. Sadly, life doesn't let us do just the things we enjoy. However...
- Attitude is half the battle. Not a "seven habits" or "daily affirmations" outlook on life attitude, but your attitude toward the specific subjects you're dealing with. Find a way to make it interesting. Figure out why your professors and TAs decided to make it their life's work. Relate your math or physics to writing video games, or something else that interests you.
- If *nothing* interests you, consider whether you're in the right field of study.
Something I've found that helps me: listen to music, but do it wearing headphones. Play music you've heard many times, and that is fairly "loud". The idea is to neutralize audible input. By playing (say) a Rush compilation disc that I've heard dozens of times, I find that I can better focus in on what I'm doing because my ears don't pick up stuff that distracts me. (Some people can work with a TV or radio on nearby; I'm not one of them. My brain tends to latch on to what I hear.) I find that, if I'm playing a disc I've played several times before, I don't actually hear the music. My brain recognizes the input and discards it as uninteresting.
I prefer the in-the-ear speaker "buds" for this, since it's more effective at blocking out all other sounds.
There's a "correctness hit" too.
On some games, e.g. Civ 3 and Wizardry 8, I've experienced repeatable strangeness. Sounds that are louder than others, usually in a fairly jarring way, or the occasional loud click. Not a problem for most games, but very apparent when it does happen.
I initially wasn't going to use onboard audio, but my VIA motherboard and my SB Audigy didn't get along (locked up tight in just about any game after a couple of minutes).
I've had some weirdness with driver updates as well, but compared to the 3.5 tons of junk that Creative likes to install on your machine -- including control panels that don't seem to want to go away, ever -- I can't really complain about brain-damaged driver installs coming through Windows Update.
One of my other machines, an Iwill mini-itx box, actually has left and right reversed on the front panel jack, but that seems to be a matter of on-board cabling rather than a matter of software or hardware.
Planetfall was not Infocom's most difficult game, but it was one of the most affecting.
Specifically, the part where your annoying robot friend Floyd comes stumbling out, mangled, and dies in your arms, having sacrificed himself to help you.
If you played the game, you understand. Most of the text of that sequence appeared on the front cover of an issue of "Softline" magazine.
The notice of its discontinuation can be found at kodak.com.
The ability to mix recordable and non-recordable data is built into the Orange Book standard. The ODC claim to cleverness (which you can see in the press release) is solely in their manufacturing technology.
It's easier than that.
With something like Total Recorder, you can play the sound through a "fake" Windows sound driver. Instead of playing sound through the speakers, it puts a pure digital version on the hard drive.
So, unless their DRM software damages the music on the way out, or provides its own set of sound drivers for every known card, you get a clean copy without analog fuzz.
One thing that could screw this up slightly is if they manage to embed your personal key in the output stream as a watermark. If they did that, they could trace ownership back. Of course, if you registered with fake info, it won't do Sony any good anyway.
It isn't a "copyright method", it's a copy protection method.
All CDs and CD-ROMs are copyrighted by virtue of their creation. Only a few are copy protected. How we ended up with this skewed verbage is beyond me.
It's not a "top 67" list, it's just the list of the 67 messages that got through that day. I wanted people to be able to see a sample of what I was getting. (It's all well and good to claim a message is "in an Asian language", but if you haven't seen one before you might not know the difference between it and, say, the message in Russian in the same list.)
.cn addresses, for things like "www.generaledu.com" that don't sound Chinese or have anything but English on them. Not really relevant to mail blocking, but sort of interesting nonetheless.
I think I see the confusion now. Most of the spam I get is English or another "European" language. This is not surprising, since most (about 2/3rds by the numbers on the page) of the spam is coming from places other than Asia. Of course, sometimes I get spam in Korean from sites in Germany or elsewhere.
To summarize:
- A significant percentage of my spam comes from Asia, but the majority does not.
- Of the spam coming from Asia, only a small percentage is in English. This runs counter to the "97% is American spammers using relays" argument some have presented.
Somebody else asked me whether China or Korea is the source of most of the spam. A quick glance at the block log suggests that most of it is coming from Korea. Curiously, a *lot* of spam, coming from many different sources, refers to URLs hosted by Chinese ISPs. I find that a lot of my URL-complaint messages on SpamCop are going to
Actually, if you look at the statistics, 79% of the messages the caused me to add an entry to the block list were in an Asian language.
At this moment, the block list has 135 entries, of which 101 were added because of an Asian-language spam. The remaining 34 were almost all in English (one was in French). By that figure, we're down to 75% Asian, which is still terribly high.
Of course, I may not be typical, given that my e-mail address has appeared on sites hosted in different countries. Still, I can't accept the premise that all these sites in Korea are victims. Whether they're trying to spam Americans or just trying to spam at home, they're still sending out lots of spam, and I've seen precious little done to stop them over the course of many months.
Sometimes she comes out after rubbing around her eyes with charcoal. Not quite sure what that's all about.
In some cases it's not about speed so much as about latency. If you have interrupts that must be serviced within a specific period of time, waiting for a user-mode process to wake up can be problematic.
With the right set of kernel tweaks it can work, but if you're working with (say) an MPEG playback chip that's throwing interrupts constantly and requires lots of hand-holding, putting things into user mode can be a real problem.
You also end up potentially exposing lots of registers to other user-mode processes, since you have to map the full set into user space. For some products this can pose a problem.
Now I know why half the spam in my mailbox is related to kornet.net. It appears the Koreans have taken it upon themselves to compete head-to-head in the great international spam delivery market.
Dropping all of Korea and China off the edge of the e-mail world is sounding better and better. It's bad enough that they're (probably inadvertently) relaying US spam through, but now I'm getting large piles of spam in languages I can't even recognize.
I guess the fact that you don't scroll horizontally on WebTV (1996) eluded the marketing folks at Opera. This reformat-the-page stuff has been happening for years.
The Danger HipTop also has the same feature, and it's even in a cell phone. Oddly enough, two out of three founders were early WebTV employees.
We like to laugh about patenting fire and the wheel, but let's face it: those wacky marketing types can reinvent stuff ten times faster than the USPTO could ever hope to.