I remember when they launched the web based teletext. The pages were basically screen captures. Made me laugh pretty hard.
A few years later I worked on a project with FBC and figured out why. The technology behind the teletext service is some proprietary garbage that makes it nearly impossible to transfer the data in any other format.
They have since launched an interface on the website that displays the teletext service in text only though.
I own an iRiver SlimX 350 CD based mp3 player, which has the same filetree based song list.
Since I only play the whole CD whenever I use the unit, I personally don't mind that.
However, if I did want to filter what songs I played based on artist, what I would probably do was to organize the files I transfer to the player in a manner that would help me do that. I sort of do that already.
I organize the songs into directories as follows:
Artist1
Album1
Album2 Artist2
Album1
Album2
This way I can always play a single album, or all songs by any artist, if I wish to.
Songs on compilation albums won't get "indexed" under the particular artist, of course.
If you only play music that you burn from your own CDs, this method is very easy to do by simply tweaking your ripping software settings a little bit. Every one of them can rip music into that sort of a directory structure.
If you download (pirated) music from the Internet, then you're going to have to do a lot of manual organizing though. Very annoying, but in the end, I think it's really worth it (there're other benefits to organizing your music this way as well).
"It seems like bluffing wouldn't be very useful against an opponent who paid attention only to probabilities."
That's very true. That's why bluffing is very difficult against low level amateur players [1], and is generally discouraged in a low stakes game, unless you KNOW it's going to work.
You also never bluff to a loose player.
I imagine playing against a "dumb" bot would eliminate bluffing from the game almost entirely.
1. low level amateur players either think they have the better hand no matter what, if they're in the game, and will call the bluff. Or more often they will always call no matter what, because they already committed to the pot the first time they put money in it.
Playing the odds in a poker table will only beat low level poker players. That's why the "rules" for an amateur or a low stakes game are very different from a pro or high stakes game.
You're completely discounting the role of betting, bluffing and player reputation in a game of poker.
In BlackJack you always play against the bank (i.e. the casino). In Poker you always play against other players, and the house (i.e. the casino) gets a cut of every pot.
A BlackJack bot, therefore, would be really, really bad for the casinos, but a poker bot would really hurt the other players the most, and the casino only if the bots manage to drive the human players away from the casino.
Costs are not the only measure of success of municipal (or utility) broadband service.
Quality of service, access to broadband services in the first place and economic development on their own terms are some of the reasons why municipalities are doing broadband access themselves.
Where do you go when the only broadband provider in town is the one you're walking away from?
That was exactly what the situation was in Truckee, and probably in most other rural towns in America. For heaven's sake, you can't even get real competition in New York City for broadband access, because the incoming cable is owned by a single company who will not share access. It's either the cable company who wired the building or crappy DSL. Forget about satellite, cause you can't put up satellite dishes on the building due to city code and/or building rules.
"However it is your responsibility to make sure your car does not fall apart on the road, so you hire people to take care of it. Same thing should be done with home pc's."
But that's exactly what the end users did, in most cases.
They bought the computer from a reputable company who equipped the computer with the operating system without proper safeguards in place.
How many who drive cars know how to fix it? I certainly don't, nor do I have any desire to learn to fix my car.
It's not the end users' fault the majority of home computers are by default magnets for virii, trojans, worms and spyware.
Certain OS manufacturer is at fault here, as well as the Dells and Gateways of the world, who insist on selling zombie networks when solutions to prevent them from occurring have been in place for quite a while.
The different Jakarta and/or Apache projects are such a valuable resource I can't even begin to evaluate the amount of time and money I've saved over the years using them.
Most of the applications I'm maintaining on a daily basis use multiple Jakarta Commons components and run on Tomcat. The quality of support from the community far exceeds the quality of support we get for most of our commercial components / products.
The site/service/whatnot could just as well defined the "neighborhood" to any interest, event or location, and the site would've been exponentially more interesting.
Combine that with the ability to form sub-communities and you could get the real interesting stuff like:
"started MIT 1980, born in Brooklyn, NY and likes to paint abstract paintings"
That's just an example, the sub-community could be anything really.
"Yes, the quality of the programmer is most important, but for the very reason that a seasoned programmer will select the best software and tools, which is equally as important. So the question is basically circular in nature."
I don't know where you work, but where I work, I don't get to choose my tools or software freely. I use what's given to me, more or less.
I would argue great developers are great because they make the best of what they have, whatever it is.
"Of course, in your tinfoil hat world. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris personally programmed this database so that it would only exclude blacks who would vote Democrat."
No, they didn't program it, but the information uncovered by Greg Palast suggests that they DID order the company doing the technology work to use a "looser" algorithm in the purging process.
Dude, with all the additional truck stops they had on major New York thruways you'd be better off with flying.
They've set up an impromptu truck stop on southbound I-95 before New York City. It's been there for about 2 - 3 weeks now and creating massive traffic jams. The traffic was already bad, but now instead of a three 2 mile delays, you have one massive 15 mile delay. It's great. Hope they find a lot of terrorists.
Of course, since they're only stopping trucks nothing is preventing a terrorist driving a Escalade packed with explosives right past the damn truck stop all the way to New York. All they're achieving is aggravating the people who have to commute past that truck stop every day.
Yes, I read his book ("The Best Democracy Money Can Buy") on it. Great book, bought copies as gifts to my friends. Don't read the book, if you suffer from high blood pressure, it will make it worse...
The information in the book is not conclusive. It hints that it might've been on purpose, but I certainly did not come out convinced that it was. I'm not a republican or a conservative, btw, quite the opposite.
At the very least there should have been some serious investigation on the issue. Of course there was none, because the whole thing was effectively kept out of the news in the US. The US media really dropped the ball on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Finnish Broadcasting Company has had their teletext service available on their website for years.
I remember when they launched the web based teletext. The pages were basically screen captures. Made me laugh pretty hard.
A few years later I worked on a project with FBC and figured out why. The technology behind the teletext service is some proprietary garbage that makes it nearly impossible to transfer the data in any other format.
They have since launched an interface on the website that displays the teletext service in text only though.
How the hell am I supposed to download anything from them, when I can't even load the registration page in less than 60 seconds.
Business2.0 had an interesting article on an electronic voting machine idea David Chaum has come up with.
Dieblod is taking shortcuts trying to maximize short term profits. Corporate greed at its best.
Two possible reasons:
1. Law enforcement agencies asked to keep it up
2. Hinet Taiwan doesn't give a shit
I'm betting on option #2.
I own an iRiver SlimX 350 CD based mp3 player, which has the same filetree based song list.
Since I only play the whole CD whenever I use the unit, I personally don't mind that.
However, if I did want to filter what songs I played based on artist, what I would probably do was to organize the files I transfer to the player in a manner that would help me do that. I sort of do that already.
I organize the songs into directories as follows:
Artist1
Album1
Album2
Artist2
Album1
Album2
This way I can always play a single album, or all songs by any artist, if I wish to.
Songs on compilation albums won't get "indexed" under the particular artist, of course.
If you only play music that you burn from your own CDs, this method is very easy to do by simply tweaking your ripping software settings a little bit. Every one of them can rip music into that sort of a directory structure.
If you download (pirated) music from the Internet, then you're going to have to do a lot of manual organizing though. Very annoying, but in the end, I think it's really worth it (there're other benefits to organizing your music this way as well).
"It seems like bluffing wouldn't be very useful against an opponent who paid attention only to probabilities."
That's very true. That's why bluffing is very difficult against low level amateur players [1], and is generally discouraged in a low stakes game, unless you KNOW it's going to work.
You also never bluff to a loose player.
I imagine playing against a "dumb" bot would eliminate bluffing from the game almost entirely.
1. low level amateur players either think they have the better hand no matter what, if they're in the game, and will call the bluff. Or more often they will always call no matter what, because they already committed to the pot the first time they put money in it.
Playing the odds in a poker table will only beat low level poker players. That's why the "rules" for an amateur or a low stakes game are very different from a pro or high stakes game.
You're completely discounting the role of betting, bluffing and player reputation in a game of poker.
Did you by any chance write the ads where buying pot funded terrorists?
"But then again if you think about it... As it stands poker is still a game of chance."
I think I would like to play against you.
In BlackJack you always play against the bank (i.e. the casino). In Poker you always play against other players, and the house (i.e. the casino) gets a cut of every pot.
A BlackJack bot, therefore, would be really, really bad for the casinos, but a poker bot would really hurt the other players the most, and the casino only if the bots manage to drive the human players away from the casino.
Something like:
:)
SELECT * FROM storage WHERE path = '/home/gorbachev/.cshrc'
Brown University got $100M today. Bill's cheap! :)
Costs are not the only measure of success of municipal (or utility) broadband service.
Quality of service, access to broadband services in the first place and economic development on their own terms are some of the reasons why municipalities are doing broadband access themselves.
Where do you go when the only broadband provider in town is the one you're walking away from?
That was exactly what the situation was in Truckee, and probably in most other rural towns in America. For heaven's sake, you can't even get real competition in New York City for broadband access, because the incoming cable is owned by a single company who will not share access. It's either the cable company who wired the building or crappy DSL. Forget about satellite, cause you can't put up satellite dishes on the building due to city code and/or building rules.
"However it is your responsibility to make sure your car does not fall apart on the road, so you hire people to take care of it. Same thing should be done with home pc's."
But that's exactly what the end users did, in most cases.
They bought the computer from a reputable company who equipped the computer with the operating system without proper safeguards in place.
"These people have machines that THEY BROKE."
No they don't.
They have machines that were delivered without adequate safeguards, and the criminals broke them.
How many who drive cars know how to fix it? I certainly don't, nor do I have any desire to learn to fix my car.
It's not the end users' fault the majority of home computers are by default magnets for virii, trojans, worms and spyware.
Certain OS manufacturer is at fault here, as well as the Dells and Gateways of the world, who insist on selling zombie networks when solutions to prevent them from occurring have been in place for quite a while.
The different Jakarta and/or Apache projects are such a valuable resource I can't even begin to evaluate the amount of time and money I've saved over the years using them.
Most of the applications I'm maintaining on a daily basis use multiple Jakarta Commons components and run on Tomcat. The quality of support from the community far exceeds the quality of support we get for most of our commercial components / products.
The site/service/whatnot could just as well defined the "neighborhood" to any interest, event or location, and the site would've been exponentially more interesting.
Combine that with the ability to form sub-communities and you could get the real interesting stuff like:
"started MIT 1980, born in Brooklyn, NY and likes to paint abstract paintings"
That's just an example, the sub-community could be anything really.
"Yes, the quality of the programmer is most important, but for the very reason that a seasoned programmer will select the best software and tools, which is equally as important. So the question is basically circular in nature."
I don't know where you work, but where I work, I don't get to choose my tools or software freely. I use what's given to me, more or less.
I would argue great developers are great because they make the best of what they have, whatever it is.
Anyone know which specific spammers are being charged?
"Of course, in your tinfoil hat world. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris personally programmed this database so that it would only exclude blacks who would vote Democrat."
No, they didn't program it, but the information uncovered by Greg Palast suggests that they DID order the company doing the technology work to use a "looser" algorithm in the purging process.
Dude, with all the additional truck stops they had on major New York thruways you'd be better off with flying.
They've set up an impromptu truck stop on southbound I-95 before New York City. It's been there for about 2 - 3 weeks now and creating massive traffic jams. The traffic was already bad, but now instead of a three 2 mile delays, you have one massive 15 mile delay. It's great. Hope they find a lot of terrorists.
Of course, since they're only stopping trucks nothing is preventing a terrorist driving a Escalade packed with explosives right past the damn truck stop all the way to New York. All they're achieving is aggravating the people who have to commute past that truck stop every day.
Yes, I read his book ("The Best Democracy Money Can Buy") on it. Great book, bought copies as gifts to my friends. Don't read the book, if you suffer from high blood pressure, it will make it worse...
The information in the book is not conclusive. It hints that it might've been on purpose, but I certainly did not come out convinced that it was. I'm not a republican or a conservative, btw, quite the opposite.
At the very least there should have been some serious investigation on the issue. Of course there was none, because the whole thing was effectively kept out of the news in the US. The US media really dropped the ball on this one.
Let's just say that even though I think the circumstances are highly suspect, I still doubt republicans would go that far.
If they really did that on purpose, I'm sure it's several felony counts, one per every voter removed that wasn't supposed to.
Too bad we will never find out, since nobody, but the "unpatriotic" are interested in reporting or hearing about it.