...until someone can explain to me the subtleties of massively complex systems with feedback...
I believe there's a name for that: chaos theory. Instead of trying to solve the massive problems, you observe and try to model the step above. Massively complex system often stabilise on a bunch of 'solutions' called strange attractors, even if some of their parameters or initial conditions are poorly known. For more info, see Poincarré, Julia, Mandelbrot and more generally fractals.
Hmmm, everyone sends html mail now (except me), so I fail to see how that would help. As for the 'not in address book' part, a lot of businesses need to receive messages from strangers (although using a web form can solve that).
The workings of Adsense are still very mysterious. I subscribed early this year after several years of deliberation (I hate advertisement). The first two months I raked 800$/mo. Since then it's been around 300$/mo. The traffic always stayed the same (the site is 10 years old). WHere does the difference come from ? They provide adsense subscribers with analysis tools, but you can go into a case by case basis, so all you got are global stats. I think overall it's a good system, but very mysterious, which is not good. Hmmm, I'm contradicting myself here...
Well yes, for someone who is inherently violent, such as yourself, a BB gun might be something they shouldn't be allowed to handle. Thanks for being the reason cops need to exist. Thanks a fucking lot.
Well, if that isn't clear enough, I wanted to but I didn't. And I don't need a religion to tell me how to behave (since reading about the history of buddhism I don't buy into the 'peaceful religion' meme anymore). I still can't think of a worse way to educate a kid than to tell him it's OK to shoot whatever he wants.
Your posts are usually more insightful and a lot more entertaining, even though I knew I'd get flamed or moderated into oblivion.
During one of my first trip to the US I was absolutely astounded by the existence of BB guns. Almost as dangerous as a real one and for...kids ?!? The neighbor's kid (then 7 year old) would wander around without supervision shooting everything that moved: frogs, birds, large insects... I would have kicked the shit out of him when I first saw that if it was not for the fear of the parents, lawsuits and such crap (to say nothing of the fear of being shot myself). Absolutely insane. I learned a year later that he shot one of his friends in the eye. I guess that's how you build up a card carrying NRA member.
Now it's been proven that when a community gets easy access to porn, the violence towards women tends to decrease. I wonder if the same kind of impact could be studied about pedophilia. Maybe there are some who are content with their stash of hentai who could otherwise turn frustrated and dangerous. Who knows ? Free hentai for every potential child abuser ?!?
"I love children and would like to have as many as possible. My cell-mate, on the other hand, robbed a convenience store."
"I'm a children's book illustrator. I don't do it for a living, though -- it's just a hobby. On weekends, I go down to the library with a Magic Marker and draw filthy pictures in the margins." -- Anthony Myers.
Am I the only one annoyed that some advancements can only be done 'through' the military ? I mean, if it's a medical advance, why should it be on a military budget ? The military is here to kill people. Give the money directly to a medical research institution instead. Yeah, I know Darpa has done great civilian advances, the internet, yadada. But why ?
There are plenty of international weapons manufacturers that would love to sell to the American public, and getting those products across the largely unprotected/unwatched US borders would probably be trivial
Correct, but for now it's more like the reverse. Most of the weapons found in Europe come from the US, from perfectly legit manufacturers, but imported illegaly. A couple years ago there was a UN decision to act on this kind of illegal imports (IIRC it would punish the manufacturer). It didn't work out because ONE country voted against it. Guess which one...
They should have wondered about this a long time ago, before there were weapons all over the country, no ?
And BTW, for those who think that the ammendments are untouchables, here are the answers to the question: "Do the US constitution amendments still matter?":
1. Sort of 2. Sort of 3. Yes 4. Nope 5. Nope 6. Sorry, no 7. Not sure 8. No 9. Not sure 10. Technically yes.
Never heard of Gold Class while I was in the US. Interesting. If you want to enjoy a beer while watching a movie, there are many european countries where you can have one.
Reminds me of another great movie theatre: in Wanaka, New Zealand, they have this strange setup where you can sit on recliners, piles of cushions, even a half-car inside the theatre to watch the movie. And then for the halfway movie break they bring you freshly baked cookies. And they have a real bar as well.
Good summary. I worked at Nasa in a lab doing mostly data analysis a long time ago, and all the system administration at the time was handled by student (full time in summer, part time the rest of the year). While many of those are dedicated and talented, it's an understatement to say that experience was lacking. Heck, I was 16 at the time ! Then again it was a long time ago in a non-mission critical lab, so things are different. But the reason was the same: funding, or rather, lack of it.
Another thing I noticed is that most of the full time researchers were old, dating back to the Apolo days. Many of them had stayed through the starving years after that but with little to no new blood pouring in. So you had basically two populations: old researchers whose main job was to secure funding for the next year, and students on temp jobs. Not the best situation. Now most of those guys must have retired, so I don't know how the situation has changed.
Some might say: "go to the live concert for the real sound", but I remember a few concerts where the sound was so bad (think swirling toilet bowl) that people were cringing (yeah, Pixies, I'm looking at you).
I did my part for the construction of Concordia station, up on the high Antarctic plateau. About 5 years of thinking and development followed by 4 summers of construction in terrible conditions. My part was to survive the first winterover there, and it wasn't that easy with -80C temperatures ! And year certainly out of the ordinary, now where do I sign up for Mars ?!?
I've been aware of this 'concrete pyramid' theory for years, but one still nags me. The pharao wanted to be encased for all eternity and at the time they were already aware of the thomb robbers. So instead of building fake chambers and maze entrance, why didn't they just pour concrete through the entire entrance corridor ? That would have solved the problem.
Your comment was probably intended as funny, but if not, display depends on your settings. On mine, the front page wsa Vista, while the kernel news was hidden on the Linux page.
I'm gonna go read that list, but I won't keep my hopes too high. I went from Win2k to XP this year only as there were only two new features that I found moderately useful: user switch without having to log off (which I rarely use since there are more computers than people in my house) and the ability to display thumbnails while in a search window. Period.
I've always disliked having a light shone in my face all day, which is exactly what a monitor amounts to. It creates the light used for display; on the other hand a sheet of paper just reflects ambient light and is thus much nicer on the eyes (same overall brightness than ambient, same color temperature, etc). I've been following all this epaper stuff for a long time, the sony ebook reader now sold and other advances in the field. What is still missing from most of those is color.
As soon as there's a discernable pattern, somebody's going to exploit that pattern in order to make more money, and as soon as that happens, the original pattern gets interrupted, thus stabilizing the marketplace
Reminds me of a Robert Forward book about (limited) time travel, where the anouncement of time travel is enough to instantly stabilize the market, as any possible pattern can then be used for gain, they all disappear.
I read a paper in computational theory that went more or less like this. They proved via lambda calculus (the base maths of computational theory) that any sufficiently complex system needs a 'cleanup function'. In practical computer terms, it's the infamous garbage disposal process where lost pointers are dropped, unused pages are flushed from memory, seldom used memory commited to long term storage (mem to cache, cache to disk, disk to tape, etc...), data reorganised (in databases) or compressed, etc... During this period few, if any, real computing activity can continue; this translates as "if you don't reboot regularly, your computer will crash or you need a good garbage disposal process which will slow down your system for a while".
Now if you believe (like many) that the brain is no more than a big computing unit, then it must abides by those rules and the sleep is nothing else than the physical manifestation of 'garbage disposal'. Keep it up for too long and it will... crash.
I've been following this subject for years and also wrote my thoughts on the subject. My conclusion is the same: the meta keywords MUST be kept inside the EXIF fields of the images, alternatively in the path/filename info.
The hitch ? No program can handle them properly: the programs that can put the keywords in the EXIF are bugged, crash often (taking the entire Windows Explorer with them, requiring a reboot in XP), have shitty UIR, overwrite other EXIF fields, drop color profiles or recompress the JPEG data (absolute no-no); the programs that should read the fields to extract the content for quick search are just too slow or re-import it into complex systems. I want to keep the two things SEPARATE, and for good reasons.
Also known as 'Freshette', sold as a medical device but often used by female mountain climbers. Take a look at the pic of my wife and her friends using one... Yeah, who'd had thought that a group pissing pic could be relevant to a/. discussion...
[...] gross hypocrisy [...] The same can be said of prostitution [...]
Interestingly, in the country where I currently live, prostitution is officially illegal, and prosecuted as such, but there is a tax category for prostitutes so they can pay their taxes like any law-abiding tax-payer. How's that for hypocrisy ? The good thing is that there is also a (IMO very good) law that prohibits government agencies to cross-correlate their files, so in this case the vice squad is not allowed to ask the tax department for a list of their tax paying prostitutes.
One thing I've noticed when a drive starts crapping out, is that the controller is very important in getting the data off the drive. Case in point: this morning I had a 400Gb drive start whirring loudly, then the server would grind to a halt and go forward for only one second every 30 seconds, although no access was being done on that drive. Moving the drive to a USB enclosure was a failure ("new hardware is connected - wait, no, hardware just disconnected"). And then I tried a PCI controller board. Copied 400Gb in one pass, not a hitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, everyone sends html mail now (except me), so I fail to see how that would help. As for the 'not in address book' part, a lot of businesses need to receive messages from strangers (although using a web form can solve that).
The workings of Adsense are still very mysterious. I subscribed early this year after several years of deliberation (I hate advertisement). The first two months I raked 800$/mo. Since then it's been around 300$/mo. The traffic always stayed the same (the site is 10 years old). WHere does the difference come from ? They provide adsense subscribers with analysis tools, but you can go into a case by case basis, so all you got are global stats. I think overall it's a good system, but very mysterious, which is not good. Hmmm, I'm contradicting myself here...
Your posts are usually more insightful and a lot more entertaining, even though I knew I'd get flamed or moderated into oblivion.
During one of my first trip to the US I was absolutely astounded by the existence of BB guns. Almost as dangerous as a real one and for...kids ?!? The neighbor's kid (then 7 year old) would wander around without supervision shooting everything that moved: frogs, birds, large insects... I would have kicked the shit out of him when I first saw that if it was not for the fear of the parents, lawsuits and such crap (to say nothing of the fear of being shot myself). Absolutely insane. I learned a year later that he shot one of his friends in the eye. I guess that's how you build up a card carrying NRA member.
Three slashdot headlines in a row, one about what the internet can be (simple and efficient and useful and not greedy), what the internet may become (whatever venture capitalists may spare on 'out-there' ideas) and what consultants think it should be (who cares)... The only headline missing is about the latest google news.
Am I the only one annoyed that some advancements can only be done 'through' the military ? I mean, if it's a medical advance, why should it be on a military budget ? The military is here to kill people. Give the money directly to a medical research institution instead. Yeah, I know Darpa has done great civilian advances, the internet, yadada. But why ?
Never heard of Gold Class while I was in the US. Interesting. If you want to enjoy a beer while watching a movie, there are many european countries where you can have one. Reminds me of another great movie theatre: in Wanaka, New Zealand, they have this strange setup where you can sit on recliners, piles of cushions, even a half-car inside the theatre to watch the movie. And then for the halfway movie break they bring you freshly baked cookies. And they have a real bar as well.
Good summary. I worked at Nasa in a lab doing mostly data analysis a long time ago, and all the system administration at the time was handled by student (full time in summer, part time the rest of the year). While many of those are dedicated and talented, it's an understatement to say that experience was lacking. Heck, I was 16 at the time ! Then again it was a long time ago in a non-mission critical lab, so things are different. But the reason was the same: funding, or rather, lack of it. Another thing I noticed is that most of the full time researchers were old, dating back to the Apolo days. Many of them had stayed through the starving years after that but with little to no new blood pouring in. So you had basically two populations: old researchers whose main job was to secure funding for the next year, and students on temp jobs. Not the best situation. Now most of those guys must have retired, so I don't know how the situation has changed.
Some might say: "go to the live concert for the real sound", but I remember a few concerts where the sound was so bad (think swirling toilet bowl) that people were cringing (yeah, Pixies, I'm looking at you).
I did my part for the construction of Concordia station, up on the high Antarctic plateau. About 5 years of thinking and development followed by 4 summers of construction in terrible conditions. My part was to survive the first winterover there, and it wasn't that easy with -80C temperatures ! And year certainly out of the ordinary, now where do I sign up for Mars ?!?
I've been aware of this 'concrete pyramid' theory for years, but one still nags me. The pharao wanted to be encased for all eternity and at the time they were already aware of the thomb robbers. So instead of building fake chambers and maze entrance, why didn't they just pour concrete through the entire entrance corridor ? That would have solved the problem.
Your comment was probably intended as funny, but if not, display depends on your settings. On mine, the front page wsa Vista, while the kernel news was hidden on the Linux page.
I'm gonna go read that list, but I won't keep my hopes too high. I went from Win2k to XP this year only as there were only two new features that I found moderately useful: user switch without having to log off (which I rarely use since there are more computers than people in my house) and the ability to display thumbnails while in a search window. Period.
I've always disliked having a light shone in my face all day, which is exactly what a monitor amounts to. It creates the light used for display; on the other hand a sheet of paper just reflects ambient light and is thus much nicer on the eyes (same overall brightness than ambient, same color temperature, etc). I've been following all this epaper stuff for a long time, the sony ebook reader now sold and other advances in the field. What is still missing from most of those is color.
Now if you believe (like many) that the brain is no more than a big computing unit, then it must abides by those rules and the sleep is nothing else than the physical manifestation of 'garbage disposal'. Keep it up for too long and it will... crash.
I've been following this subject for years and also wrote my thoughts on the subject. My conclusion is the same: the meta keywords MUST be kept inside the EXIF fields of the images, alternatively in the path/filename info.
The hitch ? No program can handle them properly: the programs that can put the keywords in the EXIF are bugged, crash often (taking the entire Windows Explorer with them, requiring a reboot in XP), have shitty UIR, overwrite other EXIF fields, drop color profiles or recompress the JPEG data (absolute no-no); the programs that should read the fields to extract the content for quick search are just too slow or re-import it into complex systems. I want to keep the two things SEPARATE, and for good reasons.
Also known as 'Freshette', sold as a medical device but often used by female mountain climbers. Take a look at the pic of my wife and her friends using one... Yeah, who'd had thought that a group pissing pic could be relevant to a /. discussion...
One thing I've noticed when a drive starts crapping out, is that the controller is very important in getting the data off the drive. Case in point: this morning I had a 400Gb drive start whirring loudly, then the server would grind to a halt and go forward for only one second every 30 seconds, although no access was being done on that drive. Moving the drive to a USB enclosure was a failure ("new hardware is connected - wait, no, hardware just disconnected"). And then I tried a PCI controller board. Copied 400Gb in one pass, not a hitch.