I had the same problem with my golden retriever when he was young ($100 USB headsets
When animals chew on inappropriate things, it can mean one or more of several things. [Caveat: my experience is largely with dogs, though I expect some of the insights will apply to felines too.]
o They are teething or have a dental problem. This is normal when they are young (and new teeth are coming in). o They are bored or feel abandoned -- inappropriate chewing, marking, etc. can be a compulsive disorder for dogs, kind of like ADHD. Sometimes it is an experssion of anxiety (particularly separation anxiety) or lack of attention. There are resources available for training this out of dogs (and cats, too, I assume) o In the case of both cats and dogs, it can mean they are pissed off at you, either for leaving them alone, not playing with them, or whatever. o Finally, it may indicate that they are hungry (is your cat *eating* the wire or just chewing it to bits?). If they are eating what they are chewing up, you'll find... evidence... routed though their South end in a couple days...:)
Deterrance and correction. The best course of action is to catch them in the act and correct them, usually with a loud "DON'T!" or something similar. In the case of dogs in particular, this is a good opportunity to establish dominance -- e.g., roll the dog on his back, pin him down (primarily by the neck or mouth), and hold him there until he stops struggling. He'll understand that you're the Alpha and that he's done something unappropriate.
[Note: this is a fight that you absolutely have to win -- if he escapes, catch him; if he tries to get away, restrain him. If you don't win the engagement, the dog will conclude that the's the Alpha and behavior problems will persist. Also, I'm not advocating *hurting* or being violent with your pet. The technique I described mimics, at least for dogs, actual dominant dog behavior, but does not inflict injury or physical pain. It sends the right message with a minimum of violence and a maximum of effectiveness and is a well-accepted training technique.]
One thing that is not effective is correcting the animal after the fact -- dogs and cats have short memories. If he chewed up your cables and you yell at him even 5 minutes later, he won't understand -- most animals don't have the sophisticated reasoning system to connect the correction with the past event. You have to catch him in the act and issue the correction post haste.
One way to ensure that you can catch them in the act is to set up a "trap" -- leave a cable on the floor and keep an eye on the animal. If, or when, he goes after it, nail him then and there. If you do this a couple times, then hopefully he'll get the idea that cables are not food/playthings:)
Another technique is to use a product such as "Sour Apple", which you coat on surfaces (such as cables) that the animal tends to eat. The product is non-toxic, but tastes quite nasty to them (very bitter/sour) and will deter them. Your local pet shop should have a selection of such products. I never had to use them with my dog, but I have friends who have used it with great success.
The behavior problem may also be due to the fact that the animal does not have any or enough appropriate toys to chew on. Go to your pet shop and buy a selection of animal- and breed- (read: size) appropriate toys. If the problem is chewing, then get chew-toys. If the problem is scratching, get scratching posts or similar products.
Introduce the toys to your pet and praise or reward him when he chews on them and plays with them. This will build a positive association between playing with the appropriate toys. Together with strong corrections for playing with inappropriate "toys", the animal should learn which toys are his and which are not.
If the problem is hunger, then "free-feeding" may be a desirable option. Rather than feeding the animal at distinct times of the day, you leave out excess food in his b
I have a friend who's into telescopes. He built a digital capture attachment for his telescope(s) using a logitech webcam (USB). He basically removed the existing lens assembly from the camera and mounted the imager inside/on/about a camera adapter for his telescope. I would imagine that the same technique would work for a microscope, and you could use an NTSC camera instead of a USB camera.
Apparently, it took him a couple trys (trial and error) to get the focal length and everything lined up properly, but it made some nice pictures.
So, after the first/. article on this subject, I actually went and read my EULA (or whatever it's called) (service agreement) with Comcast. The only thing I saw in there that indicated that they could take action against you for using too much bandwidth was a line to the effect of, "causing problems for your neighbors,", i.e., if you're sucking down so much porn that you clog the line, they'll get mad at you. This seems consinent with what double-oh_three says above.
Again, they should clearly specify what constitutes "too much" in the service agreement and give me a way of monitoring my usage (i.e., their view of my usage).
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- if you're going to limit my bitrate usage, fine, just tell me what the limit is and give me way of monitoring my usage.
Apart from meeting this requirement, as far as I'm concerned, if they're selling me 3.5Mb/s downstream bandwidth, then I have every right to use every last bit of it 24/7/365, if I want to. Granted, I don't, because I don't need or want to. But, "unlimited" aside, if you sell me a service with certain specifications, I expect you to meet those specifications and not penalize me for using your service up to the limits.
Comcast (who happens to be my ISP as well), is being sleazy and overly secretive in this matter. They need to fess up to the fact that their networks are oversubscribed and underprovisioned and that, while you and your neighbors can probably get XMb/s burst rates, they can't really sell each of you that much sustained bitrate.
Frankly, I wish they'd scrap some of the crappy cable channels and use the excess bandwidth for better internet service.
Or, they could surcharge you for net transfers over a certain threshold -- as long as they specify the threshold and give you an accurate way to monitor your usage.
These damned foreign countries. Don't you understand that the US run's the world. If the metric system were so great, wouldn't we be using it by now? Of course.
But we're not. Resistance is futile. You know why we don't use metric? Because it was invented by the French. Now, I love France -- cheese, Bordeaux wines, wonderful cusisine, art -- don't get me wrong. But the Froggies should stick to what they're good at and not try to mess with basic units of measurement. If your units were so great, why were you invaded by Germany twice in the last century? And who bailed you out? The Americans. And what units do we use? Not metric, mes amis, but good old SAE.
Convert to SAE. The lives of space probes, amusement park patrons, astronauts, and la France depend on it!:::end humor:::
Regardless or your view of case (in)sensitivity, one should not rely on case sensitivity when programming.
More specifically, IMHO, one should not have two variables or methods/functions which differ only in their capitalization, with very few exceptions. It's too bloody error prone and too hard to catch.
Some would argue that this is an example of why case insensitivity is a good thing. I disagree -- case sensitivity forces you to think about how you name your identifiers and can, in principle, lead to more readable code, due to the consistency thereby enforced.
Yeah, I've been using Mozilla for about two years now and I've stayed with it, despite its tendency to eat up every scrap of RAM in sight, because of its advertisement, popup, and spam blocking/filtering features.
Once nice feature is that when you see a banner ad, you can right click on it and select "Block images from this server." Boy, that makes pages load faster and eliminates a lot of crap on-screen.
I also like their Junk Mail filtering system -- it's not flawless, but I have control over the filtering and what is and is not marked as junk. Once you train the Bayesian filter, it seems to catch about 95% of the spam I receive. It does get false positives from time to time, but I can handle that.
Most of all, Mozilla is free, open source, and is not Microsloth. Woo hoo!
A wise friend of mine, who's been in the software/hardware business for a long time, has a saying:
"Designs are like waffles -- you throw out the first couple."
Many people make the mistake of continuing to work with an old design (read: software implimentation), tweaking it, hacking on it, etc., for fear that a rewrite will take too long, be too expensive, or never work as well.
That's why, for example, IOS is such a mess, IBM still develops in PL/X, there are so many COBOL programs still in use, and the bloody x86 instruction set still has yet to be abandoned for something more sensical.
Rewriting a module, component, or entire product gives one a chance to learn from one's mistakes the prior go-around, make the code more maintainable, stable, and secure, and generally do a better job.
I agree that following this procedure will undoubtedly introduce new bugs -- such is a fact of life. But all software has bugs -- some of them were coded last week and some of them were coded 20 years ago. To insist that users continue to utilize an old, outmoded, poor, or otherwise deficient design or implimentation is not acceptible and, IMHO, ends up costing more time and money in terms of sustaining development and support.
Actually, there is a "lossless" JPG format, but it's seldomly used. Many of the high-end new cameras allow you to store the images ina "raw" (.RAW) format, i.e., uncompressed.
You bring up a very good point. Some cameras, particularly older digital cameras, store their images in proprietary formats that require special software to read and transcode into something useful.
My dad has an old Polaroid digital camera (lord only knows why he bought it) that used such a format. When he upgraded to a newer version of M$ windows, he had a hell of a time finding new software to convert the images.
Thankfully, most of the new cameras store natively in.JPG or something similar.
However, for quality, particularly with 35mm, the gold standard is slide film (for us, it was always ISO 25 Kodachrome or 100 Ektachrome (sp?) if you needed something faster). The grain in slide film is tighter and smaller, particularly for the slower films and they can withstand much larger enlargements without quality degridation.
One thing a lot of professional photographers do (or used to do) is to take photos with slide film and then scan them using a slide scanner -- some of which approach 20-40 megapixels -- basically at the resolution of the grains of silver in the film. Even today, that's probably about the best digital quality you're going to get in a 35mm-esque form factor.
You should do your background research before making such pronouncements.
Kodak did indeed make a wide range of cameras, including the legendary Brownie (dates back to the 20's I think) up through modern auto-everything cameras. They even came out with a new "easier to use" film form factor and sold many cameras that use it. It think it was called Advantix... it never interested me since I have enough intelligence and manual dexterity to load a 35mm camera; plus the negatives were considerably smaller than 35mm.
Personally, I wouldn't have bought one of their cameras anyway... I tend to prefer Canon or Nikon, but that's just me.
In terms of quality for the dollar, particularly with respect to up-front investment, nothing beats good quality color film slides. Then again, most of Kodak's consumer-grade market is for print film and PHD (push here dummy) cameras. They made some decent ones, no doubt, but I understand their move. The value proposition is not quite there yet for most folks to switch to digital. But it's coming fast.
The legendary "Brownie" box camera comes to mind. I don't know how many millions of them Kodak sold over the years, but they were many people's first introduction to photography. The great Ansel Adams used a Brownie as his first camera, and no doubt, its ease of use (for the time) and low price helped get him enthused with the art of photography.
I'm not sure what the parity point is for film versus digital in terms of megapixels. I've heard that 35mm color negative film has an approximate resolution of between 10 and 20 megapixels. There are a couple cameras out (including Canon and Nikon, I think) who have pricey professional SLR's in this range.
But, for Joe Consumer, who has maybe $300 to spend on a new digital camera, he's lucky to get 4MP, if that. Granted, you can make some nice blowups froma 4MP image (if you took it in the highest-quality mode the camera has), but it still ain't the same as a good old ISO 100 negative.
Speaking of old... I worry about the longevity (sp?) of digital images. Most digital storage devices (disk, CDR, flash) have a finite lifespan. My librarian friends tell me that, if stored properly, a good color negative or slide will last 100 years or more. Magnetic media last, at best, 10 years. It's not clear how long CDR or DVDR's last, but I doubt it's 100 years. And most people don't archive their photos on flash, so that's kind of irrelavant.
OTOH, if you keep making copies of your digial images, they don't degrade in quality and could, in principle, last forever.
I think one of the biggest plusses of digital photography is the instant gratification factor -- you can see your pictures instantly, versus having to wait hours or days for processing. And you have control of your images -- you don't have to worry about the photo guy sneering at the boudoir photos you took of your wife >:-)
I think film will be around for a long time -- there's a huge installed base of 35mm and larger format cameras out there, into many of which people have invested thousands of dollars; also, there are still die-hard film guys who will never give up their precious silver nitrate until you pry it out of their cold dead hands.
I hope people, particularly kids, still have the opportunity to learn black and white photography, including processing and developing their own pictures. Despite the computer brains in new cameras, it's still valuable to have an understanding of exposure, lighting, depth of field, and so forth. And there's something neat about the thrill of watching an image appear out of a white piece of paper as the developer does its work.
I kind of miss that feeling... watching the progress bar in Photoshop doesn't quite do it for me:)
FreeBSD enables IPV6 by default. I personally find this annoying since I don't use it or need it, and so when I recompile my kernel, I remove the options INET6 (or whatever it's called). Otherwise, utilities like netstat spit out a bunch of useless (to me) garbage that I don't care about.
Before you flame me, I think IPV6 is a great thing and I look forward to the day when it will be widely-deployed in the US. I just don't have much need for it in my present work.
Back in the old days (94-96 range) I remember this free service from something like anon.pennet.fi, where you could "bounce" email messages through an anonymizer. You could send emails to... say... newsgroups without revealing your true identity or email address.
I remember this service being shut down for some nefarious reason several years ago. Perhaps the rise of spanmming lead to this -- I certainly see how an email anonymizer could cause problems. However, if designed and implimented correctly, I can invision a similar system with similar features but fewer spam/security concerns.
In this day and age, it is often necessary to give out SOME email address and perhaps even be able to receive responses. It would be nice to be able to do so without having to create many ficticious addresses or opening one's self up to spam and abuse.
I thought I saw a slashdot article a while ago about a converter from PATA to SATA, i.e. a dongle you plug into your PATA device that exports an SATA interface. Perhaps I am halucinating, but, if not, this might satisfy your need.
Surely using a build-in feature in Windows, as it was intended, is not hacking.
This is just another example of overzealous administrators and beaurocrats (i.e. school administration) overstepping their bounds and exuding their ignorance about technology.
Moreover, this type of behavior is likely to cause a chilling effect with regard to innovation, creativity, and learning among our young people.
At most, the student should have been admonished not to annoy his fellow classmates. At best, an observant instructor or administrator would have realized this student's creative potential and curosity and encouraged him to learn and do more with computers (perhaps, however, not during class time).
This Big Brother, we know best attitude in the US needs to end. Overreacting to beneign activities involving computers is just another example of the system gone awry.
To all the EE geeks out there... How can I block these billboards from seeing what radio station I'm listening to? Is it possible to jam them out without disturbing my or other drivers' radios?
[Prior to this research] talking about the "pain of a broken heart" is a metaphor. Your heart's not really "broken" and you don't experience physical pain. So speaking of the "pain of a broken heart" is using a metaphor; metaphors state something directly (without the use of the words like, as, etc) and don't generally make literal sense.
[After this research] the pain of rejection can now be considered analagous to physical pain. So that "slap in the face" is almost literally accurate.
To be more clear:
Metaphor: "When she broke up with me, it broke my heart."
Simile: "When she broke up with me, it felt like {my heart broke, she slapped me in the face, etc}.
It now is accurate to compare emotional pain with physical pain (if you believe the research), so rather then using a metaphor, you can use a simile.
I did both my BS and MS at UNC-Chapel Hill, where there is a fairly strict honor code. Basically, if you're caught cheating, you flunk the course and are suspended for at least one semester.
The basic message, at least in the Computer Science Department was to give credit to others. Most professors didn't care if you worked in groups on assignments; in fact, it was strongly encouraged in many classes. You generally had to turn in your own work, and it had to be your own work.
For example, the group would work a problem on the whiteboard and everyone would take notes. Then, you'd have to go home and write it up.
On the first page of every assignment, you had to sign an "Honor Pledge" that went like, "On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment." I always added an additional line such as, "I worked with, helped, or non-trivially discussed this assignment with: ". In this way, I acknowledged that the work I was turning in was my own, but I was giving credit to those whom I had helped or who had helped me.
So the two things I would suggest for you to take to your students or administration are:
1. Enforce very strict/harsh penalties for cheating (an F in the class or at least on the project; other disciplinary action).
2. Encourage students to give credit to those who help them or whom they help.
(2) is in the spirit of academic collaboration -- you give credit to all the contributors on a project, paper, etc., whether it's by listing them as an author, by citing them in your bibliography, or in a "Special Thanks To..." paragraph.
One thing to remember though, is that cheating will catch up to the cheaters eventually. They won't have learned the material and, in the end, they will get fired, won't be able to get jobs, or will flunk the exam or subsequent classes, etc. They'll get their just deserts in the end.
Another trick is to ask the student to explain his/her answer to you. If they can't explain it, and it looks too similar to another solution, then you have evidence that they cheated. Give all of them an F (unless they credited their sources...) and let the professor sort it out.
You're going to need a backup anyway -- so that, for example, you can go on vacation -- so teaching him and using his notes to write the documentation will kill two birds with one stone.
I've used this technique on more then one occasion. Being forced to explain how something works really helps you understand what the heck you did to set things up and how they really work.
Once you train your backup(s), have them run your network or perform maintenence, upgrades, etc, from time to time. If they come to you with questions (which they will), add the answers to your document.
Oh, and don't forget to update the document when you make changes. Out-of-date documentation is almost as bad, if not worse, then no documentation at all!:)
First of all, with very little exception, you NEVER have an edge over the house on slots.
Certain slots MAY be set to pay out > 100%, but they are almost always low-limit (i.e. penny or nickel) slots.
AFAIK, all slots in state-regulated casinos in Nevada pay out at least 90% (as opposed to unregulated slots on Indian reservations which may pay as low as 70%... I'm not criticizing the Native Americans, just adding that for completeness). That means, over a long period of time, for every dollar you wager, you'll get back around 90 cents.
Furthermore, each slot machine has a ROM chip in it that determines its pay rate. Those ROM chips are very strictly regulated... the casino has to go through a lot of paperwork and hassle to change them. More concicely, the casion can not change the pay rate of a slot machine without physically modifying the hardware -- it's not legal for them to do it in software.
Remember, I'm talking about state-regulated gaming in Nevada (since the poster was talking about Vegas). Other jurisdictions may have different laws and methods.
The technique of moving around from slot to slot is simply a mind game that gamblers play with themselves to make them think they have better odds. Over the short run, this may pay off, but over the long run, the house wins. Period.
Remember, geeky readers, that casions earn the vast majority of their profits from slot machines. They have very low overhead and are quite possibly the worst wager in a casino. They can be entertaining, even addictive, for certain people, which is why they are so popular.
In the end, remember that the casinos exist to make money. Any apparent advantage over the house that you may see is just that -- an apparation. Even in Blackjack, where a talented card-counter can gain a small advantage over the house, casinos are countering by adding more decks to the shoe and using random constant-shuffling machines to nix your advantage.
Boy, that article really sticks it to Verisign. What the fuck were they thinking? You don't go and mess with a fundamental error behavior in something as critical as DNS. I've heard of corporate greed, but this is just unacceptible.
The only concern I have with ISC's fix to BIND is that they just filter for that one IP address (64.94.110.11)... all Verisign has to do is change the IP in their wildcard A-record and we'll be back to square one.
I hope more people bring lawsuits against Verisign and that Verisign gets their proverbial ticket yanked, i.e., that they are no longer allowed to be the top-level registrar. Fuck them... they blew it.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the same problem with my golden retriever when he was young ($100 USB headsets
:)
:)
When animals chew on inappropriate things, it can mean one or more of several things. [Caveat: my experience is largely with dogs, though I expect some of the insights will apply to felines too.]
o They are teething or have a dental problem. This is normal when they are young (and new teeth are coming in).
o They are bored or feel abandoned -- inappropriate chewing, marking, etc. can be a compulsive disorder for dogs, kind of like ADHD. Sometimes it is an experssion of anxiety (particularly separation anxiety) or lack of attention. There are resources available for training this out of dogs (and cats, too, I assume)
o In the case of both cats and dogs, it can mean they are pissed off at you, either for leaving them alone, not playing with them, or whatever.
o Finally, it may indicate that they are hungry (is your cat *eating* the wire or just chewing it to bits?). If they are eating what they are chewing up, you'll find... evidence... routed though their South end in a couple days...
Deterrance and correction. The best course of action is to catch them in the act and correct them, usually with a loud "DON'T!" or something similar. In the case of dogs in particular, this is a good opportunity to establish dominance -- e.g., roll the dog on his back, pin him down (primarily by the neck or mouth), and hold him there until he stops struggling. He'll understand that you're the Alpha and that he's done something unappropriate.
[Note: this is a fight that you absolutely have to win -- if he escapes, catch him; if he tries to get away, restrain him. If you don't win the engagement, the dog will conclude that the's the Alpha and behavior problems will persist. Also, I'm not advocating *hurting* or being violent with your pet. The technique I described mimics, at least for dogs, actual dominant dog behavior, but does not inflict injury or physical pain. It sends the right message with a minimum of violence and a maximum of effectiveness and is a well-accepted training technique.]
One thing that is not effective is correcting the animal after the fact -- dogs and cats have short memories. If he chewed up your cables and you yell at him even 5 minutes later, he won't understand -- most animals don't have the sophisticated reasoning system to connect the correction with the past event. You have to catch him in the act and issue the correction post haste.
One way to ensure that you can catch them in the act is to set up a "trap" -- leave a cable on the floor and keep an eye on the animal. If, or when, he goes after it, nail him then and there. If you do this a couple times, then hopefully he'll get the idea that cables are not food/playthings
Another technique is to use a product such as "Sour Apple", which you coat on surfaces (such as cables) that the animal tends to eat. The product is non-toxic, but tastes quite nasty to them (very bitter/sour) and will deter them. Your local pet shop should have a selection of such products. I never had to use them with my dog, but I have friends who have used it with great success.
The behavior problem may also be due to the fact that the animal does not have any or enough appropriate toys to chew on. Go to your pet shop and buy a selection of animal- and breed- (read: size) appropriate toys. If the problem is chewing, then get chew-toys. If the problem is scratching, get scratching posts or similar products.
Introduce the toys to your pet and praise or reward him when he chews on them and plays with them. This will build a positive association between playing with the appropriate toys. Together with strong corrections for playing with inappropriate "toys", the animal should learn which toys are his and which are not.
If the problem is hunger, then "free-feeding" may be a desirable option. Rather than feeding the animal at distinct times of the day, you leave out excess food in his b
...finally a way to weigh my post-dot-com crash paycheck. :D
I have a friend who's into telescopes. He built a digital capture attachment for his telescope(s) using a logitech webcam (USB). He basically removed the existing lens assembly from the camera and mounted the imager inside/on/about a camera adapter for his telescope. I would imagine that the same technique would work for a microscope, and you could use an NTSC camera instead of a USB camera.
:)
Apparently, it took him a couple trys (trial and error) to get the focal length and everything lined up properly, but it made some nice pictures.
Good luck
So, after the first /. article on this subject, I actually went and read my EULA (or whatever it's called) (service agreement) with Comcast. The only thing I saw in there that indicated that they could take action against you for using too much bandwidth was a line to the effect of, "causing problems for your neighbors,", i.e., if you're sucking down so much porn that you clog the line, they'll get mad at you. This seems consinent with what double-oh_three says above.
Again, they should clearly specify what constitutes "too much" in the service agreement and give me a way of monitoring my usage (i.e., their view of my usage).
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- if you're going to limit my bitrate usage, fine, just tell me what the limit is and give me way of monitoring my usage.
Apart from meeting this requirement, as far as I'm concerned, if they're selling me 3.5Mb/s downstream bandwidth, then I have every right to use every last bit of it 24/7/365, if I want to. Granted, I don't, because I don't need or want to. But, "unlimited" aside, if you sell me a service with certain specifications, I expect you to meet those specifications and not penalize me for using your service up to the limits.
Comcast (who happens to be my ISP as well), is being sleazy and overly secretive in this matter. They need to fess up to the fact that their networks are oversubscribed and underprovisioned and that, while you and your neighbors can probably get XMb/s burst rates, they can't really sell each of you that much sustained bitrate.
Frankly, I wish they'd scrap some of the crappy cable channels and use the excess bandwidth for better internet service.
Or, they could surcharge you for net transfers over a certain threshold -- as long as they specify the threshold and give you an accurate way to monitor your usage.
:::begin humorous remarks:::
:::end humor:::
These damned foreign countries. Don't you understand that the US run's the world. If the metric system were so great, wouldn't we be using it by now? Of course.
But we're not. Resistance is futile. You know why we don't use metric? Because it was invented by the French. Now, I love France -- cheese, Bordeaux wines, wonderful cusisine, art -- don't get me wrong. But the Froggies should stick to what they're good at and not try to mess with basic units of measurement. If your units were so great, why were you invaded by Germany twice in the last century? And who bailed you out? The Americans. And what units do we use? Not metric, mes amis, but good old SAE.
Convert to SAE. The lives of space probes, amusement park patrons, astronauts, and la France depend on it!
Regardless or your view of case (in)sensitivity, one should not rely on case sensitivity when programming.
More specifically, IMHO, one should not have two variables or methods/functions which differ only in their capitalization, with very few exceptions. It's too bloody error prone and too hard to catch.
Some would argue that this is an example of why case insensitivity is a good thing. I disagree -- case sensitivity forces you to think about how you name your identifiers and can, in principle, lead to more readable code, due to the consistency thereby enforced.
Yeah, I've been using Mozilla for about two years now and I've stayed with it, despite its tendency to eat up every scrap of RAM in sight, because of its advertisement, popup, and spam blocking/filtering features.
Once nice feature is that when you see a banner ad, you can right click on it and select "Block images from this server." Boy, that makes pages load faster and eliminates a lot of crap on-screen.
I also like their Junk Mail filtering system -- it's not flawless, but I have control over the filtering and what is and is not marked as junk. Once you train the Bayesian filter, it seems to catch about 95% of the spam I receive. It does get false positives from time to time, but I can handle that.
Most of all, Mozilla is free, open source, and is not Microsloth. Woo hoo!
A wise friend of mine, who's been in the software/hardware business for a long time, has a saying:
"Designs are like waffles -- you throw out the first couple."
Many people make the mistake of continuing to work with an old design (read: software implimentation), tweaking it, hacking on it, etc., for fear that a rewrite will take too long, be too expensive, or never work as well.
That's why, for example, IOS is such a mess, IBM still develops in PL/X, there are so many COBOL programs still in use, and the bloody x86 instruction set still has yet to be abandoned for something more sensical.
Rewriting a module, component, or entire product gives one a chance to learn from one's mistakes the prior go-around, make the code more maintainable, stable, and secure, and generally do a better job.
I agree that following this procedure will undoubtedly introduce new bugs -- such is a fact of life. But all software has bugs -- some of them were coded last week and some of them were coded 20 years ago. To insist that users continue to utilize an old, outmoded, poor, or otherwise deficient design or implimentation is not acceptible and, IMHO, ends up costing more time and money in terms of sustaining development and support.
Actually, there is a "lossless" JPG format, but it's seldomly used. Many of the high-end new cameras allow you to store the images ina "raw" (.RAW) format, i.e., uncompressed.
You bring up a very good point. Some cameras, particularly older digital cameras, store their images in proprietary formats that require special software to read and transcode into something useful.
.JPG or something similar.
My dad has an old Polaroid digital camera (lord only knows why he bought it) that used such a format. When he upgraded to a newer version of M$ windows, he had a hell of a time finding new software to convert the images.
Thankfully, most of the new cameras store natively in
I hate slide shows, too.
However, for quality, particularly with 35mm, the gold standard is slide film (for us, it was always ISO 25 Kodachrome or 100 Ektachrome (sp?) if you needed something faster). The grain in slide film is tighter and smaller, particularly for the slower films and they can withstand much larger enlargements without quality degridation.
One thing a lot of professional photographers do (or used to do) is to take photos with slide film and then scan them using a slide scanner -- some of which approach 20-40 megapixels -- basically at the resolution of the grains of silver in the film. Even today, that's probably about the best digital quality you're going to get in a 35mm-esque form factor.
You should do your background research before making such pronouncements.
Kodak did indeed make a wide range of cameras, including the legendary Brownie (dates back to the 20's I think) up through modern auto-everything cameras. They even came out with a new "easier to use" film form factor and sold many cameras that use it. It think it was called Advantix... it never interested me since I have enough intelligence and manual dexterity to load a 35mm camera; plus the negatives were considerably smaller than 35mm.
Personally, I wouldn't have bought one of their cameras anyway... I tend to prefer Canon or Nikon, but that's just me.
In terms of quality for the dollar, particularly with respect to up-front investment, nothing beats good quality color film slides. Then again, most of Kodak's consumer-grade market is for print film and PHD (push here dummy) cameras. They made some decent ones, no doubt, but I understand their move. The value proposition is not quite there yet for most folks to switch to digital. But it's coming fast.
:)
The legendary "Brownie" box camera comes to mind. I don't know how many millions of them Kodak sold over the years, but they were many people's first introduction to photography. The great Ansel Adams used a Brownie as his first camera, and no doubt, its ease of use (for the time) and low price helped get him enthused with the art of photography.
I'm not sure what the parity point is for film versus digital in terms of megapixels. I've heard that 35mm color negative film has an approximate resolution of between 10 and 20 megapixels. There are a couple cameras out (including Canon and Nikon, I think) who have pricey professional SLR's in this range.
But, for Joe Consumer, who has maybe $300 to spend on a new digital camera, he's lucky to get 4MP, if that. Granted, you can make some nice blowups froma 4MP image (if you took it in the highest-quality mode the camera has), but it still ain't the same as a good old ISO 100 negative.
Speaking of old... I worry about the longevity (sp?) of digital images. Most digital storage devices (disk, CDR, flash) have a finite lifespan. My librarian friends tell me that, if stored properly, a good color negative or slide will last 100 years or more. Magnetic media last, at best, 10 years. It's not clear how long CDR or DVDR's last, but I doubt it's 100 years. And most people don't archive their photos on flash, so that's kind of irrelavant.
OTOH, if you keep making copies of your digial images, they don't degrade in quality and could, in principle, last forever.
I think one of the biggest plusses of digital photography is the instant gratification factor -- you can see your pictures instantly, versus having to wait hours or days for processing. And you have control of your images -- you don't have to worry about the photo guy sneering at the boudoir photos you took of your wife >:-)
I think film will be around for a long time -- there's a huge installed base of 35mm and larger format cameras out there, into many of which people have invested thousands of dollars; also, there are still die-hard film guys who will never give up their precious silver nitrate until you pry it out of their cold dead hands.
I hope people, particularly kids, still have the opportunity to learn black and white photography, including processing and developing their own pictures. Despite the computer brains in new cameras, it's still valuable to have an understanding of exposure, lighting, depth of field, and so forth. And there's something neat about the thrill of watching an image appear out of a white piece of paper as the developer does its work.
I kind of miss that feeling... watching the progress bar in Photoshop doesn't quite do it for me
FreeBSD enables IPV6 by default. I personally find this annoying since I don't use it or need it, and so when I recompile my kernel, I remove the options INET6 (or whatever it's called). Otherwise, utilities like netstat spit out a bunch of useless (to me) garbage that I don't care about.
Before you flame me, I think IPV6 is a great thing and I look forward to the day when it will be widely-deployed in the US. I just don't have much need for it in my present work.
Back in the old days (94-96 range) I remember this free service from something like anon.pennet.fi, where you could "bounce" email messages through an anonymizer. You could send emails to... say... newsgroups without revealing your true identity or email address.
I remember this service being shut down for some nefarious reason several years ago. Perhaps the rise of spanmming lead to this -- I certainly see how an email anonymizer could cause problems. However, if designed and implimented correctly, I can invision a similar system with similar features but fewer spam/security concerns.
In this day and age, it is often necessary to give out SOME email address and perhaps even be able to receive responses. It would be nice to be able to do so without having to create many ficticious addresses or opening one's self up to spam and abuse.
I thought I saw a slashdot article a while ago about a converter from PATA to SATA, i.e. a dongle you plug into your PATA device that exports an SATA interface. Perhaps I am halucinating, but, if not, this might satisfy your need.
Surely using a build-in feature in Windows, as it was intended, is not hacking.
This is just another example of overzealous administrators and beaurocrats (i.e. school administration) overstepping their bounds and exuding their ignorance about technology.
Moreover, this type of behavior is likely to cause a chilling effect with regard to innovation, creativity, and learning among our young people.
At most, the student should have been admonished not to annoy his fellow classmates. At best, an observant instructor or administrator would have realized this student's creative potential and curosity and encouraged him to learn and do more with computers (perhaps, however, not during class time).
This Big Brother, we know best attitude in the US needs to end. Overreacting to beneign activities involving computers is just another example of the system gone awry.
To all the EE geeks out there... How can I block these billboards from seeing what radio station I'm listening to? Is it possible to jam them out without disturbing my or other drivers' radios?
No, the poster is pretty close.
:)
[Prior to this research] talking about the "pain of a broken heart" is a metaphor. Your heart's not really "broken" and you don't experience physical pain. So speaking of the "pain of a broken heart" is using a metaphor; metaphors state something directly (without the use of the words like, as, etc) and don't generally make literal sense.
[After this research] the pain of rejection can now be considered analagous to physical pain. So that "slap in the face" is almost literally accurate.
To be more clear:
Metaphor: "When she broke up with me, it broke my heart."
Simile: "When she broke up with me, it felt like {my heart broke, she slapped me in the face, etc}.
It now is accurate to compare emotional pain with physical pain (if you believe the research), so rather then using a metaphor, you can use a simile.
Or you can just be pedantic.
So I guess that old expression, "I left with my ass in a sling" isn't so far from the truth afterall... :)
I did both my BS and MS at UNC-Chapel Hill, where there is a fairly strict honor code. Basically, if you're caught cheating, you flunk the course and are suspended for at least one semester.
The basic message, at least in the Computer Science Department was to give credit to others. Most professors didn't care if you worked in groups on assignments; in fact, it was strongly encouraged in many classes. You generally had to turn in your own work, and it had to be your own work.
For example, the group would work a problem on the whiteboard and everyone would take notes. Then, you'd have to go home and write it up.
On the first page of every assignment, you had to sign an "Honor Pledge" that went like, "On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment." I always added an additional line such as, "I worked with, helped, or non-trivially discussed this assignment with: ". In this way, I acknowledged that the work I was turning in was my own, but I was giving credit to those whom I had helped or who had helped me.
So the two things I would suggest for you to take to your students or administration are:
1. Enforce very strict/harsh penalties for cheating (an F in the class or at least on the project; other disciplinary action).
2. Encourage students to give credit to those who help them or whom they help.
(2) is in the spirit of academic collaboration -- you give credit to all the contributors on a project, paper, etc., whether it's by listing them as an author, by citing them in your bibliography, or in a "Special Thanks To..." paragraph.
One thing to remember though, is that cheating will catch up to the cheaters eventually. They won't have learned the material and, in the end, they will get fired, won't be able to get jobs, or will flunk the exam or subsequent classes, etc. They'll get their just deserts in the end.
Another trick is to ask the student to explain his/her answer to you. If they can't explain it, and it looks too similar to another solution, then you have evidence that they cheated. Give all of them an F (unless they credited their sources...) and let the professor sort it out.
This is exactly the approach I would take.
:)
You're going to need a backup anyway -- so that, for example, you can go on vacation -- so teaching him and using his notes to write the documentation will kill two birds with one stone.
I've used this technique on more then one occasion. Being forced to explain how something works really helps you understand what the heck you did to set things up and how they really work.
Once you train your backup(s), have them run your network or perform maintenence, upgrades, etc, from time to time. If they come to you with questions (which they will), add the answers to your document.
Oh, and don't forget to update the document when you make changes. Out-of-date documentation is almost as bad, if not worse, then no documentation at all!
First of all, with very little exception, you NEVER have an edge over the house on slots.
Certain slots MAY be set to pay out > 100%, but they are almost always low-limit (i.e. penny or nickel) slots.
AFAIK, all slots in state-regulated casinos in Nevada pay out at least 90% (as opposed to unregulated slots on Indian reservations which may pay as low as 70%... I'm not criticizing the Native Americans, just adding that for completeness). That means, over a long period of time, for every dollar you wager, you'll get back around 90 cents.
Furthermore, each slot machine has a ROM chip in it that determines its pay rate. Those ROM chips are very strictly regulated... the casino has to go through a lot of paperwork and hassle to change them. More concicely, the casion can not change the pay rate of a slot machine without physically modifying the hardware -- it's not legal for them to do it in software.
Remember, I'm talking about state-regulated gaming in Nevada (since the poster was talking about Vegas). Other jurisdictions may have different laws and methods.
The technique of moving around from slot to slot is simply a mind game that gamblers play with themselves to make them think they have better odds. Over the short run, this may pay off, but over the long run, the house wins. Period.
Remember, geeky readers, that casions earn the vast majority of their profits from slot machines. They have very low overhead and are quite possibly the worst wager in a casino. They can be entertaining, even addictive, for certain people, which is why they are so popular.
In the end, remember that the casinos exist to make money. Any apparent advantage over the house that you may see is just that -- an apparation. Even in Blackjack, where a talented card-counter can gain a small advantage over the house, casinos are countering by adding more decks to the shoe and using random constant-shuffling machines to nix your advantage.
The house always wins in the long run.
Boy, that article really sticks it to Verisign. What the fuck were they thinking? You don't go and mess with a fundamental error behavior in something as critical as DNS. I've heard of corporate greed, but this is just unacceptible.
The only concern I have with ISC's fix to BIND is that they just filter for that one IP address (64.94.110.11)... all Verisign has to do is change the IP in their wildcard A-record and we'll be back to square one.
I hope more people bring lawsuits against Verisign and that Verisign gets their proverbial ticket yanked, i.e., that they are no longer allowed to be the top-level registrar. Fuck them... they blew it.