Even headless flies took flight when researchers stimulated the correct neurons, according to the study, published in the April 7 issue of the journal Cell.
Great, now we're one step closer to an actual Night of the Living Dead.
Not to mention the cost of registering the huge number of patents they do each year (3248 patents in 2004). Some patent lawyers around here will tell you it costs upward of $6000 (Canadian, but that's about $4800 US) to register a patent, after all the legal costs, and although IBM probably isn't paying _that_ much per patent, I'm sure they aren't getting theirs at much of a discount either. Lawyers charge bigger companies more because they know they can.
Mind you, they could simply cut down on registering new patents and still save a ton, but if they could reduce it to only valid patents they would save even more (3248 patents x even $1000 each = $3,248,000). And spearheading the motion for patent reform puts them in an even more positive light with developers, who they've been wooing for some time with their Open Source support.
Obviously it's not a work sample from a previous job, but starting an Open Source project is a good way of accumulating demonstrable proof of your skills. It also teaches you some things about putting a software project together from start-to-finish, mainly that actual coding is a small piece of a big pie (documentation, packaging, web site, UI design, etc.), which will make you a more aware coder and diversify your experience/qualifications. If you can communicate this knowledge-gain0 successfully to a potential employer, you should have a stronger shot at getting a job than someone who's done nothing but straight-ahead coding (depending on the company of course, many actually do seek out lesser coders...).
What if the browser rendered a small popup notifier in the corner of suspicious divs, which you could then click on to mark that div an ad. Using an xpath expression to point to the div, you could probably accurately identify it most of the time, even if it didn't have an id attribute.
Some problems would be expiring page content (if the page changes, the marked div could become a valid one), and the fact that this alters the display of some web pages.
Another idea might be to have a centralized blacklist/whitelist of popups (incl. div ads), and have an optional setting to turn this on in Firefox's preferences. Then when people happen upon popups, they could be added to the list, and if they permit them they could be whitelisted. Or vice versa with the div ads, since you can't assume all divs are ads.
There are many problems with this idea as well, but for people who want to err on the side of strict blocking, it might not be a bad idea. It might send a message to advertisers too -- that we consider popups to be the web page equivalent of spam.
Re:Babies have an instinctive understanding of 're
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This was a point Nietzche made in Beyond Good and Evil, that the will is the least-well understood aspect of human nature, and the one we make the most assumptions about our understanding of. Interesting that will/volition/motive/morality (aspects of the same grey area) pose such a fundamental problem to AI...
I can't comment too much on Python, but Ruby does have some pretty dynamic features that make frameworks like this much easier to do. Python has many similarities, as does Perl, so it should be possible in those to a large degree as well.
I've recently written things along similar lines with PHP, but the language flexibility is much lower (better in PHP5 at least), so you have to work via workarounds at times.
As for something like Java, without getting into serious bytecode-level work, I can't see a Rails-like framework being viable at all.
I'm aware of the various obvious reasons (unrealistic deadlines/expectations, poorly defined requirements, scope changes, staff shortages, sabotage and other "real-world" issues, etc.), but I'm curious to know peoples' thoughts on a couple things:
First, how much of an effect does the fact that many universities/colleges in North America are pumping out rather mediocre, assembly-line Java programmers have on a project's changes of success?
Second, I've seen a lot of hype over offshore outsourcing, but not much in the way of actual case studies showing its success compared to in-house or traditional regional outsourcing. Anyone have any good anecdotal info here or maybe a few links that cut through the marketing hype (which is why Google wasn't of much help here when last I looked)?
If I'm passing things on to my kids and eventually their kids, I don't want the media to wear out in my own lifetime, let alone theirs. I'm talking about family photos/videos/personal recordings, etc. not my MP3 collection. I understand that technologies become obsolete, but the continual migration to a new format (or else lose it all!) is no excuse for the old technology to forget all of your data if you don't migrate in time.
I still have records from 40+ years ago that play just fine -- if newer technologies really are better, then they would last even longer. It's a scam to help ensure the mass migration to new technologies that the storage media expire in such a short time span as they do now.
To clarify, I probably should have written my post as:
- Appeal to Authority: This is an example of influence using authority, including High Status - Appeal to Popularity: This is an example of Principle of Similarity and Principle of Social Proof including "The Number of Sources" Effect.
I didn't intend, nor, I believe, did the parent poster, to make a truth-value judgement of the grandparent post. I was simply observing the similarity between the parent post's terms and their roughly-equivalent logical terms. However, I can see how it could seem that I was making a judgement on the grandparent post.
It is quite rational to base your decisions on the experiences of others, especially those who have demonstrated success at the same endeavours. This is not an appeal to authority/popularity in the sense of peer pressure/seeking acceptance from them, and that's not what I intended to imply (I didn't intend to imply anything:)).
I myself made a similar decision 3 1/2 years ago when I bought my TiBook. It was one of the best computer purchases I've ever made too. I'm definitely not disagreeing with either the resulting decision nor the reasoning behind it of the grandparent post. I was simply observing the similarity between what is taught in marketing schools (the modern school of rhetoric) and the subject (science?;)) of logic.
You're correct except for fact you misspelled "behavior"[1]
[1] Note, this is flamebait to people outside the U.S.
Nicely done.:)
Re:Marketing people love you!
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Some of these are also the names of standard logical fallacies, which it appears your Consumer Behaviour class is teaching you to exploit. These include:
- Appeal to authority: Most of the top dogs... - Appeal to popularity: Last year's conference was full of...
A logic course would teach you the same thing, minus the exploiting part. For that you'd need a course in rhetorical persuasion, or marketing by more popular terminology (ie. your course). It's interesting how long this stuff has been around, yet how fresh it can sound when presented with the psychology/marketing spin.:)
I'm pretty sure they still use maggots for exactly this purpose (as well as leeches for other purposes) in hospitals here in Canada (my girlfriend is a nurse, although she's now in labour & delivery so she's nowhere near the maggot- or leech-using floors). Aside from the "eww" factor, who cares? If it works as well, then it's more natural than an equivalent maggophobiaxycillin, so I'd say go for it.
I'd want to bring my camera, so I could show my friends afterwards.:)
I had used Macs, PCs, Windows, Linux, etc. plenty throughout the 90's. Started programming in QBasic on a 286, now now do a combo of PHP/Perl/Bash/Java/C/etc. depending on the need. My main target platform is the web, and the LAMP combo is simple/cost effective/solid enough that it just made sense. When it came time to needing portability, I wanted a desktop replacement capable machine, but I knew that to be as efficient as possible, I needed the server platform on the desktop, so I needed a Unix machine.
What other Unix-based laptop comes with even 1/10th the polish and completeness of a Mac? This makes a Mac a no-brainer purchase for anyone needing both portability and a Unix environment for writing LAMP-based web apps. I wonder how many others were in a similar scenario and switched because of it? LAMP may be benefiting Apple more than people would think.
Now I'm slowly replacing all the machines in the office with Macs. I've got a 667 TiBook, 20" G5 iMac, and a new 1.5 Mac Mini too. They're all awesome machines. The only machine left that's non-Mac is a Linux server, and that's only to offer an alternative test platform, and to run MSIE 6 via Wine through remote X sessions from our Macs. Just this week I gave away the only Windows machine we had. It felt great.
You know, us switchers sure love to talk about out it!:)
Something has changed, and I would really like to understand it better.
So would I, I'm afraid.
I've experienced exactly the same problem, but I'm not certain what renders people like this inert (or slower than molases) when such simple things are needed. I've had to tell one programmer several times to reply to an email, and then I gave up and simply dictated it to him in order for him to finally do it. Even things like committing project changes to the client-visible area -- and to CVS, for crying out loud -- have been a fight.
I suspect the main reason in this case was that they simply didn't care at all. They had no drive at all (except of course when the time came to be paid, they're always quite driven then). I'm guessing that the increase in occurrences of this is partly the result of so many people graduating from computer science now that went into it during the bubble thinking they'd make easy cash.
In my experience, people prove to be the most critical and the most difficult part of the equation. Most people are not startup employee material. Most people, especially these days, want little responsibility, no risk, and high pay. My dad calls the high pay part an "entitlement attitude", but I couldn't tell you where the phrase originated. The risk part is understandable. The lower responsibility however, is better achieved in the same way as the low risk, by becoming another minute piece in a large enough institution that the bureaucracy adds a layer of padding between yourself and the exit ways.
I definitely think it keeps things much simpler for a startup to be owned by a single person, it also creates a significant hurdle to people being dedicated to your cause. There's little for them to gain, much to risk, and the pay won't be great until you're cashflow positive somewhere down the road.
The other problematic aspect of finding the right people is that most people lack the required drive for excellence. They want crude effectiveness, and nothing more. In a smaller company, you need more perfectionists, because there is no bureaucratic padding between your work and the customer, which means that things have to be done right the first time. From my experience, excellence is getting harder and harder to find, and I believe our societal and educational structures are the cause of this condition. But that's waxing philosophical, so I'll refrain, in this post at least.;)
Programmers are infamous for their internal contradiction of attempting to be both eternally honest and eternally lazy. The "honesty" comes from their idealism. However, their laziness is downright infuriating as a manager.
use of the individual sub-programs therein so that the AS sub-program can be protected from being copied individually.
Is it not a stretch to say that AAC files are sub-programs? They are files, but they aren't executed, they're read from. This would presumably invalidate their claim, would it not? (Not that I give any credence to any of this fucking garbage)
Could the increase in traffic as a result of the addition of a calendar feature to his site simply be that the calendar he added is a search engine spider trap that the spider takes some time to dig its way out of? Calendars are potentially infinite sources of links, since their next/previous day/week/month links could go on forever.
Or am I incorrect in my understanding of what a spider trap is?
Not to be all "I'm so smart" but isn't this also rather obvious? If you're indexing private documents, don't return private results for public visitors. Simple as that.
All it takes to implement this is an "access level" field stored with each index entry, and assigning an "access level" session value to each visitor (defaulting to 0 for anonymous visitors).
Plus, this way you'll avoid pissing off visitors who click on essentially broken links in their search results.
No wonder the search capabilities of most sites are rated so poorly...
I like your metaphor of the flute and the brass marching band.
I'm one of the diminishing number of people who hold a rational faith in religions, however I guess you could say I'm a newer convert, and I'm nowhere near the serenity of mind to be able to "tune in". I've still got a lot of work to do in that area, overcoming the hyperactivity of mind that we push ourselves to strive for nowadays...
Engineers drew from "passive-dynamic" toys dating back to the 1800s that could walk downhill with the help of gravity. Little progress has been made since on getting robots to walk like people.
This remark is interesting in that perhaps we're not making progress these days because we're not paying attention. We're not looking right.
The greatest inventors in history likely wouldn't consider themselves "creators" of their inventions so much as "observers" of the natural world. Prior to the past century (thank you Nietzche) inventors and artists played a similar role (look at Da Vinci, who is considered to be both), in that their job wasn't to "create" things, but rather to "mimic" the world they saw, and seek ways to perfect it.
Now, keeping value judgements out of this (I'm not claiming they're better than we are per se), it seems to me to be more effective the way things used to be done. Perhaps our "progressive" mindset has forgotten some important lessons.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, now we're one step closer to an actual Night of the Living Dead.
Time to go rehearse some lines*, just in case.
*I know I'm mixing up movies, but I've always wanted a legitimate reason to repeat those phrases. ;)
Guess I should try RTFA more often... ;)
Not to mention the cost of registering the huge number of patents they do each year (3248 patents in 2004). Some patent lawyers around here will tell you it costs upward of $6000 (Canadian, but that's about $4800 US) to register a patent, after all the legal costs, and although IBM probably isn't paying _that_ much per patent, I'm sure they aren't getting theirs at much of a discount either. Lawyers charge bigger companies more because they know they can.
Mind you, they could simply cut down on registering new patents and still save a ton, but if they could reduce it to only valid patents they would save even more (3248 patents x even $1000 each = $3,248,000). And spearheading the motion for patent reform puts them in an even more positive light with developers, who they've been wooing for some time with their Open Source support.
Obviously it's not a work sample from a previous job, but starting an Open Source project is a good way of accumulating demonstrable proof of your skills. It also teaches you some things about putting a software project together from start-to-finish, mainly that actual coding is a small piece of a big pie (documentation, packaging, web site, UI design, etc.), which will make you a more aware coder and diversify your experience/qualifications. If you can communicate this knowledge-gain0 successfully to a potential employer, you should have a stronger shot at getting a job than someone who's done nothing but straight-ahead coding (depending on the company of course, many actually do seek out lesser coders...).
What if the browser rendered a small popup notifier in the corner of suspicious divs, which you could then click on to mark that div an ad. Using an xpath expression to point to the div, you could probably accurately identify it most of the time, even if it didn't have an id attribute.
Some problems would be expiring page content (if the page changes, the marked div could become a valid one), and the fact that this alters the display of some web pages.
Another idea might be to have a centralized blacklist/whitelist of popups (incl. div ads), and have an optional setting to turn this on in Firefox's preferences. Then when people happen upon popups, they could be added to the list, and if they permit them they could be whitelisted. Or vice versa with the div ads, since you can't assume all divs are ads.
There are many problems with this idea as well, but for people who want to err on the side of strict blocking, it might not be a bad idea. It might send a message to advertisers too -- that we consider popups to be the web page equivalent of spam.
This was a point Nietzche made in Beyond Good and Evil, that the will is the least-well understood aspect of human nature, and the one we make the most assumptions about our understanding of. Interesting that will/volition/motive/morality (aspects of the same grey area) pose such a fundamental problem to AI...
I can't comment too much on Python, but Ruby does have some pretty dynamic features that make frameworks like this much easier to do. Python has many similarities, as does Perl, so it should be possible in those to a large degree as well.
I've recently written things along similar lines with PHP, but the language flexibility is much lower (better in PHP5 at least), so you have to work via workarounds at times.
As for something like Java, without getting into serious bytecode-level work, I can't see a Rails-like framework being viable at all.
I'm aware of the various obvious reasons (unrealistic deadlines/expectations, poorly defined requirements, scope changes, staff shortages, sabotage and other "real-world" issues, etc.), but I'm curious to know peoples' thoughts on a couple things:
First, how much of an effect does the fact that many universities/colleges in North America are pumping out rather mediocre, assembly-line Java programmers have on a project's changes of success?
Second, I've seen a lot of hype over offshore outsourcing, but not much in the way of actual case studies showing its success compared to in-house or traditional regional outsourcing. Anyone have any good anecdotal info here or maybe a few links that cut through the marketing hype (which is why Google wasn't of much help here when last I looked)?
If I'm passing things on to my kids and eventually their kids, I don't want the media to wear out in my own lifetime, let alone theirs. I'm talking about family photos/videos/personal recordings, etc. not my MP3 collection. I understand that technologies become obsolete, but the continual migration to a new format (or else lose it all!) is no excuse for the old technology to forget all of your data if you don't migrate in time.
I still have records from 40+ years ago that play just fine -- if newer technologies really are better, then they would last even longer. It's a scam to help ensure the mass migration to new technologies that the storage media expire in such a short time span as they do now.
To clarify, I probably should have written my post as:
:)).
;)) of logic.
- Appeal to Authority: This is an example of influence using authority, including High Status
- Appeal to Popularity: This is an example of Principle of Similarity and Principle of Social Proof including "The Number of Sources" Effect.
I didn't intend, nor, I believe, did the parent poster, to make a truth-value judgement of the grandparent post. I was simply observing the similarity between the parent post's terms and their roughly-equivalent logical terms. However, I can see how it could seem that I was making a judgement on the grandparent post.
It is quite rational to base your decisions on the experiences of others, especially those who have demonstrated success at the same endeavours. This is not an appeal to authority/popularity in the sense of peer pressure/seeking acceptance from them, and that's not what I intended to imply (I didn't intend to imply anything
I myself made a similar decision 3 1/2 years ago when I bought my TiBook. It was one of the best computer purchases I've ever made too. I'm definitely not disagreeing with either the resulting decision nor the reasoning behind it of the grandparent post. I was simply observing the similarity between what is taught in marketing schools (the modern school of rhetoric) and the subject (science?
Some of these are also the names of standard logical fallacies, which it appears your Consumer Behaviour class is teaching you to exploit. These include:
:)
- Appeal to authority: Most of the top dogs...
- Appeal to popularity: Last year's conference was full of...
A logic course would teach you the same thing, minus the exploiting part. For that you'd need a course in rhetorical persuasion, or marketing by more popular terminology (ie. your course). It's interesting how long this stuff has been around, yet how fresh it can sound when presented with the psychology/marketing spin.
For more fallacy fun, see:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
I'm pretty sure they still use maggots for exactly this purpose (as well as leeches for other purposes) in hospitals here in Canada (my girlfriend is a nurse, although she's now in labour & delivery so she's nowhere near the maggot- or leech-using floors). Aside from the "eww" factor, who cares? If it works as well, then it's more natural than an equivalent maggophobiaxycillin, so I'd say go for it.
:)
I'd want to bring my camera, so I could show my friends afterwards.
I had used Macs, PCs, Windows, Linux, etc. plenty throughout the 90's. Started programming in QBasic on a 286, now now do a combo of PHP/Perl/Bash/Java/C/etc. depending on the need. My main target platform is the web, and the LAMP combo is simple/cost effective/solid enough that it just made sense. When it came time to needing portability, I wanted a desktop replacement capable machine, but I knew that to be as efficient as possible, I needed the server platform on the desktop, so I needed a Unix machine.
:)
What other Unix-based laptop comes with even 1/10th the polish and completeness of a Mac? This makes a Mac a no-brainer purchase for anyone needing both portability and a Unix environment for writing LAMP-based web apps. I wonder how many others were in a similar scenario and switched because of it? LAMP may be benefiting Apple more than people would think.
Now I'm slowly replacing all the machines in the office with Macs. I've got a 667 TiBook, 20" G5 iMac, and a new 1.5 Mac Mini too. They're all awesome machines. The only machine left that's non-Mac is a Linux server, and that's only to offer an alternative test platform, and to run MSIE 6 via Wine through remote X sessions from our Macs. Just this week I gave away the only Windows machine we had. It felt great.
You know, us switchers sure love to talk about out it!
Very good points.
Unfortunately in my case, the guy only had one hat on...
That's an interesting possibility.
So would I, I'm afraid.
I've experienced exactly the same problem, but I'm not certain what renders people like this inert (or slower than molases) when such simple things are needed. I've had to tell one programmer several times to reply to an email, and then I gave up and simply dictated it to him in order for him to finally do it. Even things like committing project changes to the client-visible area -- and to CVS, for crying out loud -- have been a fight.
I suspect the main reason in this case was that they simply didn't care at all. They had no drive at all (except of course when the time came to be paid, they're always quite driven then). I'm guessing that the increase in occurrences of this is partly the result of so many people graduating from computer science now that went into it during the bubble thinking they'd make easy cash.
PS. Paul Graham's "animal" test is pure brilliance.
In my experience, people prove to be the most critical and the most difficult part of the equation. Most people are not startup employee material. Most people, especially these days, want little responsibility, no risk, and high pay. My dad calls the high pay part an "entitlement attitude", but I couldn't tell you where the phrase originated. The risk part is understandable. The lower responsibility however, is better achieved in the same way as the low risk, by becoming another minute piece in a large enough institution that the bureaucracy adds a layer of padding between yourself and the exit ways.
;)
I definitely think it keeps things much simpler for a startup to be owned by a single person, it also creates a significant hurdle to people being dedicated to your cause. There's little for them to gain, much to risk, and the pay won't be great until you're cashflow positive somewhere down the road.
The other problematic aspect of finding the right people is that most people lack the required drive for excellence. They want crude effectiveness, and nothing more. In a smaller company, you need more perfectionists, because there is no bureaucratic padding between your work and the customer, which means that things have to be done right the first time. From my experience, excellence is getting harder and harder to find, and I believe our societal and educational structures are the cause of this condition. But that's waxing philosophical, so I'll refrain, in this post at least.
Programmers are infamous for their internal contradiction of attempting to be both eternally honest and eternally lazy. The "honesty" comes from their idealism. However, their laziness is downright infuriating as a manager.
Is it not a stretch to say that AAC files are sub-programs? They are files, but they aren't executed, they're read from. This would presumably invalidate their claim, would it not? (Not that I give any credence to any of this fucking garbage)
Could the increase in traffic as a result of the addition of a calendar feature to his site simply be that the calendar he added is a search engine spider trap that the spider takes some time to dig its way out of? Calendars are potentially infinite sources of links, since their next/previous day/week/month links could go on forever.
Or am I incorrect in my understanding of what a spider trap is?
Not to be all "I'm so smart" but isn't this also rather obvious? If you're indexing private documents, don't return private results for public visitors. Simple as that.
All it takes to implement this is an "access level" field stored with each index entry, and assigning an "access level" session value to each visitor (defaulting to 0 for anonymous visitors).
Plus, this way you'll avoid pissing off visitors who click on essentially broken links in their search results.
No wonder the search capabilities of most sites are rated so poorly...
I like your metaphor of the flute and the brass marching band.
I'm one of the diminishing number of people who hold a rational faith in religions, however I guess you could say I'm a newer convert, and I'm nowhere near the serenity of mind to be able to "tune in". I've still got a lot of work to do in that area, overcoming the hyperactivity of mind that we push ourselves to strive for nowadays...
The greatest inventors in history likely wouldn't consider themselves "creators" of their inventions so much as "observers" of the natural world. Prior to the past century (thank you Nietzche) inventors and artists played a similar role (look at Da Vinci, who is considered to be both), in that their job wasn't to "create" things, but rather to "mimic" the world they saw, and seek ways to perfect it.
Now, keeping value judgements out of this (I'm not claiming they're better than we are per se), it seems to me to be more effective the way things used to be done. Perhaps our "progressive" mindset has forgotten some important lessons.