Bullshit. If this were true, then there would never have been spam to begin with, because the *very first* spammers got exactly zero orders. Nobody bought anything, and yet spammers still spammed - why? because they could.
That's not only wrong, it's pretty stupid.
The first spammers made a killing on green card lottery applications brought in by their spam.
Nobody is going to expend this amount of time and money (and it does cost quite a bit of money) just because "they can". Spammers make money off of their "trade", whether it's from people buying the crap they sell, or from other means (eg selling anti-spam software), doesn't really matter.
You just have to understand that "page server" is their term for "caching proxy"
I think they mean it the other way around: the "page server" is what generates the dynamic content, while they front-end server continues to serve the static requests and initiate the dynamic ones.
This is the standard way of setting up mod_perl and tomcat installations - a lightweight static apache server that hands off (via Apache's reverse proxy) the dynamic requests to a heavier dynamic server (with a lot fewer forks/threads).
I am not sure if this would apply to caching proxies as written, seems like it might.
OWA looks GREAT on IE on Windows. It looks EXACTLY like Outlook 2003, and behaves almost exactly like IE. Which is amazing for a browser! What really sucks, is that it's totally proprietary, which means it works in nothing else, but IT departments STANDARDIZE on it, which means their users are all using it.
I may be missing something, but it works fine in Firefox. It may not have the stupid trees and panes, but no functionality is lost and it still looks fine (and a damn site better than the previous version).
Besides, all that the grown-ups care about nowadays is the minimalist display for their shiny hand-held combo device nonsense and that it syncs over the air. Most of ours haven't cracked plain old OWA open in some time.
I'm reserving Perl as a skill ONLY used when absolutely necessary
Yeah, so do I. It's also the only language I use day to day:)
I find that Effective Perl Programming is a nice "once you know the syntax" book. I don't actually remember what books I learned Perl from (I think I skimmed the Camel and then just read the perldocs), but reading this one in "retrospect" I found a lot to agree with.
I was looking for a nice Turion notebook recently and found something odd: as I understand it, AMD makes two lines of those chips, the ML which are supposed to output 35 watts (or rather not more than 35), and the MT which is 25.
I must've looked through pretty much every single model from HP, Acer and Asus (and a few others) and could not find a single one with an MT processor - is there a reason for this, or did I just miss it? A couple of reviews mentioned that there isn't much of a price difference between the two, so I don't think that's it.
Does anyone know if a similar device to the NSLU2 exists that supports firewire?
I've been looking for just such a cheap, low noise/power device to "NASify" a bunch of external disks, but with USB 2.0 only support it's not all that useful (you can only get two HDs on there).
It's a little weird too, wouldn't 1394 be a better choise for these little buggers since it's less CPU intensive? Or are the controllers that much more expensive? It seems like availability shouldn't be an issue as most external hard drives support both.
Your ignorance of Muslim society just reeks from this post.
Fair enough.
You compare your own liberal and secular upbringing to that of my country where kids are brainwashed from age 5 into believing ideologically and existentially in very dangerous ideals and imperatives.
While clearly upbringings don't get more secular than mine, it was certainly not liberal (and I don't believe I've ever compared it to yours). I've seen enough of ideological brainwashing, both secular and not to know how the process goes.
Your racism and quite evident from this post.
Kind of a big word to throw around with no reason...
Comparing your culture with Muslims and implying that Muslims have to subscribe to your culture.
That seems like a knee-jerk argument - where have I implied any such thing? All I said was that you may be underestimating the similarity between fundamentalist thinking in the different religions. How on earth does that require you to subscribe to anything?
Well they do not, and we have a culture different from yours that you do not understand. So when Muslims cry for freedom, we expect you westerners to respect us, and not put us down with nonsense that Koran is just another religious text.
I'm confused - what do Muslims, as a whole, want freedom from (there goes my ignorance again, I admit)? What form does this crying for freedom take? And how exactly am I disrespecting it?
Oh, far be it for me to judge whether the Qur'an is The One True Word of God or just another religious text. I think that if you ask a few Christians or Jews, you'll find that they are positively convinced that their texts are the true ones.
Your ingorance of ME society, Arab culture, and Muslim culture is pathetic.
I am not sure how the guys with the guitar robot have any relation to the lack of cancer cures... of course here I am, reading/. instead of working on our microarray expression database like I am supposed to be doing, so I guess you have a point...
Muslims irrationally believe that the Koran is the TRUE word of god and it should be obeyed unquestionably.
Well yeah, that kind of comes with the territory for "revealed" religions.
There are many Surahs in the Koran to kill unbelievers, infidels, apostates, and blasphemers.
There certainly is a number of those, though in context most of them call for violence only in retaliation for violence done to the believer by the aforementioned groups. There are also plenty of verses calling for religious tolerance and understanding, at least towards other peoples of The Book. Historically these were followed in practice as well, something rather unique to Islam out of the Big Three.
You will be taken to court in France and in Italy. In the Middle East, they will rip you to pieces. In the enlightened west, the Bible or Torat is not regarded as the immutable never-corrupted word of god.
You are confusing belief and its influence on politics and state law. The only reason you wouldn't be prosecuted in the US (I can't speak for the enlightened west) for defiling the Christian Bible or the Tanakh is the concept that dogmatic religion and its laws should not have influence in the governing of a democratic state.
The followers of those religions believe just as ardently as any Muslim fundamentalist that their scripture is the immutable* uncorrupted word of God.
People even pee on the cross in public.
But soon they'll be going to jail for burnin a flag - zealous protection of symbolic artefacts isn't unique to religions, it's hard to draw generaliztions from how it's practiced.
Anyway, claiming that Muslims, as a people, are somehow more gullible in interpreting their religious texts than Westerners, is just plain silly.
* One could argue that Jewish mysticism holds most sacred the mutable and permutable, rather than immutable aspect of the Tanakh, but that's completely beside the point.
I wonder if there really isn't a single person out there who knows MySQL and PHP and who can write a decent book?
Seems like the only explanation for this myriad of redundant books on such a simple topic. Really, how can there be a market that can accomodate another one of these identical books every month?
That just highlights the problem I was talking about - what's termed 'AI' in research, is not what we think of as 'AI' intuitively. That's because there isn't any research into actual AI (ie artificially creating what we understand to be sentient intelligence), rather all that present AI research does is approximate some aspect of the appearance of intelligence.
I would be really surprised if we had something which was only a little behind "true" AI.
I think the real problem is that we (ie programmers and related proffessions) are so attached to thinking about our computers in anthropomorphic terms that we throw about the term 'AI' far too quickly.
Meh, still sounds like Fox purchases a lot of shows, and expects a large proportion of them to fail, and what's more, will only start investing effort into the shows after it looks like they've taken off.
Since scifi makes up only a small percentage of the total number of shows (seriously, how many new scifi shows did they buy in the last five years?), it's not all that surprising if most or all of them fail.
This whole "Fox is out to destroy scifi as a genre!" thing sounds a bit tinfoily.
Everything you say makes a lot of sense, except each of your conclusions is a bit of a leap.
Yes, it would be exteremely interesting to see what happens when we build a computer (in our current understanding of what that is) that interacts with its environment and learns from it. Whether this produces "apparent" sentience or "actual" sentience would be quite enlightening.
That's not what we are talking about here though, the chess computer does not interact with its environment, has no capacity for learning, all it is is a bunch of heuristics and database lookups. I'm sure so are we, but in this case what the computer does is strictly defined by humans, not built up by learning.
A computer can be extended with greater ease than a human.
I can't agree with that - I spend most of my day programming computers to do new things, I know plenty of people who learn a lot faster than that.
It is our currently limited, but rapidly increasing understanding of our own sentient processes, that is the real limitation.
Of course, this limitation was my entire point. But our understanding here isn't "limited", it's nonexistent. It's not "rapidly increasing", it's making absolutely no progress whatsoever. Oh sure, we are learning plenty about the hardware (neuron function, synaptic pathways, etc), but the last time I checked, we are not one iota closer to having a theory of how sentience, consciousness, or self awareness works (or in fact, what it is).
This isn't some hubristic "we are oh so special" thing, I'm just saying this is something we know jack about, and are nowhere near being able to replicate artificially.
In other words, the computer is not the limited one. We are.
That's really neither here nor there. We are limited (as is everything), and computers, being our creations, are limited by our ingenuity, in addition to all their other limitations. So what?
3. Why are you so sure that you are not just an expensive chemical heater which happens to peform calculations fixed by someone else? Just because the illusion is convincing to you doesn't mean anyone else should believe you.
I never claimed any such thing, in fact I am absolutely positive that I am just such a chemical heater (well, I would take issue with being programmed by someone).
The point is that we know that the engineers provided the fixed algorithms for the chess computer - in this instance it's still the human heaters doing the work, regardless of how they themselves were programmed.
And please, you make far too many assumptions about what I would assume. (btw, I didn't bother with 1 and 2, I think it's pretty obvious why they are irrelevant)
Anyway, all I wanted to point out is that this "seemingly deliberately" comment is a bit of a stretch. Sure, as any large organization Fox has various internal forces working against each other, that produce final results which might seem arbitrary. Still don't forget that good shows are expensive and not great money-makers compared to Fox's other fare, and that the shows we (the/. crowd, by an large) enjoy are definitely in a niche market.
As far as ineptitude and mismanagement in marketing, there's plenty of that to go around at any network.
Here's the thing, all the computer "did" was run electricity through a circuit - an electric heater does the same thing.
The hardware and software engineers who built and programmed that computer were the ones who achieved the victory - the computer has no understanding of chess, nor in fact any capacity of understanding.
Now if they designed a general purpose AI that then learned to play chess and trounced a great-grand master (or whatever they are called), that would be a computer defeating a human.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy I was way off, then...
That's not only wrong, it's pretty stupid.
The first spammers made a killing on green card lottery applications brought in by their spam.
Nobody is going to expend this amount of time and money (and it does cost quite a bit of money) just because "they can". Spammers make money off of their "trade", whether it's from people buying the crap they sell, or from other means (eg selling anti-spam software), doesn't really matter.
I think they mean it the other way around: the "page server" is what generates the dynamic content, while they front-end server continues to serve the static requests and initiate the dynamic ones.
This is the standard way of setting up mod_perl and tomcat installations - a lightweight static apache server that hands off (via Apache's reverse proxy) the dynamic requests to a heavier dynamic server (with a lot fewer forks/threads).
I am not sure if this would apply to caching proxies as written, seems like it might.
I may be missing something, but it works fine in Firefox. It may not have the stupid trees and panes, but no functionality is lost and it still looks fine (and a damn site better than the previous version).
Besides, all that the grown-ups care about nowadays is the minimalist display for their shiny hand-held combo device nonsense and that it syncs over the air. Most of ours haven't cracked plain old OWA open in some time.
Wait, you mean IE isn't Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable? Oh wait, you're talking about a different Acid.
The Greeks couldn't even manage a coherent country; don't remember them having an empire. Did you mean the Macedonians? ;)
You missed the Islamic empires and the Mongol empire - now that was an empire! All these other ones are just sad in comparison.
Yeah, but it's not all that much fun posting this at the monastery:
Yeah, so do I. It's also the only language I use day to day :)
I find that Effective Perl Programming is a nice "once you know the syntax" book. I don't actually remember what books I learned Perl from (I think I skimmed the Camel and then just read the perldocs), but reading this one in "retrospect" I found a lot to agree with.
I must've looked through pretty much every single model from HP, Acer and Asus (and a few others) and could not find a single one with an MT processor - is there a reason for this, or did I just miss it? A couple of reviews mentioned that there isn't much of a price difference between the two, so I don't think that's it.
I've been looking for just such a cheap, low noise/power device to "NASify" a bunch of external disks, but with USB 2.0 only support it's not all that useful (you can only get two HDs on there).
It's a little weird too, wouldn't 1394 be a better choise for these little buggers since it's less CPU intensive? Or are the controllers that much more expensive? It seems like availability shouldn't be an issue as most external hard drives support both.
Fair enough.
You compare your own liberal and secular upbringing to that of my country where kids are brainwashed from age 5 into believing ideologically and existentially in very dangerous ideals and imperatives.
While clearly upbringings don't get more secular than mine, it was certainly not liberal (and I don't believe I've ever compared it to yours). I've seen enough of ideological brainwashing, both secular and not to know how the process goes.
Your racism and quite evident from this post.
Kind of a big word to throw around with no reason...
Comparing your culture with Muslims and implying that Muslims have to subscribe to your culture.
That seems like a knee-jerk argument - where have I implied any such thing? All I said was that you may be underestimating the similarity between fundamentalist thinking in the different religions. How on earth does that require you to subscribe to anything?
Well they do not, and we have a culture different from yours that you do not understand. So when Muslims cry for freedom, we expect you westerners to respect us, and not put us down with nonsense that Koran is just another religious text.
I'm confused - what do Muslims, as a whole, want freedom from (there goes my ignorance again, I admit)? What form does this crying for freedom take? And how exactly am I disrespecting it?
Oh, far be it for me to judge whether the Qur'an is The One True Word of God or just another religious text. I think that if you ask a few Christians or Jews, you'll find that they are positively convinced that their texts are the true ones.
Your ingorance of ME society, Arab culture, and Muslim culture is pathetic.
Well that's that then.
I am not sure how the guys with the guitar robot have any relation to the lack of cancer cures... of course here I am, reading /. instead of working on our microarray expression database like I am supposed to be doing, so I guess you have a point...
Well yeah, that kind of comes with the territory for "revealed" religions.
There are many Surahs in the Koran to kill unbelievers, infidels, apostates, and blasphemers.
There certainly is a number of those, though in context most of them call for violence only in retaliation for violence done to the believer by the aforementioned groups. There are also plenty of verses calling for religious tolerance and understanding, at least towards other peoples of The Book. Historically these were followed in practice as well, something rather unique to Islam out of the Big Three.
You will be taken to court in France and in Italy. In the Middle East, they will rip you to pieces. In the enlightened west, the Bible or Torat is not regarded as the immutable never-corrupted word of god.
You are confusing belief and its influence on politics and state law. The only reason you wouldn't be prosecuted in the US (I can't speak for the enlightened west) for defiling the Christian Bible or the Tanakh is the concept that dogmatic religion and its laws should not have influence in the governing of a democratic state.
The followers of those religions believe just as ardently as any Muslim fundamentalist that their scripture is the immutable* uncorrupted word of God.
People even pee on the cross in public.
But soon they'll be going to jail for burnin a flag - zealous protection of symbolic artefacts isn't unique to religions, it's hard to draw generaliztions from how it's practiced.
Anyway, claiming that Muslims, as a people, are somehow more gullible in interpreting their religious texts than Westerners, is just plain silly.
* One could argue that Jewish mysticism holds most sacred the mutable and permutable, rather than immutable aspect of the Tanakh, but that's completely beside the point.
Well, for the most part they aren't, I always found this one amusing:
Luke 19:27 "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me."
That is JC speaking btw, but you never know, could be a typo.
*shudder* Don't even joke about that!
Now I don't feel so bad about getting the DVDs off of bittorrent.
Seems like the only explanation for this myriad of redundant books on such a simple topic. Really, how can there be a market that can accomodate another one of these identical books every month?
I would be really surprised if we had something which was only a little behind "true" AI.
I think the real problem is that we (ie programmers and related proffessions) are so attached to thinking about our computers in anthropomorphic terms that we throw about the term 'AI' far too quickly.
Since scifi makes up only a small percentage of the total number of shows (seriously, how many new scifi shows did they buy in the last five years?), it's not all that surprising if most or all of them fail.
This whole "Fox is out to destroy scifi as a genre!" thing sounds a bit tinfoily.
Yes, it would be exteremely interesting to see what happens when we build a computer (in our current understanding of what that is) that interacts with its environment and learns from it. Whether this produces "apparent" sentience or "actual" sentience would be quite enlightening.
That's not what we are talking about here though, the chess computer does not interact with its environment, has no capacity for learning, all it is is a bunch of heuristics and database lookups. I'm sure so are we, but in this case what the computer does is strictly defined by humans, not built up by learning.
A computer can be extended with greater ease than a human.
I can't agree with that - I spend most of my day programming computers to do new things, I know plenty of people who learn a lot faster than that.
It is our currently limited, but rapidly increasing understanding of our own sentient processes, that is the real limitation.
Of course, this limitation was my entire point. But our understanding here isn't "limited", it's nonexistent. It's not "rapidly increasing", it's making absolutely no progress whatsoever. Oh sure, we are learning plenty about the hardware (neuron function, synaptic pathways, etc), but the last time I checked, we are not one iota closer to having a theory of how sentience, consciousness, or self awareness works (or in fact, what it is).
This isn't some hubristic "we are oh so special" thing, I'm just saying this is something we know jack about, and are nowhere near being able to replicate artificially.
In other words, the computer is not the limited one. We are.
That's really neither here nor there. We are limited (as is everything), and computers, being our creations, are limited by our ingenuity, in addition to all their other limitations. So what?
I never claimed any such thing, in fact I am absolutely positive that I am just such a chemical heater (well, I would take issue with being programmed by someone).
The point is that we know that the engineers provided the fixed algorithms for the chess computer - in this instance it's still the human heaters doing the work, regardless of how they themselves were programmed.
And please, you make far too many assumptions about what I would assume. (btw, I didn't bother with 1 and 2, I think it's pretty obvious why they are irrelevant)
I think Fox just hates shows that start with 'F'!
Anyway, all I wanted to point out is that this "seemingly deliberately" comment is a bit of a stretch. Sure, as any large organization Fox has various internal forces working against each other, that produce final results which might seem arbitrary. Still don't forget that good shows are expensive and not great money-makers compared to Fox's other fare, and that the shows we (the /. crowd, by an large) enjoy are definitely in a niche market.
As far as ineptitude and mismanagement in marketing, there's plenty of that to go around at any network.
And no, even in theory they don't have the slightest clue about how to build such machines.
The hardware and software engineers who built and programmed that computer were the ones who achieved the victory - the computer has no understanding of chess, nor in fact any capacity of understanding.
Now if they designed a general purpose AI that then learned to play chess and trounced a great-grand master (or whatever they are called), that would be a computer defeating a human.