There's a cost in that annoyance. Perhaps he is getting interrupted while doing something just so someone else can read their mail or Twitter the current status of their digestive system, and that costs him time and focus. Perhaps people borrow the computer while he's idle, but then it takes a while for them to return it when he needs to leave. Perhaps it started with one friend borrowing the machine and now there are a dozen or so people wanting to do the same - even taking the time to respond "no" might interrupt his thought process in doing something else.
For myself, I'd also be thinking about the security of my machine, about someone dropping it, about leaving for a moment (to pee, for example) and returning to discover that it had been put down and picked up by some random person - perhaps to disappear, perhaps just by someone who doesn't think it is my machine and who is cranky about giving it up.
These costs may be generally small, but they're not insignificant and the annoyance is rather more than "simple".
They not only validated the info, but also provided a visual template
My bank requires that account numbers for their pay-online system are entered in exactly the right format for the system they're talking to. So, they put the format (with no help text, of course, on the top of the page so you can refer to it handily). Why they can't prefill the text area with the format, or put the format immediately above the text area I don't understand. Even better would be a javascript engine that would prefix the text area and check the digits/letters as they get entered. Then the dashes and spaces some formats use could be automagically skipped over - not like there's much point in requiring the user to enter them is there?
I suppose I should just be grateful that I can do payments online and grateful too that they don't just make me guess at the right format.
How fucking hard is it to strip non-numeric characters from a string?
It must be incredibly difficult or you'd have web sites that could actually manage to take a credit card number with dashes in it, or a phone number with slightly different formats. But since the incredibly brilliant software types that wrote the system couldn't figure out how to manage it (see how hard a problem it is), users are required to type in long numeric strings and then verify them without the visual cues of spaces or dashes. Betcha they saved a couple of bucks in development costs though.
I think Martin's fans (and I'm one) have been fairly patient overall. It is a huge (and wonderful) work and certainly requires a lot of time to make it as good as it is. It's not like he came to my house and signed a contract with me to finish at any particular time. On the other hand, starting a series like this does seem to make a kind of promise to the readers that it will (at least eventually) be finished.
Where people lose patience is when it seems that lots of other things (calendars, figurines, tv series, games....) are taking up more of Martin's time than the books, and when those fans care about the books and not about the tchotchkes they (the fans, not the tchotchkes) - however selfishly and unrealistically - feel slighted and cranky.
Makes me think about the moderation (and meta-moderation) process. I've thought sometimes about trying to get an "ask slashdot" post on just how moderators (and meta-m's) rate things.
Indeed. My university has a deal with another university that allows us to use their classrooms on the other university's campus. That campus has wireless and it is protected by requiring the systems that connect to it to run a specific piece of software - which is supposed to ensure that your machine is virus free and all (yah,right). That software runs only on Windows (and recently on Macs), thus they have effectively precluded the use of Linux on their campus network. All, of course, in the name of "security".
Absolutely! If you have any way to move to another university, do so. You'll meet a whole new group of people, both students and faculty. With some luck the students will be from a variety of universities and the faculty will have different interests and different approaches to things. You might find that they'll expect you to learn some stuff that they do at the undergraduate level, but your old school did not, but that's a good thing.
Staying in one place, unless the program is huge and you get to deal with a whole new set of people, tends to lead to stagnation and to graduate students whose advanced degrees are only a tiny bit different from their undergraduate degrees.
The "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American was actually done by Martin Gardner, though he certainly did write about the "game of life" (among many, many other topics). I read it regularly as a kid and it was inspirational.
Then I read Berlekamp, Conway and Guy's "Winning Ways For Your Mathematical Plays" and found that just as much fun.
Can't you just use a linux kernel on another partition and use dd to copy the good partition somewhere, then dd it back when needed? I used to do this, but haven't tried (haven't needed) it recently.
Of course, you don't even really need a linux partition, just a live cd and disk space to put the image on.
Crossword puzzles. Just put one on the top page of a clipboard holding a pad of paper and lean back a bit and it will look like you're listening and taking notes, but you're actually trying to figure out what 5 across is.
OK. Source code is here - I though I had it on sourceforge, but a search there didn't seem to work. It is written in java and an adaptation of something far older (trying to use grammars to generate music). Code is not as nice as I'd like, but it is not intended to be production quality - it is intended as a testbed for hackery and experimentation.
Unpack, cd down to the html directory (down a few levels) and run make. There are scripts (unix) to then try to run different browsers ("run-firefox" for instance).
I wrote a program a few years back that used a genetic algorithm to generate HTML. First I wanted to just see if it would crash browsers (which wasn't all that hard for the most part),
but one of the things I used to score "genes" when there was no crash was the rendering time. Naturally enough, this led to long rendering times - even on relatively short (20K was the usual limit) files. Firefox once took almost 24 hours(!) to render a single such page, but the amazing thing was that it did not crash in the process. Perhaps I should dust that off again and try now.
Not all of Africa has bandits roaming around all night, and in much of the continent people actually sleep in huts and houses - even where there is no electricity. (I spent some time in Eastern Congo some years back and it was certainly the case then.)
As for not having books, I suspect that if people had more time in which they could read, they might read more. So books would be more desirable and people would print/import/write more.
As for mosquito netting, the fact that governments are corrupt, or that there is a good deal of social inertia to overcome in persuading people to use them is regrettable. But it does not mean that there may not be other things that can be accomplished to effectively change peoples lives, nor that such things should not be attempted.
But that just raises the question of how to define a hash function mathematically? The lambda calculus, Godel Numbers? Things like cryptographic hash functions don't tend to be nice algebraic thingies like f(x)=x*x+7, especially since they're usually iterative and deliberately messy - the pretty functions are likely to be less secure.
Spivak's Calculus is probably the best calculus text for someone interested in mathematics. But it may be one of the worse for someone who finds mathematics difficult. But I'm biased, I learned some of the basics from Spivak himself and he left me with a lifelong love of mathematics.
"Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays" (Berlekamp, Conway and Guy) is both fun and serious mathematics. It is probably too much for most students, but even doing some of the stuff in the first few chapters is likely to open their imagination to what mathematicians can do. The first volume (of the first, two volume, edition) covers basic combinatorial game theory with the second volume covering such things as the "dots and boxes" game, the Rubik's cube and the Game of Life.
It has been reprinted in 4 volumes recently.
The first edition (at least) is filled with puns, odd drawing, and lots of other weirdness.
I haven't used Verizon for this for a while, but they did steadfastly refuse to admit that there was any such thing as a non-Windows OS (I suspect they'll support Macs now) but all I had to do was plug in a router and plug my computer in to that and it all worked very nicely. The CD they sent me ended up in pieces (I was trying to cut CDs apart to use them for something at the time).
The same could be said of Windows (well, not the "free" part) except that our school systems, universities and other corporations are doing the training for you so you don't have to invest the time to do training. Which amounts to a massive governmental subsidy for Microsoft. A subsidy that nobody in the government ever actually decided on - but one that just became ingrained in the educational system.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a cost in that annoyance. Perhaps he is getting interrupted while doing something just so someone else can read their mail or Twitter the current status of their digestive system, and that costs him time and focus. Perhaps people borrow the computer while he's idle, but then it takes a while for them to return it when he needs to leave. Perhaps it started with one friend borrowing the machine and now there are a dozen or so people wanting to do the same - even taking the time to respond "no" might interrupt his thought process in doing something else.
For myself, I'd also be thinking about the security of my machine, about someone dropping it, about leaving for a moment (to pee, for example) and returning to discover that it had been put down and picked up by some random person - perhaps to disappear, perhaps just by someone who doesn't think it is my machine and who is cranky about giving it up.
These costs may be generally small, but they're not insignificant and the annoyance is rather more than "simple".
They not only validated the info, but also provided a visual template
My bank requires that account numbers for their pay-online system are entered in exactly the right format for the system they're talking to. So, they put the format (with no help text, of course, on the top of the page so you can refer to it handily). Why they can't prefill the text area with the format, or put the format immediately above the text area I don't understand. Even better would be a javascript engine that would prefix the text area and check the digits/letters as they get entered. Then the dashes and spaces some formats use could be automagically skipped over - not like there's much point in requiring the user to enter them is there?
I suppose I should just be grateful that I can do payments online and grateful too that they don't just make me guess at the right format.
How fucking hard is it to strip non-numeric characters from a string?
It must be incredibly difficult or you'd have web sites that could actually manage to take a credit card number with dashes in it, or a phone number with slightly different formats. But since the incredibly brilliant software types that wrote the system couldn't figure out how to manage it (see how hard a problem it is), users are required to type in long numeric strings and then verify them without the visual cues of spaces or dashes. Betcha they saved a couple of bucks in development costs though.
I think Martin's fans (and I'm one) have been fairly patient overall. It is a huge (and wonderful) work and certainly requires a lot of time to make it as good as it is. It's not like he came to my house and signed a contract with me to finish at any particular time. On the other hand, starting a series like this does seem to make a kind of promise to the readers that it will (at least eventually) be finished.
Where people lose patience is when it seems that lots of other things (calendars, figurines, tv series, games....) are taking up more of Martin's time than the books, and when those fans care about the books and not about the tchotchkes they (the fans, not the tchotchkes) - however selfishly and unrealistically - feel slighted and cranky.
Makes me think about the moderation (and meta-moderation) process. I've thought sometimes about trying to get an "ask slashdot" post on just how moderators (and meta-m's) rate things.
Not from science fiction, from "Finnegans Wake" which is certainly not your usual brand of fiction.
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
Indeed. My university has a deal with another university that allows us to use their classrooms on the other university's campus. That campus has wireless and it is protected by requiring the systems that connect to it to run a specific piece of software - which is supposed to ensure that your machine is virus free and all (yah,right). That software runs only on Windows (and recently on Macs), thus they have effectively precluded the use of Linux on their campus network. All, of course, in the name of "security".
You forgot : "cat" as a monad injection tool (which is the oft-belittled UUOC).
Of course, if cat didn't exist, you could always define an alias to "tac | tac".
Absolutely! If you have any way to move to another university, do so. You'll meet a whole new group of people, both students and faculty. With some luck the students will be from a variety of universities and the faculty will have different interests and different approaches to things. You might find that they'll expect you to learn some stuff that they do at the undergraduate level, but your old school did not, but that's a good thing.
Staying in one place, unless the program is huge and you get to deal with a whole new set of people, tends to lead to stagnation and to graduate students whose advanced degrees are only a tiny bit different from their undergraduate degrees.
Then I read Berlekamp, Conway and Guy's "Winning Ways For Your Mathematical Plays" and found that just as much fun.
Can't you just use a linux kernel on another partition and use dd to copy the good partition somewhere, then dd it back when needed? I used to do this, but haven't tried (haven't needed) it recently.
Of course, you don't even really need a linux partition, just a live cd and disk space to put the image on.
Crossword puzzles. Just put one on the top page of a clipboard holding a pad of paper and lean back a bit and it will look like you're listening and taking notes, but you're actually trying to figure out what 5 across is.
OK. Source code is here - I though I had it on sourceforge, but a search there didn't seem to work. It is written in java and an adaptation of something far older (trying to use grammars to generate music). Code is not as nice as I'd like, but it is not intended to be production quality - it is intended as a testbed for hackery and experimentation.
Unpack, cd down to the html directory (down a few levels) and run make. There are scripts (unix) to then try to run different browsers ("run-firefox" for instance).
HTML always renders fast enough
I wrote a program a few years back that used a genetic algorithm to generate HTML. First I wanted to just see if it would crash browsers (which wasn't all that hard for the most part), but one of the things I used to score "genes" when there was no crash was the rendering time. Naturally enough, this led to long rendering times - even on relatively short (20K was the usual limit) files. Firefox once took almost 24 hours(!) to render a single such page, but the amazing thing was that it did not crash in the process. Perhaps I should dust that off again and try now.
Not all of Africa has bandits roaming around all night, and in much of the continent people actually sleep in huts and houses - even where there is no electricity. (I spent some time in Eastern Congo some years back and it was certainly the case then.)
As for not having books, I suspect that if people had more time in which they could read, they might read more. So books would be more desirable and people would print/import/write more.
As for mosquito netting, the fact that governments are corrupt, or that there is a good deal of social inertia to overcome in persuading people to use them is regrettable. But it does not mean that there may not be other things that can be accomplished to effectively change peoples lives, nor that such things should not be attempted.
But that just raises the question of how to define a hash function mathematically? The lambda calculus, Godel Numbers? Things like cryptographic hash functions don't tend to be nice algebraic thingies like f(x)=x*x+7, especially since they're usually iterative and deliberately messy - the pretty functions are likely to be less secure.
On the other hand, there are things like cryptol in which you may be able to specify hash functions more mathematically. For example, here is a cryptol implementation of skein.
Spivak's Calculus is probably the best calculus text for someone interested in mathematics. But it may be one of the worse for someone who finds mathematics difficult. But I'm biased, I learned some of the basics from Spivak himself and he left me with a lifelong love of mathematics.
"Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays" (Berlekamp, Conway and Guy) is both fun and serious mathematics. It is probably too much for most students, but even doing some of the stuff in the first few chapters is likely to open their imagination to what mathematicians can do. The first volume (of the first, two volume, edition) covers basic combinatorial game theory with the second volume covering such things as the "dots and boxes" game, the Rubik's cube and the Game of Life.
It has been reprinted in 4 volumes recently.
The first edition (at least) is filled with puns, odd drawing, and lots of other weirdness.
Coincidentally in the NY Times today there is an article on how bad forensics labs really are . A good read.
But then too there is rfc 2100 on "The naming of hosts.".
Nah, just writing its digits base 13.
I haven't used Verizon for this for a while, but they did steadfastly refuse to admit that there was any such thing as a non-Windows OS (I suspect they'll support Macs now) but all I had to do was plug in a router and plug my computer in to that and it all worked very nicely. The CD they sent me ended up in pieces (I was trying to cut CDs apart to use them for something at the time).
The same could be said of Windows (well, not the "free" part) except that our school systems, universities and other corporations are doing the training for you so you don't have to invest the time to do training. Which amounts to a massive governmental subsidy for Microsoft. A subsidy that nobody in the government ever actually decided on - but one that just became ingrained in the educational system.
That would be fun to watch. Does the state/city (Arlington, VA ??) where it occurred have hate speech laws?