One wonders if the story is a spoof since being at sea does nothing to improve the legal situation and the mechanics of producing CDs on board a ship do not sound promissing, I doubt that CD pressing plants are designed to be used on ship.
Maybe they learned everything they know about law in international waters from the the Simpsons....
It's the best solution, since it uses up 99% of the bandwidth to begin with anyway. What, would you rather slow down webpage requests to increase bandwidth?
This just in: the second performance optimization the school will perform is to limit bandwidth dedicated to serving pages where the referring page originates in the "slashdot.org" domain.....
[W]e must remember that there have been patents, big companyies, monopolies and greedy people in the past who held great sway on the way things were done. But somehoe things worked out and we made it through.
We must remember that there were always people (however few) that weren't too complacent to fight these large corporations. For the pendulum to swing back, there must be something pulling it. But you're right, this is a valuable thing to keep in mind. It is important to remain optimistic that these discussions do have value in the efforts to bring things back to being tolerable again.
Just love getting the skinny on failed companies. Wish people from other companies would come out and do the same.
If you're really that interested, check out http://fuckedcompany.com/. You have to wade through a lot of garbage (they don't have the notion of Karma with their blogs (I hate that term)), but you get an almost-as-it-happens look at recently failing companies.
It's one of those sites which are propbably more entertaining to those who watch the nightly news for the explosions rather than the weather....
Actually, this kind of thing was not limited to the (then to become) airline industry. Movie production was done largely in New York, until producers realized they would be much more likely to get away with using Thomas Edison's patented motion picture camera without paying exorbitant licensing fees (which Edision was fanatical about enforcing) if they were on a different coast.
In any case, profiling is just too complicated to work all that well. There are going to be tons of false positives falling out of this AND it won't matter anyway. So what if the system fingers someone as a potential threat - you still can't lawfully detain them based on information provided by such a system.
This is exactly why profiling should be kept in advertising where it belongs. Profiling (i.e., demographics) is for taking a set of people, and tossing out those least likely to fit your market. In the set that's left, one is statistically more likely to fit your ideal customer (however, there's still a lot of noise, just less than before).
For crime, it doesn't really work, unless one is willing to prosecute a lot of innocent people. In the United States, there is the presumption of innocense. Based on this, a perfect system is one in which no innocent people are found guilty. In real life, this means that no people are found guilty. Realizing this, the founding fathers knew they had to have a compromise. It was this: for every one innocent person convicted, ten guilty people go free. Profiling strives for the scales to be tipped (i.e., for every ten innocent people convicted, one guilty person goes free).
That's not to mention that profiling is only "effective" if members of the profilied population make no efforts against being profiled (again, that's why it's effective in advertising, but not in detecting crime). I used to work for a large on-line retailer in automated fraud detection. Automated fraud detection (i.e., systems which detect the likelihood of fraud with minimal human intervention) is based on profiling.
Well guess what? As soon as fraudsters find out what they're doing doesn't work, they change the properties of their transactions to more closely mirror legitimate purchases (as seen by the profiling model). The population has incentive to become homogenous. So once the model is implemented and deployed, it reduces fraud for about a week, until people figure out what it's doing, then levels climb back up to where they were before. However, after repeatedly deploying new models, unless the number of data points increases, the incidence of false positives steadily climbs.
People have been working on this system for nearly a year now. And now, 3 months from the finish date, you are complaining.
Maybe it's because of my own lack of diligence, but this is the first I've been made aware of it. No politician asked me if I thought this system was a good idea, or a good use of my money as a taxpayer.
If they're catching criminals then their system is obviously working right?
I'm always skeptical of the term "criminal". If the mere act of saying something unpatriotic becomes a crime, then most slashdotters will be considered criminals.
If the definition of the system's success is number of criminals caught, then equilibrium will be achieved when all members of the system are criminals and all are caught.
Don't get me wrong. I sincerely believe that anyone who maliciously impedes the liberties of another deserves no access to the liberties s/he made efforts to deny.
However, I'm not happy with the directions in which the authorities and lawmakers are going. As a result, I may be considered anti-US (though I am not; I feel the ideas on which this country was founded are the greatest on earth).
For the most part, I am a law-abiding citizen (save a few speeding tickets). The more new laws that are made to squash unpopular thoughts, the more likely it will be that I will break the law (with no increased effort on my end).
I am scared of being jailed for my opinions. I mean that literally. I am also now reluctant to travel via airplane, for fear that I heighten the activity of my profile.
I'm not going to be entering or leaving the U.S. I don't mind them scanning people entering and leaving one bit. In fact, if it means that they might catch one in a million people up to no good, more power to them.
Will you still be so indifferent when they start applying the same methods to arresting domestic citizens living and working in the US based on a mathematical suspicion?
"Have a poor terror score? No problem!" "Get plane tickets with bad or no terror info!" "Poor terror index? No terror index? We can help!" "Repair your terror history instantly!"
Un-clued-in programmers will send a thousand INSERT transactions, instead of a single transaction....
Postgres does have the ability to have those INSERTs be part of a single transaction:
BEGIN; INSERT (...) INTO table VALUES (...);... COMMIT;
All the inserts are now part of one transaction.
I'm unsure if one can make this the default behavior (obviating the need for the BEGIN; statement), like one can with Oracle.
I have a feeling that "un-clued-in" programmers are likely to inadvertently cause all kinds of performance (and other) problems (not limited to the database they're using). Just ask the experienced Oracle user how long it took him/her to learn how queries were specifically interpreted and how one could improve them. Heck, do half of query writers out there even know the concept behind an explain plan or explain query?
here here here here here here (not really a comparison, but read this article and the linked Postgres article for more info)
In my personal experience, Postgres has historically been the database more prepared for larger, more multi-threaded applications.
Obviously, there have been debates about which are faster in various different applications. To be honest, I have no hard data, nor have I stretched them either to their capacity, but as a user and casual developer, they are both fast enough for me not to notice.
What's inarguable exciting can be directly quoted from MySQL's own comparison of the two (listed above):
[B]oth products are continually evolving. We at MySQL AB and the PostgreSQL developers are both working on making our respective databases as good as possible, so we are both a serious alternative to any commercial database.
Not that you [cw]ould (necessarily) use Jabber as a means of storing and propagating a profile, but it might be a more appropriate model than Napster (anyone can host a Jabber server in front of, or behind a firewall, and the server is a single point designated by the Jabber address, much like an e-mail address).
Just thinking out loud here, but what might be nice is if everyone said, "Okay, we'll all use the Mozilla bookmarks format and the vCalendar and vCard standards, and we'll devise an (XML?) indexing format (telling a client where to find all the various files with the respective information) and make them accessable via WebDAV." Now all you have to do is convince every major client out there to use WebDAV, the new indexing format, vCalendar, vCard and the Mozilla bookmarks format.
Wait a minute...that sounds like it may be a job for an LDAP directory (which one can always host oneself if one doesn't like the availabe service providers). Most mailers already have some ability to interact with an LDAP server. Are there any standards for putting address/calendar/bookmark info in there? I know that's probably not what it was designed to do, but really, does that information change that often to be ill-suited for LDAP?
Sorry...just ranting about ideas here.... My point is that I know there's enough standards and protocols out there to meet this need without too much development. I'm sure there's just too much differing ideas about how to do it, so it hasn't been done yet.
When are they going to make my plates and cups self-cleaning too?
As soon as consumers get used to the idea that all their dishware has to be clear, and that you can only "wash" them by leaving them out in successive sunny/rainy days.
Why is it that Code Red and Nimda are viruses, but an Apache worm "create[s] a P2P attack network"?
And why is P2P even being used in this context? It's a worm, just like those before it. Are ignorant readers to infer that this is why P2P networks are bad (because they can be turned into "attack network[s]")?
The only upside to 9/11 for me has been that people now respect me for the job I try to do much more, previously people griped when being security checked but now very rarely does this occur.
That's because griping is to be interpreted by the Department of Homeland Security (i.e., Ministry of Defense) as an Unamerican Action, and is punishable by unknowable consequence against the accused.
I don't know why, but I don't seem to hear any difference between CD Audio or mp3 (128kBit/s). Hell, even Windows Media sounds the same to me. (RealAudio on the other hand has real glitches in it though.)
My wife and I both can tell the difference between an unencoded AIFF and a 128kB/s MP3 on as little as an old 3-piece speaker system (my ancient Sony SRS-002PC). We can't tell the difference between the AIFF and the 128kB/s Ogg on any of our stereo systems (not that any of them are all that great). It should be said (if it's not already obvious) that neither of us are a/v buffs.
For me the test was biased (I knew which samples were which), but not for my wife. I played two reps of the three encodings of the same sample in random order twice. Here's the PHP-like pseudocode for what I did:
for ($i = 0;
$i < 2;
++$i) {
foreach ($samples as $sample)
{
print("playing sample " . indexof($sample, $samples) . "...\n");
playsample($sample);
sleep();// Let it soak in
print("playing sample " . indexof($sample, $samples) . " again...\n");
playsample($sample);// do it again for good measure
} }
vote();
In seven different samples (ranging from classical to 80's pop), she identified the MP3 as the original once. She identified Ogg as the original 3 times and AIFF as the original 3 times.
Granted she's not a significant sample (like the study has), but we both agree that MP3's sound a little "tinnier", or "sharper".
Slashdot Mirror
One wonders if the story is a spoof since being at sea does nothing to improve the legal situation and the mechanics of producing CDs on board a ship do not sound promissing, I doubt that CD pressing plants are designed to be used on ship.
Maybe they learned everything they know about law in international waters from the the Simpsons....
It's the best solution, since it uses up 99% of the bandwidth to begin with anyway. What, would you rather slow down webpage requests to increase bandwidth?
This just in: the second performance optimization the school will perform is to limit bandwidth dedicated to serving pages where the referring page originates in the "slashdot.org" domain.....
So how long before someone writes a linux driver for it?
[W]e must remember that there have been patents, big companyies, monopolies and greedy people in the past who held great sway on the way things were done. But somehoe things worked out and we made it through.
We must remember that there were always people (however few) that weren't too complacent to fight these large corporations. For the pendulum to swing back, there must be something pulling it. But you're right, this is a valuable thing to keep in mind. It is important to remain optimistic that these discussions do have value in the efforts to bring things back to being tolerable again.
Just love getting the skinny on failed companies. Wish people from other companies would come out and do the same.
If you're really that interested, check out http://fuckedcompany.com/. You have to wade through a lot of garbage (they don't have the notion of Karma with their blogs (I hate that term)), but you get an almost-as-it-happens look at recently failing companies.
It's one of those sites which are propbably more entertaining to those who watch the nightly news for the explosions rather than the weather....
Actually, this kind of thing was not limited to the (then to become) airline industry. Movie production was done largely in New York, until producers realized they would be much more likely to get away with using Thomas Edison's patented motion picture camera without paying exorbitant licensing fees (which Edision was fanatical about enforcing) if they were on a different coast.
And Hollywood was born....
We will outsmart OpenSource....
... (yes most of this also runs, if not exclusively, on windoze).
Read as:
We will outsmart, PHP, Perl, MySQL, OpenMosix, Apache, Audacity, Crystal Space, MiKTeX, SDL, Vega Strike, X-Tractor, FileZilla,
Or:
We will outsmart freedom and choice.
Somehow, I don't see it. Then again, a lot of money can buy a lot of laws....
In any case, profiling is just too complicated to work all that well. There are going to be tons of false positives falling out of this AND it won't matter anyway. So what if the system fingers someone as a potential threat - you still can't lawfully detain them based on information provided by such a system.
This is exactly why profiling should be kept in advertising where it belongs. Profiling (i.e., demographics) is for taking a set of people, and tossing out those least likely to fit your market. In the set that's left, one is statistically more likely to fit your ideal customer (however, there's still a lot of noise, just less than before).
For crime, it doesn't really work, unless one is willing to prosecute a lot of innocent people. In the United States, there is the presumption of innocense. Based on this, a perfect system is one in which no innocent people are found guilty. In real life, this means that no people are found guilty. Realizing this, the founding fathers knew they had to have a compromise. It was this: for every one innocent person convicted, ten guilty people go free. Profiling strives for the scales to be tipped (i.e., for every ten innocent people convicted, one guilty person goes free).
That's not to mention that profiling is only "effective" if members of the profilied population make no efforts against being profiled (again, that's why it's effective in advertising, but not in detecting crime). I used to work for a large on-line retailer in automated fraud detection. Automated fraud detection (i.e., systems which detect the likelihood of fraud with minimal human intervention) is based on profiling.
Well guess what? As soon as fraudsters find out what they're doing doesn't work, they change the properties of their transactions to more closely mirror legitimate purchases (as seen by the profiling model). The population has incentive to become homogenous. So once the model is implemented and deployed, it reduces fraud for about a week, until people figure out what it's doing, then levels climb back up to where they were before. However, after repeatedly deploying new models, unless the number of data points increases, the incidence of false positives steadily climbs.
People have been working on this system for nearly a year now. And now, 3 months from the finish date, you are complaining.
Maybe it's because of my own lack of diligence, but this is the first I've been made aware of it. No politician asked me if I thought this system was a good idea, or a good use of my money as a taxpayer.
If they're catching criminals then their system is obviously working right?
I'm always skeptical of the term "criminal". If the mere act of saying something unpatriotic becomes a crime, then most slashdotters will be considered criminals.
If the definition of the system's success is number of criminals caught, then equilibrium will be achieved when all members of the system are criminals and all are caught.
Don't get me wrong. I sincerely believe that anyone who maliciously impedes the liberties of another deserves no access to the liberties s/he made efforts to deny.
However, I'm not happy with the directions in which the authorities and lawmakers are going. As a result, I may be considered anti-US (though I am not; I feel the ideas on which this country was founded are the greatest on earth).
For the most part, I am a law-abiding citizen (save a few speeding tickets). The more new laws that are made to squash unpopular thoughts, the more likely it will be that I will break the law (with no increased effort on my end).
I am scared of being jailed for my opinions. I mean that literally. I am also now reluctant to travel via airplane, for fear that I heighten the activity of my profile.
I'm not going to be entering or leaving the U.S. I don't mind them scanning people entering and leaving one bit. In fact, if it means that they might catch one in a million people up to no good, more power to them.
Will you still be so indifferent when they start applying the same methods to arresting domestic citizens living and working in the US based on a mathematical suspicion?
Great. Now I'm going to get SPAM that reads:
"Have a poor terror score? No problem!"
"Get plane tickets with bad or no terror info!"
"Poor terror index? No terror index? We can help!"
"Repair your terror history instantly!"
Hopefully this will help cut down on racial profiling.
That is, of course, assuming that race is not part of the polynomial used to calculate one's "terror score".
Un-clued-in programmers will send a thousand INSERT transactions, instead of a single transaction....
...
Postgres does have the ability to have those INSERTs be part of a single transaction:
BEGIN;
INSERT (...) INTO table VALUES (...);
COMMIT;
All the inserts are now part of one transaction.
I'm unsure if one can make this the default behavior (obviating the need for the BEGIN; statement), like one can with Oracle.
I have a feeling that "un-clued-in" programmers are likely to inadvertently cause all kinds of performance (and other) problems (not limited to the database they're using). Just ask the experienced Oracle user how long it took him/her to learn how queries were specifically interpreted and how one could improve them. Heck, do half of query writers out there even know the concept behind an explain plan or explain query?
If you do a Google search for "MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, you'll get a lot of hits. Here are a few that seem to be pretty informative (if not slightly dated):
here
here
here
here
here
here (not really a comparison, but read this article and the linked Postgres article for more info)
In my personal experience, Postgres has historically been the database more prepared for larger, more multi-threaded applications.
Obviously, there have been debates about which are faster in various different applications. To be honest, I have no hard data, nor have I stretched them either to their capacity, but as a user and casual developer, they are both fast enough for me not to notice.
What's inarguable exciting can be directly quoted from MySQL's own comparison of the two (listed above):
[B]oth products are continually evolving. We at MySQL AB and the PostgreSQL developers are both working on making our respective databases as good as possible, so we are both a serious alternative to any commercial database.
It already exists. In a number of forms!
For those of you who like clicking, and not typing (or copying/pasting) here are those addresses again:
http://backflip.com/
http://bookie.mozdev.org/
http://wwwampire.mozdev.org/
Yes, I am truly that lazy.
Not that you [cw]ould (necessarily) use Jabber as a means of storing and propagating a profile, but it might be a more appropriate model than Napster (anyone can host a Jabber server in front of, or behind a firewall, and the server is a single point designated by the Jabber address, much like an e-mail address).
Just thinking out loud here, but what might be nice is if everyone said, "Okay, we'll all use the Mozilla bookmarks format and the vCalendar and vCard standards, and we'll devise an (XML?) indexing format (telling a client where to find all the various files with the respective information) and make them accessable via WebDAV." Now all you have to do is convince every major client out there to use WebDAV, the new indexing format, vCalendar, vCard and the Mozilla bookmarks format.
Wait a minute...that sounds like it may be a job for an LDAP directory (which one can always host oneself if one doesn't like the availabe service providers). Most mailers already have some ability to interact with an LDAP server. Are there any standards for putting address/calendar/bookmark info in there? I know that's probably not what it was designed to do, but really, does that information change that often to be ill-suited for LDAP?
Sorry...just ranting about ideas here.... My point is that I know there's enough standards and protocols out there to meet this need without too much development. I'm sure there's just too much differing ideas about how to do it, so it hasn't been done yet.
Isn't a public port part and parcel with permission to access said port?
I postulate that this post probably prevents precise pronunciation due to the poster's propensity to push the "p" key.
When are they going to make my plates and cups self-cleaning too?
As soon as consumers get used to the idea that all their dishware has to be clear, and that you can only "wash" them by leaving them out in successive sunny/rainy days.
...and for those of you who want real HOWTOs, guides, etc., to make your own Lego-man picture essay, check these out:
here,
here,
here,
here, and
here
Why is it that Code Red and Nimda are viruses, but an Apache worm "create[s] a P2P attack network"?
And why is P2P even being used in this context? It's a worm, just like those before it. Are ignorant readers to infer that this is why P2P networks are bad (because they can be turned into "attack network[s]")?
Offtopic, but....
Okay, "LK" may be a respectable and contributing member of the community, but this picture is just way too funny for me to take him seriously....
The only upside to 9/11 for me has been that people now respect me for the job I try to do much more, previously people griped when being security checked but now very rarely does this occur.
That's because griping is to be interpreted by the Department of Homeland Security (i.e., Ministry of Defense) as an Unamerican Action, and is punishable by unknowable consequence against the accused.
.. To keep my Windows partition....
:)
What windows partition?
I don't know why, but I don't seem to hear any difference between CD Audio or mp3 (128kBit/s). Hell, even Windows Media sounds the same to me. (RealAudio on the other hand has real glitches in it though.)
// Let it soak in // do it again for good measure
My wife and I both can tell the difference between an unencoded AIFF and a 128kB/s MP3 on as little as an old 3-piece speaker system (my ancient Sony SRS-002PC). We can't tell the difference between the AIFF and the 128kB/s Ogg on any of our stereo systems (not that any of them are all that great). It should be said (if it's not already obvious) that neither of us are a/v buffs.
For me the test was biased (I knew which samples were which), but not for my wife. I played two reps of the three encodings of the same sample in random order twice. Here's the PHP-like pseudocode for what I did:
$samples = array('aiff', 'mp3', 'ogg');
shuffle($samples);
for ($i = 0;
$i < 2;
++$i)
{
foreach ($samples as $sample)
{
print("playing sample " . indexof($sample, $samples) . "...\n");
playsample($sample);
sleep();
print("playing sample " . indexof($sample, $samples) . " again...\n");
playsample($sample);
}
}
vote();
In seven different samples (ranging from classical to 80's pop), she identified the MP3 as the original once. She identified Ogg as the original 3 times and AIFF as the original 3 times.
Granted she's not a significant sample (like the study has), but we both agree that MP3's sound a little "tinnier", or "sharper".