Fry:Hey! Stephen Hawking! Aren't you that physicist who invented gravity? Hawking:Sure. Why not? Fry:Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? [Hawking's eyes widen in horror.] 'Cause if I'm the first, I want them to call it a "Fry Hole."
Later:
Fry:So what do you nerds want? Nichols:It's about that rip in space-time that you saw. Hawking:I call it a "Hawking Hole." Fry:No fair! I saw it first! Hawking:Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
Interesting note: Apparently Stephen Hawking did provide his voice for that episode.
I'm not sure cellphone spam is such a great prospect from the spammers point of view anyways. You can't easily do nearly the same amount of volume. Based on the numbers from the article, these guys were only sending about one message every two seconds (~43,500 per day). Which may seem like a lot, but it's nothing when contrasted to a lot of e-mail spammers that are sending out millions of e-mails everyday.
Also, I would think that the conversion rate would be lower as well. I mean, with e-mail spam I can understand that a few people out of a million might see and open the message and decide to go to a company's buy whatever product the e-mail is selling. With cell phones, I don't really see the same thing happening as much. With e-mail, someone can click on a link and make an impulse buy in under 5 minutes. With cell spam, the person sees the message and then has to go out of their way to pursue the product.
This is true. It would be very nice if all publishers were willing to offer their catalog titles (those out of print anyways) as print-on-demand books. Record companies should really do the same for CDs as well. I don't know why they both don't, it's just one more way to earn more money and at least as importantly, to please their customers.
"Print on demand" systems have been around for almost a decade. They're basically a super-industrial version of your home printer, so it (in theory) doesn't cost any more per book to print one paperback book than 100,000. They're usually used by low volume publishers (i.e. a few hundred to a few thousand). Where they really shine though is when they're used to print entirely customized manuals (i.e. if you sell some modular product you can on-demand print up a version of your manual for your customer which only includes the specific parts that their solution uses).
Well maybe somebody should set something up to syndicate RSS feeds via a peer to peer service. BitTorrent would work, but it could be improved upon (people would still be grabbing a torrent every hour, so it wouldn't completely solve the problem).
1 : an immeasurably or indefinitely long period of time : AGE
2 a usually eon : a very large division of geologic time usually longer than an era b : a unit of geologic time equal to one billion years
So it looks like it's officially 1,000,000,000 years, but also a term for a really huge block of time.
I've heard this idea proposed before, but in the specific case of Google's Ad program, I don't think it would really work. Google is notorious for being very suspicious about their client sites. If some site (or a few sites) are out of the blue getting a bunch more clicks than it used to, then they're going to take notice.
Really, I've always thought that ad programs that pay per click were kind of stupid. The way to go is really affiliate programs. It makes perfect sense, don't pay people when their site brings people to your site, that's not where you get the money, pay people when their site brings people to your site and they buy something. Granted, this isn't a silver bullet because not all people that advertise are selling a product (or aren't selling one through their site), but for a lot of companies it just makes sense.
While this may seem weird at first, it's really not all that different from Universities that require (or give) students have laptops to a certain specification. Knowing that every student has an iPod lets you do cool things like distribute language lessons for them, be able to standardly trade music for a music class (no more problems with students or teachers that don't have a CD burner or a tape player or a computer to play the music on). Now whether it really makes sense considering the cost of the iPods is another matter, but who knows, Apple is certainly giving them a massive discount because they're both buying in bulk and giving Apple more positive press (just like the G5 cluster did).
For me, the choice is clear. You can compare the relatively minor pros and cons of PHP and ASP for days, but really they're both very similarly capable and you'd do about as well with one as with the other. The big difference I see is that PHP is cross platform and ASP is not. To me, that makes PHP the "winner", hands down. It makes it so that you can change platforms with your application later on and if you're writing code for other people to run then it means more people will have the opportunity to use it (whether this is an open source project or a commercial project you're doing).
ASP runs on Windows and really only runs well with IIS. PHP runs on pretty much any platform you would ever want to run it on (and plenty of platforms you wouldn't) and works just as well with any webserver I've ever considered using.
So while there may be small areas where ASP excels or where PHP is deficient, I think that those points are largely insignificant when you realize the platform limitations of ASP. Oddly enough though, I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone cite this as an advantage of PHP, whereas I come across an article comparing esoteric differences every few weeks.
Good MIDI support, sequencers and virtual synths are all great stuff, but there is one hugely crucial element to "the linux studio" that's missing, and that's support for professional sound cards.
It's always been a bit of a trick to get sound working on Linux, but it's always getting easier too and most desktop oriented distros (i.e. Mandrake, Redhat, Suse) make it no problem in most cases, but there is really zero support for most of the established professional audio interfaces (i.e. Motu, Audigy, etc.). I've had a few friends adventurous to consider playing around with Linux audio programs, but when they ask if their $200 (and up) interfaces don't work and the best I can do is point them to the O'Reilly book on writing Linux drivers, it's (understandably) a real turn-off.
In summary: If anybody out there has the time and knowledge and is looking for a project, this is a great one. Work on writing drivers for the upper-crust interfaces. I'm sure there are even a few nerds out there willing to lend you their cards so that they can get a driver for it.
My Dad was in the Navy years and years ago and apparently the radar on aircraft carriers is powerful enough to knock birds out of the air at a few hundred feet. One time a bunch of his repair crew buddies were doing work on one of these, so they turned it off and took out the fuses to ensure that it would not get turned on. While they're up working on the dish some guy comes along, sees it's not working and decides to put the fuses back in and turn it on. The guys are up there when it slowly starts to turn -- one of them jumps and slides down off the platform, and the other guy ducks the dish when it swings around and slides down after. I don't know what happened after that, but I bet the guy that put the fuses back in did not have a great time.
Of course, like all statistics though, these numbers only show part of the story. There are more holes (and more serious holes) in OSX, but does that really affect your systems security (i.e. the chances of your system being compromised)? There are less people (effectively zero) people who are writing worms for Mac OS, so you've got a very small chance of that happening and there are far less people who are experienced at targeted compromises of OSX systems (and most of those few are white hats) so again your chances of your system getting compromised are probably lower than a Windows user.
I'm not trying to minimize this though, this is something that I hope will be taken very seriously by Apple and is a real eye-opener for myself.
Call me crazy, but I think really this has as much or more to do with their web designers and/or sysadmins as it does with their political stance. I mean, I guess their webservers do somewhat match their political standing, but I doubt it was really a concious decision. Bush could have just as easily hired some Unix heavy group who would probably run Apache or John Kerry could have just as easily hired some sort of ASP.net dream team for his site. If I recall correctly in 2000 Gore DID run IIS and Bush DID run Apache.
I would bet that if you were to look at political websites beyond those of the Democratic and Republican candidates the division would be far less clear (although I would bet you would still see some of the same division).
This isn't really surprising because it just makes sense -- if an open source program is useful and does everything you want there's no reason not to include it. The real interesting thing about this is that Microsoft is not including these programs. I mean, it's not surprising that they don't given their antagonistic view towards F/OSS (and from the other side as well), but I really think this is one area where Apple's really got a leg up on Microsoft. Apple's willing to include useful open source unix tools, and so they've immediately got a huge pool of pre-written code to draw from.
I'm sure at least a few of the posts on here are going to be about making a typo while running "rm". It is with that in mind that I offer this piece of timeless advice: with rm, always type your flags last. Period. There are plenty of good examples of why this is a good idea, but I think this one shows it the best:
While typing "rm -rf/somedir/file/" you bump enter while you hit slash (they're right next to each other, remember) resulting in "rm -rf/"
If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm/somedir/file/ -rf") and you make the same mistake, you only end up typing "rm/" which does nothing, instead of a command that will fuck up your entire system.
They Might Be Giants were one of the first artists years ago to release an album ONLY in MP3 emusic.com which, while it's not as cool now, for a little while was pretty nice, it was cheap, DRMless and available in multiple formats at multiple bitrates.
Beyond that though, they regularly put songs up on their website, including exclusive unreleased songs (similar to their dial-a-song service where you call up and hear a new song on their answering machine).
Slashdot Mirror
Fry: Hey! Stephen Hawking! Aren't you that physicist who invented gravity?
Hawking: Sure. Why not?
Fry: Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? [Hawking's eyes widen in horror.] 'Cause if I'm the first, I want them to call it a "Fry Hole."
Later:
Fry: So what do you nerds want?
Nichols: It's about that rip in space-time that you saw.
Hawking: I call it a "Hawking Hole."
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Hawking: Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
Interesting note: Apparently Stephen Hawking did provide his voice for that episode.
Of course, a everyone will respect you if you've gotten a degree from Americus University.
For the last time, my girlfriend and I are both happy with the length of her penis already (zero inches by the way)! Stop sending her these messages!
I'm not sure cellphone spam is such a great prospect from the spammers point of view anyways. You can't easily do nearly the same amount of volume. Based on the numbers from the article, these guys were only sending about one message every two seconds (~43,500 per day). Which may seem like a lot, but it's nothing when contrasted to a lot of e-mail spammers that are sending out millions of e-mails everyday.
Also, I would think that the conversion rate would be lower as well. I mean, with e-mail spam I can understand that a few people out of a million might see and open the message and decide to go to a company's buy whatever product the e-mail is selling. With cell phones, I don't really see the same thing happening as much. With e-mail, someone can click on a link and make an impulse buy in under 5 minutes. With cell spam, the person sees the message and then has to go out of their way to pursue the product.
This is true. It would be very nice if all publishers were willing to offer their catalog titles (those out of print anyways) as print-on-demand books. Record companies should really do the same for CDs as well. I don't know why they both don't, it's just one more way to earn more money and at least as importantly, to please their customers.
"Print on demand" systems have been around for almost a decade. They're basically a super-industrial version of your home printer, so it (in theory) doesn't cost any more per book to print one paperback book than 100,000. They're usually used by low volume publishers (i.e. a few hundred to a few thousand). Where they really shine though is when they're used to print entirely customized manuals (i.e. if you sell some modular product you can on-demand print up a version of your manual for your customer which only includes the specific parts that their solution uses).
neat.
Well maybe somebody should set something up to syndicate RSS feeds via a peer to peer service. BitTorrent would work, but it could be improved upon (people would still be grabbing a torrent every hour, so it wouldn't completely solve the problem).
I'm waiting for somebody to turn this into a 20 question "What IT Professional am I?" quiz and put it on http://seventeen.com/
I've heard this idea proposed before, but in the specific case of Google's Ad program, I don't think it would really work. Google is notorious for being very suspicious about their client sites. If some site (or a few sites) are out of the blue getting a bunch more clicks than it used to, then they're going to take notice.
It's still an interesting possibility though.
Really, I've always thought that ad programs that pay per click were kind of stupid. The way to go is really affiliate programs. It makes perfect sense, don't pay people when their site brings people to your site, that's not where you get the money, pay people when their site brings people to your site and they buy something. Granted, this isn't a silver bullet because not all people that advertise are selling a product (or aren't selling one through their site), but for a lot of companies it just makes sense.
I'm an adult and I watch adult videos, I say leave the child porn to the children!
While this may seem weird at first, it's really not all that different from Universities that require (or give) students have laptops to a certain specification. Knowing that every student has an iPod lets you do cool things like distribute language lessons for them, be able to standardly trade music for a music class (no more problems with students or teachers that don't have a CD burner or a tape player or a computer to play the music on). Now whether it really makes sense considering the cost of the iPods is another matter, but who knows, Apple is certainly giving them a massive discount because they're both buying in bulk and giving Apple more positive press (just like the G5 cluster did).
I think that given the commentary, maybe a better headline for this would be "VOIP questioning questioned".
For me, the choice is clear. You can compare the relatively minor pros and cons of PHP and ASP for days, but really they're both very similarly capable and you'd do about as well with one as with the other. The big difference I see is that PHP is cross platform and ASP is not. To me, that makes PHP the "winner", hands down. It makes it so that you can change platforms with your application later on and if you're writing code for other people to run then it means more people will have the opportunity to use it (whether this is an open source project or a commercial project you're doing).
ASP runs on Windows and really only runs well with IIS. PHP runs on pretty much any platform you would ever want to run it on (and plenty of platforms you wouldn't) and works just as well with any webserver I've ever considered using.
So while there may be small areas where ASP excels or where PHP is deficient, I think that those points are largely insignificant when you realize the platform limitations of ASP. Oddly enough though, I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone cite this as an advantage of PHP, whereas I come across an article comparing esoteric differences every few weeks.
I'd say Zend Studio fits that position pretty well. Yes, you have to pay for it ($250), but you have to pay for Visual Studio as well.
Good MIDI support, sequencers and virtual synths are all great stuff, but there is one hugely crucial element to "the linux studio" that's missing, and that's support for professional sound cards.
It's always been a bit of a trick to get sound working on Linux, but it's always getting easier too and most desktop oriented distros (i.e. Mandrake, Redhat, Suse) make it no problem in most cases, but there is really zero support for most of the established professional audio interfaces (i.e. Motu, Audigy, etc.). I've had a few friends adventurous to consider playing around with Linux audio programs, but when they ask if their $200 (and up) interfaces don't work and the best I can do is point them to the O'Reilly book on writing Linux drivers, it's (understandably) a real turn-off.
In summary: If anybody out there has the time and knowledge and is looking for a project, this is a great one. Work on writing drivers for the upper-crust interfaces. I'm sure there are even a few nerds out there willing to lend you their cards so that they can get a driver for it.
because when I think of technology in the future, I think airships!
Also, random fact: The spire on the top of the empire state building was originally intended to be used as a docking point for derigibles.
My Dad was in the Navy years and years ago and apparently the radar on aircraft carriers is powerful enough to knock birds out of the air at a few hundred feet. One time a bunch of his repair crew buddies were doing work on one of these, so they turned it off and took out the fuses to ensure that it would not get turned on. While they're up working on the dish some guy comes along, sees it's not working and decides to put the fuses back in and turn it on. The guys are up there when it slowly starts to turn -- one of them jumps and slides down off the platform, and the other guy ducks the dish when it swings around and slides down after. I don't know what happened after that, but I bet the guy that put the fuses back in did not have a great time.
Of course, like all statistics though, these numbers only show part of the story. There are more holes (and more serious holes) in OSX, but does that really affect your systems security (i.e. the chances of your system being compromised)? There are less people (effectively zero) people who are writing worms for Mac OS, so you've got a very small chance of that happening and there are far less people who are experienced at targeted compromises of OSX systems (and most of those few are white hats) so again your chances of your system getting compromised are probably lower than a Windows user.
I'm not trying to minimize this though, this is something that I hope will be taken very seriously by Apple and is a real eye-opener for myself.
Call me crazy, but I think really this has as much or more to do with their web designers and/or sysadmins as it does with their political stance. I mean, I guess their webservers do somewhat match their political standing, but I doubt it was really a concious decision. Bush could have just as easily hired some Unix heavy group who would probably run Apache or John Kerry could have just as easily hired some sort of ASP.net dream team for his site. If I recall correctly in 2000 Gore DID run IIS and Bush DID run Apache.
I would bet that if you were to look at political websites beyond those of the Democratic and Republican candidates the division would be far less clear (although I would bet you would still see some of the same division).
This isn't really surprising because it just makes sense -- if an open source program is useful and does everything you want there's no reason not to include it. The real interesting thing about this is that Microsoft is not including these programs. I mean, it's not surprising that they don't given their antagonistic view towards F/OSS (and from the other side as well), but I really think this is one area where Apple's really got a leg up on Microsoft. Apple's willing to include useful open source unix tools, and so they've immediately got a huge pool of pre-written code to draw from.
I'm sure at least a few of the posts on here are going to be about making a typo while running "rm". It is with that in mind that I offer this piece of timeless advice: with rm, always type your flags last. Period. There are plenty of good examples of why this is a good idea, but I think this one shows it the best:
/somedir/file/" you bump enter while you hit slash (they're right next to each other, remember) resulting in "rm -rf /"
/somedir/file/ -rf") and you make the same mistake, you only end up typing "rm /" which does nothing, instead of a command that will fuck up your entire system.
While typing "rm -rf
If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm
They Might Be Giants were one of the first artists years ago to release an album ONLY in MP3 emusic.com which, while it's not as cool now, for a little while was pretty nice, it was cheap, DRMless and available in multiple formats at multiple bitrates.
Beyond that though, they regularly put songs up on their website, including exclusive unreleased songs (similar to their dial-a-song service where you call up and hear a new song on their answering machine).