As another poster alluded to, we have ID cards, but they aren't mandatory, and they are given out at the state (rather than federal) level.
Seems the big problem is that credit card companies, other stores which offer cards, and banks (to a lesser extent) are so eager to give out credit they don't require we use them.
So I'm not familiar with France... do you really need your physical ID to borrow money? If so, then I would say you do indeed have a more advanced system.
I run into very few textbooks that I actually like, so hopefully the fact that I like these two actually means something.
First, "Probability and Computing" by Mitzenmacher/Upfal is an excellent and very readable intro to probability theory and randomized algorithms.
Second, "Online Computation and Competitive Analysis" by Borodin/El-Yaniv is pretty much the de-facto standard for online algorithms. Decently readable.
I second the vote for DSLibris. Getting books into xhtml format is a pain in the ass, but once you do the reader is quite nice. The DS could use a bit higher resolution for reading, but it's not too bad IMO.
I tried emacs for about a month, trying to give it an honest shot. I actually quite liked it for editing latex docs. The problem was, there was some key combination I was hitting on accident (probably since I am used to nano keybindings) that was causing me to delete large chunks of my document (usually everything above my current view). I didn't realize it, then I would save and have to restore the file from backup. This happened several times. I think it was happening as I was saving, but could never trace back my error.
Second, although I've read Understanding GNU Emacs and Tabs [northpark.edu] I still couldn't get tabs to just be tabs, especially when using ruby-mode, which apparently sets it's own tab behavior and overwrote my own.
Any ideas? I'd like to give it another shot someday...
My mother used to make notes exactly like that when I showed her how to do stuff on the computer. She had half a notebook filled up. It makes me shudder just thinking about it.
Where I'm living, currently going to grad school, child care is $400-$800/mo. (and at the $400 range, it's like a chick with a van). For reference, rental rates here are ~$500 for a two bedroom on the low end.
My wife works and does ok, but not great. After running the numbers, if we ditch luxuries and really squeeze the budget (and stop saving!), well we still wouldn't quite be able to make it.
Things will change for us of course, but I think there are a lot of people today who are in similar situations and not just because of grad school. Between child care costs (or the opportunity cost of a single income family) and health insurance costs, people on the "low" end of the income scale are finding it pretty difficult to live what used to be a normal life.
At least child care costs are region dependent though. I could be wrong on this last point, but I believe health insurance generally costs as much in the city (where 60K/year is livable) as it does in the rural sticks (where 60K/year is quite good).
I accidently modded you overrated while trying to mod you funny. So, I'm replying to cancel the mod.
Damn ajax dropdowns!
(As an aside, I had to turn off the dynamic discussions to convince slash that I really did want to undo my moderation....)
What you say is true, but there was an interesting paper which came out in 2007, which deals with inferring the low level network topology (detecing the presence of switches/routers and how they connect up the end nodes) using RTT time in a rather slick manner. They mainly tested it on an ethernet LAN, so it might not work as well over a wider network, especially in the face of redundant links, etc. in the network.
~digs out paper~ ah, here we go: "A Fast Topology Inference -- A building block for network-aware parallel processing" T. Shirai, H Saito, K. Taura
Pretty cool stuff, though it would be nicer if everybody could just publish their network structures in a handy parsable format;-)
For different reasons from the article, I set up a similar situation for my somewhat (ok, quite) computer illiterate in-laws. One, "promiscuous" browser, firefox running in sandboxie, and a second, for doing anything which doesn't work from the first. (Firefox updates, etc.)
No, it doesn't protect against keyloggers, phishing, or anything else that is a "real" security threat, but my time cleaning out malware/trojans and other junk has gone drastically down. The fact that browsing/search history doesn't survive the session is an added bonus for them. (Though I didn't know about the auto clear in firefox, is that a new feature?)
Apple customers... will eat you alive. When confronted with an Apple customer who you think may eat you alive, it's important to remember that to actually kill or disable them, you MUST remove the HEAD from the BODY.
Heh, next up: OnStar enables remotely changing the radio/disabling the cd player. Actually, you don't even need remote assistance, just a programmable password protected cdplayer...
Parent: "Listen. Between the hours of 10pm and 6am, the family car will only play Simon and Garfunkle's greatest hits. See you at 10."
Not that I condone such heavy handed parenting tactics, however;-)
You know, the real tragedy here is that we've had movable type printing presses for some 600-800 years, and still no one has come up with a rating system for books! How am I supposed to know what books are appropriate for my children or school district without some sort of letter grade system!? I am supposed to actually read all these books? Why, there must be 10's of thousands of them out there.
For those interested, see the wiki, or this page. "Joint Stereo" can refer to a number of techniques, some of which work better than others, and some implimentations are better than others. I had incorrectly assumed it to be a compression feature not worth the bit savings ~ and it's MusicMatch's fault;-)
Ok, ok, so it's probably because I haven't used it for about 7 years, but I hated that program with a passion. In fact, I still blame that program for every shitty, joint stereo, artifact laden mp3 on the internet.
Please ignore the irrationality of any opinions stated or implied herein.
I'm afraid I don't know much about small form factor computers, so bear with me on this one...
Does anyone know if I'd be able to connect a USB hard drive and a USB soundcard and run musicpd on it? I just had to replace my MPD box with a big, ugly, old, but 10 dollar, dell. I really wouldn't mind a small quiet solution.
I don't know man. I don't really understand the analogy. Not enough cars.
Ooh! Facebook is like someone buying their kid a nice dependable car; something decent to get around in, looks ok and might even pick up a few chicks if kept clean and maintained.
Myspace, on the other hand, is like someone buying their kid a car and giving them an unlimited budget to trick it out however they see fit. Come to think of it, haven't I seen a myspace page somewhere with a giant lightning bolt painted on and huge aluminum wing stuck on the back...?;-)
This was like 6 or 7 years ago now. I was attending a secondary ed. career center and they staged a gunman attack. It was executed very nicely; everyone knew what was going on, (well, that there would be a drill of that type on that day) and the local police department and hospital ER staff was even in on it so they could practice their skills in handling the situation.
Certain students were selected play roles. I got to play a shot guy! The police dragged me out to the ER people, who tossed me in an ambulance and I went all the way to the ER. Whee.
I'm sure it was very instructive, not so much for the students but for the faculty, local PD, and hospital, who all need to coordinate together in situations such as those. I rather miss that "tech center." Shortly after Columbine the local highschools started to go batshit crazy, expelling students and messing up their lives for the most rediculous of offenses; as I understand it this sort thing still continues. The Tech center, on the other hand, still has a rather open and friendly atmostphere. The faculty and students appreciate and respect one another, and the exercise I described actually served to strengthen that bond.
Anyway, mostly rambling now. I guess the point is, I think there is some correlation between how many schools treat their students these days (ie as dangerous criminals vs., well, people) and how these sorts of exercises are run (ie as cruel experiments vs. community oriented preparation). I would also conjecture that the behavior of the students reflects how they are treated...
Many of the applications being written for the DS are really quite awesome. I have to say though, it's kind of rough because I own a new DSLite, and many of the wifi-aware homebrew apps don't work with it because they haven't been compiled against the more recent wifi drivers. (Newer DS Lites have an updated wifi chipset or something.) On the other hand, development is quite active, so (I hope) it shouldn't be just too long before most things are working. (I did attempt to compile one app against the new libraries myself, but the hours spent were fruitless.)
Also, I should note that I have a Supercard DS(One) (a slot one solution) and DSlinux doesn't boot at all with it. (Well, as of a couple weeks ago.)
Anyway, totally off topic, but I just thought I'd put some information and an anecdote out there in case it's of use to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Just send them a fake e-ticket for a real flight. Piss off spam suckers, and the TSA in one shot. It's a win/win!
... damn. Anonymous coward beat me to it. Screw it, I'm posting anyway.
As another poster alluded to, we have ID cards, but they aren't mandatory, and they are given out at the state (rather than federal) level.
Seems the big problem is that credit card companies, other stores which offer cards, and banks (to a lesser extent) are so eager to give out credit they don't require we use them.
So I'm not familiar with France... do you really need your physical ID to borrow money? If so, then I would say you do indeed have a more advanced system.
I run into very few textbooks that I actually like, so hopefully the fact that I like these two actually means something.
First, "Probability and Computing" by Mitzenmacher/Upfal is an excellent and very readable intro to probability theory and randomized algorithms.
Second, "Online Computation and Competitive Analysis" by Borodin/El-Yaniv is pretty much the de-facto standard for online algorithms. Decently readable.
I second the vote for DSLibris. Getting books into xhtml format is a pain in the ass, but once you do the reader is quite nice. The DS could use a bit higher resolution for reading, but it's not too bad IMO.
Burma Shave.
I nominate this post for best car analogy, 2008.
Reposting Logged in....
I tried emacs for about a month, trying to give it an honest shot. I actually quite liked it for editing latex docs. The problem was, there was some key combination I was hitting on accident (probably since I am used to nano keybindings) that was causing me to delete large chunks of my document (usually everything above my current view). I didn't realize it, then I would save and have to restore the file from backup. This happened several times. I think it was happening as I was saving, but could never trace back my error.
Second, although I've read Understanding GNU Emacs and Tabs [northpark.edu] I still couldn't get tabs to just be tabs, especially when using ruby-mode, which apparently sets it's own tab behavior and overwrote my own.
Any ideas? I'd like to give it another shot someday...
Yes :-) Mpd is awesome. It also does icecast streaming, which is great coupled with a php based frontend.
Finally, there's an iPhone client (mpod) which is pretty good.
My mother used to make notes exactly like that when I showed her how to do stuff on the computer. She had half a notebook filled up. It makes me shudder just thinking about it.
Just thought I'd chime in...
Where I'm living, currently going to grad school, child care is $400-$800/mo. (and at the $400 range, it's like a chick with a van). For reference, rental rates here are ~$500 for a two bedroom on the low end.
My wife works and does ok, but not great. After running the numbers, if we ditch luxuries and really squeeze the budget (and stop saving!), well we still wouldn't quite be able to make it.
Things will change for us of course, but I think there are a lot of people today who are in similar situations and not just because of grad school. Between child care costs (or the opportunity cost of a single income family) and health insurance costs, people on the "low" end of the income scale are finding it pretty difficult to live what used to be a normal life.
At least child care costs are region dependent though. I could be wrong on this last point, but I believe health insurance generally costs as much in the city (where 60K/year is livable) as it does in the rural sticks (where 60K/year is quite good).
While I disagree with most of this, I'm with the other poster, this shouldn't be modded flamebait.
Jeeze, now I'm let down by both Obama _and_ slashdot.
I accidently modded you overrated while trying to mod you funny. So, I'm replying to cancel the mod. Damn ajax dropdowns! (As an aside, I had to turn off the dynamic discussions to convince slash that I really did want to undo my moderation....)
What you say is true, but there was an interesting paper which came out in 2007, which deals with inferring the low level network topology (detecing the presence of switches/routers and how they connect up the end nodes) using RTT time in a rather slick manner. They mainly tested it on an ethernet LAN, so it might not work as well over a wider network, especially in the face of redundant links, etc. in the network.
;-)
~digs out paper~ ah, here we go: "A Fast Topology Inference -- A building block for network-aware parallel processing" T. Shirai, H Saito, K. Taura
Pretty cool stuff, though it would be nicer if everybody could just publish their network structures in a handy parsable format
For different reasons from the article, I set up a similar situation for my somewhat (ok, quite) computer illiterate in-laws. One, "promiscuous" browser, firefox running in sandboxie, and a second, for doing anything which doesn't work from the first. (Firefox updates, etc.)
No, it doesn't protect against keyloggers, phishing, or anything else that is a "real" security threat, but my time cleaning out malware/trojans and other junk has gone drastically down. The fact that browsing/search history doesn't survive the session is an added bonus for them. (Though I didn't know about the auto clear in firefox, is that a new feature?)
Heh, next up: OnStar enables remotely changing the radio/disabling the cd player. Actually, you don't even need remote assistance, just a programmable password protected cdplayer...
;-)
Parent: "Listen. Between the hours of 10pm and 6am, the family car will only play Simon and Garfunkle's greatest hits. See you at 10."
Not that I condone such heavy handed parenting tactics, however
Thought I'd share a quote from one of my top five professors... see subject.
You know, the real tragedy here is that we've had movable type printing presses for some 600-800 years, and still no one has come up with a rating system for books! How am I supposed to know what books are appropriate for my children or school district without some sort of letter grade system!? I am supposed to actually read all these books? Why, there must be 10's of thousands of them out there.
Obligatory User Friendly Strip
Heh, parent correct.
;-)
For those interested, see the wiki, or this page. "Joint Stereo" can refer to a number of techniques, some of which work better than others, and some implimentations are better than others. I had incorrectly assumed it to be a compression feature not worth the bit savings ~ and it's MusicMatch's fault
Ok, ok, so it's probably because I haven't used it for about 7 years, but I hated that program with a passion. In fact, I still blame that program for every shitty, joint stereo, artifact laden mp3 on the internet.
Please ignore the irrationality of any opinions stated or implied herein.
I'm afraid I don't know much about small form factor computers, so bear with me on this one...
Does anyone know if I'd be able to connect a USB hard drive and a USB soundcard and run musicpd on it? I just had to replace my MPD box with a big, ugly, old, but 10 dollar, dell. I really wouldn't mind a small quiet solution.
I don't know man. I don't really understand the analogy. Not enough cars.
;-)
Ooh! Facebook is like someone buying their kid a nice dependable car; something decent to get around in, looks ok and might even pick up a few chicks if kept clean and maintained.
Myspace, on the other hand, is like someone buying their kid a car and giving them an unlimited budget to trick it out however they see fit. Come to think of it, haven't I seen a myspace page somewhere with a giant lightning bolt painted on and huge aluminum wing stuck on the back...?
This was like 6 or 7 years ago now. I was attending a secondary ed. career center and they staged a gunman attack. It was executed very nicely; everyone knew what was going on, (well, that there would be a drill of that type on that day) and the local police department and hospital ER staff was even in on it so they could practice their skills in handling the situation.
Certain students were selected play roles. I got to play a shot guy! The police dragged me out to the ER people, who tossed me in an ambulance and I went all the way to the ER. Whee.
I'm sure it was very instructive, not so much for the students but for the faculty, local PD, and hospital, who all need to coordinate together in situations such as those. I rather miss that "tech center." Shortly after Columbine the local highschools started to go batshit crazy, expelling students and messing up their lives for the most rediculous of offenses; as I understand it this sort thing still continues. The Tech center, on the other hand, still has a rather open and friendly atmostphere. The faculty and students appreciate and respect one another, and the exercise I described actually served to strengthen that bond.
Anyway, mostly rambling now. I guess the point is, I think there is some correlation between how many schools treat their students these days (ie as dangerous criminals vs., well, people) and how these sorts of exercises are run (ie as cruel experiments vs. community oriented preparation). I would also conjecture that the behavior of the students reflects how they are treated...
Many of the applications being written for the DS are really quite awesome. I have to say though, it's kind of rough because I own a new DSLite, and many of the wifi-aware homebrew apps don't work with it because they haven't been compiled against the more recent wifi drivers. (Newer DS Lites have an updated wifi chipset or something.) On the other hand, development is quite active, so (I hope) it shouldn't be just too long before most things are working. (I did attempt to compile one app against the new libraries myself, but the hours spent were fruitless.) Also, I should note that I have a Supercard DS(One) (a slot one solution) and DSlinux doesn't boot at all with it. (Well, as of a couple weeks ago.) Anyway, totally off topic, but I just thought I'd put some information and an anecdote out there in case it's of use to anyone.