i disagree. the reason we like google (besides the simple interface and no pop-ups) is because it gives us relevant results. do you think that people who pay link farms to up their pagerank are the most relevant sites? i don't think so. so if the google people make the connection that searchking is bad, then it's up to them to lower searchking's pagerank. it up to google to decide what makes the most relevant results show up first, that's what keeps google the #1 search engine. if they screw up and the most relevant results are no longer the top results, then we'll find a new search engine.
i don't know actual numbers for how much energy we can get from the sun, but i do work with a bunch of people who do research for alternative energy sources. one neat statistic that i was told a while ago is:
if you take all the unused building space in america and covered them with solar cells (of today's technology and efficiency) you could generate (more than) all the power we use (even if we convert all cars to electric cars). the neat thing is that the "unused building space" doesn't mean "cover the desert with solar cells" is just means to put solar cells on every roof top, on the top of the medians along the highways. granted this is a difficult task, but what if every residential house that was built had to have it's roof coated in solar cells and put on the grid. after a while you'll be generating quite a lot of power.
another cool thing that is in development is turning the huge windows of office buildings into solar panels. in high-rise office buildings, it's not uncommon to have 10 foot tall windows that span the entire room. usually these windows are tinted and the office generally has blinds or curtains to keep all the sun out (to reduce cooling costs in the summer, and having that much sun in the office would make it to bright anyway). so rather than just using some type of tinting that reflects the light partially, i've seen some cool work with dithering (very) small solar cells in the windows, these will absorb light and turn it into electricity. so you'll get two benefits: tinted window and extra electricity for the building.
just simple solutions like that could help our upcoming power crisis when we run out of oil.
this is assuming that you can get hold of the encrypted data. i'm no expert in this field, but you'll need a dvd drive that can read the raw data...i don't think that's easy to come by. but i could be way wrong on this
i sure hope not. i don't want the average joe to be blocking pop-ups. once pop-up blocking becomes mainstream then the advertisers are going to switch to a format that is harder to deal with. i like using mozilla and blocking pop-ups, but if the advertisers change their format to a harder to block type, then i'll be seeing ads again.
i'm glad you mentioned this. i wanted to bring something related to this up, but didn't want to be off topic. my problem is that i have a quite a large collection of mp3s, mostly stuff that i got back when i was in college. i never noticed that mp3s were not terribly good quality because my sterio system wasn't very good. mp3s always sounded like cds to me. however last week i went out and bought a damn good sterio system, and now i hear pops and cracks in some of my mp3s. not all of them, just a good fraction of them sound bad. the other ones are tolerable. does anyone know of a filter or something that i can run before the output to my sound card to get rid of the pops and cracks. i know that i'll never get back any quality that isn't there, but i'd like to at least not have the annoying cracks. i imagine that there's something out there that will work like/dev/dsp but instead do a little filtering. haven't been able to find it yet though.
i'm sure the same amount of examination goes on, it's just that there's a lot less code to go through. would you rather examine the code that runs the components of the space shuttle and make sure it's 'perfect', or would you rather examine the traffic light code? even the most complicated intersection that i know of wouldn't be a very complicated program to verify.
<nitpick> what you call cellphones per person per square mile is really just cellphones per square mile. cellphones per person per square mile would be: italy:.85 usa:.45 </nitpick>
pay per view requires an additional cable box. when you call and say 'i want to watch this movie at 6:00' they program your box with the code to descramble that movie. i've never heard of stop/rewind stuff except on tivo like things, and here, they're just streaming the data and you're buffering it on your end. afaik there is no feed back from your tv/cable box to the cable company...lots of cable repeaters are only 1 way...thats why much of the country has cable tv but no cable internet service...they can't send stuff upstream.
yes, fuzzy logic is, imho, a buzz word. what people mean when they say fuzzy logic is that there isn't a definate yes or no answer, but a probability, then the computer picks the next step by the probability. fuzzy logic defines a broad range of things that are better described by the algorithms used:
the baysian spam filter we read so much about is "fuzzy logic", it uses baysian algorithms to calculate the probability that mail is spam, and then it takes certain actions depending on that probability (e.g. delete mail when the probability of being spam is greater than 95%).
the algorithm that recognizes your handwriting on a palm pilot uses "fuzzy logic". i'm not sure, but i'd bet that it has a neural network in there that looks at what you write and comes up with a probability that it's an a,b,c...and so on, and then picks the one with the highest probability.
i'm betting that in this "massive" program, the "nodes" and "connections" that the author describes are also the elements of a neural network. each creature/monster/whatever you want to call it, takes input from a number of things (what it sees, what it feels, how angry it is, etc) and through the use of a neural network predicts what it's move should be (swing sword, run, climb latter, etc) and the one with the highest probability gets executed. - this is only how i THINK it works, i know no more about "massive" than what i just read in the arcitle.
i know for sure that there are home health care companies where the nurse takes a ms-dos 5.1 laptop when going to visit the patient's home. i wrote code for them about a year ago or so. and they're one of the leaders in home health care software. funny stuff.
no command line history? what about f3 to bring back the last line, and f1 to bring back each character from the last line individually?:) i don't know about dos 1.1 and 2.0, but i'm pretty sure that 3.? had this feature, and i know 5.1 had it.
i will agree duals are great! in 1997 i put together a dual pentium 200mmx and i still use it today. it runs as fast as my pentium-iii 800 laptop (both have the same amount of ram). there's just something really nice about having that extra processor. i always advise people to go with a dual processor even if it means that they have to get a processor that a year out of date to keep the costs down.
you just need more memory...linux runnning gnome or kde on top of x takes a bunch of memory. i think that's because everything isn't as integrated as in windows. windows can share a bunch data among different programs, in linux each program needs its own copy of the data (this is just my naieve view of things, i'm not a linux hacker). i have redhat 8 with gnome running just fine on my p2 400, the reason it works so nicely is because i have a half of a gig of ram in it. my p3 800 runs the same code much slower because i only have 128M ram in it. memory is the key. i wish that the x/gnome/kde programmers could get together and work on memory consumption, but i really can't say anything because i don't contribute to the code.
from the article:
SME's new Label Gate CD consists of two kinds of music data -- one is data for audio devices to replay and the other is encoded compressed data for PCs to replay.
so basically, i'm assuming that it's similar to the previous copy protection scheme where they screw up the toc so that cdroms have a hard time reading it, but cd players can still read it. so my question - can't we just get a raw read of the cd and then we'll have the auto data in its usual form that we can eaily turn into wav and encode to a compressed format? it would just require an extra step to get the raw image of the cd since the cdrom can't read the toc right, but that should be easy (i think).
i don't care if the store manager knows if i buy a pack of pringles every trip. but i do care if the store manager sells that information to the makers pringles. or if he sells that information to the lays and they start sending me advertisements to get me to switch. i hate advertising, even if it's for something i use. all i want to know when i go to the store is the price of what i want to buy. i'll make my own decision on which product to buy.
if i had mod points, i'd vote this funny. i was just about to boot up my old 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981 this weekend just to see if it still works. lets see, it'll probably be about 22 years from 1981 when they get 4.77 GHz...that's (22years/18month) about 15 moore-time-units...2^15 is much larger than 1000 (about 32000). that's interesting.
while i agree with this, there are some more things to worry about. with client side filtering you can still review the email marked as spam to check for false positives. the isp is saying what is classified as spam, not the user - this probably means that the spam threshold is low to prevent too many false positive, or if i were more paranoid i would say that spammers could call up an isp and offer to pay them to let their spam go through.
i think we could get away with client side filtering if EVERYBODY used it, that is, it's installed by default in outlook, hotmail, whatever grandma and grandpa use for their email. have big buttons that say "this is spam", and "this is a picutre of my grandkid, it's not spam", and the like. this way the client automatically learns without much/any added complication to the user. at first we're still wasting all the bandwith that's required in downloading and testing the email, but if 99% of the people never see the spam, they won't be able to reply to it. spamers will be out of buisiness and then they won't be using up the bandwith.
i think the key is to make it trivially easy for the average user to not see spam and then spammers will go out of business and all will be well.
i'm not too sure about what the redbook standard includes, but as long at the redbook mentions multiple table of contents tracks, then it conforms. it's just that the last toc is bad and pc drives get confused. but as long as multiple tocs are mentioned in the redbook, then i see no problem calling these redbook cds.
nothing is stopping people from doing this. back about 6 years ago when i first got addicted to mp3s that's how i had to rip. my cdrom didn't support (or i atleast couldn't get it to work) direct digital ripping. so i just played the cd and recaptured it all through the sound card. the quality was worse, but only slightly. i needed a pretty good set of speakers to notice it.
that's why i'm not too worried about copy protections, if it ever comes back down to it i'll just rip via analog.
actually, i think mindstrm was being picky. as long as 'i' is defined before
for (int i=0;i<n;i++); for (i=0;i<n;i++);
then it's perfectly fine. notice there's a semicolon between the for loops, the second one is not in the scope of the first one. i think the original poster mean to give as an example:
Slashdot Mirror
iirc toy story was done by pixar before disney bought pixar. do you don't have to feel guilty for buying that. i think toy story 2 was disney though.
is that -40F or -40C :)
i disagree. the reason we like google (besides the simple interface and no pop-ups) is because it gives us relevant results. do you think that people who pay link farms to up their pagerank are the most relevant sites? i don't think so. so if the google people make the connection that searchking is bad, then it's up to them to lower searchking's pagerank. it up to google to decide what makes the most relevant results show up first, that's what keeps google the #1 search engine. if they screw up and the most relevant results are no longer the top results, then we'll find a new search engine.
i don't know actual numbers for how much energy we can get from the sun, but i do work with a bunch of people who do research for alternative energy sources. one neat statistic that i was told a while ago is:
if you take all the unused building space in america and covered them with solar cells (of today's technology and efficiency) you could generate (more than) all the power we use (even if we convert all cars to electric cars). the neat thing is that the "unused building space" doesn't mean "cover the desert with solar cells" is just means to put solar cells on every roof top, on the top of the medians along the highways. granted this is a difficult task, but what if every residential house that was built had to have it's roof coated in solar cells and put on the grid. after a while you'll be generating quite a lot of power.
another cool thing that is in development is turning the huge windows of office buildings into solar panels. in high-rise office buildings, it's not uncommon to have 10 foot tall windows that span the entire room. usually these windows are tinted and the office generally has blinds or curtains to keep all the sun out (to reduce cooling costs in the summer, and having that much sun in the office would make it to bright anyway). so rather than just using some type of tinting that reflects the light partially, i've seen some cool work with dithering (very) small solar cells in the windows, these will absorb light and turn it into electricity. so you'll get two benefits: tinted window and extra electricity for the building.
just simple solutions like that could help our upcoming power crisis when we run out of oil.
Because it takes politicions to make the legislation to have a do-not-call list. do you think they want to make it harder to get reelected?
this is assuming that you can get hold of the encrypted data. i'm no expert in this field, but you'll need a dvd drive that can read the raw data...i don't think that's easy to come by. but i could be way wrong on this
i sure hope not. i don't want the average joe to be blocking pop-ups. once pop-up blocking becomes mainstream then the advertisers are going to switch to a format that is harder to deal with. i like using mozilla and blocking pop-ups, but if the advertisers change their format to a harder to block type, then i'll be seeing ads again.
you could always use something like yahoo! tv. that stuff is sent plain html tables. you could easily parse the html and create your own schedule.
i'm glad you mentioned this. i wanted to bring something related to this up, but didn't want to be off topic. my problem is that i have a quite a large collection of mp3s, mostly stuff that i got back when i was in college. i never noticed that mp3s were not terribly good quality because my sterio system wasn't very good. mp3s always sounded like cds to me. however last week i went out and bought a damn good sterio system, and now i hear pops and cracks in some of my mp3s. not all of them, just a good fraction of them sound bad. the other ones are tolerable. does anyone know of a filter or something that i can run before the output to my sound card to get rid of the pops and cracks. i know that i'll never get back any quality that isn't there, but i'd like to at least not have the annoying cracks. i imagine that there's something out there that will work like /dev/dsp but instead do a little filtering. haven't been able to find it yet though.
or they could just call it "the internet" that way when people ask "can you put the internet on my computer" you can show them that it indeed does.
i'm sure the same amount of examination goes on, it's just that there's a lot less code to go through. would you rather examine the code that runs the components of the space shuttle and make sure it's 'perfect', or would you rather examine the traffic light code? even the most complicated intersection that i know of wouldn't be a very complicated program to verify.
pay per view requires an additional cable box. when you call and say 'i want to watch this movie at 6:00' they program your box with the code to descramble that movie. i've never heard of stop/rewind stuff except on tivo like things, and here, they're just streaming the data and you're buffering it on your end. afaik there is no feed back from your tv/cable box to the cable company...lots of cable repeaters are only 1 way...thats why much of the country has cable tv but no cable internet service...they can't send stuff upstream.
yes, fuzzy logic is, imho, a buzz word. what people mean when they say fuzzy logic is that there isn't a definate yes or no answer, but a probability, then the computer picks the next step by the probability. fuzzy logic defines a broad range of things that are better described by the algorithms used:
the baysian spam filter we read so much about is "fuzzy logic", it uses baysian algorithms to calculate the probability that mail is spam, and then it takes certain actions depending on that probability (e.g. delete mail when the probability of being spam is greater than 95%).
the algorithm that recognizes your handwriting on a palm pilot uses "fuzzy logic". i'm not sure, but i'd bet that it has a neural network in there that looks at what you write and comes up with a probability that it's an a,b,c...and so on, and then picks the one with the highest probability.
i'm betting that in this "massive" program, the "nodes" and "connections" that the author describes are also the elements of a neural network. each creature/monster/whatever you want to call it, takes input from a number of things (what it sees, what it feels, how angry it is, etc) and through the use of a neural network predicts what it's move should be (swing sword, run, climb latter, etc) and the one with the highest probability gets executed. - this is only how i THINK it works, i know no more about "massive" than what i just read in the arcitle.
i know for sure that there are home health care companies where the nurse takes a ms-dos 5.1 laptop when going to visit the patient's home. i wrote code for them about a year ago or so. and they're one of the leaders in home health care software. funny stuff.
no command line history? what about f3 to bring back the last line, and f1 to bring back each character from the last line individually? :) i don't know about dos 1.1 and 2.0, but i'm pretty sure that 3.? had this feature, and i know 5.1 had it.
i will agree duals are great! in 1997 i put together a dual pentium 200mmx and i still use it today. it runs as fast as my pentium-iii 800 laptop (both have the same amount of ram). there's just something really nice about having that extra processor. i always advise people to go with a dual processor even if it means that they have to get a processor that a year out of date to keep the costs down.
you just need more memory...linux runnning gnome or kde on top of x takes a bunch of memory. i think that's because everything isn't as integrated as in windows. windows can share a bunch data among different programs, in linux each program needs its own copy of the data (this is just my naieve view of things, i'm not a linux hacker). i have redhat 8 with gnome running just fine on my p2 400, the reason it works so nicely is because i have a half of a gig of ram in it. my p3 800 runs the same code much slower because i only have 128M ram in it. memory is the key. i wish that the x/gnome/kde programmers could get together and work on memory consumption, but i really can't say anything because i don't contribute to the code.
my question, do we really need to hack it?
from the article:
SME's new Label Gate CD consists of two kinds of music data -- one is data for audio devices to replay and the other is encoded compressed data for PCs to replay.
so basically, i'm assuming that it's similar to the previous copy protection scheme where they screw up the toc so that cdroms have a hard time reading it, but cd players can still read it. so my question - can't we just get a raw read of the cd and then we'll have the auto data in its usual form that we can eaily turn into wav and encode to a compressed format? it would just require an extra step to get the raw image of the cd since the cdrom can't read the toc right, but that should be easy (i think).
i don't care if the store manager knows if i buy a pack of pringles every trip. but i do care if the store manager sells that information to the makers pringles. or if he sells that information to the lays and they start sending me advertisements to get me to switch. i hate advertising, even if it's for something i use. all i want to know when i go to the store is the price of what i want to buy. i'll make my own decision on which product to buy.
if i had mod points, i'd vote this funny. i was just about to boot up my old 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981 this weekend just to see if it still works. lets see, it'll probably be about 22 years from 1981 when they get 4.77 GHz...that's (22years/18month) about 15 moore-time-units...2^15 is much larger than 1000 (about 32000). that's interesting.
while i agree with this, there are some more things to worry about. with client side filtering you can still review the email marked as spam to check for false positives. the isp is saying what is classified as spam, not the user - this probably means that the spam threshold is low to prevent too many false positive, or if i were more paranoid i would say that spammers could call up an isp and offer to pay them to let their spam go through.
i think we could get away with client side filtering if EVERYBODY used it, that is, it's installed by default in outlook, hotmail, whatever grandma and grandpa use for their email. have big buttons that say "this is spam", and "this is a picutre of my grandkid, it's not spam", and the like. this way the client automatically learns without much/any added complication to the user. at first we're still wasting all the bandwith that's required in downloading and testing the email, but if 99% of the people never see the spam, they won't be able to reply to it. spamers will be out of buisiness and then they won't be using up the bandwith.
i think the key is to make it trivially easy for the average user to not see spam and then spammers will go out of business and all will be well.
i'm not too sure about what the redbook standard includes, but as long at the redbook mentions multiple table of contents tracks, then it conforms. it's just that the last toc is bad and pc drives get confused. but as long as multiple tocs are mentioned in the redbook, then i see no problem calling these redbook cds.
nothing is stopping people from doing this. back about 6 years ago when i first got addicted to mp3s that's how i had to rip. my cdrom didn't support (or i atleast couldn't get it to work) direct digital ripping. so i just played the cd and recaptured it all through the sound card. the quality was worse, but only slightly. i needed a pretty good set of speakers to notice it.
that's why i'm not too worried about copy protections, if it ever comes back down to it i'll just rip via analog.