Among other people, I found a bug in the editor in Microsoft Visual C 1.52. Given 2 files, A and B where A is read-only and B is not, open them both in the editor. Make sure B is the foreground window. Switch to another application, modify A and set it back to read-only. Switch back to MSVC. You'll get a dialog that "A is modified, would you like to reload it?" Confirm the reload. Type some text in B. The characters are inserted but the insertion point doesn't move, so the text appears backwards.
As the web develops, methods of matching a set of search keywords to a set of websites related to those keywords must change with it. I envision that the Google algorithms rank search hits by summing weighted factors such as overall site popularity, META tag keywords, META tag descriptions, TITLE tag contents, text contents, keywords containted in URLs, and so on.
Can you talk a bit about how those weights have changed over time? Have there been any surprising shifts?
I gotta say, it excites me to see the potential evolution of human society.
It seems two things are true of people (as a group) today. (Among other things.)
First, individuals assume that people will hear exactly what they say in exactly the context they said it and in exactly the way they were thinking it. Do you remember in 1999 when David Howard used the word "niggardly" properly and was forced to resign because people though it sounded too much like a racial epithet? All you have to do is (1) clarify the pronunciation of the word, (2) mention that it was in the context of budgetary matters and nothing to do with blacks, and (3) state that it never crossed your mind that it could be misconstrued.
Right?
Second, individuals don't believe that others can change. Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon in 1980. Logically, I think the guy could have changed his behavior over the last twenty-one years, but the rest of my brain claims that he must still be a dangerous nutcase. Everybody is different from the person they were twenty years ago, and there's one thing that each person can tag as the worst behavior back then that they don't do anymore. Sure, some things stay the same but some do change.
Truth sometimes comes along and punches you in the head and says, "wake up--you're being an idiot." Things like the fact that WebArchive is public has the potential to do that to a large part of society. People (as a group, explicitly self-inclusive) need to look at other people as someone who could be like yourself rather than some automaton programmed with a simple set of moral and behaviorial instructions.
Let me just add that I've got my share of embarassing things on the web. Heck, even a search of my RIT user ID revealed that someone archived a part of VAX Notes from the early nineties (http://www.csh.rit.edu/~tonyl/ancient/levhall.htm )... boy was I a dolt sometimes in college--and that's not even through WebArchive. There's even worse stuff that could surface... such as the public flogging over my condescending view of homosexuality. I have to believe that people are able to change because I have.
The Star Trek comment struck me: it is certainly illegal to rebroadcast a television show, but what if you made a recording of a range of the electromagnetic spectrum covering all TV channels in a particular area and retransmitted that? For instance, if you had a 200 megasample-per-second PCM encoder and recorded the electromagnetic spectrum from 0-100MHz in New York City, you could play back that spectrum--right into the back of a TV, for instance--and watch any show that was on at the time. This isn't completely unrealistic... it'd only be 400MB/second for 16-bit samples which is what FireWire can theoretically deliver today, and you could currently pack about 8 minutes onto 200GB (some arbitrarily "large" hard drive)... about as much audio as you can put into 80MB, and 80MB was huge not so long ago (in real-world terms, kids.)
I think things like WebArchive straddle that line... in some ways, they're making a snapshot of the entirety of the Internet as a whole and providing access to that. However, since it's done by copying data from individual servers, it isn't really all that similar.
I was wondering if this book could be used in any significant way toward major home improvements. I want to get some big things done at my house like vinyl siding and buried cabling, but I can't seem to bring myself to try to find someone to do the work for fear that I can't tell that I'm getting scammed _before_ the fact. Would it be worth it to buy the book or is the pertinent stuff just a few paragraphs?
Thanks.
Wait until one of these folks invents the program that disinfects the Public Mailing List Virus. What's that you say? Well, I'm sure you're familiar with it. It works like this:
Platform: human hosts
Payload Trigger: Recipient of a public mailing list has an "out of office" automated response.
Payload: Sends a potentially limitless stream of e-mails from the mailing list of the following types:
Why am I receiving your e-mail?
Please stop sending me the e-mails.
Please stop sending me the e-mails but keep me on the list.
When you reply, please do not reply to all.
People, please stop replying to the message or these messages will continue.
Disinfection is accomplished by sending ninja technical support people to the homes of all the recipients and deleting the offending messages before the recipient gets infected.
I'd be curious to see the programatic solution, though.
I see a lot of responses that say to "have the users put the data [somewhere]." The only trouble is--and this is especially true of Microsoft products--that the users can't tell where there data is. Sure, when you click "Save" in Microsoft Word, you're generally dumped in the "My Documents" folder and it's pretty clear that you're saving a document in a particular location. You might be able to coerce people into using "H:\username." The only trouble is, MS stuff puts files everywhere--the "normal.dot" file that includes the "Author: user's name" field is in the Word subdirectory. The Microsoft Outlook database and address book files are tucked away in the "profiles" directory. The Netscape bookmarks file is in the program directory.... My point is that there's a lot of data that the user doesn't even know where it is, and it's stuff that may be nearly mission-critical.
My suggestion would be to use a decent remote backup software (Retrospect, perhaps) and (given a generic one-drive PC) set it up to back up the My Documents folder, the C:\winnt\profiles directory, and everything in c:\ except for c:\winnt and c:\Program Files. Also, configure it to back up document files from the entire hard drive (including c:\winnt and c:\Program Files.) If you think it's a problem, have people put their personal files (big Episode III trailers and the like) in a personal folder and don't back that up.
The backup would be run over the network at night. Make sure people keep their machines on. I assume your workplace is small and you should be able check the backup logs and see who turns their machines off and correct it. Some people are incorrigible, but you could put a Post-It over the power switch and offer a power strip that turns off everything else. Beyone offering all that help, you might still have a couple problem cases.
It almost doesn't matter where the data gets stored. A really decent sized tape array would probably be best. A bank of CD-RW drives and a robust labelling system would work okay. Backing up to a centralized hard drive would be okay too, especially if you could get something like a removeable drive bay and swap in new drives and take the old ones off-site. In fact, that last idea could be pretty ideal since drives keep coming down in price--a five-drive-rotation 100GB system might cost you around $1000. One of the things that I think sucks so bad is that you spend a heap of money on a good tape backup system only to have it be absurdly obsolete 5 years down the road--a "massive" tape array from 1995 held about 20GB and probably cost $10,000 or more. The removeable drive bay option seems kinda cool now that I think about it since it can be upgraded pretty cheap.
Now, if you can't get decent backup software... or at least software that can do the remote stuff well, create a batch file that backs up the set of files described above to a network drive. Set it up with the AT service on NT to get it to run each night (good luck getting it to put files on the network, though.) Some careful planning in the batch file and you can get decent logging and such. Even crappy backup software should be able to run a backup of a network drive.
I'd actually recommend a batch-based "backup" system that works entirely locally. In my own world, 95%+ of the times I've had to restore a file it's because of some local condition: either I deleted something by accident, I saved something I shouldn't have, or it got corrupted by software--rather than loss through a fire or a hardware failure. I've got a batch file that runs each night and copies most of the day-to-day data I have to a "backup" subdirectory. I've used it a couple times to get stuff back and I'm very happy to have it.
Assuming James S. Huggins' How Much Data Is That? is right with 1 Library of Congress print collection == 10 TB, and using the 1 trillion bits(10^12 I assume) per square inch, I guess 17.6 x 10^7 Libraries of Congress/hectare.
I didn't see this in the article--do they plan on putting in a homing beacon or a big target on the critical tower or towers? This would simplify the plans of the flying terrorists of 2015.
Gosh, you all missed the most important thing of all: a portable police scanner that works on both the local police and the campus police frequencies. Sure got me out of trouble a couple times...
ROCHESTER, NY -- Technology buffs have cracked music publishing giant Sony Music's elaborate Celine Dion distribution technology with a decidedly low-tech method: scribbling around the middle of a disk with a felt-tip marker.
Internet newsgroups have been circulating news of the discovery for the past week, describing the simple method of making the latest Celine Dion release, "A New Day Has Come" actually tolerable to the human ear. The technique involves covering the section of the disc from the center rim to 1cm from the edge of the disc with indellible ink.
"My children would scream in agony at the sound of the new CD," one post on alt.music.celine-dion said, "but with the modified disc, they even got their homework done while I listened."
Sony has not commented on the discovery, but experts believe no legal action will be taken since the technique does not defeat Sony's "Key2Audio" copy protection.
If you're lucky enough to be in one of the thousand cities and towns that has a local music scene, go check that out instead. Often, for less than the cost of a single CD, you can get the experience of viewing a band play on a new immersion technology called "reality" whereby the viewer experiences live music with all their senses. Plus, you won't believe how realistic the avatars are. System requirements include no CPU, 0MB RAM, 0MB HD, no CD, no soundcard, and no monitor.
In case you think you need national acts--to paraphrase from one of Rochester, NY's local bands (Burning Snella in their song "Local Music") national bands are just local bands from someplace else.
If that's not incentive enough, no F--- at Sony gets so much as a penny.
I did a little digging triggered by a reply about the efficiency of various lights in lumens-per-watt. Not believing what I read, I dug a little on the web and found a decent exploration of the problem at Don Klipstein's website titled Why LEDs can be 10 times as efficient as incandescents in some applications but not in general home lighting! I got there after reading an article on custom boat cabin lighting with LEDs at Noemi Ybarra's site which includes an outline of the physics behind the units (i.e. 1 lumen is (4pi steradiansx1candella) only if the light source is uniformly spherical, which LED's are not, so the big "mcd" ratings don't correlate well to really big "lumen" ratings.)
From my own experience with video conferencing and speaker phones, the biggest problem stems from the balance between getting enough microphone gain to pick up the quietest speaker and reducing both kinds of feedback/echo (single-site feedback / cross-site echo.) The obvious solution is to move each output device closer to its corresponding input device.
In other words, either (1) exchange the room speakers for earpieces or headphones or (2) exchange the room microphones for lapel or boom microphones. Clearly the degenerate case has everyone essentially speaking into a separate telephone receiver which probably defeats the purpose of the system altogether.
Of course, it would be way cooler to have a setup where the room microphones are aware of the room speaker output and automatically cancel it out. The trouble is it's way cooler because it's so difficult to do.
Hey, as an "old guard" Mac user, I have to say I'm not compensating for anything! And I'd be glad to put mine up against yours with a graphical ruler on my true WSYWIG screen. Heck, why don't you send a picture so I can see it in gamma-corrected, hardware-calibrated, ColorSync'ed color and let you know what the exact Pantone® match is for any given pixel!
I agree with almost everything said already by the original poster, but I just wanted to add that Apple also is very fast at computer repairs. After a month or so with my new PowerBook, the drive started making some very odd noises. I called tech support and, with a recording of the sounds, got them to agree the drive was probably bad and under warranty.
I was disappointed that they wouldn't just ship me a new drive. I called them on Monday and by Tuesday morning I had a pre-paid laptop shipping box in my hands. I packed up the laptop and sent it out. They received it on Wednesday morning, fixed it (which I could monitor on the website) and I had it back in my hands on Thursday.
Based on what I know from other people's experience, this is pretty darn quick.
I'm generally someone to think through my irrational bitching before I go spout off on it in public. I don't like the idea of Segways on the sidewalk but I couldn't quite figure out why. I've read through some of the comments and the controllability argument (which is what most people are citing) is, IMO, invalid.
Based on what I've seen and what I believe about the behavior of the device, I think controllability is not an issue. The only argument I have along these lines is the lack of a dead-man switch (which I'm not even sure is absent from the design)--I forsee a "news of the weird" clip about someone passing out/having a seizure/dying on a Segway and plowing through a crowd. The other thing that is somewhat disconcerting is that these things just stop when they break or when the battery dies. Of course, that wouldn't be my problem as a pedestrian, only a problem for the person-minus-three-grand who has to "Gingerly" tote around 75 extra pounds.
What I do think is the problem is the same one that is really the reason bicycles, inline skates and scooters are banned on sidewalks, and even the reason that joggers and runners are disliked: When someone is walking, they don't want to be concerned with what's behind me.
It is well established on the road that the driver of each vehicle is responsible for controlling their own force vector. In non-pseudo-intelectual-nerd-speak, they're responsible for not running into things in in the direction they're moving. There are rules in place (i.e. speed limits) that let people relax and not concern themselves with stuff going on behind them [for the most part anyway.] As long as people follow those two rules, things go really quite well.
On the sidewalk, however, the same rules are implied but not enforced. As long as a sidewalk is populated by people walking, they have an assumed speed limit (the vaguely defined "walking speed") that allows each pedestrian to ignore what's going on behind them. For the most part, if I'm on the sidewalk and I want to go from the right side, all the way to the left side, I can basically do it without so much as a glance to my left to make sure I don't walk right into someone.
However, if there were vehicles or people who were going faster than myself, I need to look further back before changing direction. By my estimate, even if you could assume that the sidewalk speed limit was only twice as fast as your own speed, you'd be pretty stressed about not stepping a few inches out of a straight trajectory for fear of getting hit. As a cyclist, I know that applies on the road--my speed is typically half that of cars on residential streets, and I pay attention to not deviating more than a few inches from a straight line and pray that the driver doesn't hit me anyway. When the speed difference is greater (i.e. 3x) it gets pretty terrifying.
Now, if only we could change the world and make everyone responsible for their own actions and concerned for the well being of their fellow man... ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, I slay me.
Two ideas are forming in my mind that I'll try to explore today. First, is music art and if it is, why are all other artists "starving" but musicians are not? Second, what if everyone involved with the production and distribution of music were fairly compensated? I guess this material is pretty much a rehash and summary, but I think I've got at least a couple new insights.
First off, it's bugging me at the moment so I think I'll just talk about definitions a bit. To me, what most people call "art" can be subdivided into two categories: true art and crafts (okay, technically I guess a work of "art" can be placed on a scale between those two points.) True art conveys a message that is impossible to convey through the senses or through language. Consider
van Gogh's Starry Night. No matter how many words you speak, there is something conveyed by actually seeing the painting that goes beyond description. Crafts is the use of learned skills to create a representation of something. I always use the example of those copper-plate butterflies you see at craft fairs--most people call that art, but I say it's a craft. After searching the Internet a bit for an example, if I tell you I saw this rusty dragonfly on a rod that you can put in your lawn, then
show you one,
I think you'll agree it offers little more than its descriptive representation.
Now that I got that out of my system, I'm not sure why I did. I guess I want to focus on "true art." Yeah, that was the point... When I say "art" from now on, I'm referring to things that are more like true art and less like crafts. That way, the primary value of a work is in its content, not its materials.
I want to focus on art that has similarities to music. Consider short films, for example--a group of people collaborate to create a short work whose value is defined by its ability to convey a message and the complexity of that message. Pretty similar to music. Also, consider stand-up comedy--an individual [or several individuals collaborate to] creates a joke whose value is defined by its ability to make people laugh and its complexity. Also pretty similar to music... at least in that narrow sense.
What if I buy a collection of short films and make a copy of one of them for myself... a copy that, despite the change of medium, would otherwise be considered identical to the original. Have I broken existing copyright laws? No, under the provisions of fair use. What if I give a copy to my friend? Well, yes, then--technically--but it's generally not enforced. What if I make a thousand copies and sell them? Well, then yes, I'm definitely breaking the law.
How about the peculiarities of stand-up comedy? What if a stand-up comic tells a joke like, "Aren't you glad plants aren't like people? I mean, how would you like it if some flower came over to you when you hit puberty and cut off your genitals?" [I hope nobody ever did that joke because I made it up... it's not really very funny anyway.] This comic makes money because I either pay to see the performance or I pay for a recording of a performance. What if I tell that joke to a friend of mine and I didn't give credit to the author--would that be stealing? It's a bit different because the humor of a joke is often just as it's written... sometimes the performance adds something but it's really just the writing or original idea that has value.
Now, why is it that even the most successful makers of short films and all but the top 20 or so stand-up comics are often on the verge of being broke? The most successful musicians--probably around a thousand of them--can make a decent living just making music. Why is there this disparity? Maybe if there were only a few well-paid musicians, I'd be willing to shell out cash for their higher quality performances. Hmm...
The second [and much shorter] point I wanted to make is about fair compensation. I take artistic photographs as a hobby, and I think it would be great to make a living at it... say a good living... US$150,000 for instance. I doubt I'll ever get there, but I think that would be just swell.
What if a moderately popular artist wanted the same thing... let's say they were popular enough that each year they sell a million CD's and they have four people in the band. To pay each member of the band $150K, it would work out to $0.60 per CD--and that's if they never performed live. If the material cost of the CD is $1 each (which is par with what you'd pay each for 1,000 CD's) and you've got to pay marketing people and some others (what?--maybe another $500,000 total or $0.50 each copy) and there's a 20% markup by the record stores, the end price is still only $2.52... now where does that other $12 to $18 go? If CD's were all three bucks, would that half-hour of tinkering around on your computer to make a copy really be worth it? Hmm...
That's pretty much how far my thinking on the topic has gone in this direction so take it as it stands in all its conclusion-free and solution-free glory.
Well, without context of business purchases or personal purchases, here goes both:
For business, the reasons are numerous. First, we can only buy from certain vendors easily. I would really like to get Jasc's Image Robot [I hope this isn't accidentally your company] but our vendor doesn't stock it so I'll do without until I can complain in an I-told-you-so manner that I love so much... oops... too much information, eh?
Second, I often find that I can't demonstrate the workflow I'm trying to prove with the demo. Sometimes this is a problem with crippleware and sometimes with it being hard to implement. Image Robot, for instance, looks like it'll do what I need but I haven't bothered to implement a full flow because it would be hard.
Third and so on--things other people have already mentioned. Changing priorities and the like, loss of interest, loss of job, etc.
As for software for personal use:
First, the off-the-cuff cost-benefit analysis is very important. Often I'll want a piece of software for just one little thing so even $30 might be too high for that purpose. Similarly I may only need it once.
Second, time and interest change. I may have enough time to download and install some demo, but I might not ever get back to checking it. If I go to run it and it's expired, oh well. Sometimes I just lose interest too.
I've got another specific example--Ultralingua Collegiate Dictionary I want an electronic dictionary to give me all the features I already have in American Heritage but will run on OSX [there, I let the cat out of the bag... I'm a Mac guy.] I already own American Heritage and really love the Word Hunter [definition searching utility] feature. Ultralingua, while slick, fast, and OSX-aware doesn't do that so I'm just not interested. I'll wait for Houghton Mifflin to pop out another version and buy that. So... I downloaded the demo and didn't buy the product.
Finally, and in both personal and business, software with bugs will stop me from buying. It's very odd... if you are kind enough to allow people to try-before-buying, they'll be critical of crashes and bugs that they'd just begrudgingly work around if they just bought the stupid software without trying it. The trick is that you never release a beta as a demo. Betas are betas and should be full-blown and come with a big benefit to the user for being your tester. Demos are bug-free and designed to say that you're a competent company. Nobody likes testing software for nothing... just ask any Windows user;-) [ok, ok... or Mac user or Palm user or anything user]
I worked at a small company (that is now defunct but will remain nameless) that wrote software for other companies. I was told by my coworkers that before I worked there, they were going to be really late shipping some software so they shipped a blank disk to a customer to stall for time--later to claim that the disk must have been corrupted.
Actually, I was referring to the paragraph in the original article:
For instance, say you want to know what Web pages outside of your own site have links to your pages. At Google, I can do a search for link:samizdat.com or get the same results by going to their "Advanced" search and using their "page specific search" to find pages that link to a particular page. But my results are then littered with pages from my own site -- information I don't need and don't want.
My point was that you can, indeed, filter "not on this site" by using "-site:..."
Slashdot Mirror
Among other people, I found a bug in the editor in Microsoft Visual C 1.52. Given 2 files, A and B where A is read-only and B is not, open them both in the editor. Make sure B is the foreground window. Switch to another application, modify A and set it back to read-only. Switch back to MSVC. You'll get a dialog that "A is modified, would you like to reload it?" Confirm the reload. Type some text in B. The characters are inserted but the insertion point doesn't move, so the text appears backwards.
Can you talk a bit about how those weights have changed over time? Have there been any surprising shifts?
It seems two things are true of people (as a group) today. (Among other things.)
First, individuals assume that people will hear exactly what they say in exactly the context they said it and in exactly the way they were thinking it. Do you remember in 1999 when David Howard used the word "niggardly" properly and was forced to resign because people though it sounded too much like a racial epithet? All you have to do is (1) clarify the pronunciation of the word, (2) mention that it was in the context of budgetary matters and nothing to do with blacks, and (3) state that it never crossed your mind that it could be misconstrued.
Right?
Second, individuals don't believe that others can change. Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon in 1980. Logically, I think the guy could have changed his behavior over the last twenty-one years, but the rest of my brain claims that he must still be a dangerous nutcase. Everybody is different from the person they were twenty years ago, and there's one thing that each person can tag as the worst behavior back then that they don't do anymore. Sure, some things stay the same but some do change.
Truth sometimes comes along and punches you in the head and says, "wake up--you're being an idiot." Things like the fact that WebArchive is public has the potential to do that to a large part of society. People (as a group, explicitly self-inclusive) need to look at other people as someone who could be like yourself rather than some automaton programmed with a simple set of moral and behaviorial instructions.
Let me just add that I've got my share of embarassing things on the web. Heck, even a search of my RIT user ID revealed that someone archived a part of VAX Notes from the early nineties (http://www.csh.rit.edu/~tonyl/ancient/levhall.htm ) ... boy was I a dolt sometimes in college--and that's not even through WebArchive. There's even worse stuff that could surface ... such as the public flogging over my condescending view of homosexuality. I have to believe that people are able to change because I have.
I think things like WebArchive straddle that line ... in some ways, they're making a snapshot of the entirety of the Internet as a whole and providing access to that. However, since it's done by copying data from individual servers, it isn't really all that similar.
I was wondering if this book could be used in any significant way toward major home improvements. I want to get some big things done at my house like vinyl siding and buried cabling, but I can't seem to bring myself to try to find someone to do the work for fear that I can't tell that I'm getting scammed _before_ the fact. Would it be worth it to buy the book or is the pertinent stuff just a few paragraphs? Thanks.
... yeah, but I bet Radio Shack will still sell them 2 to a pack for $2.99.
Disinfection is accomplished by sending ninja technical support people to the homes of all the recipients and deleting the offending messages before the recipient gets infected.
I'd be curious to see the programatic solution, though.
P.S. So what if it's off topic!
My suggestion would be to use a decent remote backup software (Retrospect, perhaps) and (given a generic one-drive PC) set it up to back up the My Documents folder, the C:\winnt\profiles directory, and everything in c:\ except for c:\winnt and c:\Program Files. Also, configure it to back up document files from the entire hard drive (including c:\winnt and c:\Program Files.) If you think it's a problem, have people put their personal files (big Episode III trailers and the like) in a personal folder and don't back that up.
The backup would be run over the network at night. Make sure people keep their machines on. I assume your workplace is small and you should be able check the backup logs and see who turns their machines off and correct it. Some people are incorrigible, but you could put a Post-It over the power switch and offer a power strip that turns off everything else. Beyone offering all that help, you might still have a couple problem cases.
It almost doesn't matter where the data gets stored. A really decent sized tape array would probably be best. A bank of CD-RW drives and a robust labelling system would work okay. Backing up to a centralized hard drive would be okay too, especially if you could get something like a removeable drive bay and swap in new drives and take the old ones off-site. In fact, that last idea could be pretty ideal since drives keep coming down in price--a five-drive-rotation 100GB system might cost you around $1000. One of the things that I think sucks so bad is that you spend a heap of money on a good tape backup system only to have it be absurdly obsolete 5 years down the road--a "massive" tape array from 1995 held about 20GB and probably cost $10,000 or more. The removeable drive bay option seems kinda cool now that I think about it since it can be upgraded pretty cheap.
Now, if you can't get decent backup software ... or at least software that can do the remote stuff well, create a batch file that backs up the set of files described above to a network drive. Set it up with the AT service on NT to get it to run each night (good luck getting it to put files on the network, though.) Some careful planning in the batch file and you can get decent logging and such. Even crappy backup software should be able to run a backup of a network drive.
I'd actually recommend a batch-based "backup" system that works entirely locally. In my own world, 95%+ of the times I've had to restore a file it's because of some local condition: either I deleted something by accident, I saved something I shouldn't have, or it got corrupted by software--rather than loss through a fire or a hardware failure. I've got a batch file that runs each night and copies most of the day-to-day data I have to a "backup" subdirectory. I've used it a couple times to get stuff back and I'm very happy to have it.
Well, just some thoughts ...
Assuming James S. Huggins' How Much Data Is That? is right with 1 Library of Congress print collection == 10 TB, and using the 1 trillion bits(10^12 I assume) per square inch, I guess 17.6 x 10^7 Libraries of Congress/hectare.
I didn't see this in the article--do they plan on putting in a homing beacon or a big target on the critical tower or towers? This would simplify the plans of the flying terrorists of 2015.
(18 months per double; 10^120 =~= 2^399; 1.5 years * 399 = 598.5 years)
How do you represent the end-of-line character in ASCII? Expand your answer to consider open standards of arbitrarily high complexity.
Gosh, you all missed the most important thing of all: a portable police scanner that works on both the local police and the campus police frequencies. Sure got me out of trouble a couple times ...
ROCHESTER, NY -- Technology buffs have cracked music publishing giant Sony Music's elaborate Celine Dion distribution technology with a decidedly low-tech method: scribbling around the middle of a disk with a felt-tip marker.
Internet newsgroups have been circulating news of the discovery for the past week, describing the simple method of making the latest Celine Dion release, "A New Day Has Come" actually tolerable to the human ear. The technique involves covering the section of the disc from the center rim to 1cm from the edge of the disc with indellible ink.
"My children would scream in agony at the sound of the new CD," one post on alt.music.celine-dion said, "but with the modified disc, they even got their homework done while I listened."
Sony has not commented on the discovery, but experts believe no legal action will be taken since the technique does not defeat Sony's "Key2Audio" copy protection.
(as a C++ programmer)
(lies "people's fear of Lisp" in the convoluted-seeming structures
("were taught" they in computer science classes)
)
)
C__Programmer::IsSeeminglyBizarre(LispCodingStyle) ;
In case you think you need national acts--to paraphrase from one of Rochester, NY's local bands (Burning Snella in their song "Local Music") national bands are just local bands from someplace else.
If that's not incentive enough, no F--- at Sony gets so much as a penny.
I did a little digging triggered by a reply about the efficiency of various lights in lumens-per-watt. Not believing what I read, I dug a little on the web and found a decent exploration of the problem at Don Klipstein's website titled Why LEDs can be 10 times as efficient as incandescents in some applications but not in general home lighting! I got there after reading an article on custom boat cabin lighting with LEDs at Noemi Ybarra's site which includes an outline of the physics behind the units (i.e. 1 lumen is (4pi steradiansx1candella) only if the light source is uniformly spherical, which LED's are not, so the big "mcd" ratings don't correlate well to really big "lumen" ratings.)
In other words, either (1) exchange the room speakers for earpieces or headphones or (2) exchange the room microphones for lapel or boom microphones. Clearly the degenerate case has everyone essentially speaking into a separate telephone receiver which probably defeats the purpose of the system altogether.
Of course, it would be way cooler to have a setup where the room microphones are aware of the room speaker output and automatically cancel it out. The trouble is it's way cooler because it's so difficult to do.
;-)
I was disappointed that they wouldn't just ship me a new drive. I called them on Monday and by Tuesday morning I had a pre-paid laptop shipping box in my hands. I packed up the laptop and sent it out. They received it on Wednesday morning, fixed it (which I could monitor on the website) and I had it back in my hands on Thursday.
Based on what I know from other people's experience, this is pretty darn quick.
Based on what I've seen and what I believe about the behavior of the device, I think controllability is not an issue. The only argument I have along these lines is the lack of a dead-man switch (which I'm not even sure is absent from the design)--I forsee a "news of the weird" clip about someone passing out/having a seizure/dying on a Segway and plowing through a crowd. The other thing that is somewhat disconcerting is that these things just stop when they break or when the battery dies. Of course, that wouldn't be my problem as a pedestrian, only a problem for the person-minus-three-grand who has to "Gingerly" tote around 75 extra pounds.
What I do think is the problem is the same one that is really the reason bicycles, inline skates and scooters are banned on sidewalks, and even the reason that joggers and runners are disliked: When someone is walking, they don't want to be concerned with what's behind me.
It is well established on the road that the driver of each vehicle is responsible for controlling their own force vector. In non-pseudo-intelectual-nerd-speak, they're responsible for not running into things in in the direction they're moving. There are rules in place (i.e. speed limits) that let people relax and not concern themselves with stuff going on behind them [for the most part anyway.] As long as people follow those two rules, things go really quite well.
On the sidewalk, however, the same rules are implied but not enforced. As long as a sidewalk is populated by people walking, they have an assumed speed limit (the vaguely defined "walking speed") that allows each pedestrian to ignore what's going on behind them. For the most part, if I'm on the sidewalk and I want to go from the right side, all the way to the left side, I can basically do it without so much as a glance to my left to make sure I don't walk right into someone.
However, if there were vehicles or people who were going faster than myself, I need to look further back before changing direction. By my estimate, even if you could assume that the sidewalk speed limit was only twice as fast as your own speed, you'd be pretty stressed about not stepping a few inches out of a straight trajectory for fear of getting hit. As a cyclist, I know that applies on the road--my speed is typically half that of cars on residential streets, and I pay attention to not deviating more than a few inches from a straight line and pray that the driver doesn't hit me anyway. When the speed difference is greater (i.e. 3x) it gets pretty terrifying.
Now, if only we could change the world and make everyone responsible for their own actions and concerned for the well being of their fellow man ... ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, I slay me.
First off, it's bugging me at the moment so I think I'll just talk about definitions a bit. To me, what most people call "art" can be subdivided into two categories: true art and crafts (okay, technically I guess a work of "art" can be placed on a scale between those two points.) True art conveys a message that is impossible to convey through the senses or through language. Consider van Gogh's Starry Night . No matter how many words you speak, there is something conveyed by actually seeing the painting that goes beyond description. Crafts is the use of learned skills to create a representation of something. I always use the example of those copper-plate butterflies you see at craft fairs--most people call that art, but I say it's a craft. After searching the Internet a bit for an example, if I tell you I saw this rusty dragonfly on a rod that you can put in your lawn, then show you one, I think you'll agree it offers little more than its descriptive representation.
Now that I got that out of my system, I'm not sure why I did. I guess I want to focus on "true art." Yeah, that was the point ... When I say "art" from now on, I'm referring to things that are more like true art and less like crafts. That way, the primary value of a work is in its content, not its materials.
I want to focus on art that has similarities to music. Consider short films, for example--a group of people collaborate to create a short work whose value is defined by its ability to convey a message and the complexity of that message. Pretty similar to music. Also, consider stand-up comedy--an individual [or several individuals collaborate to] creates a joke whose value is defined by its ability to make people laugh and its complexity. Also pretty similar to music ... at least in that narrow sense.
What if I buy a collection of short films and make a copy of one of them for myself ... a copy that, despite the change of medium, would otherwise be considered identical to the original. Have I broken existing copyright laws? No, under the provisions of fair use. What if I give a copy to my friend? Well, yes, then--technically--but it's generally not enforced. What if I make a thousand copies and sell them? Well, then yes, I'm definitely breaking the law.
How about the peculiarities of stand-up comedy? What if a stand-up comic tells a joke like, "Aren't you glad plants aren't like people? I mean, how would you like it if some flower came over to you when you hit puberty and cut off your genitals?" [I hope nobody ever did that joke because I made it up ... it's not really very funny anyway.] This comic makes money because I either pay to see the performance or I pay for a recording of a performance. What if I tell that joke to a friend of mine and I didn't give credit to the author--would that be stealing? It's a bit different because the humor of a joke is often just as it's written ... sometimes the performance adds something but it's really just the writing or original idea that has value.
Now, why is it that even the most successful makers of short films and all but the top 20 or so stand-up comics are often on the verge of being broke? The most successful musicians--probably around a thousand of them--can make a decent living just making music. Why is there this disparity? Maybe if there were only a few well-paid musicians, I'd be willing to shell out cash for their higher quality performances. Hmm ...
The second [and much shorter] point I wanted to make is about fair compensation. I take artistic photographs as a hobby, and I think it would be great to make a living at it ... say a good living ... US$150,000 for instance. I doubt I'll ever get there, but I think that would be just swell.
What if a moderately popular artist wanted the same thing ... let's say they were popular enough that each year they sell a million CD's and they have four people in the band. To pay each member of the band $150K, it would work out to $0.60 per CD--and that's if they never performed live. If the material cost of the CD is $1 each (which is par with what you'd pay each for 1,000 CD's) and you've got to pay marketing people and some others (what?--maybe another $500,000 total or $0.50 each copy) and there's a 20% markup by the record stores, the end price is still only $2.52 ... now where does that other $12 to $18 go? If CD's were all three bucks, would that half-hour of tinkering around on your computer to make a copy really be worth it? Hmm ...
That's pretty much how far my thinking on the topic has gone in this direction so take it as it stands in all its conclusion-free and solution-free glory.
For business, the reasons are numerous. First, we can only buy from certain vendors easily. I would really like to get Jasc's Image Robot [I hope this isn't accidentally your company] but our vendor doesn't stock it so I'll do without until I can complain in an I-told-you-so manner that I love so much ... oops ... too much information, eh?
Second, I often find that I can't demonstrate the workflow I'm trying to prove with the demo. Sometimes this is a problem with crippleware and sometimes with it being hard to implement. Image Robot, for instance, looks like it'll do what I need but I haven't bothered to implement a full flow because it would be hard.
Third and so on--things other people have already mentioned. Changing priorities and the like, loss of interest, loss of job, etc.
As for software for personal use:
First, the off-the-cuff cost-benefit analysis is very important. Often I'll want a piece of software for just one little thing so even $30 might be too high for that purpose. Similarly I may only need it once.
Second, time and interest change. I may have enough time to download and install some demo, but I might not ever get back to checking it. If I go to run it and it's expired, oh well. Sometimes I just lose interest too.
I've got another specific example--Ultralingua Collegiate Dictionary I want an electronic dictionary to give me all the features I already have in American Heritage but will run on OSX [there, I let the cat out of the bag ... I'm a Mac guy.] I already own American Heritage and really love the Word Hunter [definition searching utility] feature. Ultralingua, while slick, fast, and OSX-aware doesn't do that so I'm just not interested. I'll wait for Houghton Mifflin to pop out another version and buy that. So ... I downloaded the demo and didn't buy the product.
Finally, and in both personal and business, software with bugs will stop me from buying. It's very odd ... if you are kind enough to allow people to try-before-buying, they'll be critical of crashes and bugs that they'd just begrudgingly work around if they just bought the stupid software without trying it. The trick is that you never release a beta as a demo. Betas are betas and should be full-blown and come with a big benefit to the user for being your tester. Demos are bug-free and designed to say that you're a competent company. Nobody likes testing software for nothing ... just ask any Windows user ;-) [ok, ok ... or Mac user or Palm user or anything user]
I worked at a small company (that is now defunct but will remain nameless) that wrote software for other companies. I was told by my coworkers that before I worked there, they were going to be really late shipping some software so they shipped a blank disk to a customer to stall for time--later to claim that the disk must have been corrupted.
My point was that you can, indeed, filter "not on this site" by using "-site:..."