there are several interfaces to spotlight. You can search from the command line, in which case you presumably could write a script to do anything if you were willing to work at it. You can search from the finder (file explorer) and tell it in the gui to search only "here".
There is a GUI to tell it not to report certain folders or files created by certain applications. But it's not very configurable and too coarse.
And there are some very very complex and impossible to type or remember ways to add some logic to the search to look for certain kinds of files. But its hard to tell it to search everywhere but not report certain kinds of files.
In short Spotlight 2.0 will be much better. One can expect Vista will have the same issues. In the mean time your meta data is a confidentiality risk.
it most certainly could take care of confidental information for me. It's a computer. If there was a way to easily mark files as confidential they could be excluded from search results. yet at a flip of a switch enable reporting confidental for search results. theres already two primitive capabilities on the mac of this: the.noindex suffix and the privacy GUI for spotlight. They are close to what you want be just don't have neccessary functionality.
What you suggest is a reasonable sounding solution and it would be nice if apple had actually implemented that functionality correctly. Unfortunatley Spotlight seems to be buggy on the mail.app search issue. It's a bug because not everyone seems to see the problem. Many people including myself (see apple's discussion forums) have found that disabling mail indexing seems to cripple searching by content in mail.app. You might not notice this if you just test this by turning off the index reporting on mail but that's because mail.app will be using the previous content indexes--slowly it gets out of date and new mail is not indexed.
Even if functionality were working correctly, What i'd still prefer is tag that could be applied to anything to mark it as confidential. and then a switch in spolight that could select "include confidential info" in the search results. That way I could have my confidential data indexed but simply filtered fromt he results unless I specifically asked for it.
Another problem with meta data is the generation of meta data. If people generated their own data they could control what goes into it. But the problem here is that you just don't do it normally. Plus as documents change, get copied and modified and so on it gets out of sync unless you keep modifying it. Last thing most people would want is some rigourous change control protocol for every document and e-mail.
Which of course means automated meta-data scraping. this leads to the problem of confidential info disclosure. that's obvious. But it also leads to another problem that annoying. When do you update the meta data? when the file is created or modified? a small lag? or in batch overnight?
On macs you can force a batch overnight search. But the default on is for instant updates. If you add a search term to a document WHILE a search is being performed in another window it will find it! amazing. and very useful too. And it assures things like computers that sleep at night and detachable drives stay indexed.
But it's also amazingly annoying when you stop doing conventional desktop activities and start doing more unix like things. Tage for example untarring a 30 GB archive with twenty thousand small files in it or something that is generating transisent files in a rapid fire fashion. Well you start untarring and for the first few files it zips along. then suddenly throughput nose dives. Why? you look at your processes and you see MDL the indexing programming is chewing up your disk access.
You can work around this if you can control the file names and make sure they are ones it will not index. But that's not assured, always possible, and will vary from computer to computer.
So anyhow there's lots of fine tuning needed on these ubiquitous metadata systems. Fine grained privacy control and fine grained operation modes so it's live in desktop application mode and lags in unix/high performance modes.
The mac OS (offering previews of the next Windows OS since 1984) already suffers from this problem and so far there are no graceful solutions. Namely spotlight gathers sensitive info in ways I wish it would not. To be specific, I deal with a lot of confidential e-mail that can include personell problems of empoyees. At the same time it's got all my project info on it. When an employee comes to talk about a project I will often search for terms related to the project or sometimes by the employeees name in spotlight while they sit around my screen. Spotlight pulls up the docs and the e-mails onto the same search results screen. Seeing titles of certain e-mails or possibly just the addresses can reveal confidential information or be embarassing.
As a result I no longer have spotlight index my e-mails. And of course that's a pain in the ass since it means Mail.app's searhc feature is busted. While I can figure out how to work around that (e.g. don't use mail.app, which would be a pity), the story does not end there. Unfortunately, spotlight indexes my backup volumes too, and it can blunder across old mail there and index it.
Now you might think I could also turn off indexing the backup volumes but there's the rub. First I might not want to. Second, you can't always do it. Spotlight has some bugs in how it handles logical partitions on disks and in particular it sometimes ignores being told not to index a volume if another partitions is being indexed.
Anyhow eventually there will be more fine grained control on privacy, but then the interface will become more cludgy too. In fact that may just kill the whole fine grained control effort since most folks don't worry about this sort of things and would prefer simplicity.
It's perhaps worth noting that windows dropped making the filesystem a database (for now). That might be a smart move since making at a wrapper like spotlight means they are less locked into a single search design. Problems like this will emerge slowly and flexibility to plug problems will be needed.
Nah these are not the building blocks of future planet earths. These are the remants of destroyed planet earths. For a while the aliens were recycling the planets they were destroying but then the bottom fell out of the market for the raw materials, so they began dumping the refuse in rings around the suns where the planets once orbitted. THey are hoping that the market picks up.
I click through EULAs because I dont think they have any legal weight. Sony in turn ignores my requests not to install since they don't think EULA's have any legal weight. In sshort the 'A' in EULA is not an agreement, meeting of minds, or a legal contract. I'm fine with that I guess. Those privacy rights were unenforcable anyhow so I lose nothing.
So now you have created an obsure bit of code that gratuitously does two index lookups, a function call, and allocates twice the memory. This is even worse than the last.
That's just syntactic sugar for a memory copy, it's not a reference or pointer. when you execute this it creates a new array (not-inplace) the same size as e. fills it. then when done garbage collects the old array held by e (if nothing else is holding it).
Sure it's compact and idiomatic but it is resource intensive and wasteful. It would not even work if e were sufficiently large. And you can't do anything sophisticated with it. in the case of perl it's a pointer not a copy.
for example:
@e = (0..9); $ref_to_e = \@e; print "$e[3] is the same as $ref_to_e->[3]"; for $i (@e) { $i +=1 }; print "$e[3] is the still the same as $ref_to_e->[3]";
note that $ref_to_e still points to e.
now try this in python:
e = range(10) r = e print e[3],r[3] e = [i+1 for i in e] print e[3],r[3]
Isn't ruby the modern successor to perl and not perl 6? Why will perl 6 be better?
I'd also like to take a pot shot at python. My feeling about python is that python is a much better programming language than perl for SOPHISTICATED programs. But in general perl is actually a more cleverly conceived langauge with far more available power. Many of the criticism people lay on perl in comparing it to python are either naive or an artifact of python's youth and thus lack of cruft. The latter is changing as python matures.
Here's examples of what I mean by naive criticisms: Two things I think standard newbie criticism of python and perl get exactly wrong are whitespace and variable prefixes ($@%#\).
Pythns white space it truly annoying at first. Then you begin to see why it's such a fantastic innovation. Sure every good program has a good set of indenting rules. The trouble is despite being good, they are different. It's hard to read someone elses code with precision. With python, everyone follows the exact same rules. I can easily scan any code I find and follow the scopes, even across pages on the screen. It's truly effective in practice and one of the best things about the language.
Perl is said to rely too heavily on symbols like $,%,@ that coders think are unnessecary and dispensed with in python. Wrong. If you actually do the count you will find that python has more special gramatical signals than python! really, try counts. lets see just to name a few there's : and () and [] and {} and @ and 'r' and ','... anyhow when you are done you find there are more than in perl. Worse they are used ambiguously unlike in perl. For example the use of [] in perl only means an array lookup and someone reading the code can tell this. Not true in python. Likewise for () and ',' which have both passive uses as separators and active uses as gramatical modifiers. IN perl these have one meaning.
In perl I can visually distinguish verbs and nouns (functions, commands and variables) by their clear prefix declarations.
Part of pythons cleanlyness comes from syntactic sugar. but under the hood it's objects are implemented the same way that perl's objects are: hashes (dir dict) or pseudo-hashes(slots) are and part of it's cleanliness comes form missing functionality: for example: references in perl that are lacking in python. e.g.
for $i (@e) { $i +=1 } # $i is a pointer into @e's memory
for i in e: i = i+1 # this code does nothing at all since i is not a pointer.
As python matures and more and more idiomatic expressions enter (like generators expressions, or list iterators) or hash methods get extended (.get() has defaults added to it) things get complicated and less clean.
Perl has be criticized on this account since some of it's functions canvary depending on how they are called (e.g. split), and you have to memorize the forms. but as python iterates these same inconsistencies creep into it. for example, some things in python produce R-values and some do not but you can't know except by memorization (.sort and.rtrim for example). Ruby solve this nicely in a perlish fashion by introducing the character ! to differentiate in-place and r-value operations. In python sometimes things are short circuit expressions and sometimes they are not. for example.get() with a default actually evaluates the default value if it's a function rather than short circuiting it. On the other hand the "or" function does short circuit the evaluation when the right hand term will not be used.
So anyhow I'm not saying python is a bad language. I use it and love it. I'm saying that it gets a bad rap from people who can't think in perl. So don't flame me on that account.
Ruby seems so clean up the complains people have about perl while preserving it's advantages over python. so why do we need perl 6?
I have just enough experience with these subjects to conclude that the article hasn't given enough information to make a decision in either direction
Apparently not. Read the article again and then re-read my post. First I do explain in part why I think it is hopeless: the cylclical nature of the favorite and the likilihood that good movies lie outside the main clusters.
But read the article and you see he claims 75% accuracy on 7 catagories if he is allowed a bin plust its neighbor bins. Let's see so for any given guess, 3 out of 7 bins counts as a win. So if all the bins were equally populated then he's got a baseline of 46% accuracy that a dartboad would achieve. If the bins are not equally populated then that dartboard baseline rises. If For example, 2/3 of the population lived in 1/3 of the bins then the dart board is nearly tied with his predictor.
Yet another example of some machine learning bozo overtraining on a dataset to come up with a perfect predictro of historical data with little value for generalization. No doubt they have some dull understanding of cross validation which they mistakenly believe assures they have not over trained. Heh. In the end just as good as your linear numTit predictor.
And then when they are done they find that any future predictve power it has only is focused into a couple of clusters that any fool could have told you were sure bets. It has not value unless your goal is to recycle the same things over and over till there's just one tru formula that all money making movies must follow.
I suspect movie making is probably a lot like the stockmarket. While there's general themes that always have positive returns, the can't be a formula for big success because if there were then once it was known it would not work anymore. Originality and a cyclic nature of traditional themes is the flow but not predictable.
Charles Dickens popularized the Serial Novel. This amounts to a re-incarnation of the serial Novel. Come back again to get the next episode. Recently Steven king produced a serial novel distributed over the internet as each segment was written.
The only major difference seems to be the distribution format.
I'll confess my understanding of this is sketchy at this point. But as I read it the concept is this one has a wire connecting two resistors. The Johnson noise in the wire is determined jointly by the resistors. Both sides, sender and receiver are changing the resistance values simultaneously with the sender putting in the message and the receiver putting in random crap which gets added to the signal. A person monitoring the voltage in the middle can't tell what fraction of the noise came from which side. Therefore the message can't be extracted. Clever. Oddly it's a lot like the bell's theorem experiment in QM where both sides are changing their filters.
What seems to be the flaw in this is that he assumes that the attacker must inject current unidirectionally to determine which resistance is at which end. Perhaps another means exists, courtesy of the speed of light.
Namely if you monitor the voltage at two points along the wire then you can distinguish between a wave proapgating from left to right and right to left. So you can now determine what fraction of the noise is coming from the left and what is coming from the right. Even if the noise level made his hard to do, there's also the moment of the resistor switch to capture. Each time the resistor is changed, even if it were perfectly synchronous, the left side's noise will reach the left tap sooner he the right tap.
This last effect could possibly be masked by injecting large amounts of noise into the system during the switch. (but of course this would also mask any current injection by the attacker as well). But the former effect of the noise signals propagation might still be detectable.
No it's not a matter free versus not free though that matters. It's the principle of arbitrage. If I want to sell my 2000 year old gold ring for its true value and you want to buy a 2000 year old ring the chances we meet are close to nil. Instead I will have to sell my ring in a more liquid market that only values the gold not the age.
Faced with this, Therefore I'm willing to pay a antiquties broker a commission for you to find me. Arbitraging in the stock market are people who look for things that are priced lower than they should be due to inadequate liquidity and buy them then find markets to sell them in. ( Often they do this with options so they don't even actually own the properties. )
In either case arbitraging creates market liqudity which increases the sales value of an item closer to it's optimal value. The seller gets more and should be glad. The reverse can also be true when the arbitrager works for the buyer.
Google is effectively creating a liquid market where none exists. It helps the seller because it connects them to the buyer (reader) of the news (and ads). And it helps the buyer avoid easily found but overpriced news. But in both cases google is adding value and extracting a commision (google ads).
So yes they are adding value and thus entitled to make money. But the seller is not worse off unless they are in the class of sellers who make their money by being easily found but cost a bundle. (e.g. payday loan shop on the corner or the bank loan officer down town.)
But it does seem like the news companies should be able to opt out if they want. Maybe someone should tell them about robots.txt but instead they are greedy and want a cut of the broker's slice. It's not unheard of: it's Not unlike asking your real estate to give you a cut of the commission on a house that is particularly desirable for an agent to list.
I agree. People want cheap crap or the newst thing and when it's buggy they sue? They should get a dope slap. It's like the ipod scratches.
These people probably taste dog poop so they can avoid stepping in it. Don't be the lead dog if you are afraid of stepping in holes. pioneers get the arrows... there's an infintity of phrases in every language to describe this.
The logic here is strange and the share holders defrauded by the judge. If the goal is to make ellison 100 million poorer then this is simple: x-0.25*x = 100 million x = 133 million So ellison should pay 133 million, he'll get 25% back in the book value of his stocks, and on paper be out 100 million.
On the otherhand if the idea is that oracle was defrauded 100 million, well then it's simple. He should give 100 million to oracle, regardless of his percent ownership since any injury he caused oracle came out of his pocket book too!.
I agree the two issues have become intertwined. I think that was the argument I _was_ making. That the existence of a dvd decoder in the wild fueled the ripping. But the pro-ripping communinty likes to hide behind this shield of "well we had to decode them" and the RIAA hides behind this "decoding is illegal DMCA" shield. Neither argument holds water. As you say one can view but not rip. I'd just like both sides to be honest. I'm a big fan of the itunes fair play, and related ones that try to bring the metaphor of object ownershipand copyright into the digital age. Yeah make a few copies if you want but were going to put some bumps in the road if you start trying this wholesale. We can argue how high the bumps should be but the essential feature of the argument should be what is fair use of a copyrighted object that I purchased. I did not by the copyright itself. I bough an instance of it and unlimited replication is not consistent with owning an instance. But some localized sharing is expected just like I can share a book I own.
Okay this whole DVD decoding thing got started over the ruse that there was no playback device for linux neccessitating decoding and ripping in order to play them. It's a ludicrously lame argument but let's ignore that.
Why does the RIAA not provide a free Linux playback device for DVDs? Sure they would have to pay royalties to the MPEG algorithms folks to offer it. But that would be ridiculously cheap. For that matter they could easily push to get a law taxing all bare PCs with a few cents to pay for an MPEG royalty. Put the algorithm right in the BIOS if you want.
In any case the point is that both sides in this fight are being disingenous. If the issue were really about the lack of a DVD player on linux then the RIAA could fix that. And like wise if the lack of a player were really the reason Linux users have to rip dvds then they could just buy a commercial playback device. Both sides are lieing out there asses.
So cut the crud. this is about whether or not people have the right to rip and secondly if they have the right to re-distribute. In most cases the answer to the first is they should though specific laws make it illegal, and in the second case, no, because it's not fair use to re-distribute copies--lending your own yes, maybe making a mix tape, yes, but not a carbon copy. To put the latter one in persepective should tower records or amazon be allowed to buy one celine dion cd and then just sell copies? What if they just gave them away. Duh, neither is fair use.
people old enough may recall the unfortunate IBM dumb-terminals that had a 15Khz flyback transformer. The over-30 crowd could no hear it, but I couldn't stand to be in the same room with one. Some early color TVs were the same way.
But of course you could do this with your laptop. Might be handy at airports to keep those unwashed roaming children from sliming your precious personal space. Or for torturing the whiney brat kicking your chair in the next row of the air plane.
Hey maybe you could use this during exams in class set it at a sub audible level and sub consciously increase everyones anxiety level three notches. Supposedly church pipe organs have some stops to produce the same effect in the worshippers. Be sure to wear your noise canceling head phones tuned to that frequency.
Send the 1.6 terrabye disk but encode it. senders exchange disks, and after receipt, exchange keys by e-mail. this avoids the double step of sending two disks to insure tit-for-tat.
Once again, the post-office will become the king of high latency high bandwidth. Hollywood should quake in their boots over this, not on-line file sharing.
If these things are inexpensive enough ond can imagine peer-to-peer postal networks popping up. Say you record half of something on on DVD, and you send it to someone. They send you back half of something, and then you send the other half and so-on. tit for tat.
The problem with the above concept is that it requires the sender and the receiver to actually haveing something each other actually wanted to exchange. But if the disks get big enough you could easily put many things on them increasing the probability that one or more things on their will be something someone else wants to share. It costs you no extra postage to send 1 thing as 100 things now.
So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp, or sharing every single top 40 song for the last 100 years on a single Disk and it wont take long before everyone has every song and movie.
Slashdot Mirror
there are several interfaces to spotlight. You can search from the command line, in which case you presumably could write a script to do anything if you were willing to work at it. You can search from the finder (file explorer) and tell it in the gui to search only "here".
There is a GUI to tell it not to report certain folders or files created by certain applications. But it's not very configurable and too coarse.
And there are some very very complex and impossible to type or remember ways to add some logic to the search to look for certain kinds of files. But its hard to tell it to search everywhere but not report certain kinds of files.
In short Spotlight 2.0 will be much better. One can expect Vista will have the same issues. In the mean time your meta data is a confidentiality risk.
it most certainly could take care of confidental information for me. It's a computer. If there was a way to easily mark files as confidential they could be excluded from search results. yet at a flip of a switch enable reporting confidental for search results. theres already two primitive capabilities on the mac of this: the .noindex suffix and the privacy GUI for spotlight. They are close to what you want be just don't have neccessary functionality.
What you suggest is a reasonable sounding solution and it would be nice if apple had actually implemented that functionality correctly. Unfortunatley Spotlight seems to be buggy on the mail.app search issue. It's a bug because not everyone seems to see the problem. Many people including myself (see apple's discussion forums) have found that disabling mail indexing seems to cripple searching by content in mail.app. You might not notice this if you just test this by turning off the index reporting on mail but that's because mail.app will be using the previous content indexes--slowly it gets out of date and new mail is not indexed.
Even if functionality were working correctly, What i'd still prefer is tag that could be applied to anything to mark it as confidential. and then a switch in spolight that could select "include confidential info" in the search results. That way I could have my confidential data indexed but simply filtered fromt he results unless I specifically asked for it.
Another problem with meta data is the generation of meta data. If people generated their own data they could control what goes into it. But the problem here is that you just don't do it normally. Plus as documents change, get copied and modified and so on it gets out of sync unless you keep modifying it. Last thing most people would want is some rigourous change control protocol for every document and e-mail.
Which of course means automated meta-data scraping. this leads to the problem of confidential info disclosure. that's obvious. But it also leads to another problem that annoying. When do you update the meta data? when the file is created or modified? a small lag? or in batch overnight?
On macs you can force a batch overnight search. But the default on is for instant updates. If you add a search term to a document WHILE a search is being performed in another window it will find it! amazing. and very useful too. And it assures things like computers that sleep at night and detachable drives stay indexed.
But it's also amazingly annoying when you stop doing conventional desktop activities and start doing more unix like things. Tage for example untarring a 30 GB archive with twenty thousand small files in it or something that is generating transisent files in a rapid fire fashion. Well you start untarring and for the first few files it zips along. then suddenly throughput nose dives. Why? you look at your processes and you see MDL the indexing programming is chewing up your disk access.
You can work around this if you can control the file names and make sure they are ones it will not index. But that's not assured, always possible, and will vary from computer to computer.
So anyhow there's lots of fine tuning needed on these ubiquitous metadata systems. Fine grained privacy control and fine grained operation modes so it's live in desktop application mode and lags in unix/high performance modes.
The mac OS (offering previews of the next Windows OS since 1984) already suffers from this problem and so far there are no graceful solutions. Namely spotlight gathers sensitive info in ways I wish it would not. To be specific, I deal with a lot of confidential e-mail that can include personell problems of empoyees. At the same time it's got all my project info on it. When an employee comes to talk about a project I will often search for terms related to the project or sometimes by the employeees name in spotlight while they sit around my screen. Spotlight pulls up the docs and the e-mails onto the same search results screen. Seeing titles of certain e-mails or possibly just the addresses can reveal confidential information or be embarassing.
As a result I no longer have spotlight index my e-mails. And of course that's a pain in the ass since it means Mail.app's searhc feature is busted. While I can figure out how to work around that (e.g. don't use mail.app, which would be a pity), the story does not end there. Unfortunately, spotlight indexes my backup volumes too, and it can blunder across old mail there and index it.
Now you might think I could also turn off indexing the backup volumes but there's the rub. First I might not want to. Second, you can't always do it. Spotlight has some bugs in how it handles logical partitions on disks and in particular it sometimes ignores being told not to index a volume if another partitions is being indexed.
Anyhow eventually there will be more fine grained control on privacy, but then the interface will become more cludgy too. In fact that may just kill the whole fine grained control effort since most folks don't worry about this sort of things and would prefer simplicity.
It's perhaps worth noting that windows dropped making the filesystem a database (for now). That might be a smart move since making at a wrapper like spotlight means they are less locked into a single search design. Problems like this will emerge slowly and flexibility to plug problems will be needed.
Nah these are not the building blocks of future planet earths. These are the remants of destroyed planet earths. For a while the aliens were recycling the planets they were destroying but then the bottom fell out of the market for the raw materials, so they began dumping the refuse in rings around the suns where the planets once orbitted. THey are hoping that the market picks up.
I click through EULAs because I dont think they have any legal weight. Sony in turn ignores my requests not to install since they don't think EULA's have any legal weight. In sshort the 'A' in EULA is not an agreement, meeting of minds, or a legal contract. I'm fine with that I guess. Those privacy rights were unenforcable anyhow so I lose nothing.
mod it up.
So now you have created an obsure bit of code that gratuitously does two index lookups, a function call, and allocates twice the memory. This is even worse than the last.
e = [i + 1 for i in e]
That's just syntactic sugar for a memory copy, it's not a reference or pointer.
when you execute this it creates a new array (not-inplace) the same size as e. fills it. then when done garbage collects the old array held by e (if nothing else is holding it).
Sure it's compact and idiomatic but it is resource intensive and wasteful. It would not even work if e were sufficiently large. And you can't do anything sophisticated with it. in the case of perl it's a pointer not a copy.
for example:
@e = (0..9);
$ref_to_e = \@e;
print "$e[3] is the same as $ref_to_e->[3]";
for $i (@e) { $i +=1 };
print "$e[3] is the still the same as $ref_to_e->[3]";
note that $ref_to_e still points to e.
now try this in python:
e = range(10)
r = e
print e[3],r[3]
e = [i+1 for i in e]
print e[3],r[3]
oops r and e are different memory
Isn't ruby the modern successor to perl and not perl 6? Why will perl 6 be better?
... anyhow when you are done you find there are more than in perl. Worse they are used ambiguously unlike in perl. For example the use of [] in perl only means an array lookup and someone reading the code can tell this. Not true in python. Likewise for () and ',' which have both passive uses as separators and active uses as gramatical modifiers. IN perl these have one meaning.
.get() has defaults added to it) things get complicated and less clean.
.rtrim for example). Ruby solve this nicely in a perlish fashion by introducing the character ! to differentiate in-place and r-value operations. .get() with a default actually evaluates the default value if it's a function rather than short circuiting it. On the other hand the "or" function does short circuit the evaluation when the right hand term will not be used.
I'd also like to take a pot shot at python. My feeling about python is that python is a much better programming language than perl for SOPHISTICATED programs. But in general perl is actually a more cleverly conceived langauge with far more available power. Many of the criticism people lay on perl in comparing it to python are either naive or an artifact of python's youth and thus lack of cruft. The latter is changing as python matures.
Here's examples of what I mean by naive criticisms: Two things I think standard newbie criticism of python and perl get exactly wrong are whitespace and variable prefixes ($@%#\).
Pythns white space it truly annoying at first. Then you begin to see why it's such a fantastic innovation. Sure every good program has a good set of indenting rules. The trouble is despite being good, they are different. It's hard to read someone elses code with precision. With python, everyone follows the exact same rules. I can easily scan any code I find and follow the scopes, even across pages on the screen. It's truly effective in practice and one of the best things about the language.
Perl is said to rely too heavily on symbols like $,%,@ that coders think are unnessecary and dispensed with in python. Wrong. If you actually do the count you will find that python has more special gramatical signals than python! really, try counts. lets see just to name a few there's : and () and [] and {} and @ and 'r' and ','
In perl I can visually distinguish verbs and nouns (functions, commands and variables) by their clear prefix declarations.
Part of pythons cleanlyness comes from syntactic sugar. but under the hood it's objects are implemented the same way that perl's objects are: hashes (dir dict) or pseudo-hashes(slots) are
and part of it's cleanliness comes form missing functionality: for example: references in perl that are lacking in python. e.g.
for $i (@e) { $i +=1 } # $i is a pointer into @e's memory
for i in e: i = i+1 # this code does nothing at all since i is not a pointer.
As python matures and more and more idiomatic expressions enter (like generators expressions, or list iterators) or hash methods get extended (
Perl has be criticized on this account since some of it's functions canvary depending on how they are called (e.g. split), and you have to memorize the forms. but as python iterates these same inconsistencies creep into it.
for example, some things in python produce R-values and some do not but you can't know except by memorization (.sort and
In python sometimes things are short circuit expressions and sometimes they are not. for example
So anyhow I'm not saying python is a bad language. I use it and love it. I'm saying that it gets a bad rap from people who can't think in perl. So don't flame me on that account.
Ruby seems so clean up the complains people have about perl while preserving it's advantages over python. so why do we need perl 6?
How do you know he overtrained his system?
I have just enough experience with these subjects to conclude that the article hasn't given enough information to make a decision in either direction
Apparently not. Read the article again and then re-read my post. First I do explain in part why I think it is hopeless: the cylclical nature of the favorite and the likilihood that good movies lie outside the main clusters.
But read the article and you see he claims 75% accuracy on 7 catagories if he is allowed a bin plust its neighbor bins. Let's see so for any given guess, 3 out of 7 bins counts as a win. So if all the bins were equally populated then he's got a baseline of 46% accuracy that a dartboad would achieve. If the bins are not equally populated then that dartboard baseline rises. If For example, 2/3 of the population lived in 1/3 of the bins then the dart board is nearly tied with his predictor.
In short it's a crapy predictor.
Yet another example of some machine learning bozo overtraining on a dataset to come up with a perfect predictro of historical data with little value for generalization. No doubt they have some dull understanding of cross validation which they mistakenly believe assures they have not over trained. Heh. In the end just as good as your linear numTit predictor.
And then when they are done they find that any future predictve power it has only is focused into a couple of clusters that any fool could have told you were sure bets. It has not value unless your goal is to recycle the same things over and over till there's just one tru formula that all money making movies must follow.
I suspect movie making is probably a lot like the stockmarket. While there's general themes that always have positive returns, the can't be a formula for big success because if there were then once it was known it would not work anymore. Originality and a cyclic nature of traditional themes is the flow but not predictable.
Charles Dickens popularized the Serial Novel. This amounts to a re-incarnation of the serial Novel. Come back again to get the next episode. Recently Steven king produced a serial novel distributed over the internet as each segment was written.
The only major difference seems to be the distribution format.
regardless, the two-point speed of light hack I outlined still wins.
I'll confess my understanding of this is sketchy at this point. But as I read it the concept is this one has a wire connecting two resistors. The Johnson noise in the wire is determined jointly by the resistors. Both sides, sender and receiver are changing the resistance values simultaneously with the sender putting in the message and the receiver putting in random crap which gets added to the signal. A person monitoring the voltage in the middle can't tell what fraction of the noise came from which side. Therefore the message can't be extracted. Clever. Oddly it's a lot like the bell's theorem experiment in QM where both sides are changing their filters.
What seems to be the flaw in this is that he assumes that the attacker must inject current unidirectionally to determine which resistance is at which end. Perhaps another means exists, courtesy of the speed of light.
Namely if you monitor the voltage at two points along the wire then you can distinguish between a wave proapgating from left to right and right to left. So you can now determine what fraction of the noise is coming from the left and what is coming from the right. Even if the noise level made his hard to do, there's also the moment of the resistor switch to capture. Each time the resistor is changed, even if it were perfectly synchronous, the left side's noise will reach the left tap sooner he the right tap.
This last effect could possibly be masked by injecting large amounts of noise into the system during the switch. (but of course this would also mask any current injection by the attacker as well). But the former effect of the noise signals propagation might still be detectable.
No it's not a matter free versus not free though that matters. It's the principle of arbitrage. If I want to sell my 2000 year old gold ring for its true value and you want to buy a 2000 year old ring the chances we meet are close to nil. Instead I will have to sell my ring in a more liquid market that only values the gold not the age.
Faced with this, Therefore I'm willing to pay a antiquties broker a commission for you to find me. Arbitraging in the stock market are people who look for things that are priced lower than they should be due to inadequate liquidity and buy them then find markets to sell them in. ( Often they do this with options so they don't even actually own the properties. )
In either case arbitraging creates market liqudity which increases the sales value of an item closer to it's optimal value. The seller gets more and should be glad. The reverse can also be true when the arbitrager works for the buyer.
Google is effectively creating a liquid market where none exists. It helps the seller because it connects them to the buyer (reader) of the news (and ads). And it helps the buyer avoid easily found but overpriced news. But in both cases google is adding value and extracting a commision (google ads).
So yes they are adding value and thus entitled to make money. But the seller is not worse off unless they are in the class of sellers who make their money by being easily found but cost a bundle. (e.g. payday loan shop on the corner or the bank loan officer down town.)
But it does seem like the news companies should be able to opt out if they want. Maybe someone should tell them about robots.txt
but instead they are greedy and want a cut of the broker's slice. It's not unheard of: it's Not unlike asking your real estate to give you a cut of the commission on a house that is particularly desirable for an agent to list.
I agree. People want cheap crap or the newst thing and when it's buggy they sue? They should get a dope slap. It's like the ipod scratches.
These people probably taste dog poop so they can avoid stepping in it. Don't be the lead dog if you are afraid of stepping in holes. pioneers get the arrows... there's an infintity of phrases in every language to describe this.
What's a saying in your language?
The logic here is strange and the share holders defrauded by the judge. If the goal is to make ellison 100 million poorer then this is simple:
x-0.25*x = 100 million
x = 133 million
So ellison should pay 133 million, he'll get 25% back in the book value of his stocks, and on paper be out 100 million.
On the otherhand if the idea is that oracle was defrauded 100 million, well then it's simple. He should give 100 million to oracle, regardless of his percent ownership since any injury he caused oracle came out of his pocket book too!.
Stupid decision.
I agree the two issues have become intertwined. I think that was the argument I _was_ making. That the existence of a dvd decoder in the wild fueled the ripping. But the pro-ripping communinty likes to hide behind this shield of "well we had to decode them" and the RIAA hides behind this "decoding is illegal DMCA" shield. Neither argument holds water. As you say one can view but not rip. I'd just like both sides to be honest. I'm a big fan of the itunes fair play, and related ones that try to bring the metaphor of object ownershipand copyright into the digital age. Yeah make a few copies if you want but were going to put some bumps in the road if you start trying this wholesale. We can argue how high the bumps should be but the essential feature of the argument should be what is fair use of a copyrighted object that I purchased. I did not by the copyright itself. I bough an instance of it and unlimited replication is not consistent with owning an instance. But some localized sharing is expected just like I can share a book I own.
Okay this whole DVD decoding thing got started over the ruse that there was no playback device for linux neccessitating decoding and ripping in order to play them. It's a ludicrously lame argument but let's ignore that.
Why does the RIAA not provide a free Linux playback device for DVDs? Sure they would have to pay royalties to the MPEG algorithms folks to offer it. But that would be ridiculously cheap. For that matter they could easily push to get a law taxing all bare PCs with a few cents to pay for an MPEG royalty. Put the algorithm right in the BIOS if you want.
In any case the point is that both sides in this fight are being disingenous. If the issue were really about the lack of a DVD player on linux then the RIAA could fix that. And like wise if the lack of a player were really the reason Linux users have to rip dvds then they could just buy a commercial playback device. Both sides are lieing out there asses.
So cut the crud. this is about whether or not people have the right to rip and secondly if they have the right to re-distribute. In most cases the answer to the first is they should though specific laws make it illegal, and in the second case, no, because it's not fair use to re-distribute copies--lending your own yes, maybe making a mix tape, yes, but not a carbon copy. To put the latter one in persepective should tower records or amazon be allowed to buy one celine dion cd and then just sell copies? What if they just gave them away. Duh, neither is fair use.
Grating's in front keep out the old people?
people old enough may recall the unfortunate IBM dumb-terminals that had a 15Khz flyback transformer. The over-30 crowd could no hear it, but I couldn't stand to be in the same room with one. Some early color TVs were the same way.
But of course you could do this with your laptop. Might be handy at airports to keep those unwashed roaming children from sliming your precious personal space. Or for torturing the whiney brat kicking your chair in the next row of the air plane.
Hey maybe you could use this during exams in class set it at a sub audible level and sub consciously increase everyones anxiety level three notches. Supposedly church pipe organs have some stops to produce the same effect in the worshippers. Be sure to wear your noise canceling head phones tuned to that frequency.
Send the 1.6 terrabye disk but encode it. senders exchange disks, and after receipt, exchange keys by e-mail. this avoids the double step of sending two disks to insure tit-for-tat.
Once again, the post-office will become the king of high latency high bandwidth. Hollywood should quake in their boots over this, not on-line file sharing.
If these things are inexpensive enough ond can imagine peer-to-peer postal networks popping up. Say you record half of something on on DVD, and you send it to someone. They send you back half of something, and then you send the other half and so-on. tit for tat.
The problem with the above concept is that it requires the sender and the receiver to actually haveing something each other actually wanted to exchange. But if the disks get big enough you could easily put many things on them increasing the probability that one or more things on their will be something someone else wants to share. It costs you no extra postage to send 1 thing as 100 things now.
So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp, or sharing every single top 40 song for the last 100 years on a single Disk and it wont take long before everyone has every song and movie.
Plummers make a lot of money for not much work. sounds like he's a smart guy.