Actually this isn't as funny as it sounds. In normal drug trials you are testing something that can only affect the individual. But in case the treatment is another virus that can be propogated between individuals. If the virus mutates into something that is harmful then what started out as a simple clinical trial (and might not have passed into main stream medicine) could turn into a problem as bad as HIV itself. So some form of containment would need to be in place.
Spam is simply not profitable enough to last much longer.
I can't see how this is true. 40% of all email is considered "spam" with the prediction that this figure will rise to 80% in 2008. If it were the case that it is not profitable then spammers would stop doing it and find other ways of making money; after all, they are "business" people.
Remember that they are sending an email for something that might be $30, of which they get a percentage of each sale (I would assume). They send it to several million people with, say, the chance that 99% of them will bin it before reading it. Of the remaining 1% that read it 1% might take up the offer. So you're talking about 0.01% (if my maths is right) of several million people, which is still in the 100's. To send the mail it cost them a few dollars, and they've likely made tens of dollars.
What the ASRG appears to be doing is making the cost of sending the email in the first place more "expensive" (and I don't necessarily mean financially) so that, for the average user, this has only a small effect, but for someone emailing millions of people every day it has a profound effect: it drives them into unprofitability.
... whenever I first met people but I found their reply was "Oh" followed by a long pause. Now, whenever I introduce myself and have to say what I do, I tell people I'm an "artist": I take bits and bytes and create a masterpiece, or I colour-by-numbers.
Britain is Britain, the political alliance of England, Scotland and Wales, we are our own union, we don't want European trash, and we're not in Europe...
It is funny very anti-European people such as yourself like to make this type of comment with regards to Europe, but seem completely blind to the fact that the UK has given away much of it's independance to the USA over the last half a century or so.
And that they don't mention the fact that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are all trying to get away from England by devolution.
You forget (or have never seen) template methods. std::swap(a,b), for example, swaps the values of two 'things' and can be specialised to handle 'things' that need more work than the standard 'assign a to a temporary, assign b to a, assign the temporary to b' mentality. Templates are not just for classes but for methods too.
(big apologies for the 'things' bit... early evening... long day... brain tired!)
Still, I have to wonder if this is a slippery slope that we are travelling down. How long before chain emails and inoccuous humorous forwards are also denied?
As with everything: one mans meat is another mans poison. "Spam" is a term that is unique to the person saying it or hearing it. If I lacked a sense of humour then "spam" is anything funny. If I didn't have a debt then those damn debt consolidation emails would be spam. If I lacked a work ethic then that mail I just received from my boss saying that I should stop read/. would be spam.
Signed, cushty, the hardest working poorest clown.
The flip side is to make it prohibitively expensive to actually send spam. Postal services the world over charge for delivery of mail, why not for email? Those who send large amounts of email would then large amounts of cash. Downside is that Joe Bloggs will be paying for sending too.
The other is probably design by contract or something like that. Checking that things that call a method pass good parameters and that methods return what they say they should. A generic aspect could check that all parameters are not null and that a method doesn't return null. A more specific aspect could check particular method parameters, return values, and object consistency. Once confirmed to be working you remove the aspects and your code will "just work like normal" *gulp*
Aspects are cross-cutting concerns, they are things that cut through numbers of classes. My way of thinking: draw vertical rectangles side-by-side and call these "classes", now draw a horizontal box that cuts through them all and this is an "aspect".
The simple example, and one used in the book I believe, is that of logging. Say you have to log the entry to and exit from every single method in your code. Typically you would probably write this directly putting "entering XYZ, exitting XYZ" actually in the code. But with aspects you can write one aspect that basically says "on entry to any method log the method and parameters, on exit log the method" and compile your code and away you go.
So? Why would I want to do this? Well, now that you have been through your development process and discovered everything runs fine, you decide to go into production. Want to remove every single log line to improve speed? With the "normal" approach you'll have to write a script to remove them or do it manually. With aspects: just dont use the aspect in the compilation! Put them back in by compiling in the aspect again.
For me aspects are a real benefit but they do you head in for a while when you're an OO programmer!
What happens when ...
on
Server In A Fly
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Some people seem to be missing the point: this is not a "database" it is a persistence mechanism. What they are saying is that persisting objects is difficult (er, tend to disagree but I'll bite) and so they are solving this. Whether a RDBMS offers better searching is completely irrelevent as this, in their architecture, is handled by the application.
What they seemed to gloss over is that you need to take snapshots of the actual data. If you didn't you'd have to keep every single "log" in order to safely playback the actions and know you have the same data in the same state. Loose one log, say the very first one, and you're pretty much screwed.
The only reason the show is going to be 'respun' after Sarah leaves is because she's the title character and a Buffyless Buffy has to be called something else.
I beg to differ: take the long running (since 1983) UK Glaswegian TV Policeman show 'Taggart'. Mark McManus, the actor who played the lead character Jim Taggart died in 1994, and yet the series continues to this day with the name 'Taggart' and nobody playing Jim Taggart.
I remember the early days of OS/2 when, if you believe "independent sources", Microsoft counted every sale of OS/2 as a sale of Windows. The last graph I took any notice of had both on an equal footing. Everything these days is spin, whichever side you're on.
That has to be one of the worst pieces of advice I've ever received. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, and just means that you bottle it all up which isn't good.
The best bit of advice I received came from someone who bullied me: I stood up to him in front of a big group of other kids and, for once, it didn't end in a kicking. He said I was the only person to confront him and actually pay him respect. You see, not only did people see me as a 'nerd' (including myself) but they saw him as a 'bully', and he felt like everybody treated him like he was stupid so he lashed out at them. I didn't. It wasn't until after this, when we got chatting, that I found out we had a lot in common (and that he was a fairly handy amateur boxer!)
That was 14 years ago, and we are still friends.
My advice: respect yourself, respect others, and don't be quick to judge as there's always something you can learn from someone else.
Thinking about it now though, I suppose it's the second best bit of advice; the best being "don't eat yellow snow".
I've found the best way to interview people is to actually get them in and work on a problem amongs their potential co-workers. I personally don't interview very well when it comes to answer questions; don't get me wrong, I know my stuff, it's just I have a tendancy to work myself into a stew (just like I did before I took any exams). I was really surprised when I went for an interview at a company when they turned round and asked me to come back and spend a day with their development team, working on a problem that was related to their product. It gave me the chance to actually sit at a machine, code, talk to the team, and generally show what I could really do.
If you want to know if someone will fit into a team then the only real way is to put them in the team for a while. It worked so well for me that I took it to the next company I worked for.
Obviously you still have to have that first interview where you do ask some technical questions, but make the questions those that will identify someone that knows nothing about something they've put on their CV so you can cut the dead wood quickly.
I personally don't like having to fill in my details with websites, although I have with those that are any good and allow me to unsubscribe from mailing lists of adverts. But this is not the only way to retrieve marketing information about visitors to a site:
Companies such as Autonomy and Escape Velocity Technology have technology that does automatic collection of your online habits and can form a picture of you so that each time you visit a website powered by their products it can be adapted to your behaviour. There are no forms to fill in, it just works off exactly what you've done; so if you read articles on company profits (or losses as the case currently seems to be out there!) then you'll get similar articles presented to you more often and adverts might be for online stock brokers (or debt collectors;) They can even get down to the order you do stuff and what times you do it. If you know what someone does you have a good chance that you can work out the demographic "bucket" they fit into and can use that for e-marketing.
The Internet is almost anonymous: you can be who you like, when you like it. Filling in forms with misinformation is just like creating a "new you", but can you break the habits of your real persona?
Slashdot Mirror
Check http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/ for a Mini-ITX based cluster.
Actually this isn't as funny as it sounds. In normal drug trials you are testing something that can only affect the individual. But in case the treatment is another virus that can be propogated between individuals. If the virus mutates into something that is harmful then what started out as a simple clinical trial (and might not have passed into main stream medicine) could turn into a problem as bad as HIV itself. So some form of containment would need to be in place.
Spam is simply not profitable enough to last much longer.
I can't see how this is true. 40% of all email is considered "spam" with the prediction that this figure will rise to 80% in 2008. If it were the case that it is not profitable then spammers would stop doing it and find other ways of making money; after all, they are "business" people.
Remember that they are sending an email for something that might be $30, of which they get a percentage of each sale (I would assume). They send it to several million people with, say, the chance that 99% of them will bin it before reading it. Of the remaining 1% that read it 1% might take up the offer. So you're talking about 0.01% (if my maths is right) of several million people, which is still in the 100's. To send the mail it cost them a few dollars, and they've likely made tens of dollars.
What the ASRG appears to be doing is making the cost of sending the email in the first place more "expensive" (and I don't necessarily mean financially) so that, for the average user, this has only a small effect, but for someone emailing millions of people every day it has a profound effect: it drives them into unprofitability.
I did and they asked me to get my bits out.
... whenever I first met people but I found their reply was "Oh" followed by a long pause. Now, whenever I introduce myself and have to say what I do, I tell people I'm an "artist": I take bits and bytes and create a masterpiece, or I colour-by-numbers.
Britain is Britain, the political alliance of England, Scotland and Wales, we are our own union, we don't want European trash, and we're not in Europe...
It is funny very anti-European people such as yourself like to make this type of comment with regards to Europe, but seem completely blind to the fact that the UK has given away much of it's independance to the USA over the last half a century or so.
And that they don't mention the fact that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are all trying to get away from England by devolution.
And the fact that it should be int main(int argc, char *argv[]) but who am I to quibble.
You forget (or have never seen) template methods. std::swap(a,b), for example, swaps the values of two 'things' and can be specialised to handle 'things' that need more work than the standard 'assign a to a temporary, assign b to a, assign the temporary to b' mentality. Templates are not just for classes but for methods too.
(big apologies for the 'things' bit ... early evening ... long day ... brain tired!)
Still, I have to wonder if this is a slippery slope that we are travelling down. How long before chain emails and inoccuous humorous forwards are also denied?
As with everything: one mans meat is another mans poison. "Spam" is a term that is unique to the person saying it or hearing it. If I lacked a sense of humour then "spam" is anything funny. If I didn't have a debt then those damn debt consolidation emails would be spam. If I lacked a work ethic then that mail I just received from my boss saying that I should stop read /. would be spam.
Signed, cushty, the hardest working poorest clown.
The flip side is to make it prohibitively expensive to actually send spam. Postal services the world over charge for delivery of mail, why not for email? Those who send large amounts of email would then large amounts of cash. Downside is that Joe Bloggs will be paying for sending too.
Not saying I like the idea.
The other is probably design by contract or something like that. Checking that things that call a method pass good parameters and that methods return what they say they should. A generic aspect could check that all parameters are not null and that a method doesn't return null. A more specific aspect could check particular method parameters, return values, and object consistency. Once confirmed to be working you remove the aspects and your code will "just work like normal" *gulp*
Aspects are cross-cutting concerns, they are things that cut through numbers of classes. My way of thinking: draw vertical rectangles side-by-side and call these "classes", now draw a horizontal box that cuts through them all and this is an "aspect".
The simple example, and one used in the book I believe, is that of logging. Say you have to log the entry to and exit from every single method in your code. Typically you would probably write this directly putting "entering XYZ, exitting XYZ" actually in the code. But with aspects you can write one aspect that basically says "on entry to any method log the method and parameters, on exit log the method" and compile your code and away you go.
So? Why would I want to do this? Well, now that you have been through your development process and discovered everything runs fine, you decide to go into production. Want to remove every single log line to improve speed? With the "normal" approach you'll have to write a script to remove them or do it manually. With aspects: just dont use the aspect in the compilation! Put them back in by compiling in the aspect again.
For me aspects are a real benefit but they do you head in for a while when you're an OO programmer!
... a web spider comes along?
Some people seem to be missing the point: this is not a "database" it is a persistence mechanism. What they are saying is that persisting objects is difficult (er, tend to disagree but I'll bite) and so they are solving this. Whether a RDBMS offers better searching is completely irrelevent as this, in their architecture, is handled by the application.
What they seemed to gloss over is that you need to take snapshots of the actual data. If you didn't you'd have to keep every single "log" in order to safely playback the actions and know you have the same data in the same state. Loose one log, say the very first one, and you're pretty much screwed.
The only reason the show is going to be 'respun' after Sarah leaves is because she's the title character and a Buffyless Buffy has to be called something else.
I beg to differ: take the long running (since 1983) UK Glaswegian TV Policeman show 'Taggart'. Mark McManus, the actor who played the lead character Jim Taggart died in 1994, and yet the series continues to this day with the name 'Taggart' and nobody playing Jim Taggart.I remember the early days of OS/2 when, if you believe "independent sources", Microsoft counted every sale of OS/2 as a sale of Windows. The last graph I took any notice of had both on an equal footing. Everything these days is spin, whichever side you're on.
That has to be one of the worst pieces of advice I've ever received. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, and just means that you bottle it all up which isn't good.
The best bit of advice I received came from someone who bullied me: I stood up to him in front of a big group of other kids and, for once, it didn't end in a kicking. He said I was the only person to confront him and actually pay him respect. You see, not only did people see me as a 'nerd' (including myself) but they saw him as a 'bully', and he felt like everybody treated him like he was stupid so he lashed out at them. I didn't. It wasn't until after this, when we got chatting, that I found out we had a lot in common (and that he was a fairly handy amateur boxer!)
That was 14 years ago, and we are still friends.
My advice: respect yourself, respect others, and don't be quick to judge as there's always something you can learn from someone else.
Thinking about it now though, I suppose it's the second best bit of advice; the best being "don't eat yellow snow".
An amusing posting to comp.lang.c++.moderated: new keyword.
I've found the best way to interview people is to actually get them in and work on a problem amongs their potential co-workers. I personally don't interview very well when it comes to answer questions; don't get me wrong, I know my stuff, it's just I have a tendancy to work myself into a stew (just like I did before I took any exams). I was really surprised when I went for an interview at a company when they turned round and asked me to come back and spend a day with their development team, working on a problem that was related to their product. It gave me the chance to actually sit at a machine, code, talk to the team, and generally show what I could really do.
If you want to know if someone will fit into a team then the only real way is to put them in the team for a while. It worked so well for me that I took it to the next company I worked for.
Obviously you still have to have that first interview where you do ask some technical questions, but make the questions those that will identify someone that knows nothing about something they've put on their CV so you can cut the dead wood quickly.
I personally don't like having to fill in my details with websites, although I have with those that are any good and allow me to unsubscribe from mailing lists of adverts. But this is not the only way to retrieve marketing information about visitors to a site:
;) They can even get down to the order you do stuff and what times you do it. If you know what someone does you have a good chance that you can work out the demographic "bucket" they fit into and can use that for e-marketing.
Companies such as Autonomy and Escape Velocity Technology have technology that does automatic collection of your online habits and can form a picture of you so that each time you visit a website powered by their products it can be adapted to your behaviour. There are no forms to fill in, it just works off exactly what you've done; so if you read articles on company profits (or losses as the case currently seems to be out there!) then you'll get similar articles presented to you more often and adverts might be for online stock brokers (or debt collectors
The Internet is almost anonymous: you can be who you like, when you like it. Filling in forms with misinformation is just like creating a "new you", but can you break the habits of your real persona?