Er... differentiating would give rate of production, which on its own isn't enough to tell you how many are in production at the moment.
If you're working with years as the time unit, assuming rate = current number in production is equivalent to assuming it takes a year to make one chip...
Unless you got the 173 million figure from somewhere else?
Nearly... it was 600,000 downloads, not 600,000 broken internet connections. According to the article only 'a handful' of the 600,000 who downloaded the patch had problems.
Nobody seems to have picked up on the most intelligent point in the article... if P2P software was biased towards same-ISP connections, it could dramatically bring down the cost. If it was further biased against international connections, that would help too...
Are there any P2P clients doing this?... 'use our client and your ISP won't get upset' might be a good advertisment...
I imagine they teach all CS undergraduates about the THERAC-25, and how simple safety measures like hardware interlocks are much, much more reliable than software...
In this case, couldn't you check dive times against a book or something to make sure you're not completely off the mark?... what about something to measure nitrogen levels? Anything so you're not relying purely on software... (or, as someone has already suggested, you could use two completely different pieces of software).
The DLM is a recent addition and decidely screwed up, unfortunately. New versions should be out soon...
If you go to 'My Account', there's a page with details of everything you've downloaded... you try to download again from there and it won't count against you.
Depending on why the DLM isn't working, with a bit of messing about you can tell it to use a local proxy then get the proxy to give you the URL's and use a real download manager... have a look on my site under java/emusic for what I use.
The key is to stick a custom proxy between the DLM and the net, then extract the URL's and pass them to wget. Much more reliable... plus no watermarking (if that's indeed what's going on).
Well said -- it all depends on your taste in music. Since I'm pretty much anti-mainstream, it suits me well:-)... plus I enjoy sampling music for stuff that I like.
Yeah, you can cancel after the free trial and join later... careful where you click when you're in the free trial though, there are a few occurances of 'click here to start paying us money'.
As for the minimum subscription lengths... no way to get out of those.
There's recently been some trouble since they introduced a proprietary download manager (with Windows/Mac/Linux versions)... it's fairly bad software and has various problems, but new versions are on the way...
Still, that's what the free trial is for... see how it works for you. If you can't stand it, figure out how to use wget instead, that's what I did;-).
Map then applies whatever function we pass in to every member in the array (called a list in functional programming).
So, all you functional programmers, remember... a list is just another name for an array:-P
Seriously, though... I was discussing the future of programming languages with some friends and we agreed that a real step forward would be to provide features such as higher order functions in a mainstream language... could this be it?
If so then it's a little worrying... I'd rather not see any revolutionary languages come out of MS, if at all possible...
(Cambridge's Computer Science degree teaches ML followed by Java in the first year... would they switch to teaching just F# if it became popular?)
I hacked together a challenge-response system in Perl without too much trouble about a year ago. Hardly rocket science.
I don't use it any more, though, since I neglected to whitelist a mailing list and got an angry response... it's not worth the hassle. I just use a whitelist, and every so often I manually check if anything has slipped through... works nicely.
How about server-side clipping? If you can't see the player, you don't get the data.
Of course to do this properly would introduce a massive load on the server... and the whole setup would need to be low-latency for it to work at all... but it's not completely inconceivable.
It just occured to me, this could present the ultimate punishment for spammers... jail time for the amount of our time they've wasted. It's a numbers game...
Suppose it wastes an average of one second of someone's time per email.
That means he wastes one year of person time every three days. In six months -- that's sixty years of potentially productive time he's wasted. Same effect as killing someone.
Can anyone really take this seriously? It doesn't even begin to offer a solution to spam. Sounds like a troll to me.
Of course, if there was some magic way to implement such a tax, it might work. Odd how most of the solutions to spam rely on an impossible assumption becoming true...
Slashdot Mirror
Notice that he said cumulative output... if f(x) is cumulative output then f'(x) is rate of production...
Er... differentiating would give rate of production, which on its own isn't enough to tell you how many are in production at the moment.
If you're working with years as the time unit, assuming rate = current number in production is equivalent to assuming it takes a year to make one chip...
Unless you got the 173 million figure from somewhere else?
I agree, that could mean it's not blocking against much... anyone care to dig up some numbers?... nothing in the article...
Yes...
But if it's blocking against atmospheric pressure (not quite sure on that one) then it's an impressive feat...
New Scientist has proved itself unable to filter compsci articles before...
There was an article about Java applets stealing CPU time in which the author repeatedly mixed up Java and Javascript... it was embarrasingly bad.
;-)
Nearly... it was 600,000 downloads, not 600,000 broken internet connections. According to the article only 'a handful' of the 600,000 who downloaded the patch had problems.
The article says that since this wasn't a critical patch, just an 'improvement', auto update doesn't install it.
Nobody seems to have picked up on the most intelligent point in the article... if P2P software was biased towards same-ISP connections, it could dramatically bring down the cost. If it was further biased against international connections, that would help too...
Are there any P2P clients doing this?... 'use our client and your ISP won't get upset' might be a good advertisment...
I imagine they teach all CS undergraduates about the THERAC-25, and how simple safety measures like hardware interlocks are much, much more reliable than software...
In this case, couldn't you check dive times against a book or something to make sure you're not completely off the mark?... what about something to measure nitrogen levels? Anything so you're not relying purely on software... (or, as someone has already suggested, you could use two completely different pieces of software).
The DLM is a recent addition and decidely screwed up, unfortunately. New versions should be out soon...
If you go to 'My Account', there's a page with details of everything you've downloaded... you try to download again from there and it won't count against you.
Depending on why the DLM isn't working, with a bit of messing about you can tell it to use a local proxy then get the proxy to give you the URL's and use a real download manager... have a look on my site under java/emusic for what I use.
The key is to stick a custom proxy between the DLM and the net, then extract the URL's and pass them to wget. Much more reliable... plus no watermarking (if that's indeed what's going on).
Have a look on my site under java/emusic...
Well said -- it all depends on your taste in music. Since I'm pretty much anti-mainstream, it suits me well :-)... plus I enjoy sampling music for stuff that I like.
The new high quality VBR encoding is great...
Yeah, you can cancel after the free trial and join later... careful where you click when you're in the free trial though, there are a few occurances of 'click here to start paying us money'.
As for the minimum subscription lengths... no way to get out of those.
There's recently been some trouble since they introduced a proprietary download manager (with Windows/Mac/Linux versions)... it's fairly bad software and has various problems, but new versions are on the way...
Still, that's what the free trial is for... see how it works for you. If you can't stand it, figure out how to use wget instead, that's what I did ;-).
How about emusic? Subscription service, 'unlimited' downloads, and you own the (high quality VBR) MP3s.
I say 'unlimited' because they get upset if you download more than a few thousand tracks a month... still good value though.
Map then applies whatever function we pass in to every member in the array (called a list in functional programming).
So, all you functional programmers, remember... a list is just another name for an array :-P
Seriously, though... I was discussing the future of programming languages with some friends and we agreed that a real step forward would be to provide features such as higher order functions in a mainstream language... could this be it?
If so then it's a little worrying... I'd rather not see any revolutionary languages come out of MS, if at all possible...
(Cambridge's Computer Science degree teaches ML followed by Java in the first year... would they switch to teaching just F# if it became popular?)
I hacked together a challenge-response system in Perl without too much trouble about a year ago. Hardly rocket science.
I don't use it any more, though, since I neglected to whitelist a mailing list and got an angry response... it's not worth the hassle. I just use a whitelist, and every so often I manually check if anything has slipped through... works nicely.
How about server-side clipping? If you can't see the player, you don't get the data.
Of course to do this properly would introduce a massive load on the server... and the whole setup would need to be low-latency for it to work at all... but it's not completely inconceivable.
It just occured to me, this could present the ultimate punishment for spammers... jail time for the amount of our time they've wasted. It's a numbers game...
Let's see... ten million spam emails a day...
Suppose it wastes an average of one second of someone's time per email.
That means he wastes one year of person time every three days. In six months -- that's sixty years of potentially productive time he's wasted. Same effect as killing someone.
And spammers deserve to live... why?
Er. I think you meant to post that to the last article. This one is about telemarketers and how to sue them.
Can anyone really take this seriously? It doesn't even begin to offer a solution to spam. Sounds like a troll to me.
Of course, if there was some magic way to implement such a tax, it might work. Odd how most of the solutions to spam rely on an impossible assumption becoming true...
What's wrong with subscription-based?... unlimited downloads for $10 a month is great value if you like the music.
And since they offer a free trial, there's no reason not to see if you like the music...
Anyway. I seem to be selling emusic a lot here... ah yes, I remember, if more people join they'll get more and better music :-)
(They just switched to high quality variable bit rate MP3s, incidentally, which is quite cool).
Respect.
Out of interest... do you include emusic (see my sig) with those existing crappy music downloading services?