Interesting commentary on today's society...people would rather invest in a virtual dog than accept the responsibility of owning an actual pet.
Why should everyone accept the responsibility of having an actual pet? If anything, this would show that people are more responsible: instead of getting a dog and not being able to care for it properly, people get a virtual pet.
That's probably mostly because technology does _not_ have a use in the learning process. If you go to, say, a college engineering class, most professors use two technological tools: chalk and a chalkboard. That's the time-tested, proven way. It works much better than anything else. Apparently, you have yet to realize that.
In case you haven't noticed, students were a lot smarter before the advent of computers and graphing calculators in schools. I'm sure the quality of instruction would only improve if the school got rid of all the computers and paid teachers more instead. I think young people are already overexposed to computers and don't learn other, more important skills.
Re:Using Captcha for distributed processing
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 1
You can't use this computing time to solve any problem you don't already know the answer to -- how would you verify the result?
Last I checked, the ADA didn't apply to websites. If it did, then most sites out there would be in major trouble, even without captchas. About 70% of all websites are at least partially broken if you use text magnification, and few sites have proper ALT tags.
A startup usually can't afford to have a very nice office, or to let people do what they want. After all, letting everyone work on their pet project 20% of the time means the main project could be getting 20% more time. The success of a startup usually hinges on the main product, so it's crunch time all the time. Not to mention, a start-up probably won't have as many smart, experienced people -- usually, that is too expensive.
I think there are some lessons to be learned or relearned from Google. One of these is that it's better to hire very smart, well-educated employees instead of mediocre ones with just "experience", even if they cost much more. Second, it's important to create a comfortable, productive environment. What I don't understand is why that's considered a new idea. Most of what Google is doing was happening in 1995.
This is easy to work around. I can probably get a 60% success rate for your site just by writing a parser for the more common phrases. It's not hard to get a few thousand of these and program a parser that can answer most of these. These are very easy to break.
What makes you think your method is any better? It would be gamed just like PageRank (much worse, actually). Overreliance on any single method is not good if you want to have a decent search engine.
First, the real-time clock in your PC has absolutely nothing to do with the clock generators. Second, it's a PLL clocked from a crystal, which should be _very_ accurate. An error of maybe a few kilohertz would be very significant, and 2MHz is a huge inaccuracy.
Wrong. In the US at least, there is a specific part of the rules which allows very low-power unlicensed transmitters in the FM band. There are also the ISM bands and a few other unlicensed bands. It is illegal to transmit anywhere else without a license, regardless of power.
I'd say a simple solution would be to use an ATA and a cordless phone.
Well, it _is_ a crappy design. The whole issue with debris falling off and hitting the tiles is caused by a major design error (namely, placing the orbiter at the bottom of the foam-covered fuel tank with its heat shield facing the tank). Also, considering that the ISS serves virtually no useful purpose aside from providing something for the shuttle to do, I don't really see why it needs to be completed. It seems to be a huge money pit.
In that case, the cable modem was simply plugged into an existing cable outlet, the installer didn't do anything else. However, I've seen them use the cheap crappy splitters which cause a 6dB loss instead of the more expensive 3.5dB ones.
Relicensing code under a more stringent license would not do anything useful. The code has already been licensed as GPL, you can't retroactively withdraw it. Since the GPL permits redistribution, the owner of the code can't do anything.
If you have problems with cable, it's a good idea to remove any splitters and stuff in the line and replace them with good-quality ones. I had this same problem, and found out that my house had like 3 splitters before the cable modem jack. By the time the signal got there, it was severely degraded.
Are you pulling this out of your ass? Photovoltaics cost a lot because they are labor-intensive to produce and require specialized equipment. If you actually bothered to research the numbers, you would find out that solar panels generate that amount in only 3 years or so (out of 30 or more).
Yeah, well, I got news for you: melting steel or aluminum also uses nasty chemicals and electricity. Hell, just about any industrial process uses them. The real problem with photovoltaics is their high cost.
Don't be so dismissive towards the HR people. They are typically the ones who make the hiring decisions with regard to interns. Where I co-op, the HR person is responsible for all the interns. If they don't like you, you won't even get a chance to interview.
That's called a private settlement, moron. It has nothing to do with the GPL (which has already been violated at that point). If I wanted to dismiss any claims against a party only in exchange for a bunch of money, I could do that too. Or, I could refuse to settle and go to court (which would award monetary damages). You do not have to release your source code unless you want to.
Uh dude, what you are saying is complete BS. The speed "limits" are artificially low and are used to supplement the city/county's income. There is no good reason for any street to have a 30mph speed limit. Most people end up doing 40-45 and it's considered acceptable unless the cop is in a bad mood. Every city I've been in, the speed limits were at least 10mph lower than they should have been. Maybe if the government would set the speed limits based on the road design people would actually respect them. I find it difficult to drive 30mph on a road that's designed for 55mph (2 lanes, wide shoulder, wide banked turns).
The GPL does not work that way. I don't know where everyone is getting this shit from. Technically, they've already violated the GPL and releasing the source code as GPL won't rectify the situation. In reality, they have simply infringed copyright, so the Linux kernel devs can sue them and demand damages. Of course, that would take money and would ultimately be pointless.
There isn't a single portable HDD-based MP3 player I know of with a replaceable battery. Not to mention it's pretty damn cheap, considering it easily lasts for a couple of years. This is not a problem specific to the ipod, it is common to all small MP3 players with rechargeable batteries. Besides, it's not that hard to replace the battery yourself.
What other design deficiencies are you thinking about? I can't think of a single one, really. Apple certainly has the best product on the market.
The front-end is a box which takes in telephone calls. Our regression testing actually makes hundreds of automated phone calls when a new release is being tried out - and the results of each of those calls is checked down to the source-class level.
You do realize that your program is trivial compared to something like Oracle?
Luckily the code is written well enough that there hasn't been more than one or two non-trivial fixes, and the bugs they fixed weren't themselves critical.
It's nice when you can do that. However, I'm sure your software is not nearly as complex as Oracle's. Not to mention, some problem domains lend themselves much better to modularization than others.
Many problems simply cannot be cleanly broken up into nice, isolated black boxes that you can test individually. Operating systems are one such problem, and Oracle has some resemblance to an operating system. In such problems, there are often so many unforeseen interactions that any small change can lead to major breakage.
If a fix isn't trivial, why isn't it? (Usually because of poor architecture or code quality.)
Or perhaps simply because it's a complex problem? It's pretty easy to write some GUI front-end for something and make it have zero bugs. Try writing an OS kernel with zero bugs.
why does it take more than a year to fix it?
Because Oracle might rather perform more testing than ship a potentially broken fix for a minor security issue? It's a lot more important to have reliable software than secure software when it comes to databases. Security is very far down on the list compared to, say, data integrity.
If the fix is available, why don't you release it immediately?
Now, let's not propagate urban legends farther than they need to go. Yes, they had problems with the insulation when they first started using the non-freon stuff. It had nothing to do with the Columbia disaster, however -- all the problems were solved back around 1997 or so. It also had nothing to do with freon or lack thereof, it was just a different enough material that they needed to make some changes.
I own some of their clothes. I've never once visited or had the desire to visit their website. The website is simply not a major component of their business. Maddox had a hilarious article where he compared his traffic ranking to that of PepsiCo, McDonalds, and so on. Apparently, people are more interested in reading about hairy balls than visiting Pepsi's website.
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Interesting commentary on today's society...people would rather invest in a virtual dog than accept the responsibility of owning an actual pet.
Why should everyone accept the responsibility of having an actual pet? If anything, this would show that people are more responsible: instead of getting a dog and not being able to care for it properly, people get a virtual pet.
That's probably mostly because technology does _not_ have a use in the learning process. If you go to, say, a college engineering class, most professors use two technological tools: chalk and a chalkboard. That's the time-tested, proven way. It works much better than anything else. Apparently, you have yet to realize that.
In case you haven't noticed, students were a lot smarter before the advent of computers and graphing calculators in schools. I'm sure the quality of instruction would only improve if the school got rid of all the computers and paid teachers more instead. I think young people are already overexposed to computers and don't learn other, more important skills.
You can't use this computing time to solve any problem you don't already know the answer to -- how would you verify the result?
Last I checked, the ADA didn't apply to websites. If it did, then most sites out there would be in major trouble, even without captchas. About 70% of all websites are at least partially broken if you use text magnification, and few sites have proper ALT tags.
A startup usually can't afford to have a very nice office, or to let people do what they want. After all, letting everyone work on their pet project 20% of the time means the main project could be getting 20% more time. The success of a startup usually hinges on the main product, so it's crunch time all the time. Not to mention, a start-up probably won't have as many smart, experienced people -- usually, that is too expensive.
I think there are some lessons to be learned or relearned from Google. One of these is that it's better to hire very smart, well-educated employees instead of mediocre ones with just "experience", even if they cost much more. Second, it's important to create a comfortable, productive environment. What I don't understand is why that's considered a new idea. Most of what Google is doing was happening in 1995.
This is easy to work around. I can probably get a 60% success rate for your site just by writing a parser for the more common phrases. It's not hard to get a few thousand of these and program a parser that can answer most of these. These are very easy to break.
Are you retarded?
What makes you think your method is any better? It would be gamed just like PageRank (much worse, actually). Overreliance on any single method is not good if you want to have a decent search engine.
First, the real-time clock in your PC has absolutely nothing to do with the clock generators. Second, it's a PLL clocked from a crystal, which should be _very_ accurate. An error of maybe a few kilohertz would be very significant, and 2MHz is a huge inaccuracy.
Wrong. In the US at least, there is a specific part of the rules which allows very low-power unlicensed transmitters in the FM band. There are also the ISM bands and a few other unlicensed bands. It is illegal to transmit anywhere else without a license, regardless of power.
I'd say a simple solution would be to use an ATA and a cordless phone.
Well, it _is_ a crappy design. The whole issue with debris falling off and hitting the tiles is caused by a major design error (namely, placing the orbiter at the bottom of the foam-covered fuel tank with its heat shield facing the tank). Also, considering that the ISS serves virtually no useful purpose aside from providing something for the shuttle to do, I don't really see why it needs to be completed. It seems to be a huge money pit.
In that case, the cable modem was simply plugged into an existing cable outlet, the installer didn't do anything else. However, I've seen them use the cheap crappy splitters which cause a 6dB loss instead of the more expensive 3.5dB ones.
Right. But that doesn't prevent you from forking it.
Relicensing code under a more stringent license would not do anything useful. The code has already been licensed as GPL, you can't retroactively withdraw it. Since the GPL permits redistribution, the owner of the code can't do anything.
If you have problems with cable, it's a good idea to remove any splitters and stuff in the line and replace them with good-quality ones. I had this same problem, and found out that my house had like 3 splitters before the cable modem jack. By the time the signal got there, it was severely degraded.
Are you pulling this out of your ass? Photovoltaics cost a lot because they are labor-intensive to produce and require specialized equipment. If you actually bothered to research the numbers, you would find out that solar panels generate that amount in only 3 years or so (out of 30 or more).
Yeah, well, I got news for you: melting steel or aluminum also uses nasty chemicals and electricity. Hell, just about any industrial process uses them. The real problem with photovoltaics is their high cost.
Don't be so dismissive towards the HR people. They are typically the ones who make the hiring decisions with regard to interns. Where I co-op, the HR person is responsible for all the interns. If they don't like you, you won't even get a chance to interview.
That's called a private settlement, moron. It has nothing to do with the GPL (which has already been violated at that point). If I wanted to dismiss any claims against a party only in exchange for a bunch of money, I could do that too. Or, I could refuse to settle and go to court (which would award monetary damages). You do not have to release your source code unless you want to.
Uh dude, what you are saying is complete BS. The speed "limits" are artificially low and are used to supplement the city/county's income. There is no good reason for any street to have a 30mph speed limit. Most people end up doing 40-45 and it's considered acceptable unless the cop is in a bad mood. Every city I've been in, the speed limits were at least 10mph lower than they should have been. Maybe if the government would set the speed limits based on the road design people would actually respect them. I find it difficult to drive 30mph on a road that's designed for 55mph (2 lanes, wide shoulder, wide banked turns).
The GPL does not work that way. I don't know where everyone is getting this shit from. Technically, they've already violated the GPL and releasing the source code as GPL won't rectify the situation. In reality, they have simply infringed copyright, so the Linux kernel devs can sue them and demand damages. Of course, that would take money and would ultimately be pointless.
There isn't a single portable HDD-based MP3 player I know of with a replaceable battery. Not to mention it's pretty damn cheap, considering it easily lasts for a couple of years. This is not a problem specific to the ipod, it is common to all small MP3 players with rechargeable batteries. Besides, it's not that hard to replace the battery yourself.
What other design deficiencies are you thinking about? I can't think of a single one, really. Apple certainly has the best product on the market.
The front-end is a box which takes in telephone calls. Our regression testing actually makes hundreds of automated phone calls when a new release is being tried out - and the results of each of those calls is checked down to the source-class level.
You do realize that your program is trivial compared to something like Oracle?
Luckily the code is written well enough that there hasn't been more than one or two non-trivial fixes, and the bugs they fixed weren't themselves critical.
It's nice when you can do that. However, I'm sure your software is not nearly as complex as Oracle's. Not to mention, some problem domains lend themselves much better to modularization than others.
Many problems simply cannot be cleanly broken up into nice, isolated black boxes that you can test individually. Operating systems are one such problem, and Oracle has some resemblance to an operating system. In such problems, there are often so many unforeseen interactions that any small change can lead to major breakage.
If a fix isn't trivial, why isn't it? (Usually because of poor architecture or code quality.)
Or perhaps simply because it's a complex problem? It's pretty easy to write some GUI front-end for something and make it have zero bugs. Try writing an OS kernel with zero bugs.
why does it take more than a year to fix it?
Because Oracle might rather perform more testing than ship a potentially broken fix for a minor security issue? It's a lot more important to have reliable software than secure software when it comes to databases. Security is very far down on the list compared to, say, data integrity.
If the fix is available, why don't you release it immediately?
See above.
Now, let's not propagate urban legends farther than they need to go. Yes, they had problems with the insulation when they first started using the non-freon stuff. It had nothing to do with the Columbia disaster, however -- all the problems were solved back around 1997 or so. It also had nothing to do with freon or lack thereof, it was just a different enough material that they needed to make some changes.
I own some of their clothes. I've never once visited or had the desire to visit their website. The website is simply not a major component of their business. Maddox had a hilarious article where he compared his traffic ranking to that of PepsiCo, McDonalds, and so on. Apparently, people are more interested in reading about hairy balls than visiting Pepsi's website.