But after a couple decades, car builders managed to make them more reliable, and roads were built, and now many people can't imagine living without one.
Good point. Price, weight, maximum load, portability, distance between recharges, suitable roads - when (or if) these are improved, electric (or perhaps not-yet-invented-technology-powered) scooters will become popular. But I still prefer anti-gravity belts for short distances and teleportation for longer ones.
Ok, how do I know that their RNG isn't rigged? I am aware that there are secure protocols for gambling over the net, but will people trust the protocol? Its implementation? I am not sure.
Ok, a business plan joke:
0. Become Rivest.
1. Change the winning probability from x to x-0.0001%
2. Transfer the 0.0001% of revenue to a private account
3. Profit!!!
A survey conducted recently by the National Geographic revealed that 74% lions think that wildlife isn't accurately depicted in nature movies. "C'mon, I spend most of the day sleeping or scratching myself and nature movies only show us dismembering zebras picturesquely! Confrontation with real life is disappointing for most of the cubs. We demand that at least 80% of air time be dedicated to sleeping and scratching." said an Anonymous Lion.
I think this "No VPN" policy is tough to enforce. How do they define VPN? VPN traffic is usually encrypted, but so are secure payment sessions. How are they going to discern between those? Does it boil down to "no long encrypted TCP sessions"? What about disguising VPN traffic as downloads or online gaming (by using steganography)?
Re:The ./ obsession with a cashless society?
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 1
Where does this Slashdot obsession with a cashless/e-gold/alternative currency come from?
I don't know about Slashdot, but I have a good reason to be interested in cashless money transfer.
I am a lazy programmer . I can write small python scripts, java applets and such, but I am too lazy to create a full blown app that anybody would pay more than 5 dollars for, especially without knowing if it catches on.
Now if there was a system that would let me easily set up an account for collecting 10 cent fees without adding 1 dollar commission to each transfer, I could try to write some mini-apps (I actually have a few ideas for a 10 cent mini-apps) and see if people buy any of them. Well, if they did I could add some features and sell the lucky app for 20 cents per licence then and get rich:-)
Well, with the current system I could ask people to send me coins in letters, but I think no one would bother, filling a secure web form is much easier.
Feel free to answer with "business model" jokes, heh heh.
This shows that quality comes at a cost. If you truly want to get good quality goods, don't expect to keep forcing the market to make cheaper and cheaper products.
Unfortunately this works one way only. While low cost very often means low quality, high cost does not guarantee high quality. Free market only works if consumers are informed.
Now the article mentions that motherboard manufacturers' lawyers threatened the guy who posted the list of affected motherboards on the net. I think that this is the real problem, not the faulty capacitors, industrial espionage or businesses overcutting costs - these things will always happen, but the situation gets really bad when the mechanisms for fixing them stop working.
Is there a way to remove the Trash and Home icons from the desktop yet? I've been able to do this in XP and KDE3 since they came out. If I can't have a totally clear desktop, I'll pass on this release.
I just type 'X' (from the text-mode console) and admire the ultra-clean desktop.
On rare occasions when I need something done I type 'export DISPLAY=:0 ; sleep 10 ; xterm' from another console before that.
In other words, instead of concurrent applications collaborating, they will vie for resources or just freeze while waiting for the other to take a lead.
"Better coordination will be required to meet that demand, and this protocol provides that," said Park, who presented his research this week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Symposium on Applications and the Internet in Orlando, Fla. His paper, titled "A Scalable Protocol for Deadlock and Livelock Free Co-Allocation of Resources in Internet Computing," has not been published yet.
As far as I can tell from the articles it's about a protocol for avoiding deadlock in a distributed environment.
This is cool and schmool, but where exactly are the collaborating applications that need to share and lock resources across Internet? Locking is useful only in preventing concurrent access to a critical nondivisible resource. Of course, web browsers share servers, but they don't need to lock them (well, sometimes they "lock" them, but this is only a side effect known as "slashdotting"). P2P apps? I don't think they need to lock anything in order to share files.
A-ha! Web services! Ok, what web services? Have you ever used a distributed web service application that needed to lock resources? I thought so.
I am not saying that this protocol is bogus, but it will probably be useful for apps that don't exist yet, at least on the Internet.
MLD, gzip, neural networks, bayesian filtering and probably a bunch of other spam-filtering methods are all based on the following scheme: get a (big) number of spam messages, a number of non-spam messages (preferably specific to the current user of the filter) and use a learning algorithm on these to produce an automatic classifier.
What bothers me about this method is that you can never be 100% sure what the learning algorithm will actually learn. My friends seldom send me HTML mail. Most of my spam is HTML. A learning algorithm will probably learn that HTML mail is spam, especially if it never gets HTML "ham" during its training period. Then if one of my clueless friends sends me a HTML message, it will not go through and this is clearly bad.
I will never trust an automatic filter so as to delete a message marked as "spam" without reading, but I think it can still be useful for ranking messages, so that spam gets read less often and deleted faster.
More unlike anything except Delphi. Recently I tried to find a working grammar definition for Delphi Pascal and found out that the grammar published by Borland is not quite complete. The best thing available is from some guys who sort of reverse-engineered the Borland grammar - they just fiddled with the grammar file until their parser managed to parse a big set of sample Delphi Pascal files. I suspect that the only Delphi Pascal definition is the compiler itself, which I find sad.
May I ask where you work and/or what it is you do?
I work for a small custom solutions provider / systems integrator. I mostly do database stuff in Delphi - usually the whole development cycle from requirements analysis to implementation. This is the fourth company I work for (not counting small one-time contracts), so I too had to try hard to find a job that fits me.
I like working for small companies but have been pretty unsuccessful with finding a group of people i really like and respect.
Well, I can only wish you good luck. Any advice I could give you can probably find on the net.
Small companies can be just as Dilbertesque when they are run by PHB's that only know the >1000 person corporate life.
I know this, since my present job is not my first one (all previous were also small). But I still think it's more probable to find a small company that suits you than a big one, unless of course you are the CEO.
Each of the companies employs >1000 people. I think it's best to work for a much smaller company, one when you know all coworkers and the CEO says hello to you everyday. I work for such a company and just smile at my friends telling horror stories from the Dilbert side of the reality.
Awhile back, it was stated that XBox game discs spun backwards, thus making emulation and even making legitimate backups as close to impossible as anyone could ever imagine.
I don't know about that, but I've heard from a reliable source that if you play an Xbox disc backwards, you hear Satan himself speaking!
It seems that with thsi system the equivalent of paths getting long would be that the number of metadat items required to specify a particular file would become unmanagably large.
We won't know for sure until one of these funny filesystems becomes popular, but I think that the number of attributes for specifying a file will grow slower than three depth in a hierarchical filesystem.
Splitting a crowded directory affects all subdirs - they become one level deeper. On the other hand if a particular attribute tuple gets crowded (suppose I have many pics of leather clad pink bunnies), you only have to specify an additional attribute for this particular tuple (for example 'big eared' and 'small eared'). Notice, that the 'leather clad pink horses' tuple remains unaffected, and when it grows large, the already added 'big eared' and 'small eared' attribute will probably work fine.
This has some analogies in graph theory - while a hierarchical file system is a tree (and a not very well balanced one), an attribute based system is a hypercube-like structure. Generally, paths in hypercubes are shorter than in random trees of same degree. This of course is very vague and might not work in reality (just as HFS isn't a well-balanced tree, an attribute FS might be far from a nice regular hypercube).
Yeah, non-descriptive directory names are poo.
But make those directory names descriptive, and all of a sudden you're not so much of an idiot.
There are bigger problems than non-descriptive names:
1. Paths tend to get long.
2. You have to be careful of your "current path". Some apps have weird defaults and if you're not careful, you end up with your file in a strange location.
3. Some items do not fit into the hierarchical structure. Should my porn directory be organized into movies, stills and texts or perhaps perverted, spicy and nice? Whichever atrribute I choose I will have trouble searching on the other.
Of course I can always use locate or find, but these tools only look at preset attributes (filename, last access date, substrings) and the solution from the article lets you specify your own attributes.
It should be forbidden to give away something that somebody is trying to make a living by selling.
Why exactly should that be so? I'd gladly make a living selling sand on a desert, but I am scared that evil people will give it away.
Or would you rather people be unable to feed their families?Guess it's back to subsistence farming for all of us. Or are you opposed to that, too? You'd have us return to being hunter-gatherers, wouldn't you? Or is that still too much? Should we just all kill ourselves and return the planet to a natural state of lemurs and starfish and fuck knows what else?
Whoa, a very scary future you paint here!. But why will writing free software cause all that? I believe that laws supporting unviable business models would get us there sooner than writing free software.
I actually make a living by writing applications and I'm totally unafraid of free software - we're a small company making custom applications. Everybody is free to make what we make and give it away. I am not afraid of that and that's because we're making money writing software, not selling it.
Answer me, cocksucker!
You are a very bad man.
Oh, by the way, you've got troll!
I think you mean "You got trolled!". Well, I don't know why I spend so much time arguing with anonymous cowards.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, a business plan joke:
0. Become Rivest.
1. Change the winning probability from x to x-0.0001%
2. Transfer the 0.0001% of revenue to a private account
3. Profit!!!
Ok, randomization has its uses, but what advantage does it have over just waiting till the micropayments sum up to $10 and sending them then?
A survey conducted recently by the National Geographic revealed that 74% lions think that wildlife isn't accurately depicted in nature movies. "C'mon, I spend most of the day sleeping or scratching myself and nature movies only show us dismembering zebras picturesquely! Confrontation with real life is disappointing for most of the cubs. We demand that at least 80% of air time be dedicated to sleeping and scratching." said an Anonymous Lion.
But Gretzky gets the rebound! News at eleven.
"Brain Sex:The Real Difference Between Men & Women"
Anne Moir, Ph.D. and David Jessel
Of course you might also pick one alternative as the only truth and call anyone who disagrees with it a moron.
We should let them speak, but cover our ears and mumble "we're the best, we're the best, we're the best...".
I think this "No VPN" policy is tough to enforce. How do they define VPN? VPN traffic is usually encrypted, but so are secure payment sessions. How are they going to discern between those? Does it boil down to "no long encrypted TCP sessions"? What about disguising VPN traffic as downloads or online gaming (by using steganography)?
I am a lazy programmer . I can write small python scripts, java applets and such, but I am too lazy to create a full blown app that anybody would pay more than 5 dollars for, especially without knowing if it catches on.
Now if there was a system that would let me easily set up an account for collecting 10 cent fees without adding 1 dollar commission to each transfer, I could try to write some mini-apps (I actually have a few ideas for a 10 cent mini-apps) and see if people buy any of them. Well, if they did I could add some features and sell the lucky app for 20 cents per licence then and get rich :-)
Well, with the current system I could ask people to send me coins in letters, but I think no one would bother, filling a secure web form is much easier.
Feel free to answer with "business model" jokes, heh heh.
Now the article mentions that motherboard manufacturers' lawyers threatened the guy who posted the list of affected motherboards on the net. I think that this is the real problem, not the faulty capacitors, industrial espionage or businesses overcutting costs - these things will always happen, but the situation gets really bad when the mechanisms for fixing them stop working.
On rare occasions when I need something done I type 'export DISPLAY=:0 ; sleep 10 ; xterm' from another console before that.
By the way, what is this Gnome thing?
Shooting heroin turns any unpleasant experience into a pleasant one not just tasting crappy coffee into tasting smooth coffee.
This is cool and schmool, but where exactly are the collaborating applications that need to share and lock resources across Internet? Locking is useful only in preventing concurrent access to a critical nondivisible resource. Of course, web browsers share servers, but they don't need to lock them (well, sometimes they "lock" them, but this is only a side effect known as "slashdotting"). P2P apps? I don't think they need to lock anything in order to share files.
A-ha! Web services! Ok, what web services? Have you ever used a distributed web service application that needed to lock resources? I thought so.
I am not saying that this protocol is bogus, but it will probably be useful for apps that don't exist yet, at least on the Internet.
What bothers me about this method is that you can never be 100% sure what the learning algorithm will actually learn. My friends seldom send me HTML mail. Most of my spam is HTML. A learning algorithm will probably learn that HTML mail is spam, especially if it never gets HTML "ham" during its training period. Then if one of my clueless friends sends me a HTML message, it will not go through and this is clearly bad.
I will never trust an automatic filter so as to delete a message marked as "spam" without reading, but I think it can still be useful for ranking messages, so that spam gets read less often and deleted faster.
Each of the companies employs >1000 people. I think it's best to work for a much smaller company, one when you know all coworkers and the CEO says hello to you everyday. I work for such a company and just smile at my friends telling horror stories from the Dilbert side of the reality.
They never test the number of text lines per second in text mode. Or Nethack FPS. My card does 7.5 FPS in Nethack, if I click the keys really fast.
Splitting a crowded directory affects all subdirs - they become one level deeper. On the other hand if a particular attribute tuple gets crowded (suppose I have many pics of leather clad pink bunnies), you only have to specify an additional attribute for this particular tuple (for example 'big eared' and 'small eared'). Notice, that the 'leather clad pink horses' tuple remains unaffected, and when it grows large, the already added 'big eared' and 'small eared' attribute will probably work fine.
This has some analogies in graph theory - while a hierarchical file system is a tree (and a not very well balanced one), an attribute based system is a hypercube-like structure. Generally, paths in hypercubes are shorter than in random trees of same degree. This of course is very vague and might not work in reality (just as HFS isn't a well-balanced tree, an attribute FS might be far from a nice regular hypercube).
1. Paths tend to get long.
2. You have to be careful of your "current path". Some apps have weird defaults and if you're not careful, you end up with your file in a strange location.
3. Some items do not fit into the hierarchical structure. Should my porn directory be organized into movies, stills and texts or perhaps perverted, spicy and nice? Whichever atrribute I choose I will have trouble searching on the other.
Of course I can always use locate or find, but these tools only look at preset attributes (filename, last access date, substrings) and the solution from the article lets you specify your own attributes.
The answer is in the G:\archived\userFolders\shlemiel\appfiles\textdocs \myFavEditorFiles\compDocs\scratch\WhyHierarchical FSBad.txt file.
I actually make a living by writing applications and I'm totally unafraid of free software - we're a small company making custom applications. Everybody is free to make what we make and give it away. I am not afraid of that and that's because we're making money writing software, not selling it.
You are a very bad man. I think you mean "You got trolled!". Well, I don't know why I spend so much time arguing with anonymous cowards.