I don't understand the "my desk must be wire free" mentality. Wireless networking is nice because it's like a lamp: you can move around and use it equally; new people can walk into the room and use it without extra technology, etc. But I don't see the point of wireless mice, hard drives, etc. With a range of 3-10m, in order to move your computer very far, you have to carry the same number of objects whether or not they have wires. Normal human orientation is toward the computer/monitor, so the cords leading from user input devices all lead away from the user.
If it's for aesthetic reasons, I suggest finding a way to make wires look niftier. It's probably cheaper than adding wireless chips.
Understanding the MADness of Mutually Assured Destruction requires a bit of mental gymnastics.
Thinking with MADness, it's in North Korea's interest to convince the world that it has nukes. Without nukes, they have no feasible deterrent against an army of superior strength (U.S., China, etc.).
When dealing with nuclear weapons, safe is better than sorry, so when someone announces "We have nuclear weapons," one should act as if they did. However, repeated claims without evidence can lead others to think the claimant is bluffing. The next step is therefore to perform a nuclear test, proving "Yes, I am a skunk, and yes, my glands are charged." It's no coincidence that India and Pakistan conducted their first nuclear tests within about a month of each other. It's a high stakes, high tech, high investment Mexican standoff.
So in one sense, "nukes are the most useless weapon" because they take an enormous amount of resources for a handfull of bombs the owners hope to never use. On the other hand, building a single nuclear bomb can be a lot more cost effective than establishing a large enough army to deter one's enemies.
It does not make me comfortable to know that people like Kim Jong Il and George W. Bush are in charge of weapons of mass destruction. As Robert McNamara revealed in The Fog of War, the fate of the world could rest on having inaccurate information.
The technology problem has been solved. Now it becomes a political and psychological problem. To see how small things can lead to big problems, watch Dr. Strangelove, perhaps the only movie I think everyone should watch.
The Department of the Interior is in charge of, among other things, leasing land for mining (gambling), national recreation areas (sex), leasing land for grazing (auctions), and parts of the Oregon Trail (computer games).
DOI has a lot of wealth and uses it to aid in the production of cheap food, minerals, and fun.
Depends how you define "desirable." As of a few years ago, the fastest growing cities in the nation were Greeley, CO, St. George, UT, and Las Vegas, NV. I've been to all three, and they all leave a lot to be desired (like a stable water source).
(Not that I'm saying Pittsburgh is particularly desirable...)
Most web browsers can already remember what you've previously entered on forms. The only risk of a privacy breach is if someone visits your house and starts to type "britain" and sees that it wants to prefill "brittany spears nude." Sure, you can't log in from another machine and scroll to that one time you searched for "why does it hurt when I pee," but isn't it just as easy to type that again?
I heard that the average Google search is about one and a half words long. And if the search went well, you found what you needed already. How often do you need to search again?
OKCupid's designers (math geeks from Harvard) anticipated this sort of study, so they built their entire matching algorithm on it.
Most dating sites have a small (fixed) number of variables you can set, such as "wants kids" and "smokes." Say there's 10 variables with 4 values each. That's 2^20 possible distinct people (1 megaperson) on the site.
OKCupid does that too. But then OKCupid lets users create additional variables for study (over 2000 at this point) with two to four possible values. So there's more than 2^2000 possible OKCupid users, or "more than there are atoms in the universe." That's a much nicer dating pool.
But it's not just a bit array. It's weighted. You decide how much each variable is important to you. I can give a question like "Do you play a musical instrument" marginal importance -- it'd be neat if I had a musician partner, but it's not a big deal. However, it's vital that a potential match properly answer the question "Would you consider dating a person of Caucasian descent?"
There are several other key factors making OKCupid a great site to meet people. As you mentioned, there are lots of non-single people on the site. This is actually a big plus for a dating site because it means not everyone is trying to get in your pants. Some just want to know what's your inner Hobbit. Many of these people are interesting, worth talking too, and fun to have dinner with.
The site has a great sense of humor. The test you take when you sign up is a parody of the famed Meyers-Briggs personality test, but with results like "The Boy Next Door" and "The Dirty Little Secret." One of the random logout messages is "See? The internet's not so bad..." The graphics are humorous, and many users make the effort to have a profile entertaining to people completely uninterested in dating them.
Finally, their user interface is pretty well designed. Their new messaging interface is similar to Google Chat and their ads are pretty non-obnoxious. Not to mention the whole site's charge-free (supported by donations and ads).
Disclaimer: I don't work for OKCupid, but I did meet my wife there.
I think "planned" is the key word there. Our whole team has a standup meeting three times a week for about 15 minutes. That's a meeting. When we start on a major piece of work, three or four folks will have a design meeting for 30 minutes to a couple hours.
When people are working on something and encounter a snag or quandry, three or four people get together and brainstorm solutions. This is spur of the moment and informal, so it doesn't really feel like a meeting, just a discussion.
We define our schema in an XML format. We have a class that builds a DB from that format, subclassed by database type, making skeletal DB install an automated process. This also means it's the same process to install a client site using Oracle as it is to install a test database on a developer machine using Postgres.
When our master build runs test cases, it drops all tables and creates them all fresh using the XML definitions. Each JUnit test case is responsible for ensuring it has the data it needs. In some cases, this is done by setting up a facade on the regular service so that the test can worry about semantics and not data storage. In other cases, the test (or a utility) creates test data. You could presumably also copy part of your live data, though that makes it much more difficult to know what the correct answer is in advance.
If you follow this structure, multiple releases with different schemas is trivial. Just have a parameter for the DB URL in your test suite and let it build the correct database version for you when it checks your schema out of your source repository.
(Incidentally, keeping your database schema in your source repository also allows easy comparison of database structure between code versions, making it easier to figure out what must happen when you upgrade.)
I was present at a Pirate Party this weekend. Ninjas were outnumbered about 20 to 1 with only three or four non-voters. Let's go plunder a Diebold voting machine and set the wreckage straight!
Your Congresscritters actually don't have a lot of say in the matter. Elections are implemented in large part by county government officials and they have a fair amount of leeway about things like voting technology. Within a state you can expect to see many different voting devices used.
I program software for county governments (though it's not election-related). Despite what Slashdot readers would like, solid design and strong security is far from the main concern of the people with whom the purchasing decision resides. For instance, the main reason cited when our software isn't chosen during a selection process is that we haven't installed in a county of comparable size. Diebold has a track record of being able to deliver on a large scale and that typically carries a lot more weight than rock solid security. Support infrastructure is another major factor. Most folks in my company are glad that we're not trying to compete in the elections arena because each one of your clients will have a bucket of support incidents on the same day. Diebold's a large company and can handle that volume. Even the best open source product needs a lot of warm bodies, educated on the system, available on the first Tuesday in November. Open source is a big plus in the eyes of Slashdot readers, but elected officials rarely know the benefits of open source.
We as Slashdot readers need to present our technical credentials, educate officials and the public, and voice concerns when the counties in which we reside are shopping for new voting technology. Since almost every county in the country got a new voting system in 2004, most will be reluctant to buy again soon, but if we point out enough flaws they could be convinced. Concerned geeks (and others) in Boulder County, Colorado were able to convince the county to select a system with a paper trail. (Optical scanning, I believe.) It took a long time for them to get their results, but the system is able to be verified by hand in case of controversy.
Back when I started using the internet (1993), I thought it was really cool that you could % finger coke@cs.wisc.edu and see if the vending machine was on.
Now I can % finger @coke.cs.ucsd.edu and see who's on the vending machine.
True, it doesn't require a constitutional amendment... it requires about 20 constitutional amendments... to about 20 constitutions.
What Florida taught us is that the Electoral College has 50 vulnerabilities to small errors. It's a lot harder to have 50 errors change the popular vote for over 100,000,000 voters.
We bought a few JProfiler licenses a few years ago and have had good success with it. It can easily profile remote JVMs (servlet containers, for instance). I've used the Heap Walker a few times to discover static references that shouldn't be kept around and have had good success finding performance bottlenecks.
I hear recent versions plus 1.5 resolve a lot of stability and performance problems, but I haven't had enough problems to warrant pulling it out in a while. It's not a perfect product, but it's told us what we need to know.
Perhaps we should amend the bill to fight the following sorts of fraud:
* Passing rejection hotline numbers as real phone numbers * Willfully misrepresenting relationship status or sexual persuasion * Transporting STDs across orifice lines * Beeing sweet in a bar but an asshole in the morning
Me, I married a fabulous woman I met on OK Cupid, a dating site by nerds full of interesting people.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand the "my desk must be wire free" mentality. Wireless networking is nice because it's like a lamp: you can move around and use it equally; new people can walk into the room and use it without extra technology, etc. But I don't see the point of wireless mice, hard drives, etc. With a range of 3-10m, in order to move your computer very far, you have to carry the same number of objects whether or not they have wires. Normal human orientation is toward the computer/monitor, so the cords leading from user input devices all lead away from the user.
If it's for aesthetic reasons, I suggest finding a way to make wires look niftier. It's probably cheaper than adding wireless chips.
Understanding the MADness of Mutually Assured Destruction requires a bit of mental gymnastics.
Thinking with MADness, it's in North Korea's interest to convince the world that it has nukes. Without nukes, they have no feasible deterrent against an army of superior strength (U.S., China, etc.).
When dealing with nuclear weapons, safe is better than sorry, so when someone announces "We have nuclear weapons," one should act as if they did. However, repeated claims without evidence can lead others to think the claimant is bluffing. The next step is therefore to perform a nuclear test, proving "Yes, I am a skunk, and yes, my glands are charged." It's no coincidence that India and Pakistan conducted their first nuclear tests within about a month of each other. It's a high stakes, high tech, high investment Mexican standoff.
So in one sense, "nukes are the most useless weapon" because they take an enormous amount of resources for a handfull of bombs the owners hope to never use. On the other hand, building a single nuclear bomb can be a lot more cost effective than establishing a large enough army to deter one's enemies.
It does not make me comfortable to know that people like Kim Jong Il and George W. Bush are in charge of weapons of mass destruction. As Robert McNamara revealed in The Fog of War, the fate of the world could rest on having inaccurate information.
The technology problem has been solved. Now it becomes a political and psychological problem. To see how small things can lead to big problems, watch Dr. Strangelove, perhaps the only movie I think everyone should watch.
Judging by the site layout, I'd say the design department's average age is still about 16...
The Department of the Interior is in charge of, among other things, leasing land for mining (gambling), national recreation areas (sex), leasing land for grazing (auctions), and parts of the Oregon Trail (computer games).
DOI has a lot of wealth and uses it to aid in the production of cheap food, minerals, and fun.
Depends how you define "desirable." As of a few years ago, the fastest growing cities in the nation were Greeley, CO, St. George, UT, and Las Vegas, NV. I've been to all three, and they all leave a lot to be desired (like a stable water source).
(Not that I'm saying Pittsburgh is particularly desirable...)
Most web browsers can already remember what you've previously entered on forms. The only risk of a privacy breach is if someone visits your house and starts to type "britain" and sees that it wants to prefill "brittany spears nude." Sure, you can't log in from another machine and scroll to that one time you searched for "why does it hurt when I pee," but isn't it just as easy to type that again?
I heard that the average Google search is about one and a half words long. And if the search went well, you found what you needed already. How often do you need to search again?
The article noted that stock prices fell. Investors are worried they can't use their credit card to play the market.
OKCupid's designers (math geeks from Harvard) anticipated this sort of study, so they built their entire matching algorithm on it.
Most dating sites have a small (fixed) number of variables you can set, such as "wants kids" and "smokes." Say there's 10 variables with 4 values each. That's 2^20 possible distinct people (1 megaperson) on the site.
OKCupid does that too. But then OKCupid lets users create additional variables for study (over 2000 at this point) with two to four possible values. So there's more than 2^2000 possible OKCupid users, or "more than there are atoms in the universe." That's a much nicer dating pool.
But it's not just a bit array. It's weighted. You decide how much each variable is important to you. I can give a question like "Do you play a musical instrument" marginal importance -- it'd be neat if I had a musician partner, but it's not a big deal. However, it's vital that a potential match properly answer the question "Would you consider dating a person of Caucasian descent?"
There are several other key factors making OKCupid a great site to meet people. As you mentioned, there are lots of non-single people on the site. This is actually a big plus for a dating site because it means not everyone is trying to get in your pants. Some just want to know what's your inner Hobbit. Many of these people are interesting, worth talking too, and fun to have dinner with.
The site has a great sense of humor. The test you take when you sign up is a parody of the famed Meyers-Briggs personality test, but with results like "The Boy Next Door" and "The Dirty Little Secret." One of the random logout messages is "See? The internet's not so bad..." The graphics are humorous, and many users make the effort to have a profile entertaining to people completely uninterested in dating them.
Finally, their user interface is pretty well designed. Their new messaging interface is similar to Google Chat and their ads are pretty non-obnoxious. Not to mention the whole site's charge-free (supported by donations and ads).
Disclaimer: I don't work for OKCupid, but I did meet my wife there.
I think "planned" is the key word there. Our whole team has a standup meeting three times a week for about 15 minutes. That's a meeting. When we start on a major piece of work, three or four folks will have a design meeting for 30 minutes to a couple hours.
When people are working on something and encounter a snag or quandry, three or four people get together and brainstorm solutions. This is spur of the moment and informal, so it doesn't really feel like a meeting, just a discussion.
Most other departments would have reported the loss of "over 1,000" laptops. At least we can count on the USCB to know just how many grew legs.
But what was their average age? And how many laptops filled out the Race and Ethnicity section? Are the Toshibas worried about racial profiling?
We define our schema in an XML format. We have a class that builds a DB from that format, subclassed by database type, making skeletal DB install an automated process. This also means it's the same process to install a client site using Oracle as it is to install a test database on a developer machine using Postgres.
When our master build runs test cases, it drops all tables and creates them all fresh using the XML definitions. Each JUnit test case is responsible for ensuring it has the data it needs. In some cases, this is done by setting up a facade on the regular service so that the test can worry about semantics and not data storage. In other cases, the test (or a utility) creates test data. You could presumably also copy part of your live data, though that makes it much more difficult to know what the correct answer is in advance.
If you follow this structure, multiple releases with different schemas is trivial. Just have a parameter for the DB URL in your test suite and let it build the correct database version for you when it checks your schema out of your source repository.
(Incidentally, keeping your database schema in your source repository also allows easy comparison of database structure between code versions, making it easier to figure out what must happen when you upgrade.)
I'll just download the company for free.
I was present at a Pirate Party this weekend. Ninjas were outnumbered about 20 to 1 with only three or four non-voters. Let's go plunder a Diebold voting machine and set the wreckage straight!
Yarr.
Mainstream TV and newspapers are hardly immune to this effect.
Your Congresscritters actually don't have a lot of say in the matter. Elections are implemented in large part by county government officials and they have a fair amount of leeway about things like voting technology. Within a state you can expect to see many different voting devices used.
I program software for county governments (though it's not election-related). Despite what Slashdot readers would like, solid design and strong security is far from the main concern of the people with whom the purchasing decision resides. For instance, the main reason cited when our software isn't chosen during a selection process is that we haven't installed in a county of comparable size. Diebold has a track record of being able to deliver on a large scale and that typically carries a lot more weight than rock solid security. Support infrastructure is another major factor. Most folks in my company are glad that we're not trying to compete in the elections arena because each one of your clients will have a bucket of support incidents on the same day. Diebold's a large company and can handle that volume. Even the best open source product needs a lot of warm bodies, educated on the system, available on the first Tuesday in November. Open source is a big plus in the eyes of Slashdot readers, but elected officials rarely know the benefits of open source.
We as Slashdot readers need to present our technical credentials, educate officials and the public, and voice concerns when the counties in which we reside are shopping for new voting technology. Since almost every county in the country got a new voting system in 2004, most will be reluctant to buy again soon, but if we point out enough flaws they could be convinced. Concerned geeks (and others) in Boulder County, Colorado were able to convince the county to select a system with a paper trail. (Optical scanning, I believe.) It took a long time for them to get their results, but the system is able to be verified by hand in case of controversy.
So now not only can I hope for a high number of miles per gallon out of a new Prius, I can also hope for lots of vertical feet per gallon.
He's ham strung to deal with spam? Maybe there was too much pork in the legislation.
Perhaps Canadians can distract Californians, Israil sites can snag some folks from Illinois, and Poland can abscond with some perl programmer traffic.
When I went to empty my GMail Spam folder this morning I noticed a text ad for Spam Fajitas. Yum!
Back when I started using the internet (1993), I thought it was really cool that you could
% finger coke@cs.wisc.edu
and see if the vending machine was on.
Now I can
% finger @coke.cs.ucsd.edu
and see who's on the vending machine.
True, it doesn't require a constitutional amendment... it requires about 20 constitutional amendments... to about 20 constitutions.
What Florida taught us is that the Electoral College has 50 vulnerabilities to small errors. It's a lot harder to have 50 errors change the popular vote for over 100,000,000 voters.
Because when a pirate skull appears in the mirror and informs me that the jacuzzi is ready, I know I want to jump right in.
So you're saying the ant just rolls back the transaction?
We bought a few JProfiler licenses a few years ago and have had good success with it. It can easily profile remote JVMs (servlet containers, for instance). I've used the Heap Walker a few times to discover static references that shouldn't be kept around and have had good success finding performance bottlenecks.
I hear recent versions plus 1.5 resolve a lot of stability and performance problems, but I haven't had enough problems to warrant pulling it out in a while. It's not a perfect product, but it's told us what we need to know.
Perhaps we should amend the bill to fight the following sorts of fraud:
* Passing rejection hotline numbers as real phone numbers
* Willfully misrepresenting relationship status or sexual persuasion
* Transporting STDs across orifice lines
* Beeing sweet in a bar but an asshole in the morning
Me, I married a fabulous woman I met on OK Cupid, a dating site by nerds full of interesting people.