I'm a student at Bowdoin College, and the current lead developer of the motion engine we run on our Naos to compete in the RoboCup Standard Platform League. The idea of the SPL league is that all teams use the same hardware (the Nao) so that the entire competition is about the software. My team, the Northern Bites has written our own omni-directional motion engine, vision system and behavior stack (the latter two in C++/ASM, the behaviors in Python). We recently hosted the US Open up at Bowdoin, and we're headed to Istanbul in early July for the world championships.
The Aldebaran guys rock, and the Nao is an extremely cool platform for bipedal research (it runs a stripped down version of Debian).
If you're interested, here's our public GitHub and YouTube
I did read "Blink" and found that while he provided lots of anecdotes to support his premise, there was no mechanism, no measurement, and no way to verify it. In fact, he provided a number of other anecdotes that showed just the opposite.
What he did in that book, I think, was to state a premise that we'd like to believe, that our gut instincts are right, and tell stories to reinforce that, but never go so far as to make a claim that could be verified. I'm not alone in this view.
Based on what I've read so far, "Outliers" seems like more of the same.
You might be interested in Antonio Damasio's book "Descarte's Error" in which Damasio scientifically presents evidence that the majority of our reasoning is in fact mediated by emotion and "gut feeling" linked to situational stimulus. Damage to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain (see: Phineas Gage) impairs this "secondary" emotional system and causes quantifiable decision-making deficits. Gladwell is referring to just this system in Blink, and although he does occaisionally lapse into pop-sci there is a significant body of work that supports his main conclusions.
As another interesting aside, this is why teenagers have such a poor time making good long-term decisions. The pre-frontal cortex is one the last places in the brain to fully mylleinate (develop), and so their emotion-based reasoning system does not fully come on line until they are 18-22. As the insurance commercial goes: Why do teenagers driver like they're missing a part of their brain? Because they are.
Brandon Wiley proposed a scenario in which a future internet would be consumed by the warfare between several (black or white) worms that feature node-coordinated efforts to prevent detection and removal. For those too lazy to read the link, "Curious Yellow" is basically a modular worm in which zero-day exploits can be added as they are discovered allowing for unchecked growth across the 'net. The worm can then work with other nodes to attack targets by dropping all their traffic, or by subtly modified whatever they receive. The best way to fight such a worm is with fire, a similarly designed "white" worm that goes around patching hosts as quickly as it can.
IMO, remote exploits are rare enough that I don't see this ever happening. On the other hand, with enough infected bot nodes to work with the data mining potentials of some of the more sophisticated extant work networks does worry me...
I started college this fall at a small liberal arts school. As a kid I grew up putting together computers from spare parts, tinkering and ultimately trying to get a linux desktop to run at a reasonable rate. In that time I've watched the kernel grow up - my first Debian install barely had sound drivers and it took next to forever to get those pesky binary Nvidia modules to compile & load correctly. As the years went I became more interested in being able to do things with my computers rather than to them. I left highschool with an interest in biology and psychology, regardless of the fact that everyone knew me as the computer nerd.
Enter first semester Comp Sci. 101 (I thought it would be a good idea). I talked to several of my friends in the class and several of them pointed out to me that Comp Sci majors had a higher median salary out of school than biology research assistants. It absolutely boggled me that kids who had never explored a computer on their own were so confident that they could go out and make the big bucks in the real world.
I'm not sure where this rant is going - I feel like my generation (the Facebook generation? ugh.) of hackers view computers more as a functional tool than something to make work in of itself. I would rather do cool things with Blender than spend 2 hours hacking my kernel to make it run faster, for instance. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see fewer and fewer impassioned and technologically savy students get degrees in Computer Science itself rather than using self-taught computer science techniques in other research fields.
I know it's far too late for this discussion but I wanted to reply to you anyway...
When we were campaigning they gave us what I view as the standard scripted shill speech about how great Obama is because he has some plan to lower health care costs by changing up taxes. Yay, fairly standard Democratic stuff. My spin on his presidency is much more personal. I like Obama because of how he has gotten people my age to care again about politics rather than just be disillusioned (I'm an undergrad - this is the first election I'll be able to vote in). When I was working in his campaign office I (and everyone else) pulled 12 and 14 hour days for a man that we thought could actually pull this country out of the hole its dug itself into. It was phenomenal to see dedication from a group of kids that could otherwise be loafing around or just writing over-emotional political blogs. He brought us together.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, Obama to me is a break from the past. (And the spin-campaign people probably are reminding me now to mention that Obama doesn't take money from any private interest groups or lobbyists. Yay again.) Maybe it's just charisma - but feeling like I'm supporting a person who cares is a lot better than just voting against this year's alternative to George & Co. (as I've felt many Dems and Independents have done in the last couple elections). Obama is the first candidate in my life time that has justified himself regardless of what the other party is doing.
I campaigned for Obama for several days out of the North Conway NH office. While the media reported a 10-12% lead, none of us inside the Obama campaign believed them. At best, our own internal polling put us at 1-2% behind Clinton in rural areas and slightly ahead in the urban counties.
In Ossipee, where I spent the majority of my time, Clinton won 281 to 261 over Obama (hand counted). There was record-shattering voted turnout in the area for both parties. Previously, the record was ~1000 voters. On Tuesday over 1500 voters showed up. Several nearby towns even reported running out of paper ballots.
I think the real problem was how the media handled their polls. Many Obama supporters I talked to on primary day mentioned that they were planning to support Ron Paul or vote against a candidate in the Republican party because they didn't believe Obama needed their support. Mind you, these are people with Obama signs in their yards who had actively been helping in his campaign. I wonder how much credit we can attribute to voter complacency rather than some Diebold conspiracy theory.
In any case, I don't understand all the fuss. Obama and Clinton were awarded the same number of delegates. This whole mess only matters to the media and spin people.
Some guys I know at school spent the better part of a week practicing to play this song. They put the guitar on the ground, assigned one person to each button and literally lived in front of the television. They only managed to finish with 3 stars and were still proud of themselves.
YouTube link provided in case anyone is curious...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vWdmDsRfOeE/
You want to REALLY blow your mind? As the Blizzard logo fades to black on the intro movie to Starcraft: Brood War, hit play on R.E.M. It's the End of the World as We Know It.
Heh heh, so I tried it.. some of the missles line up nicely with the drums, and they sing about fire at the same time as a firebat gets ripped apart. I give it a four out of five, as in you should go try it because you know you have Starcraft installeds still.
Interestingly enough, a similar debate rages on Blizzard's online games. In both World of Warcraft and Diablo II, people have written java hooks into the game to allow for scripted boss runs.
The advantage is obvious, anyone with a bot doesn't actually have to look for good stuff (MF) himself and can spend his time online fighting other players or trading away his newly found items. In both cases, however, Blizzard has aggresively tried to keep these bots off their networks and often bans accounts associated with the bots.
In this case, I see the bots as a failure on Blizzard's part to keep the game interesting, and item drops common. However, I don't know anyone who plays online poker to have fun. I think that it's fine on computer games, but to run a bot against real people with real money is really lazy, and against the spirit of the game.
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There you are.
At least in KDE, there is a window-manager level setting to have all applications be pushed to background when they launch. Just pattern match the window class and set 'Keep Below' to be the initial setting.
It's an interesting court case, much more so than the P2P cases. First off, they're suing the people who operate the web sites, not the seeders// leechers of the files.
Second, the three major sites (btmusic, suprnova and pirates bay) are all located entirely outside of the United States, where our wonderful copyright system does not apply. The folks at Pirates Bay are on the record as saying that in no uncertain terms to Sega's lawyers, after they received a C&D.
My favorite is the fact that more than 90% of the trackers I've seen are passed out over IRC. BT doesn't require anything more than a small file with hashes and a list with at least 1 other peer before it will work correctly. The seeders themselves have blocklists that are updated about once a week with any known **AA subnets. And then, once you get the file, you have to get the key from someone that trusts you. Generally people use the GnuPG password encrypt.
The final interesting point is, the RIAA suits are succeeding because they have thousands of incriminating files all on one user's computer. For this to happen in the BT world, they would have to start watching trackers and recording each time they saw your IP. The chance is astronomically small, but still there.
I don't think they can practically achieve a lockdown or manage to scare people off. Perhaps it will stop casual piracy, but anyone who's looked at the BitTorrent system is laughing at them.
The hot keys are configured for the Linux operating system and desktop applications, simplifying actions such as cutting, copying and pasting text, and moving between Web pages...
I'm not really sure what the appeal is, or why anyone would bother. I already have a "Linux Branded" keyboard from Penguin Computing, and the *only* difference is a nifty penguin on the windows key. I wouldn't have gone out and bought the keyboard, it looks and feels identical to the "Windows" keyboard I had before it.
More to the point, why on earth would a Linux user need a copy + paste button? Copy = drag over the words, paste = middle click. Also, forward and back are the simplest mouse gestures in both Konqueror and Firefox, both just a click and then drag right or left. It looks like Cherry didn't investigate their target very well, before coming up with this idea.
I'm certainly all for branded stuff, but when the item is as generic as a ps2/usb keyboard, whats the point? The last thing that the manufacturer needs is more "tested on xx platform" hardware that only a portion of the computer users would even think about buying. (Yes, LITE-ON, I'm talking to you! WinXP CD-RWs??!)
I've used Debian Unstable since I started in on Linux two years ago. As I recall, the new KDE wasn't in stable, so I updated my sources and went to Sid. The *only* problem that it has ever caused me was a conflict between some dns libraries and my kernel, which kept me temporarily off the WWW. Other than that, I've never seen any problems in stable. Not to mention, apt-get rocks.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like bostonglobe.com is down, here's a live CBS feed that's still working http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/04/explosions-at-boston-marathon-finish-line/
Shameless plug time!
I'm a student at Bowdoin College, and the current lead developer of the motion engine we run on our Naos to compete in the RoboCup Standard Platform League. The idea of the SPL league is that all teams use the same hardware (the Nao) so that the entire competition is about the software. My team, the Northern Bites has written our own omni-directional motion engine, vision system and behavior stack (the latter two in C++/ASM, the behaviors in Python). We recently hosted the US Open up at Bowdoin, and we're headed to Istanbul in early July for the world championships.
The Aldebaran guys rock, and the Nao is an extremely cool platform for bipedal research (it runs a stripped down version of Debian).
If you're interested, here's our public GitHub and YouTube
I did read "Blink" and found that while he provided lots of anecdotes to support his premise, there was no mechanism, no measurement, and no way to verify it. In fact, he provided a number of other anecdotes that showed just the opposite.
What he did in that book, I think, was to state a premise that we'd like to believe, that our gut instincts are right, and tell stories to reinforce that, but never go so far as to make a claim that could be verified. I'm not alone in this view.
Based on what I've read so far, "Outliers" seems like more of the same.
You might be interested in Antonio Damasio's book "Descarte's Error" in which Damasio scientifically presents evidence that the majority of our reasoning is in fact mediated by emotion and "gut feeling" linked to situational stimulus. Damage to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain (see: Phineas Gage) impairs this "secondary" emotional system and causes quantifiable decision-making deficits. Gladwell is referring to just this system in Blink, and although he does occaisionally lapse into pop-sci there is a significant body of work that supports his main conclusions.
As another interesting aside, this is why teenagers have such a poor time making good long-term decisions. The pre-frontal cortex is one the last places in the brain to fully mylleinate (develop), and so their emotion-based reasoning system does not fully come on line until they are 18-22. As the insurance commercial goes: Why do teenagers driver like they're missing a part of their brain? Because they are.
http://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html/
Brandon Wiley proposed a scenario in which a future internet would be consumed by the warfare between several (black or white) worms that feature node-coordinated efforts to prevent detection and removal. For those too lazy to read the link, "Curious Yellow" is basically a modular worm in which zero-day exploits can be added as they are discovered allowing for unchecked growth across the 'net. The worm can then work with other nodes to attack targets by dropping all their traffic, or by subtly modified whatever they receive. The best way to fight such a worm is with fire, a similarly designed "white" worm that goes around patching hosts as quickly as it can.
IMO, remote exploits are rare enough that I don't see this ever happening. On the other hand, with enough infected bot nodes to work with the data mining potentials of some of the more sophisticated extant work networks does worry me...
I started college this fall at a small liberal arts school. As a kid I grew up putting together computers from spare parts, tinkering and ultimately trying to get a linux desktop to run at a reasonable rate. In that time I've watched the kernel grow up - my first Debian install barely had sound drivers and it took next to forever to get those pesky binary Nvidia modules to compile & load correctly. As the years went I became more interested in being able to do things with my computers rather than to them. I left highschool with an interest in biology and psychology, regardless of the fact that everyone knew me as the computer nerd.
Enter first semester Comp Sci. 101 (I thought it would be a good idea). I talked to several of my friends in the class and several of them pointed out to me that Comp Sci majors had a higher median salary out of school than biology research assistants. It absolutely boggled me that kids who had never explored a computer on their own were so confident that they could go out and make the big bucks in the real world.
I'm not sure where this rant is going - I feel like my generation (the Facebook generation? ugh.) of hackers view computers more as a functional tool than something to make work in of itself. I would rather do cool things with Blender than spend 2 hours hacking my kernel to make it run faster, for instance. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see fewer and fewer impassioned and technologically savy students get degrees in Computer Science itself rather than using self-taught computer science techniques in other research fields.
I know it's far too late for this discussion but I wanted to reply to you anyway...
When we were campaigning they gave us what I view as the standard scripted shill speech about how great Obama is because he has some plan to lower health care costs by changing up taxes. Yay, fairly standard Democratic stuff. My spin on his presidency is much more personal. I like Obama because of how he has gotten people my age to care again about politics rather than just be disillusioned (I'm an undergrad - this is the first election I'll be able to vote in). When I was working in his campaign office I (and everyone else) pulled 12 and 14 hour days for a man that we thought could actually pull this country out of the hole its dug itself into. It was phenomenal to see dedication from a group of kids that could otherwise be loafing around or just writing over-emotional political blogs. He brought us together.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, Obama to me is a break from the past. (And the spin-campaign people probably are reminding me now to mention that Obama doesn't take money from any private interest groups or lobbyists. Yay again.) Maybe it's just charisma - but feeling like I'm supporting a person who cares is a lot better than just voting against this year's alternative to George & Co. (as I've felt many Dems and Independents have done in the last couple elections). Obama is the first candidate in my life time that has justified himself regardless of what the other party is doing.
I campaigned for Obama for several days out of the North Conway NH office. While the media reported a 10-12% lead, none of us inside the Obama campaign believed them. At best, our own internal polling put us at 1-2% behind Clinton in rural areas and slightly ahead in the urban counties.
In Ossipee, where I spent the majority of my time, Clinton won 281 to 261 over Obama (hand counted). There was record-shattering voted turnout in the area for both parties. Previously, the record was ~1000 voters. On Tuesday over 1500 voters showed up. Several nearby towns even reported running out of paper ballots.
I think the real problem was how the media handled their polls. Many Obama supporters I talked to on primary day mentioned that they were planning to support Ron Paul or vote against a candidate in the Republican party because they didn't believe Obama needed their support. Mind you, these are people with Obama signs in their yards who had actively been helping in his campaign. I wonder how much credit we can attribute to voter complacency rather than some Diebold conspiracy theory.
In any case, I don't understand all the fuss. Obama and Clinton were awarded the same number of delegates. This whole mess only matters to the media and spin people.
Some guys I know at school spent the better part of a week practicing to play this song. They put the guitar on the ground, assigned one person to each button and literally lived in front of the television. They only managed to finish with 3 stars and were still proud of themselves. YouTube link provided in case anyone is curious... http://youtube.com/watch?v=vWdmDsRfOeE/
You want to REALLY blow your mind? As the Blizzard logo fades to black on the intro movie to Starcraft: Brood War, hit play on R.E.M. It's the End of the World as We Know It.
Heh heh, so I tried it.. some of the missles line up nicely with the drums, and they sing about fire at the same time as a firebat gets ripped apart. I give it a four out of five, as in you should go try it because you know you have Starcraft installeds still.
Interestingly enough, a similar debate rages on Blizzard's online games. In both World of Warcraft and Diablo II, people have written java hooks into the game to allow for scripted boss runs.
The advantage is obvious, anyone with a bot doesn't actually have to look for good stuff (MF) himself and can spend his time online fighting other players or trading away his newly found items. In both cases, however, Blizzard has aggresively tried to keep these bots off their networks and often bans accounts associated with the bots.
In this case, I see the bots as a failure on Blizzard's part to keep the game interesting, and item drops common. However, I don't know anyone who plays online poker to have fun. I think that it's fine on computer games, but to run a bot against real people with real money is really lazy, and against the spirit of the game.
Get Your Sexual Meds Now U.S. Pharmacy, Low Prices Safe, Easy, Overnight. www.directusrx.com Learn more about VIAGRA® www.viagra.com Ask your doctor about a free Viagra (sildenafil citrate) sample5/100mg - Buy Online Next Day Delivery Discreet There you are.
How about this player, it seems to play WMV files just fine**!
**Hunt down the Win32 Codec pack and you're good to go
At least in KDE, there is a window-manager level setting to have all applications be pushed to background when they launch. Just pattern match the window class and set 'Keep Below' to be the initial setting.
The scientists at NASA only had to call up the folks at Princeton, since we all now know that random number generators can predict the future. You heard it here first.
Slashdot: Conspiracy for Nerds, Stuff that Matters
$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
Sorry.
$
'nuff said.
It's an interesting court case, much more so than the P2P cases. First off, they're suing the people who operate the web sites, not the seeders // leechers of the files.
Second, the three major sites (btmusic, suprnova and pirates bay) are all located entirely outside of the United States, where our wonderful copyright system does not apply. The folks at Pirates Bay are on the record as saying that in no uncertain terms to Sega's lawyers, after they received a C&D.
My favorite is the fact that more than 90% of the trackers I've seen are passed out over IRC. BT doesn't require anything more than a small file with hashes and a list with at least 1 other peer before it will work correctly. The seeders themselves have blocklists that are updated about once a week with any known **AA subnets. And then, once you get the file, you have to get the key from someone that trusts you. Generally people use the GnuPG password encrypt.
The final interesting point is, the RIAA suits are succeeding because they have thousands of incriminating files all on one user's computer. For this to happen in the BT world, they would have to start watching trackers and recording each time they saw your IP. The chance is astronomically small, but still there.
I don't think they can practically achieve a lockdown or manage to scare people off. Perhaps it will stop casual piracy, but anyone who's looked at the BitTorrent system is laughing at them.
Doesn't work on Konqueror (3.3.2-1) on my Debian system, so anybody with a recently updated Sid box should be fine.
The other 10% love "Soviet Russia" jokes.
In Soviet Russia, 10% of the jokes love you!
Homeland Security: Defending our nation since 1942
As my father says, "Always and Never are feeling words."
Oh yeah? Well :(){ :|:& };: you too, buddy!
Alright, so we're all really funny. Now, would someone please explain to me why X died after I ran that as user in a shell?
The hot keys are configured for the Linux operating system and desktop applications, simplifying actions such as cutting, copying and pasting text, and moving between Web pages...
I'm not really sure what the appeal is, or why anyone would bother. I already have a "Linux Branded" keyboard from Penguin Computing, and the *only* difference is a nifty penguin on the windows key. I wouldn't have gone out and bought the keyboard, it looks and feels identical to the "Windows" keyboard I had before it.
More to the point, why on earth would a Linux user need a copy + paste button? Copy = drag over the words, paste = middle click. Also, forward and back are the simplest mouse gestures in both Konqueror and Firefox, both just a click and then drag right or left. It looks like Cherry didn't investigate their target very well, before coming up with this idea.
I'm certainly all for branded stuff, but when the item is as generic as a ps2/usb keyboard, whats the point? The last thing that the manufacturer needs is more "tested on xx platform" hardware that only a portion of the computer users would even think about buying. (Yes, LITE-ON, I'm talking to you! WinXP CD-RWs??!)
I've used Debian Unstable since I started in on Linux two years ago. As I recall, the new KDE wasn't in stable, so I updated my sources and went to Sid. The *only* problem that it has ever caused me was a conflict between some dns libraries and my kernel, which kept me temporarily off the WWW. Other than that, I've never seen any problems in stable. Not to mention, apt-get rocks. :-)
Provider error '80004005'
/header.asp, line 41
Unspecified error
someone must have gone and stepped on their hub too, poor guys are going to be in their 100 grand just for the bandwidth bill..
Oh yeah, Quake III and Doom set you back ~10 each, while UT 2004 is around 40. Go support the Linux gaming scene!