Why the hell would I want a box shipped to me? I'm happy to download stuff from the web. The Powers know I pay enough for a fat pipe so I can download big installers fine.
I happen to work for a software company that does most of its business selling software from our Web site. We have a free version that is actually quite useful, then a for-pay upgrade, a few add-ons, and an enterprise product. We charge under $50 for most products, and our business is fine. Last quarter was our best ever by a large margin.
We do happen to use license keys to activate our products, but all that does is unlock the for-pay features, and even our for-pay products run for at least 30 days on a free trial period. But I think someone in our company realizes if you make things too hard for customers, they go over to the competition pretty fast.
The RIAA, MPAA, and now software vendors are going crazy! I wouldn't hesitate to plunk down $50 for Studio MX, but $900 (or $500 for the upgrade) is just complete bunk. I don't make money on my personal web hacking. Why don't software companies get real and offer hobbyist pricing? Or even reasonable pricing across the board, there's a thought.
Of course the One Ring was the creation of Sauron. But Sauron himself was sort of a force of nature. He is never quite personified in the stories, existing mostly as a lurking presence off-stage. The Ring is still beyond the understanding and control of even the greatest of the Wise, and so even while created as an act of art, exists more as a force of nature for the characters in the story.
I haven't read Coraline yet (it's on my list, which is kind of long right now), but there's a strong case to be made that Buffy is science fiction, not fantasy. I'd say The Two Towers, and all of LOTR, is definitely fantasy. But you don't need gadgets and flying cars to be science fiction.
I've had this conversation with some other SF authors (yeah, I have pretentions), and it seems the big distinction between SF and fantasy isn't the way the world differs from our own (high-tech vs. magic), but how the characters relate to it. In SF, technology is external and understandable. In fantasy, magic is beyond understanding, and it's a mostly internal thing. Being able to do spells and make potions is just a different flavor of technology. But the One Ring isn't technology, it's a force of nature, and thus magic.
The supernatural in Buffy is very much magical technology. Anyone, even Xander, can pick up a stake and nail a vamp. Even the Slayer is technology - the Shadow Men just bound the essence of a demon to the slayer line and presto!, superchicks to fight vampires.
I don't think it's the same people giving themselves awards. The Hugos are awarded by the membership of the World Science-Fiction Convetion (http://www.worldcon.org/). Yes, many authors are members, but the bulk are just fen. So the awards are given by a few thousand people active in the SF fan community.
That said, yes, it's not particularly scientific or democratic. But that's what the award means - WorldCon thinks this book is the best. If you aren't happy with the selections, you can do what I did this year. I purchased a relatively inexpensive associate (non-attending) membership which allowed me to vote for the Hugos, and I'll be able to nominate for next year's awards too.
Of course none of the entries I voted for won. Too bad, because Kiln People rocked.
I haven't heard anything, but you might want to check out http://theonering.net/ - they are a good place for LOTR rumors etc.
Personally, I'm hoping to see a bit more character development of Eomer. All that got lost in the theatrical release.
Re:Account for people with misshapen bodies?
on
Chimera Twins Story
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, I know of one case where this was so. I used to work with a guy who was a chimeric twin. He volunteered for some genetic research at Stanford and they came back and said he had two sets of DNA. He had one of the oddest shaped bodies I've ever seen. Looked kind of like something from Star Wars - like a ball perched on top of really long legs.
A huge percentage of ASL is non-manual (I forget the percentage, but I think it's over 30%). Facial expression can completely change the meaning of a sentence. If you make exactly the same signs but shake your head, you've negated the meaning. Or if you say something but raise your eyebrows you turn it into a yes/no question. Distance is communicated with head tilt, size with the mouth, and some signs change depending on if you stick out your tongue. So it's not just a question of idiom, but a significant amount of meaning. Much more than bablefish signal loss.
To give you an idea of how hard it is for even a fluent, bilingual, human speaker to translate ASL and English, let alone a machine, there isn't even a useful written form of ASL. Attempts at written forms of ASL all end up looking like pictograms of gestures, not symbolic representations. The information density is very high in comparison to written language, because the visual channel is parallel. Experiments show ASL can communicate spatial information in 1/3 the time of spoken language, and it's very fast for other kinds of information as well. Classifiers (iconographic descriptors) and spatial reference pronouns rock.
By the way, I don't know how the inventor signed "I'll help you" with one hand (RTFA). That's a two-handed sign. (Note that it's a single sign. The sign for the verb "help" is inflected, so it always includes a subject and object as part of the gesture, indicating them by positional reference.)
Everything you need to get work done is available for the Mac.
Almost. Unfortunately, there are a few missing pieces. Adobe FrameMaker still won't run on Mac OS X, and only version 6 runs on OS 9. And while MS has promised Entourage will work off Exchange servers RSN, it's not here yet.
I'm sure other people have their own missing pieces that keep them from using Macs at work, but these are the ones that continue to make me endure the hell of Windows.
Hear, hear! Smalltalk in general and Squeak in particular have many advantages as first languages for kids.
The biggest plus is that Smalltalk was developed FOR teaching kids to program. Alan Kay has always had a not-so-secret agenda to teach kids programming as part of a basic educational curriculum, and Smalltalk was his first serious attempt to create a suitable language and programming environment for that purpose. Over the years Alan, and many others involved in Smalltalk and Squeak, have done a lot of research in this area, and it shows in the ease with which children pick up programming using these tools.
Alan once recounted a funny story to me about using Smalltalk-72 to teach programming to kids. They had a group of a dozen or two kids they were working with in the experiment. Most of the kids picked it up easily and were doing some pretty cool things. But two kids never could get the hang of programming. It turned out that both of the kids had parents who worked for HP, and had previously taught their kids some programming using BASIC. The poor kids already had learned what the limitations of BASIC were, and never were able to get outside that conceptual box to be able to use Smalltalk effectively. I think that's an important thing to keep in mind - don't start kids learning on a crippled system, but give them one that gives them a big enough box to think in that they won't be learning bad programming habits they will have to unlearn later.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the important part of programming is being able to think in the right abstractions. A real programmer doesn't think in terms of the language syntax, but thinks in concepts like iteration, recursion, list, array, etc. Only after solving a problem at the abstract level does a real programmer translate the solution into the syntax of the language. (That's why learning a new language is simple for a professional programmer. It should only be a matter of a few days to pick up a new language, unless is uses radically new concepts.) Smalltalk is nice because it has such simple syntax. C++, Java, Perl, PHP, etc. have very complex syntax with many operators and lots of shortcuts and syntactic sugar. Smalltalk has about 6* lanugage constructs, and everything else is done with messaging.
(* A coworker who was a Lisp expert and I once compared Scheme and Smalltalk syntax. It turns out the two languages had exactly the same number of lanugage constructs with equivalent functionality. I remember the number of constructs (e.g. declaring a temp/local var, message send/function call, quoting) was about 6.)
When you sign a contract with someone, both parties keep a copy of the contract. How is it valid to have only one party to a contract keep a copy of it? The customer should also have a copy of the recording.
If the recordings of phone conversations were stored as mp3 files, the customers could sign their conversations with their private crypto keys, validating the recording as authentic. I know some call centers record calls digitally. It shoudn't be too hard to send me an email with the file so i can generate an MD5 hash/message digest, sign it and return the signed message digest. Then there's no question, and I have a copy of the conversation for my files too.
Or I guess the low-tech solution is to just record the calls ourselves. Any software that can record a conversation off the DSP modem?
Memory cards have some non-volatile memory and some security circuitry to check keys, etc. Processor cards have a programmable CPU. Prior to JavaCard, processor cards were programmed almost exclusively in assembly code. Microsoft tried to compete with JavaCard with MS Windows for SmartCards (I'm not kidding here), but the system was lame and doesn't seem to have much support anymore.
JavaCard smart cards can be programmed using the Java programming language, but are restricted to a subset of the language. There are no Floats, Strings, or other big data types, but just int, char, byte, short and objects. But you get full inheritance, interfaces, etc. JavaCard has its own VM that has some similarities to the Java VM but is really a different beast. The bytecode set is optimized for execution on 8 and 16 bit processors and for the subset of the Java language that is practical to run on such limited hardware.
There is also some very cool security built into the language runtime for controlling access to objects based on the application execution context, so even if you can forge a pointer to an object in another application, the VM still won't let you execute its code. This level of security is needed to make financial service companies comfortable with putting 3rd party software on their cards.
Eventually as smart cards get bigger, the JavaCard VM will probably give way to the KVM (Java Micro Edition), though there may have to be some extensions added so the extra security from JavaCard isn't lost.
I totally misread the headline at first glance. I saw "DOS Attack on US Postal Service". And since today is tax day in the US, I thought this was a joke about the deluge of tax returns being mailed today flooding the post office and causing their service to break down. Oh well, maybe next year.
There is nothing arbitrary about a chromosome. A chromosome is a single strand of DNA. As such, it's an important distinction in genetics.
The units go something like:
+ base pair = a single pairing of nucleotides + codon = a triplet of base pairs that make up a "letter" in the genetic "alphabet" + gene = a group of codons + chromosome = a strand (single molecule) of DNA + genome = a complete set of genes
Alan Kay said (and I paraphrase): A big enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.
After a point, you're not just running the same software slightly faster; you're running whole new classes of software. Just think, ripping and playing audio mp3s wasn't possible on home computers of 10 years ago. Even if you'd had the software, it would have taken forever to rip stuff, and you wouldn't get realtime playback of good enough quality. Now You can rip, mix and burn on almost anything you buy today.
If you up processor power by an order of magnitude (or two), entirely new things become possible.
When I worked at Xerox (not PARC) in the 80s, we had an Alto lab with a dozen or so Altos. They were so cool. Besides all the visible features, what really made them kick was that they had programmable microcode. So you could code up a new high-level instruction set and build your own language. This was how the Smalltalk-72 VM was implemented. They also had removable hard disk platters. Something the size of a pizza that held about 2.5MB. And besides the 3-button mouse, they had a 5-key chord keyboard - right hand mousing, left hand chording, it was a surprisingly fast way to edit.
The other totally fun thing about the Altos was they supported network games. My favorite was Mazewars. This was almost certainly the first multiplayer FPS game in the world. Everyone played an identical looking eyeball. You zipped around a maze and shot each other (with withering glares, I guess). But you really needed to be good on the chord keyset to win.
Bringing cold water from the depths has an unmentioned potential side-effect. Will it be replaced by warmer water from elsewhere? Cold, deep waters often support amazingly rich ecosystems. Raising the temperature even a few degrees could easily destroy entrie habitats. Will these generators warm the depths, and what effect will that have on the deep ecosystems?
Slashdot Mirror
Why the hell would I want a box shipped to me? I'm happy to download stuff from the web. The Powers know I pay enough for a fat pipe so I can download big installers fine.
I happen to work for a software company that does most of its business selling software from our Web site. We have a free version that is actually quite useful, then a for-pay upgrade, a few add-ons, and an enterprise product. We charge under $50 for most products, and our business is fine. Last quarter was our best ever by a large margin.
We do happen to use license keys to activate our products, but all that does is unlock the for-pay features, and even our for-pay products run for at least 30 days on a free trial period. But I think someone in our company realizes if you make things too hard for customers, they go over to the competition pretty fast.
Macromedia's recently released Studio MX also uses product activation.
The RIAA, MPAA, and now software vendors are going crazy! I wouldn't hesitate to plunk down $50 for Studio MX, but $900 (or $500 for the upgrade) is just complete bunk. I don't make money on my personal web hacking. Why don't software companies get real and offer hobbyist pricing? Or even reasonable pricing across the board, there's a thought.
AC? What, karma is too good for you?
Of course the One Ring was the creation of Sauron. But Sauron himself was sort of a force of nature. He is never quite personified in the stories, existing mostly as a lurking presence off-stage. The Ring is still beyond the understanding and control of even the greatest of the Wise, and so even while created as an act of art, exists more as a force of nature for the characters in the story.
I haven't read Coraline yet (it's on my list, which is kind of long right now), but there's a strong case to be made that Buffy is science fiction, not fantasy. I'd say The Two Towers, and all of LOTR, is definitely fantasy. But you don't need gadgets and flying cars to be science fiction.
I've had this conversation with some other SF authors (yeah, I have pretentions), and it seems the big distinction between SF and fantasy isn't the way the world differs from our own (high-tech vs. magic), but how the characters relate to it. In SF, technology is external and understandable. In fantasy, magic is beyond understanding, and it's a mostly internal thing. Being able to do spells and make potions is just a different flavor of technology. But the One Ring isn't technology, it's a force of nature, and thus magic.
The supernatural in Buffy is very much magical technology. Anyone, even Xander, can pick up a stake and nail a vamp. Even the Slayer is technology - the Shadow Men just bound the essence of a demon to the slayer line and presto!, superchicks to fight vampires.
I don't think it's the same people giving themselves awards. The Hugos are awarded by the membership of the World Science-Fiction Convetion (http://www.worldcon.org/). Yes, many authors are members, but the bulk are just fen. So the awards are given by a few thousand people active in the SF fan community.
That said, yes, it's not particularly scientific or democratic. But that's what the award means - WorldCon thinks this book is the best. If you aren't happy with the selections, you can do what I did this year. I purchased a relatively inexpensive associate (non-attending) membership which allowed me to vote for the Hugos, and I'll be able to nominate for next year's awards too.
Of course none of the entries I voted for won. Too bad, because Kiln People rocked.
Actually, it's more like 20 metric tons. That's 55 cubic meters of PowerMac!
I haven't heard anything, but you might want to check out http://theonering.net/ - they are a good place for LOTR rumors etc.
Personally, I'm hoping to see a bit more character development of Eomer. All that got lost in the theatrical release.
Actually, I know of one case where this was so. I used to work with a guy who was a chimeric twin. He volunteered for some genetic research at Stanford and they came back and said he had two sets of DNA. He had one of the oddest shaped bodies I've ever seen. Looked kind of like something from Star Wars - like a ball perched on top of really long legs.
A huge percentage of ASL is non-manual (I forget the percentage, but I think it's over 30%). Facial expression can completely change the meaning of a sentence. If you make exactly the same signs but shake your head, you've negated the meaning. Or if you say something but raise your eyebrows you turn it into a yes/no question. Distance is communicated with head tilt, size with the mouth, and some signs change depending on if you stick out your tongue. So it's not just a question of idiom, but a significant amount of meaning. Much more than bablefish signal loss.
To give you an idea of how hard it is for even a fluent, bilingual, human speaker to translate ASL and English, let alone a machine, there isn't even a useful written form of ASL. Attempts at written forms of ASL all end up looking like pictograms of gestures, not symbolic representations. The information density is very high in comparison to written language, because the visual channel is parallel. Experiments show ASL can communicate spatial information in 1/3 the time of spoken language, and it's very fast for other kinds of information as well. Classifiers (iconographic descriptors) and spatial reference pronouns rock.
By the way, I don't know how the inventor signed "I'll help you" with one hand (RTFA). That's a two-handed sign. (Note that it's a single sign. The sign for the verb "help" is inflected, so it always includes a subject and object as part of the gesture, indicating them by positional reference.)
Everything you need to get work done is available for the Mac.
Almost. Unfortunately, there are a few missing pieces. Adobe FrameMaker still won't run on Mac OS X, and only version 6 runs on OS 9. And while MS has promised Entourage will work off Exchange servers RSN, it's not here yet.
I'm sure other people have their own missing pieces that keep them from using Macs at work, but these are the ones that continue to make me endure the hell of Windows.
I thought that should be...
The Nanotech Nose: Towards a Smaller Smeller
Hear, hear! Smalltalk in general and Squeak in particular have many advantages as first languages for kids.
The biggest plus is that Smalltalk was developed FOR teaching kids to program. Alan Kay has always had a not-so-secret agenda to teach kids programming as part of a basic educational curriculum, and Smalltalk was his first serious attempt to create a suitable language and programming environment for that purpose. Over the years Alan, and many others involved in Smalltalk and Squeak, have done a lot of research in this area, and it shows in the ease with which children pick up programming using these tools.
Alan once recounted a funny story to me about using Smalltalk-72 to teach programming to kids. They had a group of a dozen or two kids they were working with in the experiment. Most of the kids picked it up easily and were doing some pretty cool things. But two kids never could get the hang of programming. It turned out that both of the kids had parents who worked for HP, and had previously taught their kids some programming using BASIC. The poor kids already had learned what the limitations of BASIC were, and never were able to get outside that conceptual box to be able to use Smalltalk effectively. I think that's an important thing to keep in mind - don't start kids learning on a crippled system, but give them one that gives them a big enough box to think in that they won't be learning bad programming habits they will have to unlearn later.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the important part of programming is being able to think in the right abstractions. A real programmer doesn't think in terms of the language syntax, but thinks in concepts like iteration, recursion, list, array, etc. Only after solving a problem at the abstract level does a real programmer translate the solution into the syntax of the language. (That's why learning a new language is simple for a professional programmer. It should only be a matter of a few days to pick up a new language, unless is uses radically new concepts.) Smalltalk is nice because it has such simple syntax. C++, Java, Perl, PHP, etc. have very complex syntax with many operators and lots of shortcuts and syntactic sugar. Smalltalk has about 6* lanugage constructs, and everything else is done with messaging.
(* A coworker who was a Lisp expert and I once compared Scheme and Smalltalk syntax. It turns out the two languages had exactly the same number of lanugage constructs with equivalent functionality. I remember the number of constructs (e.g. declaring a temp/local var, message send/function call, quoting) was about 6.)
Zion0101 is the 6th Zion.
It's zero-based, duh.
it's just doubleplusungood!
When you sign a contract with someone, both parties keep a copy of the contract. How is it valid to have only one party to a contract keep a copy of it? The customer should also have a copy of the recording.
If the recordings of phone conversations were stored as mp3 files, the customers could sign their conversations with their private crypto keys, validating the recording as authentic. I know some call centers record calls digitally. It shoudn't be too hard to send me an email with the file so i can generate an MD5 hash/message digest, sign it and return the signed message digest. Then there's no question, and I have a copy of the conversation for my files too.
Or I guess the low-tech solution is to just record the calls ourselves. Any software that can record a conversation off the DSP modem?
...a Beowulf cluster of this!
Memory cards have some non-volatile memory and some security circuitry to check keys, etc. Processor cards have a programmable CPU. Prior to JavaCard, processor cards were programmed almost exclusively in assembly code. Microsoft tried to compete with JavaCard with MS Windows for SmartCards (I'm not kidding here), but the system was lame and doesn't seem to have much support anymore.
JavaCard smart cards can be programmed using the Java programming language, but are restricted to a subset of the language. There are no Floats, Strings, or other big data types, but just int, char, byte, short and objects. But you get full inheritance, interfaces, etc. JavaCard has its own VM that has some similarities to the Java VM but is really a different beast. The bytecode set is optimized for execution on 8 and 16 bit processors and for the subset of the Java language that is practical to run on such limited hardware.
There is also some very cool security built into the language runtime for controlling access to objects based on the application execution context, so even if you can forge a pointer to an object in another application, the VM still won't let you execute its code. This level of security is needed to make financial service companies comfortable with putting 3rd party software on their cards.
Eventually as smart cards get bigger, the JavaCard VM will probably give way to the KVM (Java Micro Edition), though there may have to be some extensions added so the extra security from JavaCard isn't lost.
I totally misread the headline at first glance. I saw "DOS Attack on US Postal Service". And since today is tax day in the US, I thought this was a joke about the deluge of tax returns being mailed today flooding the post office and causing their service to break down. Oh well, maybe next year.
There is nothing arbitrary about a chromosome. A chromosome is a single strand of DNA. As such, it's an important distinction in genetics.
The units go something like:
+ base pair = a single pairing of nucleotides
+ codon = a triplet of base pairs that make up a "letter" in the genetic "alphabet"
+ gene = a group of codons
+ chromosome = a strand (single molecule) of DNA
+ genome = a complete set of genes
Alan Kay said (and I paraphrase): A big enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.
After a point, you're not just running the same software slightly faster; you're running whole new classes of software. Just think, ripping and playing audio mp3s wasn't possible on home computers of 10 years ago. Even if you'd had the software, it would have taken forever to rip stuff, and you wouldn't get realtime playback of good enough quality. Now You can rip, mix and burn on almost anything you buy today.
If you up processor power by an order of magnitude (or two), entirely new things become possible.
When I worked at Xerox (not PARC) in the 80s, we had an Alto lab with a dozen or so Altos. They were so cool. Besides all the visible features, what really made them kick was that they had programmable microcode. So you could code up a new high-level instruction set and build your own language. This was how the Smalltalk-72 VM was implemented. They also had removable hard disk platters. Something the size of a pizza that held about 2.5MB. And besides the 3-button mouse, they had a 5-key chord keyboard - right hand mousing, left hand chording, it was a surprisingly fast way to edit.
The other totally fun thing about the Altos was they supported network games. My favorite was Mazewars. This was almost certainly the first multiplayer FPS game in the world. Everyone played an identical looking eyeball. You zipped around a maze and shot each other (with withering glares, I guess). But you really needed to be good on the chord keyset to win.
Bringing cold water from the depths has an unmentioned potential side-effect. Will it be replaced by warmer water from elsewhere? Cold, deep waters often support amazingly rich ecosystems. Raising the temperature even a few degrees could easily destroy entrie habitats. Will these generators warm the depths, and what effect will that have on the deep ecosystems?
Because everyone knows there's no difference between kids and criminals. Or is that kids and property?
Bumper sticker: My junenile delinquent is screwing your honor roll student.
I found it quite simple to sum up the moral of this story: Any evil can be conquered with love, courage and good manners.
The good manners are the most important part.