I joined my local Freecycle and it was was great, but, as Craig found out with his list, it doesn't scale and I've been forced to unsubscribe because of the sheel volume of postings. The reason that Craigslist is a website for larger (and even smaller) cities is that sending everything to everyone is not a long term solution. But for tiny communities Freecycle is just right.
It's all about the size of the group you are expecting to build. If it is a small community, then everyone chatting to everyone fosters a sense of belonging, but if you are expecting hundreds of people to join, then everyone chatting to everyone makes for too much noise and not enough signal.
Actually, the real problem is how they funded that act (HAVA - Help America Vote Act). They gave lump sums of money to each district, and those lump sums expire. This means that election districts NEED to upgrade really soon now, and they have no money to maintain or to do fancy paper systems. Because it was a onetime huge sum with no upkeep attached, the district managers have an interest in big expensive systems that salesmen tell them have very low repeating costs (i.e. computers). And because they aren't computer experts, they are easily hoodwinked.
The solution has many parts, but the biggest is just to raise awareness of the need to generate paper ballots.
Counting ballots is exactly the kind of thing that scales nicely - just hire more counters. O(lg n) maybe, but then there's still no reason that in the US we couldn't simply wait 24 hours for nice handcounted results, except for our obsession with real time nownownow results.
In a related note, you can fit a full 40oz inside a regulation ultimate frisbee. But it really doesn't look like it's possible. A nice way to win some bets.
Be careful here. In order to say "patents help the little guy", you have to look at how effective they've been at letting small inventors take on big corporations, as you mention, but you ALSO have to look at how effective they are at allowing big corporations to squash the little guy flat.
I know that I wouldn't want to be a software developer in any domain MS or IBM or SCO have ever done anything...
It sounds like you will only accept evidence that has proven truthful in a court of law. Give us some standards of proof here - right now the preponderance of evidence is that a) the Diebold CEO was a big Bush supporter b) Diebold machines consistently err Republican that c) http://www.electiledysfunction.org/ConyersOhioHear ing_chunk_8.wmv republican organizations were actively enquiring about how they could undetectably change the vote and that d) the election results didn't match the exit polls. If you want to indictable evidence that everyone agrees upon, then you are out of luck. All that we have is evidence of either gross stupidity or maliciousness. Since we can't rule out the former, and the lack of a paper trail outrules testing whether vote switching occurred, it's circumstantial evidence forever. If you are determined to think the best of the man, then nothing anyone says will convince you otherwise.
But since he's either too dumb to be a CEO or too evil, either way I'm gald he's gone.
My favorite conspiracy theory about aspartame is that the Diet Coke that the Coca Cola Corp. sent over to support our troops in the first Gulf War was stored in the sun and then later refrigerated. And that Gulf War Syndrome is ACTUALLY methyl alcohol poisoning from the denatured Diet Coke.
Monsanto colluding with the government to poison US soldiers. You don't get better conspiracy theories than that.
The best AJAX apps (i.e. Google maps) provide a way of bookmarking a result. But it's true that most of them do break the back button. That's the price of doing AJAX business.
If you have data that can be incrementally processed, then shell scripts with pipes can bring about a high degree of speedup process1 | process2 | process3 with all three of them running on different processors means that your program can get up to a 3x speedup for free! No MPI/PVM/pthreads/etc required!
(Note: the program chain will complete in time roughly proportional to the time of the slowest link. This trick only works when each program doesn't need to read in all the data before it finishes processing.)
And, to clarify and correct myself, it looks like they are claiming that the internet is not scale-free. Which is not quite the same thing as being power-law, but is generally related.
Actually, there's a paper coming out from some very bright people at CalTech that says that we've been wrong about that for some time, and the internet ISN'T a power-law network, it only looks like that because of how we measure it. Interesting idea, that one.
Re:Where was the headline when NUnit was released?
on
An Early Look at JUnit 4
·
· Score: 2, Informative
JUnit was actually the first - it was written back when people were still figuring out to call it "unit testing" as distinct from functional testing, and it was certainly the first widely used framework that supported unit testing.
In that sense, all the other xUnit stuff is decidedly a descendant of JUnit.
Programming is a craft. You only learn it properly by being a defacto apprentice for a while. Computer science gives you the theoretical underpinnings required to give you the potential to be an excellent apprentice.
Possibly. But on Linux there's also the possibility of going into/etc/init and removing the scripts you don't want to start. Total control from top to bottom. I'm sure that people have hacked around this and that in Windows, but it's still an opaque box that usually works right only if you are very careful about not breaking it.
It's sort of sad that 'stop your system from doing things you don't want it to do' is front page news for Windows.
Well, they are trying to think of the children! Specifically, the children who are 17 years old, have access the necessary skills to download and install a patch off the internet, but do not know of the wealth of pornographic material available on that same medium.
Which is like one kid.
So please, think of the Timmy Bronkett from Cleveland, OH.
Hrm. What is a slide show scripting language? I know what all those words mean individually, but their sum makes no sense. You mean like some bizarre new form of troff or LaTeX or PIC but for slides? It's HTML. That's not a "scripting language", it is a "markup language".
S5 is a set of javascript and CSS files that wwhen combined with properly written XHTML will transform your web browser into something that looks and acts remarkably like a Powerpoint clone.
The benefits to this are that you can use HTML and your favorite editor to author your presentation instead of frickin Powerpoint, your presentation will display on any and all platforms, and your presentation is instantly web accessible without forcing people to fire up the ol PDF viewer or, worse yet, powerpoint viewer.
It's a powerpoint alternative that uses your web browser and HTML. It allows me to write my presentations in VIM, where I can really bang out the text, instead of in Powerpoint or LaTeX. Powerpoint is a shitty program which encourages shitty thinking (as are its clones), and LaTeX is really designed for documents not slides, and all of the solutions for that are total and complete hacks.
Try S5 for presentations. I've been quite happy with it (http://soy.dyndns.org/~peter/projects/research/lo ng_term_routeviews/present/), and you can write XHTML instead of frickin Powerpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
I joined my local Freecycle and it was was great, but, as Craig found out with his list, it doesn't scale and I've been forced to unsubscribe because of the sheel volume of postings. The reason that Craigslist is a website for larger (and even smaller) cities is that sending everything to everyone is not a long term solution. But for tiny communities Freecycle is just right.
It's all about the size of the group you are expecting to build. If it is a small community, then everyone chatting to everyone fosters a sense of belonging, but if you are expecting hundreds of people to join, then everyone chatting to everyone makes for too much noise and not enough signal.
Actually, the real problem is how they funded that act (HAVA - Help America Vote Act). They gave lump sums of money to each district, and those lump sums expire. This means that election districts NEED to upgrade really soon now, and they have no money to maintain or to do fancy paper systems. Because it was a onetime huge sum with no upkeep attached, the district managers have an interest in big expensive systems that salesmen tell them have very low repeating costs (i.e. computers). And because they aren't computer experts, they are easily hoodwinked.
The solution has many parts, but the biggest is just to raise awareness of the need to generate paper ballots.
Counting ballots is exactly the kind of thing that scales nicely - just hire more counters. O(lg n) maybe, but then there's still no reason that in the US we couldn't simply wait 24 hours for nice handcounted results, except for our obsession with real time nownownow results.
In a related note, you can fit a full 40oz inside a regulation ultimate frisbee. But it really doesn't look like it's possible. A nice way to win some bets.
Be careful here. In order to say "patents help the little guy", you have to look at how effective they've been at letting small inventors take on big corporations, as you mention, but you ALSO have to look at how effective they are at allowing big corporations to squash the little guy flat.
I know that I wouldn't want to be a software developer in any domain MS or IBM or SCO have ever done anything...
It sounds like you will only accept evidence that has proven truthful in a court of law. Give us some standards of proof here - right now the preponderance of evidence is that a) the Diebold CEO was a big Bush supporter b) Diebold machines consistently err Republican that c) http://www.electiledysfunction.org/ConyersOhioHear ing_chunk_8.wmv republican organizations were actively enquiring about how they could undetectably change the vote and that d) the election results didn't match the exit polls. If you want to indictable evidence that everyone agrees upon, then you are out of luck. All that we have is evidence of either gross stupidity or maliciousness. Since we can't rule out the former, and the lack of a paper trail outrules testing whether vote switching occurred, it's circumstantial evidence forever. If you are determined to think the best of the man, then nothing anyone says will convince you otherwise.
But since he's either too dumb to be a CEO or too evil, either way I'm gald he's gone.
My favorite conspiracy theory about aspartame is that the Diet Coke that the Coca Cola Corp. sent over to support our troops in the first Gulf War was stored in the sun and then later refrigerated. And that Gulf War Syndrome is ACTUALLY methyl alcohol poisoning from the denatured Diet Coke.
Monsanto colluding with the government to poison US soldiers. You don't get better conspiracy theories than that.
The best AJAX apps (i.e. Google maps) provide a way of bookmarking a result. But it's true that most of them do break the back button. That's the price of doing AJAX business.
If you have data that can be incrementally processed, then shell scripts with pipes can bring about a high degree of speedup
process1 | process2 | process3
with all three of them running on different processors means that your program can get up to a 3x speedup for free! No MPI/PVM/pthreads/etc required!
(Note: the program chain will complete in time roughly proportional to the time of the slowest link. This trick only works when each program doesn't need to read in all the data before it finishes processing.)
ODF is an XML-based format. So when you ask "why can't we use XML?", the answer is "they are trying to!"
http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/
Does the same thing and uses other peoples' bugfixes.
LaTeX presentations look awesome if you use http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/
I highly recommend it.
It was on NANOG recently - lemme check - yup!
g y-PNAS-0508.pdf
Article: http://www.physorg.com/news6940.html
Actual Paper: http://netlab.caltech.edu/pub/papers/Doyle-topolo
And, to clarify and correct myself, it looks like they are claiming that the internet is not scale-free. Which is not quite the same thing as being power-law, but is generally related.
Actually, there's a paper coming out from some very bright people at CalTech that says that we've been wrong about that for some time, and the internet ISN'T a power-law network, it only looks like that because of how we measure it. Interesting idea, that one.
JUnit was actually the first - it was written back when people were still figuring out to call it "unit testing" as distinct from functional testing, and it was certainly the first widely used framework that supported unit testing.
In that sense, all the other xUnit stuff is decidedly a descendant of JUnit.
Programming is a craft. You only learn it properly by being a defacto apprentice for a while. Computer science gives you the theoretical underpinnings required to give you the potential to be an excellent apprentice.
Ideally, mass would go up in our new sexy space elavator and people would go up in very safe and small rockets, and then rendezvous up in orbit.
The US already tried to change the zero point of the longitude system to be centered on Washington DC instead of Greenwich. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_meridian
We have a long tradition of doing the egotistical thing w.r.t. internationally recognized standards.
Possibly. But on Linux there's also the possibility of going into /etc/init and removing the scripts you don't want to start. Total control from top to bottom. I'm sure that people have hacked around this and that in Windows, but it's still an opaque box that usually works right only if you are very careful about not breaking it.
It's sort of sad that 'stop your system from doing things you don't want it to do' is front page news for Windows.
Well, they are trying to think of the children! Specifically, the children who are 17 years old, have access the necessary skills to download and install a patch off the internet, but do not know of the wealth of pornographic material available on that same medium.
Which is like one kid.
So please, think of the Timmy Bronkett from Cleveland, OH.
Thanks! I just installed it, and I've already managed to deny 10 ips that tried dictionary attacks in the past 48 hours. Quite nice.
Doubly linked lists are impossible to implement due to namespace problems and issues about how PHP's aliases are neither ferences nor pointers.
Because ATOM - the SOAP-using, kitchen-sink-including extension to RSS - is chopped liver in MS land? It even uses their buzzwords!
Hrm. What is a slide show scripting language? I know what all those words mean individually, but their sum makes no sense. You mean like some bizarre new form of troff or LaTeX or PIC but for slides? It's HTML. That's not a "scripting language", it is a "markup language".
S5 is a set of javascript and CSS files that wwhen combined with properly written XHTML will transform your web browser into something that looks and acts remarkably like a Powerpoint clone.
The benefits to this are that you can use HTML and your favorite editor to author your presentation instead of frickin Powerpoint, your presentation will display on any and all platforms, and your presentation is instantly web accessible without forcing people to fire up the ol PDF viewer or, worse yet, powerpoint viewer.
It's a powerpoint alternative that uses your web browser and HTML. It allows me to write my presentations in VIM, where I can really bang out the text, instead of in Powerpoint or LaTeX. Powerpoint is a shitty program which encourages shitty thinking (as are its clones), and LaTeX is really designed for documents not slides, and all of the solutions for that are total and complete hacks.
Try S5 for presentations. I've been quite happy with it (http://soy.dyndns.org/~peter/projects/research/lo ng_term_routeviews/present/), and you can write XHTML instead of frickin Powerpoint.
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/