Dedicated to not providing you with faulty misinformation, I at Sarcasta.net hereby never forswear to not provide you, the reader, with misleading misinformation. All of my misinformation will be of the highest quality and caliber, and should a piece of misinformation be deemed faulty or unsatisfactorily fulfilling of its duty as quality misinformation, I will do nothing whatsoever, GUARANTEED!
This is the same site, you will note, where she confirms that she said yes.
Well, at least she's sure to not forget her proposal. My better half was so overwhelmed that it's just a blank. She takes my word for it that she said "Yes!"
I've got Speakeasy DSL which runs about $100/month for 768 down, 384 up. It may have come down a bit (my better half handles the bills), and I might be able to shave off a few more bucks if I trimmed unnecessary services (like the shell account), but it's still more than the local telco (PacHell), which is cool by me because Speakeasy is really customer focused. They happily set up reverse DNS for my (static) IPs, they have no problem with me running servers, they give advance notice of outages, and much more. I believe that level of service is worth paying for. Most people I know don't. They're happier saving $10 month.
I think the head of Sweden's telco is probably right - that does sound cheap and people will not voluntarily pay more, but guess what: if those rates are raised $10, people will still pay - they'll just complain about it. Remember when AOL raised rates from like $19.95 to $21.95? It made headline news in the states. I remember everyone grumbling about it. But a month later everyone forgot and AOL continued to grow exponentially after that time (I'm sure they've leveled off since though). One thing I'd be curious about is how are they able to keep rates so low in Sweden? Was part/all of the network government sponsored? Does the unique low price of broadband give Sweden a competive edge to attract high-tech companies to set up shop there over other countries? I don't think the existing customers will be much of a factor in any price increases, but I think they should keep bigger issues like these in mind.
This gives a whole new meaning to the saying about an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce War and Peace. No need for the typewriters anymore.
-"Zow"
Of sentience and reliability
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Joy sees little in the modern history of software development to suggest the emergence of sentient machines. His experience has led him to believe that it's difficult to build things that are reliable.
Well, my experience (while not as monumental as Joy's) has led me to believe that sentience has hardly anything to do with reliablity. For a sterotypical example, consider the absent minded scientist. I know many a briliant person who could never find their keys.
I heard of another student who went to the opposite extreme. In freshman programming the TA's would always put a sample executable in the class directory so that we could compare our output with the canonical output. Now maybe this was just an urban legend, but a year or two before me there was this bright student who couldn't get his program to work, so what he ended up doing was commenting out his entire program and having his main exec the sample program. At my university, anyone who even understood what a system call was in freshman programming was considered a genuous by their classmates, so we were rather disappointed to hear that he failed that assignment - the general concensus was that he should have gotten an 'A' for ingenuity.
If anybody has any specific questions, please post to this comment and I'll reply.
As mentioned by others in this thread, checking every student's submission against every other is a n^2 problem - how did you deal with the computational requirement?
If you're a webmaster at timecanada.com, I suggest you start cleaning out your desk now.
On the contrary - when Chris posted the story he said, "Time Canada seems a bit slow", but when I went there, it seemed just fine. That can only mean that this Webmaster not only survived a/.ing, but improved performance of their system in the process. Maybe some heads will roll, but they'd be idiots to fire whoever's running that shop.
-"Zow"
Re:This is a sign of some sort of cultural deficie
on
Goodbye, "Majestic"
·
· Score: 2
Even more to the point, getting death threats is cool? How do you know they aren't real? Are you about to say that you relish the day when reality and fantasy blur to the point that you can't tell which is which?
Um, if you can't tell if deaththreats against you are part of some game or not, then you've got bigger problems than some stupid game.
Wasn't there a movie about this back in the '80's about some college kids that played "assisination" or something against other students using paintball guns until one of the students gets mistaken as an actual spy. ..
-"Zow"
Re:This is a sign of some sort of cultural deficie
on
Goodbye, "Majestic"
·
· Score: 2
Hmm. Isn't life generally about thinking of something you want and then going and getting it? Isn't a lot of the life you _think_ you have contained inside your head?
You know, you have a point - and that comment in this whole thread discussing consumerism and the like made me think: what if you could create a game like Majestic that actually improved the world all the while the players think they're just enjoying a game? Like for example, the "game" calls you up and tells you to go volunteer in the bread line down at the Salvation Army where you'll get your next clue or something like that. If people aren't motivated to help others purely out of the goodness of their own hearts, then let them think it's just a game. Won't matter either way to the family that just got evicted because their Internet startup went belly-up.
It's kind of like the/. story a couple weeks ago that talked about utilizing the time people use playing Solitare to leverage it to solve real problems.
I remember reading up the other day on a game called Star Command.
You mean the DOS game with CGA graphics where you have a spaceship, a team of 6 people, and you get different missions so you fly around the galaxy to fulfill them? I loved that game! I think I probably spent more time with that game than any other, ever. Published by SSI if I recall correctly. . . I had to tape the instruction manual together because I used it so much it was just falling apart. Do you recall where you found something on it? Google isn't being very helpful.
Don't take this the wrong way, but the way your wife got her job was by being the only physical oceanographer to apply, and you're encouraging other people to pursue that career path? Won't that create compitition for your wife?
I can beat that: ctwm, aka Claude's Tab Window Manager. It's a modified version of the vererable TWM to give such modern amenities as virtual desktops, animated gliphs, and the like. I've used it off and on for about 7 years - tried other window managers, but I just keep coming back. It hasn't changed much in that time, but I think that's a good thing: it's stable as a rock - hasn't crashed, hung or gone into a funky state on me once. And it does all this with negliable resources: I used to run it on NCD X-terminals and the like and it ran like a champ. Okay, it started to drag on a Sun 3/60, but what wouldn't? On my modern 1200x1600 24-bit desktop it's using just 1820kB resident, 3204kB total memory, which is on par with tcsh. And since I've logged in 9 hours ago it's used just 23 seconds of time on my 600MHz box (and that's with animated gliphs).
The downside? Someone who isn't used to a traditional X environment will be lost - it's not the place to start someone who just came from Windows, but once you get used to it and customize it for your needs, you just forget that it's there. All the configuration is through a single rc file and the man page documents the options really well. The only downside to its configurability is that there are so many options that it takes a long time to play with them and find what you like.
Oh, and the reason I started using it was that all my friends were sick of TWM (which was the default wm in our CS department back then) so they all started using FVWM. I liked FVWM's features (esp. virtual desktops) and configurability, but I didn't like the overhead (especially since I did end up on X-terminals and old Suns quite a bit), so I searched around and found ctwm.
My 2 cents,
-"Zow"
Not just the CD & keep it up to date
on
Linux at the Library?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A few assorted thoughts as I wait for my compilation. ..
Just the disk alone probably wouldn't be much good for most members of the target audience. Donate a book that comes with a RedHat/Mandrake/whatever that includes instructions on how to install it, use it, etc. Anyone got any recommendations on what good books are for this?
Keep it up to date. You aren't doing anyone a favour by donating a copy of RedHat 5.1. Make an effort to see that the library is at least using the current major version number of whatever distro you provide.
I imagine that doing something like this could impose unforseen, unnecessary burdens on the librarians, like having people ask them for tech support. Anyone care to speculate on what these problems might be and what we can do to prevent them from becoming problems in the first place? (Like leaving your contact info or contact info for the local LUG for the librarians to give out to people with questions.)
I'm pulling this from deep in my memory, so I may be completely off here, but I seem to recall that the University of Califoria, Berkeley had a large array of radio telescopes in Concord, CA - I saw a picture once and they didn't look to be that big - maybe 1 meter radius tops, but the picture wasn't that good so my sense of scale could have been completely off. In any case, it's probably worth digging around the department of astronomy pages at Berkeley and see what you can dig up - chances are that it's affiliated with SETI.
I wonder when Xerox filed that patent, as Palm (or whatever they were called originally - before 3Com bought them) was selling the software to use graffiti as input on the Apple Newton back in 1994 or so? I think we still have one of the original packages at work.
Okay, it may be in poor form to reply to one's own post, but I have to express my feelings to the moderators (at futile as it may be). Why? I got three people who labeled this post as a troll, and one redundant.
Let's start with the easy one: it wasn't redundant - I checked the comments before I posted. I didn't see any other post that attempted to make light of the fact that there where two windows security stories in just as many hours.
Now for the Trolls. You people don't understand what a troll is. A troll is a beast of a post that adds nothing to the discussion, but serves to demean the general humanity of the average slashdot reader. The name troll stems from the passing of Jon Postal (if memory serves - I'm 99% sure on this one), when some trolls started to post offensive comments such as "good riddin's" and the like. At the time, Slashdot was just starting to gain real mainstream exposure and as such, many high profile Internet pioneers had just started to read it. There were many unkind words from them regarding the level of respect that was being expressed towards their friend and collegue, and I'm sure many dismissed/. altogether after that. It was generally thought that there needed to be a label for these types of posts to seperate them from other types of negative posts (flamebait/offtopic/etc), because there is this perception of being worse. To get back to my point, I don't believe that my post in any way insults anyone's basic dignity and it was by no means meant to troll.
Now, I did rather expect that it would be moderated three ways:
Funny - that is after all the intent behind the message and many of the other readers here share my warped sense of humour.
Flamebait - for the humour impared, my comment could be taken to be nothing more than a jab at our friends at Microsoft.
Overrated - should someone understand that I was trying to be funny, but just think I failed miserably.
Humm. Might have been durring the airshows then, because I thought they were flying pretty low and pulling some (relatively) tight turns. Definately B-52s though - distinctive airframe & engines.
I think Minot is the other 52 base. I grew up in South Dakota, and Ellsworth was a big 52 base until they all got replaced with the B-1s. They still have a 52 wing somewhere around there. As I don't think they have an actual bomber wing down at Offut (Omaha, NE - SAC HQ), Minot would seem to be the next logical choice. If anyone knows for sure, I'd be interested (but not interested enough to weed through the AF web pages:-).
And this thing is IMPRESSIVE. If you've seen one, its hard to imagine it flying
Travis AFB is pretty much between me in the East Bay and Davis, where I go to school, so I get to see the B-52s on my way to school ocassionally. Let me tell you, when you've got one just a couple hundred meters directly over your head, impressive is not the only word going through your mind. You're also inclined to pray that the laws of physics continue hold true today.
An alternative method is to live close, but have an address that's just really hard to find: growing up I lived in a city that had a pretty consistant grid layout to the streets, at least in any part of the city that was more than 15 years old. We lived on this little street that curved right through a couple of these otherwise nice rectangular blocks. I think it was all the free pizzas we got that caused Domino's to change their 30-minutes or free policy - the complaints about reckless driving were just a red anchovie.
The name of the court I live on now is shared with the attached street, an avenue, and a boulivard (sp?) located in rather different parts of town. Since none of the pizza joints here have a 30-minutes or free policy, I just always pick up the pie because otherwise it takes about 2 hours and 3 phone calls for them to find us.
The moral to the story is that a linear (or even polynomial) solution to the TSP is not going to keep the pizza places from giving you free pies as long as you live somewhere that either causes the algorithm to bomb (like next to a circle that causes the program to get caught in an infinite loop), or at an ambiguous address.
No kidding - It's kind of like a FAX machine: That'll be about $70,000 if you just want to send or receive, or about $150,000 if you want to send and receive, give or take $10k.
Slashdot Mirror
I see that Kathleen has this mission statement posted on her site. To quote:
This is the same site, you will note, where she confirms that she said yes.
Well, at least she's sure to not forget her proposal. My better half was so overwhelmed that it's just a blank. She takes my word for it that she said "Yes!"
Congratulations to both of you!
-"Zow"
I've got Speakeasy DSL which runs about $100/month for 768 down, 384 up. It may have come down a bit (my better half handles the bills), and I might be able to shave off a few more bucks if I trimmed unnecessary services (like the shell account), but it's still more than the local telco (PacHell), which is cool by me because Speakeasy is really customer focused. They happily set up reverse DNS for my (static) IPs, they have no problem with me running servers, they give advance notice of outages, and much more. I believe that level of service is worth paying for. Most people I know don't. They're happier saving $10 month.
I think the head of Sweden's telco is probably right - that does sound cheap and people will not voluntarily pay more, but guess what: if those rates are raised $10, people will still pay - they'll just complain about it. Remember when AOL raised rates from like $19.95 to $21.95? It made headline news in the states. I remember everyone grumbling about it. But a month later everyone forgot and AOL continued to grow exponentially after that time (I'm sure they've leveled off since though). One thing I'd be curious about is how are they able to keep rates so low in Sweden? Was part/all of the network government sponsored? Does the unique low price of broadband give Sweden a competive edge to attract high-tech companies to set up shop there over other countries? I don't think the existing customers will be much of a factor in any price increases, but I think they should keep bigger issues like these in mind.
-"Zow"
This gives a whole new meaning to the saying about an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce War and Peace. No need for the typewriters anymore.
-"Zow"
Well, my experience (while not as monumental as Joy's) has led me to believe that sentience has hardly anything to do with reliablity. For a sterotypical example, consider the absent minded scientist. I know many a briliant person who could never find their keys.
-"Zow"
Cute.
I heard of another student who went to the opposite extreme. In freshman programming the TA's would always put a sample executable in the class directory so that we could compare our output with the canonical output. Now maybe this was just an urban legend, but a year or two before me there was this bright student who couldn't get his program to work, so what he ended up doing was commenting out his entire program and having his main exec the sample program. At my university, anyone who even understood what a system call was in freshman programming was considered a genuous by their classmates, so we were rather disappointed to hear that he failed that assignment - the general concensus was that he should have gotten an 'A' for ingenuity.
-"Zow"
As mentioned by others in this thread, checking every student's submission against every other is a n^2 problem - how did you deal with the computational requirement?
-"Zow"
On the contrary - when Chris posted the story he said, "Time Canada seems a bit slow", but when I went there, it seemed just fine. That can only mean that this Webmaster not only survived a /.ing, but improved performance of their system in the process. Maybe some heads will roll, but they'd be idiots to fire whoever's running that shop.
-"Zow"
Um, if you can't tell if deaththreats against you are part of some game or not, then you've got bigger problems than some stupid game.
Wasn't there a movie about this back in the '80's about some college kids that played "assisination" or something against other students using paintball guns until one of the students gets mistaken as an actual spy. . .
-"Zow"
You know, you have a point - and that comment in this whole thread discussing consumerism and the like made me think: what if you could create a game like Majestic that actually improved the world all the while the players think they're just enjoying a game? Like for example, the "game" calls you up and tells you to go volunteer in the bread line down at the Salvation Army where you'll get your next clue or something like that. If people aren't motivated to help others purely out of the goodness of their own hearts, then let them think it's just a game. Won't matter either way to the family that just got evicted because their Internet startup went belly-up.
It's kind of like the /. story a couple weeks ago that talked about utilizing the time people use playing Solitare to leverage it to solve real problems.
-"Zow"
Oh, well then, it's okay.
You mean the DOS game with CGA graphics where you have a spaceship, a team of 6 people, and you get different missions so you fly around the galaxy to fulfill them? I loved that game! I think I probably spent more time with that game than any other, ever. Published by SSI if I recall correctly. . . I had to tape the instruction manual together because I used it so much it was just falling apart. Do you recall where you found something on it? Google isn't being very helpful.
-"Zow"
Anthrax or Osama bin Laden? I think it's a safe bet they already have Windows XP.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Don't take this the wrong way, but the way your wife got her job was by being the only physical oceanographer to apply, and you're encouraging other people to pursue that career path? Won't that create compitition for your wife?
I can beat that: ctwm, aka Claude's Tab Window Manager. It's a modified version of the vererable TWM to give such modern amenities as virtual desktops, animated gliphs, and the like. I've used it off and on for about 7 years - tried other window managers, but I just keep coming back. It hasn't changed much in that time, but I think that's a good thing: it's stable as a rock - hasn't crashed, hung or gone into a funky state on me once. And it does all this with negliable resources: I used to run it on NCD X-terminals and the like and it ran like a champ. Okay, it started to drag on a Sun 3/60, but what wouldn't? On my modern 1200x1600 24-bit desktop it's using just 1820kB resident, 3204kB total memory, which is on par with tcsh. And since I've logged in 9 hours ago it's used just 23 seconds of time on my 600MHz box (and that's with animated gliphs).
The downside? Someone who isn't used to a traditional X environment will be lost - it's not the place to start someone who just came from Windows, but once you get used to it and customize it for your needs, you just forget that it's there. All the configuration is through a single rc file and the man page documents the options really well. The only downside to its configurability is that there are so many options that it takes a long time to play with them and find what you like.
Oh, and the reason I started using it was that all my friends were sick of TWM (which was the default wm in our CS department back then) so they all started using FVWM. I liked FVWM's features (esp. virtual desktops) and configurability, but I didn't like the overhead (especially since I did end up on X-terminals and old Suns quite a bit), so I searched around and found ctwm.
My 2 cents,
-"Zow"
A few assorted thoughts as I wait for my compilation. . .
-"Zow"
I'm pulling this from deep in my memory, so I may be completely off here, but I seem to recall that the University of Califoria, Berkeley had a large array of radio telescopes in Concord, CA - I saw a picture once and they didn't look to be that big - maybe 1 meter radius tops, but the picture wasn't that good so my sense of scale could have been completely off. In any case, it's probably worth digging around the department of astronomy pages at Berkeley and see what you can dig up - chances are that it's affiliated with SETI.
Good luck & have fun!
-"Zow"
No, that's bound to give me nightmares.
All my rights are being stripped away. . .
My processor is too slow. . .
Can't sleep. . . must see Episode II. . .
-"Zow"
I wonder when Xerox filed that patent, as Palm (or whatever they were called originally - before 3Com bought them) was selling the software to use graffiti as input on the Apple Newton back in 1994 or so? I think we still have one of the original packages at work.
-"Zow"
Okay, it may be in poor form to reply to one's own post, but I have to express my feelings to the moderators (at futile as it may be). Why? I got three people who labeled this post as a troll, and one redundant.
Let's start with the easy one: it wasn't redundant - I checked the comments before I posted. I didn't see any other post that attempted to make light of the fact that there where two windows security stories in just as many hours.
Now for the Trolls. You people don't understand what a troll is. A troll is a beast of a post that adds nothing to the discussion, but serves to demean the general humanity of the average slashdot reader. The name troll stems from the passing of Jon Postal (if memory serves - I'm 99% sure on this one), when some trolls started to post offensive comments such as "good riddin's" and the like. At the time, Slashdot was just starting to gain real mainstream exposure and as such, many high profile Internet pioneers had just started to read it. There were many unkind words from them regarding the level of respect that was being expressed towards their friend and collegue, and I'm sure many dismissed /. altogether after that. It was generally thought that there needed to be a label for these types of posts to seperate them from other types of negative posts (flamebait/offtopic/etc), because there is this perception of being worse. To get back to my point, I don't believe that my post in any way insults anyone's basic dignity and it was by no means meant to troll.
Now, I did rather expect that it would be moderated three ways:
You only have five points. Use them wisely.
-"Zow"
Hey, CmdrTaco, what's with having another duplicate story today? You just reported about the new windows vulnerability two hours ago.
Oh, wait. . .
Humm. Might have been durring the airshows then, because I thought they were flying pretty low and pulling some (relatively) tight turns. Definately B-52s though - distinctive airframe & engines.
I think Minot is the other 52 base. I grew up in South Dakota, and Ellsworth was a big 52 base until they all got replaced with the B-1s. They still have a 52 wing somewhere around there. As I don't think they have an actual bomber wing down at Offut (Omaha, NE - SAC HQ), Minot would seem to be the next logical choice. If anyone knows for sure, I'd be interested (but not interested enough to weed through the AF web pages :-).
-"Zow"
Travis AFB is pretty much between me in the East Bay and Davis, where I go to school, so I get to see the B-52s on my way to school ocassionally. Let me tell you, when you've got one just a couple hundred meters directly over your head, impressive is not the only word going through your mind. You're also inclined to pray that the laws of physics continue hold true today.
-"Zow"
So "the Slashdot Enthusiast's Valhalla" is 403: "Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server."
Um. . . no.
An alternative method is to live close, but have an address that's just really hard to find: growing up I lived in a city that had a pretty consistant grid layout to the streets, at least in any part of the city that was more than 15 years old. We lived on this little street that curved right through a couple of these otherwise nice rectangular blocks. I think it was all the free pizzas we got that caused Domino's to change their 30-minutes or free policy - the complaints about reckless driving were just a red anchovie.
The name of the court I live on now is shared with the attached street, an avenue, and a boulivard (sp?) located in rather different parts of town. Since none of the pizza joints here have a 30-minutes or free policy, I just always pick up the pie because otherwise it takes about 2 hours and 3 phone calls for them to find us.
The moral to the story is that a linear (or even polynomial) solution to the TSP is not going to keep the pizza places from giving you free pies as long as you live somewhere that either causes the algorithm to bomb (like next to a circle that causes the program to get caught in an infinite loop), or at an ambiguous address.
-"Zow"
No kidding - It's kind of like a FAX machine: That'll be about $70,000 if you just want to send or receive, or about $150,000 if you want to send and receive, give or take $10k.
-"Zow"