My impression was that the use of e-mail lists was on the decline.
To the contrary! It's on the rise. Usenet alone--which is a backwater in that most people don't know where it is and how to find it--on Usenet alone there were 13.1 million unique identities who used Usenet in 2002, and by that we mean that they were a contributor and wrote at least one message. How many people read the message? We have no idea. That number is invisible and is fragmented over a half-million servers that are not sharing their data. But conservatively you could estimate that there are 10 readers for every writer, so that makes it 130 million Usenet users per year. And that's a small number compared to majordomo lists, or things like Yahoo Groups, and the number of people who have a bulletin board on things like UltimateBBS.
My guess is that this an overestimate. I suspect that most lurkers
might actually post one per year. It could probably be worked out.
If you know the distribution of posts, say 5 million post once, 2
million post twice,... then you have a guess at the distribution,
and that could give you a good estimate for total number. My guess
is a zipth law or poission type distribution.
"Now we finally know how Linux has matured from hobby OS to IT-company platform," Sontag jibes. "If something sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't," topped McBride. Evolved technology simply cannot be had for free. "Free Software -- not our thing." UNXIX comprises 20 years of development work: Based on it, SCO wants to make money for another 20 years. McBride appealed for support from partners and developers from the UNIX community, otherwise, "the times for good business might soon be over." GPL and Open Source destroy legal business models -- compensations and a legal business model for the future are therefore necessary. Heise seconded: That SCO once distributed its code as Linux distributor, did not mean that Linux users where protected from all demands because of the GPL. Copyright for code can only be obtained by a written contract with the license owner, is his position.
Besides the legal pandemonium, SCO plans to actually continue product development. CEO McBride left it to his Chief of Development to introduce the roadmap. The most important innovation is a new version of SCO Openserver, codenamed "Legend" [Translator: As in something that's never going to happen, eh?]. Legend is supposed to offer superior Java support and Samba 3 for improved Windows support.
Strange how a company which says Freesoftware - not our thing. Then claims
support for Samba (opensouce if I'm not mistaken) as one of the top points on their roadmap.
Don't do a Ph D if you want to raise your earning potential.
The only good reason to do a PhD is if you love the subject
NEED to find out more and are intrested in the theoretical
aspects of the subject and dream of an acedemic job or in a
research labs.
By the fact your that your asking the wrong question, i.e.
is it good for my earnings rathetr than is it my pasion then
I'd sujest you don't do a PhD. Money is not the issue!
Huh,
p(its a spam) = p(its a spam|contains word viagra) * p(contains word viagra) +...
a bit of rewriting gives Bayes throrem.
The priors are p(its a spam|contains word viagra).
Haveing been in statistics departments which host confrences on basian
image analysis which uses entirely the same techniques as these.
A far more prnounced exponential decay is exhibited in the comment posted and scores acheived. I had a look at the score vrs time posted and got a graph a bit like:
where the x-axis is number of hours since article posted, one * per hour. Basically most of the comment activity happens in the first two or three hours.
Points to note, if you want to get a high score, post quickly. There are problably good posts which are posted late but never get to see the light of day. Quite understandable behavour as moderators can't be bothered to wade through 100's of posts, higher chance of redundant post.
There might be ways where moderation system could be changed to streatch the curve out.
The supplied like to Bob the Builder may not be the official one. Which accoding to my younger friends is Bob the builder.
Its actually kept a lot of kids in the hood amused for a good long while, despight being a very unslashdotish flash site.
The supplied like to Bob the Builder may not be the official one. Which accoding to my younger friends is Bob the builder.
Its actually kept a lot of kids in the hood amused for a good long while, despight being a very unslashdotish flash site.
Re:Being arrested can just be the start of the pro
on
Linking Dangerously
·
· Score: 1
You used physical force instead of democratic pressure.
There are very different means of protest. Some choose violence, some choose non-violence or pasive resistance. I chose not to use violence of any sort, this included physical and verbal violence. Your post is actually more violent than my actions.
Protest against REAL injustice, you petty little powderpuff!
The malasian airways protest was protesting about
malasians wholescale clearence of rain forrests and the desplacement of the tribes people there.
The action was done in solidarity with 30 malasian tribes people who were being held by their govenment. Read the archive of raisethefist.
Every item them is about an injustice.
This is why, from 1930-2003 not ONE problem has been solved by student activists.
But so much has been changed by law breaking protest.
Suffrigetts - Womans right to vote, Ganhdi - independence for india. Swords into ploughshare
brought the whole East Timor situation too the public eye. Earth First protest in the UK caused the govenment to re think roads program (some roads were halted). GM activists - changed the publics perception of GM food.
Yes direct action is not the only tool for the job. That is why are now prefer to work by spreading information see Plants For A Future.
Being arrested can just be the start of the proces
on
Linking Dangerously
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There are many many people who have used
court cases, being arrested and prision as
a political tool, indeed it can really gell the movement together.
Heres a few examples which spring to mind.
Gandhi two long streatches in jail. Malcome X, Martin Luther King.
Swords into ploughshares three women took hammers to a UK Hawk aircraft, caused several million pounds worth of damage. Did they run, no they just sat down and waited to be arrested.
Mc Libel Trial a very high profile libel case. Through fighting the case the anti Mc Donalds movement became much more high profile.
Earth First direct action (breaking the law) for the environment.
In my youth, I engaged in a few actions
(locking myself to the houses of parliment and
Malaysian airlines office) with 90% arrest chance. And yes I got arrested but not charged.
Its a very different fealing being locked up for your beleif rather than for a crime or an injustice. Indeed its even empowering in a way.
This case is a little different. But I hope he will take it in the right way, with dignety.
And realise that its part of the process of change. A year (six months with good behaviour)
is not than long for your beleifs.
However, while you're right that 0.1% of A LOT may well be a large amount of money, that doesn't make it a significant amount of money.
I ment to refer to statistical significance.
i.e trying to gague if the numbers have meaning or are just noise.
Quoting insignificant numbers could get them seriously fried.
Of course it wouldn't. But they would also quote a confidence interval, which is not mentioned in this article.
I was trying to posit that there is a implict
confidence interval sugested by the number of digits they quote. If they are statisticans worth their sort they will not quote 1.7% when the
confidence interval is +/- 0.5%.
Also note that a 0.1%point change doesn't mean anything. 45.63241% of convincing sounding statistics are too accurate to be true (margin of error 41.553%)
It may well be significant. Lets rewrite these interms of actually numbers sold. At a guess say 10,000,000 chips sold. Now 1.7% of 10 millions
170,000 and 1.8% is 180,000 would you say the difference between 170,000 and 180,000 is significant? As another post said thats a 6% increase enough to put a smile of Linus's face.
Percentages are not a golden standard, they only make sense when you know the sample size. Very large samples mean very small levels of significance.
Now we don't have much to go on from the article
but there are a few hints as to why these numbers might make sense:
Mercury's numbers include so-called x86 processors shipped for inclusion in desktops, notebooks, servers and Xboxes. Microsoft incorporates Intel processors into its Xbox gaming console.
this gives some evidence that they may actually
have access to factory door numbers of chips.
A second reasons is the very high stability in the market. Last year intel was up 6%, this year down 0.3%. This is not a volitile market and small changes are big news. Consider the male female ratio, its flat as a pancake through the years. Even a.1% change is enough to get a lot of people worried.
A third bit of evidence is the number of decimal places used. Its common practice to only quote the significant digits, all numbers are quoted acurate to 0.1% sugesting that Mercuary know significance to this level. Giving Mercuary some credit, they are well respected market anaysists who have are far more demanding audience audience (wall street brokers) than the slashdot crew. Quoting insignificant numbers could get them seriously fried.
So there is little we can tell, we working on 2nd hand data where the information needed to decide
on the significance has been ommited. On balance I'd trust Mercuary who have paid staticians on board more that a slashdotters.
I've long suspected that there was something
not quite right about the forms interface.
Its always seemed a bit ugly. Not particullarly clever, and much worse than input choices you can get on standalone apps and games.
These are really just niggling fealing, somehow it could be better.
One particular niggle is the text box input.
I want to do a web forum and I want to make it really easy to input quite rich text. I'm like the user to create rich content with italics, paragraphs, links, embedded pictures and tables.
But my uses are a non technical crowd so html markup will not do!
I want an interface as easy as Word, no I want an
interface as easy as a computer games six year olds can play.
But I don't want Flash, not easilly indexable.
I have big misgiving about XML, somehow the XML stuff, XLink, XPath, XCSS, Xtc seems too complicated. HTML had a nice simplicity to it,
XML just seems to have lost the elegance.
I also want a spell check button on the slashdot post comment page!
now, with virtual items this is tricky. baboo the barbarian "worked" for several hundred hours to win the +12 shears of torpiary. so, to baboo, thos shears have a "value" of 100 hours. however, some programmer wrote up those shears in 2 minutes and created a dozen of them with a keystroke. so, to the authors of the game, the shears are worth 2.01 minutes of labour.
An interesting analysis, but in some sence your not comparing like with like. As I see it theres two different worlds going on here. The in game world which baboo exists in. Then there is the world of the sysadmin, if you like valhalla, the relm of the gods. Both the theorys of value work fine in both of the different world. The problem comes with the different value systems. Trying to
translate one value system to another.
Clash of (monatary) value systems are common throughout the real world. When two culture come together: american indians selling NY for ten dollars. I guess you could see the a clash between
parent and child, where one pound is worth very different things to each.
The parent-child example is quite good as its a similar sort of structure to sysadmin-player or indeed God(s)-man. Sysadmins should really be taking the roles of parents in that they are providing a safe and exciting world for the child/player to exist in. I'm meaning safe in a very week sense in that children are not going to threaterend by thing from the outside world (kidnapped etc), and that players are not going to be ripped off by hackers.
The hacker is an interesting ingredient in the mix. Actually someone exsisting in both the different worlds and exploiting the direrences in exchage rates. A small theft in one world but a large theft in the other world. It might even be consider that they were obtained by a pact with the devil (another god like entity).
Posible solutions:
Eternal vigilance by the sysadmins to ensure the cosistance of the world.
Ensuring that its not posible to exploit the difference, say by digitally signing in game objects.
Using appropriate justice in the different systems. Minor penilaties in realworld, but in game world theft of a +12 shears: I would not like to think of the consequences which could be wrougth (could make for an interesting game though!)
A final off topic thought, in paper D&D I always prefered being the DM, in those days 1 in every 10 players was a DM. Now its 1 in 10,000. I'd love to see online games where I could create my own worlds for others to play in.
Hang on, this program might crash. j is a pointer, but it has not been initalised. You should assume that its going to take a random value. Hence *j = 2; is setting some random memory location to 2. Bang!
I've no real problem with the pointer syntax.
Yes pointers can fry your head, but thats not the
syntax's fault, its just what you get with a language which lets you work close to the memory.
Enums with constant, non sequential values. A good feature, with useful applications. Consider this example from a maths parser.
I've found a big bloat problem
with using the expat xml parser. Its basically
doubling the size of my C programs. With
a coresponding increase in size of downloads.
I'm only doing a very simple parsing job, and
I don't need most of the functionality.
For a job like it might be better to write my own parser, only a couple of hundred lines,
than use expat. It would also have been easier
than using the expat code. Heck the code for the
interface to with expat is more that just writing the parser from scratch.
How much of our world (pre computer) is a virtual
construct?
Take money for example, its well known that
that only 10% of the money in supply is backed by hard cash. The rest is promisory notes.
Thats what happened in the great depression
people lost faith in virtual world that is the banks. They all wanted to see the hard cash
which just was not there.
Your virtual house in the Sims is worth nothing.
You real money in the bank may also be worth nothing, your just relying on the collective
belief in the money supply. Its just lucky thats
theres a bit more shared confidence in the money supply than in the game of everquest.
Minsky, being the "highly regarded" and "leader" in AI, wrote a paper that proved that these perceptrons could never learn more complicated patterns, and threw a bunch of math at the reader. So people stopped. After all, there was a mathematical proof that perceptrons weren't going anywhere. Research skidded to a halt for decades because of Minsky.
Of course, then someone developed the (gasp!) THREE layer perceptron/neural net and sure enough with the right formula it could learn much more complicated tasks.
Another take on the above. People got very
excited about (single layer) perceptions.
Minsky saved everyone a lot of effort by showing that they could not work. So people had to go away and think harder and came up with a way round the problem, multi layer perceptrions.
Sometimes fields need someone to come along and say. Everybody your wasting your time, this is a dead end avenue, jump out of the box, try some inovation.
> One of the authors, VS Ramachandran, gave this > year's Reith lectures [bbc.co.uk] on the subject > of Neuroscience. You can read or listen to the > lectures on the Beeb's website. Well worth taking > a look at. Some of it is absolutely fascinating.
I'd just like to add to this recomendation. (mod it up) One of the lectures is specifically about synathesia, and the other lectures cover a multitude of nuro phenonema. Also a great web site with real audio of all the lectures and interactive brain maps etc.
> No, they're extremely aggressive about hiding fraud. If you have a problem (such as being defrauded by a seller), PayPal will tell you "not our problem, deal with the seller," conveniently neglecting to tell you about the "dreaded C-word" (chargeback).
Well thats just the service PayPal offer, they make it easy for anyone to sell stuff over the internet. For example my small charity gets online subs through paypal.
To make it easly for people to sell they don't do all the checks that credit card companies do (which would cost the seller $$$). I for one have never signed an agreement saying I promise to supply the good.
So you can't really expect any legal guarantee from paypal.
Its great that there is an service like paypal, just don't expect it to be more that it is.
I really felt the context of the subject was missing in my School and Collage studies in Mathematics.
I was pretty un aware of which bit we were being taught were new ie. this centuary and which bits clasical mathematics. It took until my MSc before I had an inkling of what the boundaries of the current understanding was.
Having a whole chapter of the book on Einstein seems great. The one physisist people have heard of and he does not get a single mention up to Degree level.
I'm all for this sort of book, hope it manages to grab attention without dumbing down. And hope it does follow the pop-science sales formula
num_sales = 1/num_formulas
by eliminating the actual sums (etc) for waffle. A very fine line.
(Whoopse, ignore previous malformated post, hit
submit rather than preview. Hay maybe they should swith the order of buttons?)
Yet another slashdot ripping to shreds,
(it does seem to be a good forum for that).
Like attracts like, slashdot attracts
anti MS, lame jokes, with the occasional
flash of inspiration. The moderation system
while good at filtering out the dross
can help keep the party line.
I just had two years away from slashdot at it seems to have dropped in quality. Two years ago
reading at 4/5 would give me the most interesting
comments, normally about 10 which is enough to
really cover most points in a discussion.
Now your typical item is getting 30-40 in the
4/5 level. And I never get to the end of the
list as I get board by the repeated discussion.
Have a look at the number of comments in
Do You Write Backdoors? thread.
37 at 5, 52 at 4, 86 at 3, 220 at 2, 368 at at 1
and 531 at 0. The ratio of these are
37/52 =.7 5 vrs 4
52/86 =.6 4 vrs 3
86/220 =.4 3 vrs 2
220/368 =.7 2 vrs 1
So 70% of posts with 4 get moderated up to 5.
We see a big drops from 2 to 3 and small drops from 4 to 5.
I'd like to see a sharper drop, so its only
the really good comments which get to be 5. This is possibly achievable by reducing the
number of moderation points around.
I'm with Joel on quoting. I almost never quote
and do not enjoy the pickyness in usenet.
This may be my personal preferance, I tend to
prefer quick overviews to small details.
He's certainly right on how small design changes
affect the type of discussion. I've done
several small changes my own
discussion board at
Plants For A Future
(which is really a means for adding corections
to pages rather than a true discussion board).
Originally you had to go to a new page to add
a comment, I wanted to encourage more posts
and also to make it easier for people to add
links to other sites with related info.
So put the reply box right there on the page
and add a box so people can easily add a link
without having to know about all that <a href
stuff. Sure enough number of links went up.
Just thinking of my dream discussion board software. All these small changes could be
easily configurable so that you create the
kind of discussion you want.
Now I'm going to go away and remove that
followup link from my board. The feature
never worked well anyway.
Yet another slashdot ripping to shreds,
(it does seem to be a good forum for that).
Like attracts like, slashdot attracts
anti MS, lame jokes, with the occasional
flash of inspiration. The moderation system
while good at filtering out the dross
can help keep the party line.
I just had two years away from slashdot at it seems to have dropped in quality. Two years ago
reading at 4/5 would give me the most interesting
comments, normally about 10 which is enough to
really cover most points in a discussion.
Now your typical item is getting 30-40 in the
4/5 level. And I never get to the end of the
list as I get board by the repeated discussion.
Have a look at the number of comments in
Do You Write Backdoors? thread.
37 at 5, 52 at 4, 86 at 3, 220 at 2, 368 at at 1
and 531 at 0. The ratio of these are
37/52 =.7
52/86 =.6
86/220 =.4
220/368 =.7
So 70% of posts with 4 get moderated up to 5.
We see a big drops from 2 to 3 and small drops from 4 to 5.
I'd like to see a sharper drop, so its only
the really good comments which get to be 5. This is possibly achievable by reducing the
number of moderation points around.
I'm with Joel on quoting. I almost never quote
and do not enjoy the pickyness in usenet.
This may be my personal preferance, I tend to
prefer quick overviews to small details.
He's certainly right on how small design changes
affect the type of discussion. I've done
several small changes my own
discussion board at
Plants For A Future
(which is really a means for adding corections
to pages rather than a true discussion board).
Originally you had to go to a new page to add
a comment, I wanted to encourage more posts
and also to make it easier for people to add
links to other sites with related info.
So put the reply box right there on the page
and add a box so people can easily add a link
without having to know about all that <a href
stuff. Sure enough number of links went up.
Just thinking of my dream discussion board software. All these small changes could be
easily configurable so that you create the
kind of discussion you want.
Now I'm going to go away and remove that
followup link from my board. The feature
never worked well anyway.
ttfn Rich
The statistical community tend to use R or S
or a few other statistical packages. Very effective
for large matrix calculations, singular value decomposition and that sort of thing.
I've done a lot of work in 3D pure mathematical
graphics (drawing algebraic surfaces etc), and JavaView
and Geomview
are nice platforms for viewing 3D data.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that this an overestimate. I suspect that most lurkers might actually post one per year. It could probably be worked out. If you know the distribution of posts, say 5 million post once, 2 million post twice, ... then you have a guess at the distribution,
and that could give you a good estimate for total number. My guess
is a zipth law or poission type distribution.
Strange how a company which says Freesoftware - not our thing. Then claims support for Samba (opensouce if I'm not mistaken) as one of the top points on their roadmap.
By the fact your that your asking the wrong question, i.e. is it good for my earnings rathetr than is it my pasion then I'd sujest you don't do a PhD. Money is not the issue!
Haveing been in statistics departments which host confrences on basian image analysis which uses entirely the same techniques as these.
A far more prnounced exponential decay is exhibited in the comment
;-(
posted and scores acheived. I had a look at the score vrs time
posted and got a graph a bit like:
5 **
4 **
3 **
2 *** *** **
1 *** ******* *****
0 *** ******* ******
where the x-axis is number of hours since article posted, one * per hour.
Basically most of the comment activity happens in the first two or three
hours.
Points to note, if you want to get a high score, post quickly.
There are problably good posts which are posted late but never
get to see the light of day. Quite understandable behavour
as moderators can't be bothered to wade through 100's of
posts, higher chance of redundant post.
There might be ways where moderation system could be changed
to streatch the curve out.
Unfortunatly no one will get to read this
The supplied like to Bob the Builder may not be the official one. Which accoding to my younger friends is Bob the builder. Its actually kept a lot of kids in the hood amused for a good long while, despight being a very unslashdotish flash site.
The supplied like to Bob the Builder may not be the official one. Which accoding to my younger friends is Bob the builder. Its actually kept a lot of kids in the hood amused for a good long while, despight being a very unslashdotish flash site.
There are very different means of protest. Some choose violence, some choose non-violence or pasive resistance. I chose not to use violence of any sort, this included physical and verbal violence. Your post is actually more violent than my actions.
Protest against REAL injustice, you petty little powderpuff!
The malasian airways protest was protesting about malasians wholescale clearence of rain forrests and the desplacement of the tribes people there. The action was done in solidarity with 30 malasian tribes people who were being held by their govenment. Read the archive of raisethefist. Every item them is about an injustice.
This is why, from 1930-2003 not ONE problem has been solved by student activists.
But so much has been changed by law breaking protest.
Suffrigetts - Womans right to vote, Ganhdi - independence for india. Swords into ploughshare brought the whole East Timor situation too the public eye. Earth First protest in the UK caused the govenment to re think roads program (some roads were halted). GM activists - changed the publics perception of GM food.
Yes direct action is not the only tool for the job. That is why are now prefer to work by spreading information see Plants For A Future.
Heres a few examples which spring to mind.
In my youth, I engaged in a few actions (locking myself to the houses of parliment and Malaysian airlines office) with 90% arrest chance. And yes I got arrested but not charged. Its a very different fealing being locked up for your beleif rather than for a crime or an injustice. Indeed its even empowering in a way.
This case is a little different. But I hope he will take it in the right way, with dignety. And realise that its part of the process of change. A year (six months with good behaviour) is not than long for your beleifs.
I ment to refer to statistical significance. i.e trying to gague if the numbers have meaning or are just noise.
Quoting insignificant numbers could get them seriously fried.
Of course it wouldn't. But they would also quote a confidence interval, which is not mentioned in this article.
I was trying to posit that there is a implict confidence interval sugested by the number of digits they quote. If they are statisticans worth their sort they will not quote 1.7% when the confidence interval is +/- 0.5%.
It may well be significant. Lets rewrite these interms of actually numbers sold. At a guess say 10,000,000 chips sold. Now 1.7% of 10 millions 170,000 and 1.8% is 180,000 would you say the difference between 170,000 and 180,000 is significant? As another post said thats a 6% increase enough to put a smile of Linus's face.
Percentages are not a golden standard, they only make sense when you know the sample size. Very large samples mean very small levels of significance.
Now we don't have much to go on from the article but there are a few hints as to why these numbers might make sense:
this gives some evidence that they may actually have access to factory door numbers of chips.A second reasons is the very high stability in the market. Last year intel was up 6%, this year down 0.3%. This is not a volitile market and small changes are big news. Consider the male female ratio, its flat as a pancake through the years. Even a .1% change is enough to get a lot of people worried.
A third bit of evidence is the number of decimal places used. Its common practice to only quote the significant digits, all numbers are quoted acurate to 0.1% sugesting that Mercuary know significance to this level. Giving Mercuary some credit, they are well respected market anaysists who have are far more demanding audience audience (wall street brokers) than the slashdot crew. Quoting insignificant numbers could get them seriously fried.
So there is little we can tell, we working on 2nd hand data where the information needed to decide on the significance has been ommited. On balance I'd trust Mercuary who have paid staticians on board more that a slashdotters.
These are really just niggling fealing, somehow it could be better.
One particular niggle is the text box input. I want to do a web forum and I want to make it really easy to input quite rich text. I'm like the user to create rich content with italics, paragraphs, links, embedded pictures and tables. But my uses are a non technical crowd so html markup will not do!
I want an interface as easy as Word, no I want an interface as easy as a computer games six year olds can play.
But I don't want Flash, not easilly indexable. I have big misgiving about XML, somehow the XML stuff, XLink, XPath, XCSS, Xtc seems too complicated. HTML had a nice simplicity to it, XML just seems to have lost the elegance.
I also want a spell check button on the slashdot post comment page!
Clash of (monatary) value systems are common throughout the real world. When two culture come together: american indians selling NY for ten dollars. I guess you could see the a clash between parent and child, where one pound is worth very different things to each.
The parent-child example is quite good as its a similar sort of structure to sysadmin-player or indeed God(s)-man. Sysadmins should really be taking the roles of parents in that they are providing a safe and exciting world for the child/player to exist in. I'm meaning safe in a very week sense in that children are not going to threaterend by thing from the outside world (kidnapped etc), and that players are not going to be ripped off by hackers.
The hacker is an interesting ingredient in the mix. Actually someone exsisting in both the different worlds and exploiting the direrences in exchage rates. A small theft in one world but a large theft in the other world. It might even be consider that they were obtained by a pact with the devil (another god like entity).
Posible solutions:
A final off topic thought, in paper D&D I always prefered being the DM, in those days 1 in every 10 players was a DM. Now its 1 in 10,000. I'd love to see online games where I could create my own worlds for others to play in.
Hang on, this program might crash. j is a pointer, but it has not been initalised. You should assume that its going to take a random value. Hence *j = 2; is setting some random memory location to 2. Bang!
I've no real problem with the pointer syntax. Yes pointers can fry your head, but thats not the syntax's fault, its just what you get with a language which lets you work close to the memory.
Enums with constant, non sequential values. A good feature, with useful applications. Consider this example from a maths parser.
or maybe an enum to handle ascii character input.For a job like it might be better to write my own parser, only a couple of hundred lines, than use expat. It would also have been easier than using the expat code. Heck the code for the interface to with expat is more that just writing the parser from scratch.
Take money for example, its well known that that only 10% of the money in supply is backed by hard cash. The rest is promisory notes. Thats what happened in the great depression people lost faith in virtual world that is the banks. They all wanted to see the hard cash which just was not there.
Your virtual house in the Sims is worth nothing. You real money in the bank may also be worth nothing, your just relying on the collective belief in the money supply. Its just lucky thats theres a bit more shared confidence in the money supply than in the game of everquest.
Going back to our Latin roots:....
A good site for the mreanings of Latin Names of plants is Dictionary of Botanical Epithets.
I've taken these names and incorperated them in the Plants For A Future Database of useful plants.
Minsky, being the "highly regarded" and "leader" in AI, wrote a paper that proved that these perceptrons could never learn more complicated patterns, and threw a bunch of math at the reader. So people stopped. After all, there was a mathematical proof that perceptrons weren't going anywhere. Research skidded to a halt for decades because of Minsky.
Of course, then someone developed the (gasp!) THREE layer perceptron/neural net and sure enough with the right formula it could learn much more complicated tasks.
Another take on the above. People got very excited about (single layer) perceptions. Minsky saved everyone a lot of effort by showing that they could not work. So people had to go away and think harder and came up with a way round the problem, multi layer perceptrions.
Sometimes fields need someone to come along and say. Everybody your wasting your time, this is a dead end avenue, jump out of the box, try some inovation.
> One of the authors, VS Ramachandran, gave this
> year's Reith lectures [bbc.co.uk] on the subject
> of Neuroscience. You can read or listen to the
> lectures on the Beeb's website. Well worth taking
> a look at. Some of it is absolutely fascinating.
I'd just like to add to this recomendation. (mod it up) One of the lectures is specifically about synathesia, and the other lectures cover a multitude of nuro phenonema. Also a great web site with real audio of all the lectures and interactive brain maps etc.
> No, they're extremely aggressive about hiding fraud. If you have a problem (such as being defrauded by a seller), PayPal will tell you "not our problem, deal with the seller," conveniently neglecting to tell you about the "dreaded C-word" (chargeback).
Well thats just the service PayPal offer, they make it easy for anyone to sell stuff over the internet. For example my small charity gets online subs through paypal.
To make it easly for people to sell they don't do all the checks that credit card companies do
(which would cost the seller $$$). I for one have never signed an agreement saying I promise to supply the good.
So you can't really expect any legal guarantee from paypal.
Its great that there is an service like paypal, just don't expect it to be more that it is.
Is -1 prime? If so -3 = -1 * 3.
I really felt the context of the subject was
missing in my School and Collage studies in Mathematics.
I was pretty un aware of which bit we were being taught were new ie. this centuary and which bits clasical mathematics. It took until my MSc before
I had an inkling of what the boundaries of the current understanding was.
Having a whole chapter of the book on Einstein
seems great. The one physisist people have heard of and he does not get a single mention up to Degree level.
I'm all for this sort of book, hope it manages
to grab attention without dumbing down. And hope
it does follow the pop-science sales formula
num_sales = 1/num_formulas
by eliminating the actual sums (etc) for waffle.
A very fine line.
Yet another slashdot ripping to shreds, (it does seem to be a good forum for that). Like attracts like, slashdot attracts anti MS, lame jokes, with the occasional flash of inspiration. The moderation system while good at filtering out the dross can help keep the party line.
I just had two years away from slashdot at it seems to have dropped in quality. Two years ago reading at 4/5 would give me the most interesting comments, normally about 10 which is enough to really cover most points in a discussion. Now your typical item is getting 30-40 in the 4/5 level. And I never get to the end of the list as I get board by the repeated discussion. Have a look at the number of comments in Do You Write Backdoors? thread. 37 at 5, 52 at 4, 86 at 3, 220 at 2, 368 at at 1 and 531 at 0. The ratio of these are
- 37/52 =
.7 5 vrs 4
- 52/86 =
.6 4 vrs 3
- 86/220 =
.4 3 vrs 2
- 220/368 =
.7 2 vrs 1
So 70% of posts with 4 get moderated up to 5. We see a big drops from 2 to 3 and small drops from 4 to 5.I'd like to see a sharper drop, so its only the really good comments which get to be 5. This is possibly achievable by reducing the number of moderation points around.
I'm with Joel on quoting. I almost never quote and do not enjoy the pickyness in usenet. This may be my personal preferance, I tend to prefer quick overviews to small details.
He's certainly right on how small design changes affect the type of discussion. I've done several small changes my own discussion board at Plants For A Future (which is really a means for adding corections to pages rather than a true discussion board). Originally you had to go to a new page to add a comment, I wanted to encourage more posts and also to make it easier for people to add links to other sites with related info. So put the reply box right there on the page and add a box so people can easily add a link without having to know about all that <a href stuff. Sure enough number of links went up.
Just thinking of my dream discussion board software. All these small changes could be easily configurable so that you create the kind of discussion you want.
Now I'm going to go away and remove that followup link from my board. The feature never worked well anyway.
ttfn Rich
Yet another slashdot ripping to shreds, (it does seem to be a good forum for that). Like attracts like, slashdot attracts anti MS, lame jokes, with the occasional flash of inspiration. The moderation system while good at filtering out the dross can help keep the party line. I just had two years away from slashdot at it seems to have dropped in quality. Two years ago reading at 4/5 would give me the most interesting comments, normally about 10 which is enough to really cover most points in a discussion. Now your typical item is getting 30-40 in the 4/5 level. And I never get to the end of the list as I get board by the repeated discussion. Have a look at the number of comments in Do You Write Backdoors? thread. 37 at 5, 52 at 4, 86 at 3, 220 at 2, 368 at at 1 and 531 at 0. The ratio of these are 37/52 = .7
52/86 = .6
86/220 = .4
220/368 = .7
So 70% of posts with 4 get moderated up to 5.
We see a big drops from 2 to 3 and small drops from 4 to 5.
I'd like to see a sharper drop, so its only
the really good comments which get to be 5. This is possibly achievable by reducing the
number of moderation points around.
I'm with Joel on quoting. I almost never quote
and do not enjoy the pickyness in usenet.
This may be my personal preferance, I tend to
prefer quick overviews to small details.
He's certainly right on how small design changes
affect the type of discussion. I've done
several small changes my own
discussion board at
Plants For A Future
(which is really a means for adding corections
to pages rather than a true discussion board).
Originally you had to go to a new page to add
a comment, I wanted to encourage more posts
and also to make it easier for people to add
links to other sites with related info.
So put the reply box right there on the page
and add a box so people can easily add a link
without having to know about all that <a href
stuff. Sure enough number of links went up.
Just thinking of my dream discussion board software. All these small changes could be
easily configurable so that you create the
kind of discussion you want.
Now I'm going to go away and remove that
followup link from my board. The feature
never worked well anyway.
ttfn Rich
I've done a lot of work in 3D pure mathematical graphics (drawing algebraic surfaces etc), and JavaView and Geomview are nice platforms for viewing 3D data.