Funny, I live in Minnesota, and I do bike to work year round. More in the summer, but sometimes in the winter. It's not that bad on a nice brisk 25-degree day if the roads are clear, the wind low, and you have the right clothes (and attitude).
Thankfully, I've never seen anyone having cybersex on Slashdot.
Collaborative research: MovieLens and WikiLens
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'll also throw out a couple of sites our research lab runs. MovieLens is a long-running personalized movie recommender that has a reasonably active, large userbase and that has generated a lot of research in collaborative filtering and HCI. More specific to the movies-and-wiki theme, we've got a fairly new site WikiLens that combines community addition of content (based on PhpWiki) with ratings and recommendations. Neither is a replacement for IMDb but many people have found MovieLens to be darn useful and we're hoping WikiLens will take off as well.
Low tech solutions like electrical tape are fine, but the original poster is looking for something a bit more sophisticated. Originally appearing in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and reprinted here, the DarkBulb may be just the ticket.
An interesting way to practice with a debugger would be to create a set of "known bad" programs with hints and solutions available. This'd be a nice little open source resource to develop that, say, teachers could use to help students figure out how to debug and do maintenance type programming.
Re:Thousands per year
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I dunno, if I were writing a program like this, I'd insert mail addresses I monitor into the stream of addresses I sent out. If I send one of those addresses to you, and I don't get my mail back, no soup for you.
And then, of course, the company gets robbed/hurt/taken away to the evil lawyer of the super-victim. Although based on the lack of lawsuit activity from people harmed by software installs that leave vulnerable services/"features" on by default, maybe the phone companies or software providers wouldn't be liable after all.
Imagine a world where we're all broadcasting identity. Say we've got RFID-enabled nametags at the wedding. Now picture a camera that has a (preferably directional) RFID reader. Suddenly all your photos have the names of all the subjects automagically added as metadata. Scary in some contexts, useful in others (like most technologies, I suppose).
About being told dumb things about computers by adults: I had one of the old Radio Shack color computers, circa 1984. I went down to the local Radio Shack -- not one of the mall stores, this was the Columbus (OH) Computer Center. They told me "there's no such thing as an assembly language for those computers". Argh! I might have become a computer wizard instead of a failed music teacher turned perpetual grad student.
I know there's value in asking people about their past experiences with similar problems, but all too often what you get is people's opinions about your problem, experience-based or not.
Another approach would be to mock up a couple of interfaces and get some honest-to-god users. Take them all on a field trip outside and test the various color combinations.
Finally, as Drakin suggested, consider providing a small range of reasonable color choices, make the default the one that tested the best overall, and let each user pick the colors they want.
I worked as a low-level manager at McDonald's back in the day. They had a spiffy DOS-based computer system for working with cash and employee records.
Well, one night, I'm bored, and I notice there's a handy little feature (don't remember exactly what) from hitting Ctrl-A. So I start going through the alphabet... get to Ctrl-N, and I'm at a dos prompt. It's 11pm, no one's around, and none of the other managers would know what the hell to do anyways. Can't get anyone at corporate.
"DIR" reveals a list of some 100.EXE files. I start scanning for one, find one that sounds like it might start the system, run it. Yeah, it started the system. From scratch. Everything, and I mean everything, was gone -- employee records, store sales history, boom. No backups. A very sad night.
Ideas can be inspiring to others. Churning
ideas often leads to better ideas. Sharing
ideas can get your systems built when you
don't have time yourself. Not everything good
is a built tool:
To every thing, code, code, code...
There is a season, code, code, code...
And a time for every system to develop.
A time to think, a time to build,
A time to talk, a time to choose
A time to share all our thoughts,
A time to learn; not to do this is to lose...
About Who Wants to Be a Millionaire... we wrote a paper at one point about using Google to build an automated player for it. One of our co-authors discovered that Russian audiences screw up the audience poll on purpose (see http://laughingplace.com/News-ID502690.asp for a claim). Perhaps the Germans do it too.
What is this "basic disaster service" of which the article speaks? TV should stay up during a disaster? As for the community-maintained website of how things are, I don't remember that working so well in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there was a lot of bogus "information" on victim lists that were hastily compiled by anyone. There's an opportunity for designing reliable self-maintaining community software here (arguably, Slashdot is an example) but just throwing something out there is probably not good.
"This company will likely be purchased by MS shortly?" Unlikely -- Sandia Nat'l Labs is a government institution. (Insert lame joke about MS purchasing the Justice Department already.)
Three responses. 1) It's at least possible that someone will come up with a method that models a user's behavior and needs that is better at predicting when and how to help than humans are. 2) Humans are busy, and you probably don't have one trying to learn your peculiarities 24 hours a day. A computer could. 3) Is it useful when that imperfect human sitting next to you offers help that is sometimes on target? If so, why wouldn't a computer that offers help that is sometimes on target also be useful? Or do we demand not just artificial intelligence but artifical omniscience?
Check out artificialmarkets.com for some published research on using markets to make predictions. One concrete system, The Foresight Exchange lets you play this game with the possibility of scientific discoveries -- and claims that its futures values roughly correlate with the probability of the events happening. Of course, this is not for real money, but it's an interesting idea.
I'll bite. Alas, what often happens in situations like this is that you get Bad + Bad: people use the wrong tool for the wrong job. It's sad, because the idea that for a given job there are more and less appropriate languages is practically a cultural meme among programmers -- but that idea is regularly ignored in practice.
Exactly 17%, hm? Not 19.5, or 12, but a 17 percent improvement in musical performance?
Their measuring scale, according to the article:
"the equivalent of one grade". At least that
part is in terms the people IMing in the back
of the concert hall to each other will understand, but the 17% part is just ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I live in Minnesota, and I do bike to work year round. More in the summer, but sometimes in the winter. It's not that bad on a nice brisk 25-degree day if the roads are clear, the wind low, and you have the right clothes (and attitude).
The ACM programming contest has been around for a while although not so much at strip clubs.
Thankfully, I've never seen anyone having cybersex on Slashdot.
I'll also throw out a couple of sites our research lab runs. MovieLens is a long-running personalized movie recommender that has a reasonably active, large userbase and that has generated a lot of research in collaborative filtering and HCI. More specific to the movies-and-wiki theme, we've got a fairly new site WikiLens that combines community addition of content (based on PhpWiki) with ratings and recommendations. Neither is a replacement for IMDb but many people have found MovieLens to be darn useful and we're hoping WikiLens will take off as well.
4. A mouse.
Low tech solutions like electrical tape are fine, but the original poster is looking for something a bit more sophisticated. Originally appearing in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and reprinted here, the DarkBulb may be just the ticket.
An interesting way to practice with a debugger would be to create a set of "known bad" programs with hints and solutions available. This'd be a nice little open source resource to develop that, say, teachers could use to help students figure out how to debug and do maintenance type programming.
I dunno, if I were writing a program like this, I'd insert mail addresses I monitor into the stream of addresses I sent out. If I send one of those addresses to you, and I don't get my mail back, no soup for you.
And then, of course, the company gets robbed/hurt/taken away to the evil lawyer of the super-victim. Although based on the lack of lawsuit activity from people harmed by software installs that leave vulnerable services/"features" on by default, maybe the phone companies or software providers wouldn't be liable after all.
Imagine a world where we're all broadcasting identity. Say we've got RFID-enabled nametags at the wedding. Now picture a camera that has a (preferably directional) RFID reader. Suddenly all your photos have the names of all the subjects automagically added as metadata. Scary in some contexts, useful in others (like most technologies, I suppose).
About being told dumb things about computers by adults: I had one of the old Radio Shack color computers, circa 1984. I went down to the local Radio Shack -- not one of the mall stores, this was the Columbus (OH) Computer Center. They told me "there's no such thing as an assembly language for those computers". Argh! I might have become a computer wizard instead of a failed music teacher turned perpetual grad student.
I know there's value in asking people about their past experiences with similar problems, but all too often what you get is people's opinions about your problem, experience-based or not. Another approach would be to mock up a couple of interfaces and get some honest-to-god users. Take them all on a field trip outside and test the various color combinations. Finally, as Drakin suggested, consider providing a small range of reasonable color choices, make the default the one that tested the best overall, and let each user pick the colors they want.
Conventions matter as far as clean code, even at the level of case choices. Language choice doesn't help here, does it?
Must disagree. I can't think of a language that enforces clean code. Can anyone?
Well, one night, I'm bored, and I notice there's a handy little feature (don't remember exactly what) from hitting Ctrl-A. So I start going through the alphabet... get to Ctrl-N, and I'm at a dos prompt. It's 11pm, no one's around, and none of the other managers would know what the hell to do anyways. Can't get anyone at corporate.
"DIR" reveals a list of some 100 .EXE files. I start scanning for one, find one that sounds like it might start the system, run it. Yeah, it started the system. From scratch. Everything, and I mean everything, was gone -- employee records, store sales history, boom. No backups. A very sad night.
Ideas can be inspiring to others. Churning ideas often leads to better ideas. Sharing ideas can get your systems built when you don't have time yourself. Not everything good is a built tool: To every thing, code, code, code... There is a season, code, code, code... And a time for every system to develop. A time to think, a time to build, A time to talk, a time to choose A time to share all our thoughts, A time to learn; not to do this is to lose...
About Who Wants to Be a Millionaire... we wrote a paper at one point about using Google to build an automated player for it. One of our co-authors discovered that Russian audiences screw up the audience poll on purpose (see http://laughingplace.com/News-ID502690.asp for a claim). Perhaps the Germans do it too.
What is this "basic disaster service" of which the article speaks? TV should stay up during a disaster? As for the community-maintained website of how things are, I don't remember that working so well in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there was a lot of bogus "information" on victim lists that were hastily compiled by anyone. There's an opportunity for designing reliable self-maintaining community software here (arguably, Slashdot is an example) but just throwing something out there is probably not good.
"This company will likely be purchased by MS shortly?" Unlikely -- Sandia Nat'l Labs is a government institution. (Insert lame joke about MS purchasing the Justice Department already.)
Three responses. 1) It's at least possible that someone will come up with a method that models a user's behavior and needs that is better at predicting when and how to help than humans are. 2) Humans are busy, and you probably don't have one trying to learn your peculiarities 24 hours a day. A computer could. 3) Is it useful when that imperfect human sitting next to you offers help that is sometimes on target? If so, why wouldn't a computer that offers help that is sometimes on target also be useful? Or do we demand not just artificial intelligence but artifical omniscience?
The real culprit? You mean, like OJ?
Check out artificialmarkets.com for some published research on using markets to make predictions. One concrete system, The Foresight Exchange lets you play this game with the possibility of scientific discoveries -- and claims that its futures values roughly correlate with the probability of the events happening. Of course, this is not for real money, but it's an interesting idea.
I'll bite. Alas, what often happens in situations like this is that you get Bad + Bad: people use the wrong tool for the wrong job. It's sad, because the idea that for a given job there are more and less appropriate languages is practically a cultural meme among programmers -- but that idea is regularly ignored in practice.
Exactly 17%, hm? Not 19.5, or 12, but a 17 percent improvement in musical performance? Their measuring scale, according to the article: "the equivalent of one grade". At least that part is in terms the people IMing in the back of the concert hall to each other will understand, but the 17% part is just ridiculous.
No, but it does handle julian calendars: http://www.pauahtun.org/julian_period.html