I think one of the biggest reasons people don't maintain their computers as well as their cars is that it's required so much more frequently. I wrote a paper a few months ago on antivirus technology, and a constant theme in my research was that of how to stop viruses without needing updates because people just didn't apply the updates. One reason that was repeatedly cited was that the updates need to be applied so often.
My antivirus updates daily (automagically, of course), but people get really tired of having to actually try to maintain something every single day. In the case of a car - which I agree is a good analogy - you change the oil every three months and put gas in once a week (or so). There is nothing daily about "routine maintenance" on a car, but computers are different...
You have a lot of good points.:) But I think one thing people often overlook is that computers are very different from anything we've ever seen in the world, in terms of time. "Computer-time" is much faster than "Everything-else-time" - a computer's year is probably a car's 10 years. They evolve faster and require more attention (or at least more regular attention) than pretty much anything out there, except babies.:P I suspect that a big problem in educating people about computers is just that: they're not used to anything that changes so rapidly.
Exactly. Whether your agree or disagree, my opinion is that if I own a restaurant and I don't want to serve black customers, then I ought not have to. In my personal case, if I owned a restaurant I'd serve anybody that walked in the door because I don't see how race factors into anything beyond skin color. But my point is, that should be my choice.
A private business is just that - private. Whom it chooses to serve is not the business of the government. Or at least, should not be. If you believe the government has the power to mandate businesses cater to everyone, then you must also believe that the government can tell me that I can't discriminate personally - I must treat serial killers and rapists just as I would my best friends. Well you can forget that. I'd rather whack myself in the face with a hammer than treat a rapist as a friend.
My point is, private business is overregulated. It's got nothing to do with racism, sexism, or any other -ism. I just believe that discrimination by private entities is perfectly legal and no business of the government. If the discrimination is really bad, the consumers will take care of it - unless the discrimination works in favor of a small niche, in which case that niche will see to its survival. Also, do NOT bash Mississippi as some kind of backward racist society. Bring your ass down here and live a few years. In my experience in various parts of the state, there is no kind of racial tension or hatred anywhere - I've spent time in the smallest of small cities, our largest, our academic capital, our agricultural heart, the coast, and pretty much every type of city in between. If you honestly think Mississippi is filled with black-hating white people, you've got another thing coming.
When I was working as a webmaster at Mississippi State University (the site I made: http://www.agecon.msstate.edu), I followed federal, state, and university guidelines for web page design, which included using descriptive ALT tags and banned the use of graphics-only links. Like the response above me said, it's a pain sometimes, but ultimately it's worth it if you make life easier for someone else.
Granted, this isn't anything to do with garbled text for registration things, but I just wanted to chime in with my personal experience with the ALT tag issue. The federal government and most state governments have regulations about websites to make them handicap-accessible (I think there are even some regulations in the Americans With Disabilities Act).
My main rant is this: private industry can discriminate. I don't care who they are, any private company can (or should be able to) intentionally single out individual groups and refuse service to them if they want to. They shouldn't, but they certainly have that right. Why not? I mean, I don't recall ever hearing, "Private industry by the people, for the people, of the people." It's more like, "Private industry by the rich person, for the rich person, of the rich person." And that's alright, isn't it? He never agreed to serve humanity. What he does with his company is his business.
Yep, the Army is a business, but I bet Dell would classify it as "Government" just like they do the local universities, and give them that package (which also includes the option to ship without an OS, if I'm not mistaken). Still, the Army is a business. We're constantly reminded that we have to make our customers happy (and in my particular branch of things, the customers are the people who would die if the dam broke;)).
Dell will and does sell computers without an OS to businesses. I wanted my laptop without an OS, but they wouldn't do it unless I was a business and buying lots of them.
I'm going to patent the rental process by which users rent a DVD at no charge but must return it within 48 hours from the time they placed their order or face a $3.99 per day late fee. All orders will be shipped out via Pony Express from a warehouse in central Africa. All shipments leaving the continent will go by sail-less raft.
Slingshots never worked out very well for the Coyote. Doesn't anyone pay attention to the great value of cartoons? Sheesh... how many boulders must fall on the heads of coyotes before someone gets it?
On the other hand, rockets never worked for the Coyote either... maybe NASA is on to something! Is it possible... could cartoons be... unrealistic? Noooooo!
Aye, very scary indeed. I agree with you on the point that a lot of people don't pay enough attention when driving, and this will certainly give them another point of detachment. Regardless of what they call it, I don't really want help braking. I have a style of braking that I rather like - short. I don't want my car to decide that I'm waiting too long to brake. That's my business. heheh
On another note, I really don't stop at stop signs.;) I execute what cops like to ticket as "rolling stops" which are not, in fact, stops at all. But as my driver's ed teacher told us, "If you open the door and touch the road and it doesn't hurt, you're as good as stopped. You don't have to really stop." (Cops everywhere disagree!);)
Goody! Now I don't have to be bothered taking my foot off the gas pedal and putting it on that pesky brake pedal, unless of course I need to come to a complete stop! But who does that? Stop signs might as well says "slow down a little and look both ways." If they park a car next to it, this system will handle it for you! Yay!
Everyone seems so concerned about structure and habits and blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. What about the very most basic constructs that practically every single programming language ever (are there exceptions? I don't know) have had? Variables! IF-THEN statements! Loops!
QBasic is a great language for learning the absolute most basic ideas of programming. That's what most people have trouble grasping at first, I think, not whitespace conventions, semicolons, or character case-dependency. I watched a lot of people in my programming classes flouder with C++ pointers because they weren't really clear on variables (I know, that seems pretty sad). I saw a lot of people have trouble with the C++ FOR loop (the only new thing I learned was the syntax, having used the heck out of "for i = 1 to 100 step 2" in QBasic).
Programming form doesn't matter nearly so much as basic concepts, and I think everyone here suggesting QBasic makes a good first language is absolutely right: it has all the fundamentals of programming, and it's simple. The perfect combination for a beginner's tool.
Nevermind Gandalf at Helm's Deep; what were the elves doing there? So far, that's the only aspect of either of the movies that really bothered me - everything else was understandable, but that... whatever happened to the "Last Alliance of Men and Elves"?:P
The goal would shift away from making a profit towards benefitting humanity as a whole. You have to keep in mind that a device like that would completely and totally eradicate the need for money. If everyone has access to everything that has ever been created, then nobody needs money to buy anything. Share and share alike.
Why would such a device be suppressed? There's really no reason whatsoever. The argument that industries would cease to exist doesn't really matter at all, because the people who work those jobs would be better off unemployed if they had such a device. Even the fat cats would see a marked improvement in their lifestyles.
It's not about wanting a new language. I just meant consider the possibility that this is the future of written communication. If you seriously believe that schools are going to be able to stop it, I've got news for you. Do you want to know what will stop it?
The "real world." Write "i can do whatevr u want me 2 & work well w/ every1" on your resume and see how fast you don't get hired. But that's still beside the point. The point was simply to consider the possibility that someday AIM-speak may be as acceptable as real English as a written language. I did not ask whether or not that would be a good thing - personally, I think it would be terrible - but just threw it out as something to think about.
Don't bash me for raising an interesting question. You think it's a bad idea, fine. So do I. Get off my case. You missed the train entirely on this one.
All well and good. Sampling at 44.1kHz gives you all the frequency components from 0 up to 22.05kHz. Nyquist theory. In a nutshell, you sample at two times the highest frequency you want. If you're smart you'd also run it through a low-pass prefilter before sampling, otherwise you wind up with crossover (high frequencies overlapping with lower ones in the sampled signal, thereby either increasing an existing frequency component or creating a whole new one). Try recording a 30kHz hum sampled at 44.1kHz with no prefilter and see if you don't wind up with a 14.1kHz hum.
I'm just curious if anyone has considered this the foundations of some new language. I mean, AIM-speak (or "l337"-speak as I've often seen it referred to in other places, though it isn't necessarily) is so widely used at this point and it's just a variation on English though, I'll grant, a rather huge variation. But how many langauges in common use today were not derived at least partially from another language? My guess is very few. The two most widely used, English and Spanish, come primarily from Latin (yes, English too, even though a lot of scholars are hell-bent on saying it's a Germanic language - but something like 70% of the English language comes directly from Latin).
My point is, AIM-speakers may be mutilating the written English langauge, but they could very well be perfecting a new written language at the same time. We could very well be witnessing the beginnings of a whole new era in the course of human history. The use of AIM-speak is not the only indicator of that, and it would be difficult to argue that the whole of humanity is not on the brink of massive change. Personally, I think the changes are made obvious by the fight of government and business to cope with it.
Hooray for socialism... FDR wanted "hand up, not a hand out." Well that idea got screwed, and now for some reason the whole country has this idea that we're supposed to be socialistic. BAAAAH!
Alright, I'm all for providing high-speed 'net access to everyone in the whole big country, and the government has to be involved to make that happen because, without poking, industry will never provide service to rural areas. But... wasn't the Agricultural Adjustment Act (1932) struck down (1936) for taxing one group for the benefit of another? Hello? What's the difference?
Prod one group without gouging another's eyes out... sheesh.
Because rural areas grow their own potatoes and shoot their own cows. S'why urban areas pay more for fresh food than rural areas.:P If anything, the government should be subsidizing fresh food to urban areas.;)
I write my own code because, generally, I'm the one left maintaining it. If some minor requirement changes, it's much easier to open up the code and find the necessary changes in code I wrote (since, theoretically, I understand it better than anyone else) than to wade through someone else's code. In the case of libraries, I can make my one little change and be done rather than have to crack open the library, or worse find a replacement and rewrite whole blocks of code to use the new library.
Is this similar to the concept of sandboxing, in which a process is executed in a VM where it is isolated from the rest of the system while the OS outside watches to make sure nothing bad happens?
I've read of this as a potential antivirus solution, but it sounds like a bit much overhead to me. It's still at least reasonably quick to do pattern scanning. Anyway, off topic... heheh:)
Well, the big advantage of C# for our particular project is that it makes web services really easy to deploy, and since web services are cross-platform, the language doesn't really matter. In this particular case, it's more of a preference call than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Google must be slipping. I can't find a single article about the United States selling commercial airliners to bin laden!
I think one of the biggest reasons people don't maintain their computers as well as their cars is that it's required so much more frequently. I wrote a paper a few months ago on antivirus technology, and a constant theme in my research was that of how to stop viruses without needing updates because people just didn't apply the updates. One reason that was repeatedly cited was that the updates need to be applied so often.
:) But I think one thing people often overlook is that computers are very different from anything we've ever seen in the world, in terms of time. "Computer-time" is much faster than "Everything-else-time" - a computer's year is probably a car's 10 years. They evolve faster and require more attention (or at least more regular attention) than pretty much anything out there, except babies. :P I suspect that a big problem in educating people about computers is just that: they're not used to anything that changes so rapidly.
:)
My antivirus updates daily (automagically, of course), but people get really tired of having to actually try to maintain something every single day. In the case of a car - which I agree is a good analogy - you change the oil every three months and put gas in once a week (or so). There is nothing daily about "routine maintenance" on a car, but computers are different...
You have a lot of good points.
Anyway, my two cents.
I'd never really considered monopolies, but they do have their own set of rules. Good point. :)
Exactly. Whether your agree or disagree, my opinion is that if I own a restaurant and I don't want to serve black customers, then I ought not have to. In my personal case, if I owned a restaurant I'd serve anybody that walked in the door because I don't see how race factors into anything beyond skin color. But my point is, that should be my choice.
A private business is just that - private. Whom it chooses to serve is not the business of the government. Or at least, should not be. If you believe the government has the power to mandate businesses cater to everyone, then you must also believe that the government can tell me that I can't discriminate personally - I must treat serial killers and rapists just as I would my best friends. Well you can forget that. I'd rather whack myself in the face with a hammer than treat a rapist as a friend.
My point is, private business is overregulated. It's got nothing to do with racism, sexism, or any other -ism. I just believe that discrimination by private entities is perfectly legal and no business of the government. If the discrimination is really bad, the consumers will take care of it - unless the discrimination works in favor of a small niche, in which case that niche will see to its survival. Also, do NOT bash Mississippi as some kind of backward racist society. Bring your ass down here and live a few years. In my experience in various parts of the state, there is no kind of racial tension or hatred anywhere - I've spent time in the smallest of small cities, our largest, our academic capital, our agricultural heart, the coast, and pretty much every type of city in between. If you honestly think Mississippi is filled with black-hating white people, you've got another thing coming.
When I was working as a webmaster at Mississippi State University (the site I made: http://www.agecon.msstate.edu), I followed federal, state, and university guidelines for web page design, which included using descriptive ALT tags and banned the use of graphics-only links. Like the response above me said, it's a pain sometimes, but ultimately it's worth it if you make life easier for someone else.
Granted, this isn't anything to do with garbled text for registration things, but I just wanted to chime in with my personal experience with the ALT tag issue. The federal government and most state governments have regulations about websites to make them handicap-accessible (I think there are even some regulations in the Americans With Disabilities Act).
My main rant is this: private industry can discriminate. I don't care who they are, any private company can (or should be able to) intentionally single out individual groups and refuse service to them if they want to. They shouldn't, but they certainly have that right. Why not? I mean, I don't recall ever hearing, "Private industry by the people, for the people, of the people." It's more like, "Private industry by the rich person, for the rich person, of the rich person." And that's alright, isn't it? He never agreed to serve humanity. What he does with his company is his business.
Lawsuits suck. I'm going to sue lawyers.
Yep, the Army is a business, but I bet Dell would classify it as "Government" just like they do the local universities, and give them that package (which also includes the option to ship without an OS, if I'm not mistaken). Still, the Army is a business. We're constantly reminded that we have to make our customers happy (and in my particular branch of things, the customers are the people who would die if the dam broke ;)).
Dell will and does sell computers without an OS to businesses. I wanted my laptop without an OS, but they wouldn't do it unless I was a business and buying lots of them.
I'm going to patent the rental process by which users rent a DVD at no charge but must return it within 48 hours from the time they placed their order or face a $3.99 per day late fee. All orders will be shipped out via Pony Express from a warehouse in central Africa. All shipments leaving the continent will go by sail-less raft.
I think it could make money!
Except for the bit where Goliath was rather large and not an animal? ;)
Slingshots never worked out very well for the Coyote. Doesn't anyone pay attention to the great value of cartoons? Sheesh... how many boulders must fall on the heads of coyotes before someone gets it?
On the other hand, rockets never worked for the Coyote either... maybe NASA is on to something! Is it possible... could cartoons be... unrealistic? Noooooo!
Aye, very scary indeed. I agree with you on the point that a lot of people don't pay enough attention when driving, and this will certainly give them another point of detachment. Regardless of what they call it, I don't really want help braking. I have a style of braking that I rather like - short. I don't want my car to decide that I'm waiting too long to brake. That's my business. heheh
;) I execute what cops like to ticket as "rolling stops" which are not, in fact, stops at all. But as my driver's ed teacher told us, "If you open the door and touch the road and it doesn't hurt, you're as good as stopped. You don't have to really stop." (Cops everywhere disagree!) ;)
On another note, I really don't stop at stop signs.
Goody! Now I don't have to be bothered taking my foot off the gas pedal and putting it on that pesky brake pedal, unless of course I need to come to a complete stop! But who does that? Stop signs might as well says "slow down a little and look both ways." If they park a car next to it, this system will handle it for you! Yay!
I'll back you up on this. :)
Everyone seems so concerned about structure and habits and blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. What about the very most basic constructs that practically every single programming language ever (are there exceptions? I don't know) have had? Variables! IF-THEN statements! Loops!
QBasic is a great language for learning the absolute most basic ideas of programming. That's what most people have trouble grasping at first, I think, not whitespace conventions, semicolons, or character case-dependency. I watched a lot of people in my programming classes flouder with C++ pointers because they weren't really clear on variables (I know, that seems pretty sad). I saw a lot of people have trouble with the C++ FOR loop (the only new thing I learned was the syntax, having used the heck out of "for i = 1 to 100 step 2" in QBasic).
Programming form doesn't matter nearly so much as basic concepts, and I think everyone here suggesting QBasic makes a good first language is absolutely right: it has all the fundamentals of programming, and it's simple. The perfect combination for a beginner's tool.
Nevermind Gandalf at Helm's Deep; what were the elves doing there? So far, that's the only aspect of either of the movies that really bothered me - everything else was understandable, but that... whatever happened to the "Last Alliance of Men and Elves"? :P
The goal would shift away from making a profit towards benefitting humanity as a whole. You have to keep in mind that a device like that would completely and totally eradicate the need for money. If everyone has access to everything that has ever been created, then nobody needs money to buy anything. Share and share alike.
Why would such a device be suppressed? There's really no reason whatsoever. The argument that industries would cease to exist doesn't really matter at all, because the people who work those jobs would be better off unemployed if they had such a device. Even the fat cats would see a marked improvement in their lifestyles.
It's not about wanting a new language. I just meant consider the possibility that this is the future of written communication. If you seriously believe that schools are going to be able to stop it, I've got news for you. Do you want to know what will stop it?
The "real world." Write "i can do whatevr u want me 2 & work well w/ every1" on your resume and see how fast you don't get hired. But that's still beside the point. The point was simply to consider the possibility that someday AIM-speak may be as acceptable as real English as a written language. I did not ask whether or not that would be a good thing - personally, I think it would be terrible - but just threw it out as something to think about.
Don't bash me for raising an interesting question. You think it's a bad idea, fine. So do I. Get off my case. You missed the train entirely on this one.
All well and good. Sampling at 44.1kHz gives you all the frequency components from 0 up to 22.05kHz. Nyquist theory. In a nutshell, you sample at two times the highest frequency you want. If you're smart you'd also run it through a low-pass prefilter before sampling, otherwise you wind up with crossover (high frequencies overlapping with lower ones in the sampled signal, thereby either increasing an existing frequency component or creating a whole new one). Try recording a 30kHz hum sampled at 44.1kHz with no prefilter and see if you don't wind up with a 14.1kHz hum.
I'm just curious if anyone has considered this the foundations of some new language. I mean, AIM-speak (or "l337"-speak as I've often seen it referred to in other places, though it isn't necessarily) is so widely used at this point and it's just a variation on English though, I'll grant, a rather huge variation. But how many langauges in common use today were not derived at least partially from another language? My guess is very few. The two most widely used, English and Spanish, come primarily from Latin (yes, English too, even though a lot of scholars are hell-bent on saying it's a Germanic language - but something like 70% of the English language comes directly from Latin).
:)
My point is, AIM-speakers may be mutilating the written English langauge, but they could very well be perfecting a new written language at the same time. We could very well be witnessing the beginnings of a whole new era in the course of human history. The use of AIM-speak is not the only indicator of that, and it would be difficult to argue that the whole of humanity is not on the brink of massive change. Personally, I think the changes are made obvious by the fight of government and business to cope with it.
Anyway... just a thought.
Hooray for socialism... FDR wanted "hand up, not a hand out." Well that idea got screwed, and now for some reason the whole country has this idea that we're supposed to be socialistic. BAAAAH!
Me for President!
Alright, I'm all for providing high-speed 'net access to everyone in the whole big country, and the government has to be involved to make that happen because, without poking, industry will never provide service to rural areas. But... wasn't the Agricultural Adjustment Act (1932) struck down (1936) for taxing one group for the benefit of another? Hello? What's the difference?
Prod one group without gouging another's eyes out... sheesh.
Because rural areas grow their own potatoes and shoot their own cows. S'why urban areas pay more for fresh food than rural areas. :P If anything, the government should be subsidizing fresh food to urban areas. ;)
I write my own code because, generally, I'm the one left maintaining it. If some minor requirement changes, it's much easier to open up the code and find the necessary changes in code I wrote (since, theoretically, I understand it better than anyone else) than to wade through someone else's code. In the case of libraries, I can make my one little change and be done rather than have to crack open the library, or worse find a replacement and rewrite whole blocks of code to use the new library.
;)
At least, that's what it's about to me.
Is this similar to the concept of sandboxing, in which a process is executed in a VM where it is isolated from the rest of the system while the OS outside watches to make sure nothing bad happens?
:)
I've read of this as a potential antivirus solution, but it sounds like a bit much overhead to me. It's still at least reasonably quick to do pattern scanning. Anyway, off topic... heheh
Well, the big advantage of C# for our particular project is that it makes web services really easy to deploy, and since web services are cross-platform, the language doesn't really matter. In this particular case, it's more of a preference call than anything else.
Don't forget Mississippi in that list. ;)