I don't see any reason by Red Cross donations were being routed through someone's PayPal account. Well, sorry, I do see one: so that someone, instead of just posting a link to the Red Cross donation page, could instead garner all the credit for "organizing" a relief fund.
It's a foolish waste of money, of course, since Pay Pal charges for each transaction (7% or so?), so everyone is making additional donations to the Pay Pal overlords. And I assume that at the end the guy running this "Something Awful" self-promotion would just make a collected donation to the Red Cross on his own credit card, meaning credit charges are paid twice.
Not to mention further of course that people who donated through Pay Pal probably won't be able to claim it as an IRS deduction, but whoever ran the promotion in the first place might have a shot himself.
All foolish, self-promotional and highly irregular.
In the Wired article (I know this isn't about spam, but what the hell):
"Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content."
Uh, no, not as far as I can tell. "Frozen in time," perhaps, after someone decided to stop blogging, but I used blogger for six months and never had a single hitch. Apparently, googling "blogger sucks" gives you thousands of sites bitching about google's service.
Sometimes there are outages, when you can't get in to alter a post or something similar, but those were few and far between (at least they happened less than half a dozen times in six months, and it only lasted a few hours.)
I guess this is a sign about how popular blogger is. I mean, then only way to balance my experience (zero fatal errors in six months) with thousands of complaints is to assume that there are a HELL of a lot of bloggers out there.
Oh, and to those bitching in general about blogs: please shut up. Yes, there are annoying vanity blogs, but blogger -- and the blogging concept -- has been a godsend to specialists, as well as to political organizing.
I use Mellel, which is not open source (I don't think), but is shareware. It is pretty sleek looking, runs fast, and I haven't had a problem with it. Customer support is great.
It seems like the main users of Mellel are people needing multilingual support, especially for things like Hebrew (reading the other way) and Japanese, Arabic, etc. It also integrates with some of the bibliography software out there. And I'm pretty damn sure it reads in.doc files.
I tried, multiple times, to go electronic with my notebooks (I'm a grad student in astronomy.) It never panned out, mainly because paper and pen are just way more convenient and have that "scribble" factor: you can get things down without being quite sure what you're trying to say. Later, you can write things up in "proper" form (which for me is LaTeX.)
In my experience, having an additional layer between brain and note (the syntax of an electronic journal program, whether it's HTML or not) shorts out this process. (I'm reminded of the time I tried to use a tape recorder to record notes: I would just come up speechless.) Oh, and having your own clever electronic notetaking system really gets in the way when you meet your advisor and he wants to scribble herself.
But, if you don't want the benefit of my experience, here are the things I tried:
LaTeX. Easy, good looking output with simple math syntax (actually, I do something use LaTeX when I'm writing out complicated maths, instead of doing it by hand. Makes it easier to edit mistakes in a long formula.) My old college roommate does EVERYTHING in LaTeX (he's a mathematician now) -- all his notes, everything. He is also a little weird.
NoteTaker. Cute "metaphors" that seem to get in the way of actually doing anything.
omnigraffle. I thought I would use this to diagram various systems I was looking at. No go, too complicated to figure out.
I'm about to write some web-based software in Python -- including the need for "user" accounts, etc. etc..
I'd like to have a lot of flexibility, but also not to have some massive beast (I've already written a prototype in Perl.) Why should I learn all this RoR stuff instead? Isn't it just another way to do cgi?
I mean, I'm no guru here. Help me out, guys.
I was a contributor to issue one &...
on
Makers of MAKE
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· Score: 1
I have to say when I saw the final product, I was rather disappointed. There was really a huge amount of filler ("how to blog! here is how to get your blog... sign on to a free blog service... don't forget passwords are case sensitive...") and what was interesting was duplicated on the web -- where the material belongs in the first place, IMO.
Make could be really good if they went beyond just replicating the kind of stuff that appears -- for free -- on the web. So far, however, they just seem to be paying (well, I might add!) hobbyists for the rights to reprint their webpages.
For example, they have a long article on how to build a kite camera to do ariel photography. Pretty neat -- but I think anybody who wanted to do that would be far better served by going onto the web and googling (or going to rec.kites.) Then you can compare different rigs, get a diversity of opinions, learn your options -- and, in the end, contribute your own experiences -- all for, well, free.
Oh the memories! Before the curriculum switched to C.
Actually rather annoying. I'm a scientist now, so I will never get a good programming education -- high school's bubble sorts and linked lists are all I have. But everything in the sciences is done using C, and I don't have the time to sit down properly and grok syntax and style the C way.
Including all those C subtleties when dealing with two dimensional arrays. So I write C as if it's Pascal, with none of that pointery elegance.
(Of course, the old school here uses FORTRAN, which we have to learn to read, but FORTRAN is really just the Apple IIe BASIC with procedures and local variables instead of GOSUB. [ducks huge flamewar (?)])
First off, it is misleading to call this a "warning": the letter was, according to the site admin "pretty much 'cease and desist' or we will come after you." That's a threat.
Wonderful to know how easy it is for lawyers to make up these letters. They mean nothing and are written as easily as ordinary people burn toast -- but they can sure intimidate. For those willing to give Ziff Davis a pass, I wonder if the Pocket site admins are willing to post the content of the e-mails they received? Perhaps you'd feel a little differently about "legal mistakes" when you see what they're really like.
It's ridiculous that companies have such power; were it not for slashdot, I wonder if Ziff Davis would have done a thing after the fact? The mere fact that Ziff Davis employees can fire off a letter that can effectively force sites to censor themselves should be a wake up call to folks everywhere.
The Oxford student newspaper guys are angling to get a nice job on Fleet street after graduation, and are trying to come up with attention getting scoops. If their real intention was to help the network sysadmins, they should have brought this up privately (since the article doesn't mention it, I assume they didn't.)
Instead, they went to the front page. I wonder why they didn't stop to check with the Uni? Perhaps they were afraid that locking down the network would have prevented their scoop?
If you want to class these guys as do-gooding whistle-blowers, it's a tough task. Should they be punished? Yes. What if, in order to prove their point, went in and read your e-mail after hacking your account? Or their off-the-shelf hack-kit contained malware that trashed your directories? Still keen on this kind of "journalism"?
They could, perhaps, have avoided problems and gotten their scoop, by having a few users consent to being hacked as a demonstration -- if, of course, the hacking was just a packet sniffer.
The Little Schemer, a very unusual book on LISP (well, OK, on Scheme, but close enough.) It is a fun read, written in a sort of oddball Socratic method style, and it also has a sequel, the Seasoned Schemer.
A really good introduction, I think, for someone who is interested in more "theoretical" aspects of computer science; what you learn from that book is directly applicable to CS, but also mathematics, analytic styles of philosophy, &c.. Another way to look at it is as a more advanced, and more technical, companion to Godel, Escher, Bach.
There are plenty of astronomical surveys that are in the public domain. For example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (google "SDSS SQL") has its public release in SQL format. I am not sure how they bundle it for download and offline access -- the full set in in the TB, so you would have to make some serious cuts.
Look around for an astronomical survey that interests you. Learn a little of the science so that you can think of interesting things to play with (or just read some of the associated papers to repeat their results.) Keep an eye on the science press to hear about new (and old) surveys, and then look up their homepages to see if they have released the data to the public. Oftentimes, data is released with a paper, so look on xxx.lanl.gov as well.
If you come up with interesting educational uses and a nice interface, consider putting it up on the web and dropping a line to the coordinator. Most surveys don't have dedicated public education staff. (On the other hand, most surveys are very busy, so don't expect a rapid response.)
Important: some of the sets are huge. Be conservative with the bandwidth. Don't download gigs and gigs over and over again, and if you have a choice, pick "off peak" times to grab a set. Also, the surveys usually have their hands full already, so don't expect to get any help with untangling the data -- if a set is not making sense or is poorly documented, your only real option is to move on to another one.
The greatest barrier to usability still seems to be site overdesign. Pages are far more complicated than they need to be (thankfully, much of the blog software is well designed in this regard, giving ample space to the actual content of each page.) Once you pack in a left and right column, and fill the rest of the space with ads, it takes a good deal of concentration to focus on the actual material you came for.
Why are sites overdesigned? Why don't site designers trust the user more? (Overdesigned sites tend to crowd all of their content on to every page via hyperlinks, as if the user can't be trusted to figure out the "back" button.)
To a point, it is about ego: a designer wants to brand every single page in a unique fashion, and that usually means marking up the content and squeezing it down. But there are plenty of ways a designer can satisfy her own ego, and present the content well, with minimalistic designs. The wikipedia is an excellent example of how a lot of features can be made unobtrusive and helpful, letting the content shine through.
In the end, it is really more about company psychology. For the same reason that a bank wants to have a gigantic storefront to assure customers that their money is safe, a company wants its web pages to look expensive and permanent, and the quickest route ends up being a cluttered visual experience as the company shows off the various clever "features" it is rich enough to pay for. A "bare" page bereft of logos and menus and news from other pages seems like an admission of poverty.
But this ends up making the user experience frenetic and disjointed. Oftentimes you can get around this problem by going to the "printer friendly" page where the article or information is presented in a traditional and human-readable fashion.
The numbers seem very suspicious: that curve is decidedly linear. You would expect to see some variation, because of (for example) of the time of day. It looks like Apple picked some reasonable songs/minute value.
What happens when the reasonable rate begins to differ from the average real rate? It would probably be a bad idea for them to give out the actual data, which would be useful for competitors.
Anyway, either Apple is going to use the actual data, or they are going to use the fake data. I imagine they will use the fake data, because otherwise the 10^8 mile mark will come on the homepage at the wrong time. If they *do* use the fake data, you could theoretically increase the odds of winning to something like 1 in 2000 by picking the right five minute interval. If you were even smarter, you could time it to the second.
Assuming you're the only one to read this comment, of course. I wonder what the legal implications are?
web comic people are going with the old -- and apparently very function -- methods.
Indeed. The old methods work for some people. However, the world isn't on-size fits all. Most TV is ad-supported as well, but not ALL of it. The fact that one method is working for many people does not mean that nothing better should ever be worked on.
I suppose I'm still waiting to see the problems described adequately, and laid out so that we can see why current methods are failing, why the real-world solutions can't be applied, and how micropayments solve them.
The TV that isn't ad supported is subscription supported. The micropayment system -- where a service is funded entirely by micropayment -- is the payphone. For lots of reasons, of course, payphones are falling away, but even before cellphones, you saw that people were moving to calling cards (essentially a charge account system.)
The search engine problem you bring up is another reason micropayments will create trouble for the struggling young site. It's just another functioning system micropayments "break" without providing any good replacement.
It seems like micropayments are a solution looking for a problem. Others have gone over the difficulties (mostly PR) that Rivest has; let's step back and take a look at why micropayments are meant to be exciting.
The idea, essentially, is that it allows people to make money off of their content in a new fashion. Instead of advertising or subscription, people pay, per use, to get content ad-free.
The web comics world is all very excited about this. Imagine! Cover your bandwidth and make money just for your art! No need to build a subscriber base for print copies, no need to get big enough to be ad-supported, no need to whore out on the side. Instead, get everyone to pay a tenth of a cent every time they want to read your page. Or maybe five cents for your monthly magnus opus.
Does this ever happen in the real world? When was the last time you paid five cents for anything other than a stick of gum from the General Store? Newspapers are the closest you get, but they are mostly ad-supported anyway, and your 75 cents is not coming close to defraying the cost of production. Perhaps giving money to buskers, but it's hard to imagine people would feel the same way about tossing a quarter to some anonymous fancy webmaster that they do about giving the same to some ragged hipster they see every day.
Meanwhile, except for a few self-promoters who also handily want you to deposit $10 in their micropayment system, web comic people are going with the old -- and apparently very function -- methods. They get advertising banners, they promote their hard copies, they do promotional work. Comics not big enough to hit this put up a paypal donation button, sell t-shirts, &c to the hard core fans who want to feel like they're supporting a cool indie artist. Meanwhile, musicians go out and give concerts; their mp3s and even their hard copy albums are mostly around to draw people in to hear a live performance.
So what is the big deal? It's an interesting intellectual problem, and this is a clever solution, but the idea of making scads of cash off of it -- and revolutionising internet content distribution -- seems to me to be a lot of hype, and something only those totally out of touch with how the various "worlds" of content have already solved this problem.
It's an interesting proposition. Anybody with a math background learning Go for the first time has probably thought of similar things; the board is so abstracted (there are no "home rows" as in Chess, for example.)
But the same thing could have been accomplished much more quickly by simply displaying a 2-d board and defining how the edges are connected (see mathworld for the notation.) The usual Go board configuration is the "disc", but you could play Go on the Klein bottle if you wished.
In the end, I think topological Go would be easiest played in 2 dimensions with the players keeping in mind the edge identifications (hey, they're Go players, they're smart), but it would be very cool to do game replays with the full 3-d effect. It would probably be rather intimidating for the punters but, hey, they're Go players...
(Would some people be better at various Go topologies? That would be interesting. Perhaps a 1d disc player would be a 3kyu Klein bottle player. I doubt it, but if it did happen, it would be quite interesting. Are there different skills that come into play?)
I agree with the poster who mentioned that the very low barrier-to-entry for adventure/puzzle style games kind of saturated the market. If you are looking at, say, an action game, defects in the rendering or graphics are very obvious and you can save your time.
Meanwhile, an adventure game doesn't reveal its wonders (or failures) for at least an hour, perhaps more. It is hard to separate out bad games from very very good ones, and I think the market soured as people gave up after too many bad experiences.
Essentially, adventure games have similar problems to literature. You don't need a million dollars and a team of writers to code together a game, and you have such freedom to innovate that there is no easy box-checking to do to determine if what you've written is up to scratch.
The interactive fiction people have really come together to produce detailed game reviews and open competitions (see IFcomp) as a sort of homebrew version of the book-review and annual prizes that help readers cull through the tens of thousands of books each year.
I'm not sure how common my experience is, but I've never owned a windows machine, and, while I've used them occasionally, I've never done any significant amount of work on one (e.g., write a paper, run a calculation, coded an algorithm.)
I started playing with computers when my father brought in an Apple ][e. From there, I went on to use a IIGS (a rather fun machine, and with ProDOS, which taught me the elementary Apple GUI which just hasn't changed very much at all.)
When I was in High School, I had a Macintosh (actually one of the first Powerbooks, which ran wonderfully for four years.) It was loaded with all kinds of shareware, and it worked wonderfully. I've been a Mac user ever since.
It is true that you can pirate software very easily on the PC -- it's just everywhere. I imagine Microsoft, though not the vendors, is happy with this arrangement. You can still get MS Word (which I don't use anymore) on a college campus for the Mac, but you just can't get the billions of "warez". Yes, there is a huge lack of games on the Mac, but that's probably why I was able to graduate.
Now that I have a research stipend and need to use UNIX on a very regular basis, I don't mind the (apocryphal?) price markup for the Mac. Most Mac vendors producing the superexpensive software (e.g., Maple, Mathematica, IDL,...) give amazing student discounts so I don't have to pirate, and the amount of high quality shareware coming out is stunning. Programmers seem to like working on OS X much more than they did with the later versions of the Classic OS, and it pays off.
So, to make a long story short: what keeps me off windows is that I've never even seen it's benefits and I'd rather deal with what I know than what I don't.
Most reseachers I know produce one magnificent failure after another on the quest for a new piece of knowledge.
Yes! It's nice to hear this once in awhile, since most failures are presented at first as great successes, and when their flaws are discovered, they sort of quietly disappear. A young researcher entering the field sees all around what appear to be amazing, intimidating solutions, and it takes a while to understand that nearly all (or in my field, all) of them have more or less fatal flaws.
There's a balance to be struck between presenting the half-baked and having the guts to present something completely new and only half-understood. It seems like this guy has built up enough "credit" in the community with his earlier work to have the option to throw this up in the air without damaging his reputation too much.
It is a pity that you have to build up credit like that, but given the number of people working in the field, it takes a bit of karma to rise above the noise.
For the new generation of CCDs, data transfer is a big problem (especially since many telescopes are in rather isolated locations -- high in the Chilean mountains, for example.) I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."
Google for the icebike website to get some of the story.
Charging and discharging can be either endothermic or exothermic reactions. For example, NiCads are endothermic chargers -- i.e., they absorb heat as they charge (this is a nice property, because it means you can flash charge one much faster with less risk.) Endothermic chargers are exothermic dischargers -- naturally, since you are running the process in reverse.
Lead acid batteries are the opposite -- they are exothermic chargers, endothermic dischargers, meaning they absorb energy as they are discharged.
Of course, one must take into account the effect of internal resistance of the battery which changes as the battery is discharged. Usually, however, it is much less than the bulb, and so the energy dissipated -- I believe -- does not offset fully the endothermic nature of the chemical reaction.
(Not an expert, they're all fast asleep right now.)
One of the things Fermilab is trying to do is get a measurement of the so called weak lensing effect. Matter distorts spacetime, and light is thus bent as it passes nearby a big cluster. This is gravitational lensing.
Famously, it is seen as "strong" lensing -- when the source is very close on the sky to the cluster, and the light gets bent enough that there are multiple images. Nobody really believed it could happen, but then in the last decade or so it's become an accepted and popular thing to play with and observe.
Weak lensing is when there are no multiple images, and instead only a slight distortion. Much harder to see and measure -- you basically look for a whole bunch of galaxies that are slightly distorted.
That means you need a very wide field of view -- to get enough galaxies quickly enough -- but also a very good resolution -- to be able to measure the slight distortions. Hence the need for such an insane[ly cool] device.
Why go through all this trouble? Well, weak lensing is one of the view ways to measure all the matter in the universe on very large scales. Because nearly all the matter is supposed to be invisible, in the past people have used various "tracers" that we can see. But there's a huge amount of debate as to how good the various tracers are, and, of course, you need a direct measurement to be sure you're not off in la-la land.
Weak lensing measures it all because all matter, regardless of how bright it is, bends spacetime in the same fashion. So, if you can get a good weak lensing measurement, you can theoretically create an unbiased map of the matter distribution. No need to cross your fingers and hope that some tracer is behaving properly.
It all fits into dark energy because dark energy is supposed to alter the extent to which matter can cluster (roughly speaking, dark energy behaves like antigravity, and pushes things apart, stopping them from falling together.)
Of course, weak lensing is just one of the things this guy is meant to do -- there are lots of other neat things that hopefully someone more awake than I can describe.
Mostly complexity: designing a circuit to both charge a small battery and power the light while moving, and then to switch over when the bicycle stops.
There are some companies that build such a circuit (the backup light is actually a set of low-power LEDs.) I haven't seen any that give a bright enough beam when stopped.
In general, it is quite hard to get a bright enough light out of a dynamo on a city street, stopped or no. Even at night, there is a lot of ambient light shining in to drivers' eyes, and you need a somewhat powerful beam to cut through that (at least 10 W, maybe 20) so you can be seen.
For country roads, a dynamo is more than sufficient.
The one time I had to make a consumer choice between the various designs was when building a bicycle light. I ended up going with lead acid for two main reasons:
1. Lead acid is somewhat forgiving, and can theoretically last forever if you are mostly careful not to do a deep discharge. Most other designs have a finite number of cycles.
2. Price. It's an old technology. Car manufacturing has driven the development, and you are pretty certain to get a functional battery that does what it's supposed to.
There are two downsides.
1. No deep discharge. Once the voltage starts to drop a little, you better get back home to recharge or the battery will be dead (not sure of the chemistry involved.)
2. Low temperature functioning. Lead acid batteries cool down as you draw current from them. If you take them out for a midnight ride in the winter, you will find your voltage dropping much quicker than you expect. NiCads actually generate heat as you discharge them, and so can keep functioning even in freezing conditions.
As I understand, for these second two reasons, most commerically available bicycle lights are now NiCad. This should mean you can go for a three hour bicycle ride and draw twenty watts of light. However, it does mean that you have to replace the batteries every other year or so (depending on usage.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any reason by Red Cross donations were being routed through someone's PayPal account. Well, sorry, I do see one: so that someone, instead of just posting a link to the Red Cross donation page, could instead garner all the credit for "organizing" a relief fund.
It's a foolish waste of money, of course, since Pay Pal charges for each transaction (7% or so?), so everyone is making additional donations to the Pay Pal overlords. And I assume that at the end the guy running this "Something Awful" self-promotion would just make a collected donation to the Red Cross on his own credit card, meaning credit charges are paid twice.
Not to mention further of course that people who donated through Pay Pal probably won't be able to claim it as an IRS deduction, but whoever ran the promotion in the first place might have a shot himself.
All foolish, self-promotional and highly irregular.
In the Wired article (I know this isn't about spam, but what the hell):
"Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content."
Uh, no, not as far as I can tell. "Frozen in time," perhaps, after someone decided to stop blogging, but I used blogger for six months and never had a single hitch. Apparently, googling "blogger sucks" gives you thousands of sites bitching about google's service.
Sometimes there are outages, when you can't get in to alter a post or something similar, but those were few and far between (at least they happened less than half a dozen times in six months, and it only lasted a few hours.)
I guess this is a sign about how popular blogger is. I mean, then only way to balance my experience (zero fatal errors in six months) with thousands of complaints is to assume that there are a HELL of a lot of bloggers out there.
Oh, and to those bitching in general about blogs: please shut up. Yes, there are annoying vanity blogs, but blogger -- and the blogging concept -- has been a godsend to specialists, as well as to political organizing.
I use Mellel, which is not open source (I don't think), but is shareware. It is pretty sleek looking, runs fast, and I haven't had a problem with it. Customer support is great.
.doc files.
It seems like the main users of Mellel are people needing multilingual support, especially for things like Hebrew (reading the other way) and Japanese, Arabic, etc. It also integrates with some of the bibliography software out there. And I'm pretty damn sure it reads in
I tried, multiple times, to go electronic with my notebooks (I'm a grad student in astronomy.) It never panned out, mainly because paper and pen are just way more convenient and have that "scribble" factor: you can get things down without being quite sure what you're trying to say. Later, you can write things up in "proper" form (which for me is LaTeX.)
In my experience, having an additional layer between brain and note (the syntax of an electronic journal program, whether it's HTML or not) shorts out this process. (I'm reminded of the time I tried to use a tape recorder to record notes: I would just come up speechless.) Oh, and having your own clever electronic notetaking system really gets in the way when you meet your advisor and he wants to scribble herself.
But, if you don't want the benefit of my experience, here are the things I tried:
LaTeX. Easy, good looking output with simple math syntax (actually, I do something use LaTeX when I'm writing out complicated maths, instead of doing it by hand. Makes it easier to edit mistakes in a long formula.) My old college roommate does EVERYTHING in LaTeX (he's a mathematician now) -- all his notes, everything. He is also a little weird.
NoteTaker. Cute "metaphors" that seem to get in the way of actually doing anything.
omnigraffle. I thought I would use this to diagram various systems I was looking at. No go, too complicated to figure out.
In the end, I went with this. It's open source!
I'm about to write some web-based software in Python -- including the need for "user" accounts, etc. etc.. I'd like to have a lot of flexibility, but also not to have some massive beast (I've already written a prototype in Perl.) Why should I learn all this RoR stuff instead? Isn't it just another way to do cgi? I mean, I'm no guru here. Help me out, guys.
I have to say when I saw the final product, I was rather disappointed. There was really a huge amount of filler ("how to blog! here is how to get your blog... sign on to a free blog service... don't forget passwords are case sensitive...") and what was interesting was duplicated on the web -- where the material belongs in the first place, IMO.
Make could be really good if they went beyond just replicating the kind of stuff that appears -- for free -- on the web. So far, however, they just seem to be paying (well, I might add!) hobbyists for the rights to reprint their webpages.
For example, they have a long article on how to build a kite camera to do ariel photography. Pretty neat -- but I think anybody who wanted to do that would be far better served by going onto the web and googling (or going to rec.kites.) Then you can compare different rigs, get a diversity of opinions, learn your options -- and, in the end, contribute your own experiences -- all for, well, free.
Actually rather annoying. I'm a scientist now, so I will never get a good programming education -- high school's bubble sorts and linked lists are all I have. But everything in the sciences is done using C, and I don't have the time to sit down properly and grok syntax and style the C way.
Including all those C subtleties when dealing with two dimensional arrays. So I write C as if it's Pascal, with none of that pointery elegance.
(Of course, the old school here uses FORTRAN, which we have to learn to read, but FORTRAN is really just the Apple IIe BASIC with procedures and local variables instead of GOSUB. [ducks huge flamewar (?)])
A short analysis of the press account of the signal here.
First off, it is misleading to call this a "warning": the letter was, according to the site admin "pretty much 'cease and desist' or we will come after you." That's a threat.
Wonderful to know how easy it is for lawyers to make up these letters. They mean nothing and are written as easily as ordinary people burn toast -- but they can sure intimidate. For those willing to give Ziff Davis a pass, I wonder if the Pocket site admins are willing to post the content of the e-mails they received? Perhaps you'd feel a little differently about "legal mistakes" when you see what they're really like.
It's ridiculous that companies have such power; were it not for slashdot, I wonder if Ziff Davis would have done a thing after the fact? The mere fact that Ziff Davis employees can fire off a letter that can effectively force sites to censor themselves should be a wake up call to folks everywhere.
The Oxford student newspaper guys are angling to get a nice job on Fleet street after graduation, and are trying to come up with attention getting scoops. If their real intention was to help the network sysadmins, they should have brought this up privately (since the article doesn't mention it, I assume they didn't.)
Instead, they went to the front page. I wonder why they didn't stop to check with the Uni? Perhaps they were afraid that locking down the network would have prevented their scoop?
If you want to class these guys as do-gooding whistle-blowers, it's a tough task. Should they be punished? Yes. What if, in order to prove their point, went in and read your e-mail after hacking your account? Or their off-the-shelf hack-kit contained malware that trashed your directories? Still keen on this kind of "journalism"?
They could, perhaps, have avoided problems and gotten their scoop, by having a few users consent to being hacked as a demonstration -- if, of course, the hacking was just a packet sniffer.
The Little Schemer, a very unusual book on LISP (well, OK, on Scheme, but close enough.) It is a fun read, written in a sort of oddball Socratic method style, and it also has a sequel, the Seasoned Schemer.
A really good introduction, I think, for someone who is interested in more "theoretical" aspects of computer science; what you learn from that book is directly applicable to CS, but also mathematics, analytic styles of philosophy, &c.. Another way to look at it is as a more advanced, and more technical, companion to Godel, Escher, Bach.
There are plenty of astronomical surveys that are in the public domain. For example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (google "SDSS SQL") has its public release in SQL format. I am not sure how they bundle it for download and offline access -- the full set in in the TB, so you would have to make some serious cuts.
Look around for an astronomical survey that interests you. Learn a little of the science so that you can think of interesting things to play with (or just read some of the associated papers to repeat their results.) Keep an eye on the science press to hear about new (and old) surveys, and then look up their homepages to see if they have released the data to the public. Oftentimes, data is released with a paper, so look on xxx.lanl.gov as well.
If you come up with interesting educational uses and a nice interface, consider putting it up on the web and dropping a line to the coordinator. Most surveys don't have dedicated public education staff. (On the other hand, most surveys are very busy, so don't expect a rapid response.)
Important: some of the sets are huge. Be conservative with the bandwidth. Don't download gigs and gigs over and over again, and if you have a choice, pick "off peak" times to grab a set. Also, the surveys usually have their hands full already, so don't expect to get any help with untangling the data -- if a set is not making sense or is poorly documented, your only real option is to move on to another one.
The greatest barrier to usability still seems to be site overdesign. Pages are far more complicated than they need to be (thankfully, much of the blog software is well designed in this regard, giving ample space to the actual content of each page.) Once you pack in a left and right column, and fill the rest of the space with ads, it takes a good deal of concentration to focus on the actual material you came for.
Why are sites overdesigned? Why don't site designers trust the user more? (Overdesigned sites tend to crowd all of their content on to every page via hyperlinks, as if the user can't be trusted to figure out the "back" button.)
To a point, it is about ego: a designer wants to brand every single page in a unique fashion, and that usually means marking up the content and squeezing it down. But there are plenty of ways a designer can satisfy her own ego, and present the content well, with minimalistic designs. The wikipedia is an excellent example of how a lot of features can be made unobtrusive and helpful, letting the content shine through.
In the end, it is really more about company psychology. For the same reason that a bank wants to have a gigantic storefront to assure customers that their money is safe, a company wants its web pages to look expensive and permanent, and the quickest route ends up being a cluttered visual experience as the company shows off the various clever "features" it is rich enough to pay for. A "bare" page bereft of logos and menus and news from other pages seems like an admission of poverty.
But this ends up making the user experience frenetic and disjointed. Oftentimes you can get around this problem by going to the "printer friendly" page where the article or information is presented in a traditional and human-readable fashion.
The numbers seem very suspicious: that curve is decidedly linear. You would expect to see some variation, because of (for example) of the time of day. It looks like Apple picked some reasonable songs/minute value.
What happens when the reasonable rate begins to differ from the average real rate? It would probably be a bad idea for them to give out the actual data, which would be useful for competitors.
Anyway, either Apple is going to use the actual data, or they are going to use the fake data. I imagine they will use the fake data, because otherwise the 10^8 mile mark will come on the homepage at the wrong time. If they *do* use the fake data, you could theoretically increase the odds of winning to something like 1 in 2000 by picking the right five minute interval. If you were even smarter, you could time it to the second.
Assuming you're the only one to read this comment, of course. I wonder what the legal implications are?
web comic people are going with the old -- and apparently very function -- methods.
Indeed. The old methods work for some people. However, the world isn't on-size fits all. Most TV is ad-supported as well, but not ALL of it. The fact that one method is working for many people does not mean that nothing better should ever be worked on.
I suppose I'm still waiting to see the problems described adequately, and laid out so that we can see why current methods are failing, why the real-world solutions can't be applied, and how micropayments solve them.
The TV that isn't ad supported is subscription supported. The micropayment system -- where a service is funded entirely by micropayment -- is the payphone. For lots of reasons, of course, payphones are falling away, but even before cellphones, you saw that people were moving to calling cards (essentially a charge account system.)
The search engine problem you bring up is another reason micropayments will create trouble for the struggling young site. It's just another functioning system micropayments "break" without providing any good replacement.
It seems like micropayments are a solution looking for a problem. Others have gone over the difficulties (mostly PR) that Rivest has; let's step back and take a look at why micropayments are meant to be exciting.
The idea, essentially, is that it allows people to make money off of their content in a new fashion. Instead of advertising or subscription, people pay, per use, to get content ad-free.
The web comics world is all very excited about this. Imagine! Cover your bandwidth and make money just for your art! No need to build a subscriber base for print copies, no need to get big enough to be ad-supported, no need to whore out on the side. Instead, get everyone to pay a tenth of a cent every time they want to read your page. Or maybe five cents for your monthly magnus opus.
Does this ever happen in the real world? When was the last time you paid five cents for anything other than a stick of gum from the General Store? Newspapers are the closest you get, but they are mostly ad-supported anyway, and your 75 cents is not coming close to defraying the cost of production. Perhaps giving money to buskers, but it's hard to imagine people would feel the same way about tossing a quarter to some anonymous fancy webmaster that they do about giving the same to some ragged hipster they see every day.
Meanwhile, except for a few self-promoters who also handily want you to deposit $10 in their micropayment system, web comic people are going with the old -- and apparently very function -- methods. They get advertising banners, they promote their hard copies, they do promotional work. Comics not big enough to hit this put up a paypal donation button, sell t-shirts, &c to the hard core fans who want to feel like they're supporting a cool indie artist. Meanwhile, musicians go out and give concerts; their mp3s and even their hard copy albums are mostly around to draw people in to hear a live performance.
So what is the big deal? It's an interesting intellectual problem, and this is a clever solution, but the idea of making scads of cash off of it -- and revolutionising internet content distribution -- seems to me to be a lot of hype, and something only those totally out of touch with how the various "worlds" of content have already solved this problem.
It's an interesting proposition. Anybody with a math background learning Go for the first time has probably thought of similar things; the board is so abstracted (there are no "home rows" as in Chess, for example.)
But the same thing could have been accomplished much more quickly by simply displaying a 2-d board and defining how the edges are connected (see mathworld for the notation.) The usual Go board configuration is the "disc", but you could play Go on the Klein bottle if you wished.
In the end, I think topological Go would be easiest played in 2 dimensions with the players keeping in mind the edge identifications (hey, they're Go players, they're smart), but it would be very cool to do game replays with the full 3-d effect. It would probably be rather intimidating for the punters but, hey, they're Go players...
(Would some people be better at various Go topologies? That would be interesting. Perhaps a 1d disc player would be a 3kyu Klein bottle player. I doubt it, but if it did happen, it would be quite interesting. Are there different skills that come into play?)
Meanwhile, an adventure game doesn't reveal its wonders (or failures) for at least an hour, perhaps more. It is hard to separate out bad games from very very good ones, and I think the market soured as people gave up after too many bad experiences.
Essentially, adventure games have similar problems to literature. You don't need a million dollars and a team of writers to code together a game, and you have such freedom to innovate that there is no easy box-checking to do to determine if what you've written is up to scratch.
The interactive fiction people have really come together to produce detailed game reviews and open competitions (see IFcomp) as a sort of homebrew version of the book-review and annual prizes that help readers cull through the tens of thousands of books each year.
I started playing with computers when my father brought in an Apple ][e. From there, I went on to use a IIGS (a rather fun machine, and with ProDOS, which taught me the elementary Apple GUI which just hasn't changed very much at all.)
When I was in High School, I had a Macintosh (actually one of the first Powerbooks, which ran wonderfully for four years.) It was loaded with all kinds of shareware, and it worked wonderfully. I've been a Mac user ever since.
It is true that you can pirate software very easily on the PC -- it's just everywhere. I imagine Microsoft, though not the vendors, is happy with this arrangement. You can still get MS Word (which I don't use anymore) on a college campus for the Mac, but you just can't get the billions of "warez". Yes, there is a huge lack of games on the Mac, but that's probably why I was able to graduate.
Now that I have a research stipend and need to use UNIX on a very regular basis, I don't mind the (apocryphal?) price markup for the Mac. Most Mac vendors producing the superexpensive software (e.g., Maple, Mathematica, IDL,...) give amazing student discounts so I don't have to pirate, and the amount of high quality shareware coming out is stunning. Programmers seem to like working on OS X much more than they did with the later versions of the Classic OS, and it pays off.
So, to make a long story short: what keeps me off windows is that I've never even seen it's benefits and I'd rather deal with what I know than what I don't.
Yes! It's nice to hear this once in awhile, since most failures are presented at first as great successes, and when their flaws are discovered, they sort of quietly disappear. A young researcher entering the field sees all around what appear to be amazing, intimidating solutions, and it takes a while to understand that nearly all (or in my field, all) of them have more or less fatal flaws.
There's a balance to be struck between presenting the half-baked and having the guts to present something completely new and only half-understood. It seems like this guy has built up enough "credit" in the community with his earlier work to have the option to throw this up in the air without damaging his reputation too much.
It is a pity that you have to build up credit like that, but given the number of people working in the field, it takes a bit of karma to rise above the noise.
For the new generation of CCDs, data transfer is a big problem (especially since many telescopes are in rather isolated locations -- high in the Chilean mountains, for example.) I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."
Google for the icebike website to get some of the story.
Charging and discharging can be either endothermic or exothermic reactions. For example, NiCads are endothermic chargers -- i.e., they absorb heat as they charge (this is a nice property, because it means you can flash charge one much faster with less risk.) Endothermic chargers are exothermic dischargers -- naturally, since you are running the process in reverse.
Lead acid batteries are the opposite -- they are exothermic chargers, endothermic dischargers, meaning they absorb energy as they are discharged.
Of course, one must take into account the effect of internal resistance of the battery which changes as the battery is discharged. Usually, however, it is much less than the bulb, and so the energy dissipated -- I believe -- does not offset fully the endothermic nature of the chemical reaction.
(Not an expert, they're all fast asleep right now.)
One of the things Fermilab is trying to do is get a measurement of the so called weak lensing effect. Matter distorts spacetime, and light is thus bent as it passes nearby a big cluster. This is gravitational lensing.
Famously, it is seen as "strong" lensing -- when the source is very close on the sky to the cluster, and the light gets bent enough that there are multiple images. Nobody really believed it could happen, but then in the last decade or so it's become an accepted and popular thing to play with and observe.
Weak lensing is when there are no multiple images, and instead only a slight distortion. Much harder to see and measure -- you basically look for a whole bunch of galaxies that are slightly distorted.
That means you need a very wide field of view -- to get enough galaxies quickly enough -- but also a very good resolution -- to be able to measure the slight distortions. Hence the need for such an insane[ly cool] device.
Why go through all this trouble? Well, weak lensing is one of the view ways to measure all the matter in the universe on very large scales. Because nearly all the matter is supposed to be invisible, in the past people have used various "tracers" that we can see. But there's a huge amount of debate as to how good the various tracers are, and, of course, you need a direct measurement to be sure you're not off in la-la land.
Weak lensing measures it all because all matter, regardless of how bright it is, bends spacetime in the same fashion. So, if you can get a good weak lensing measurement, you can theoretically create an unbiased map of the matter distribution. No need to cross your fingers and hope that some tracer is behaving properly.
It all fits into dark energy because dark energy is supposed to alter the extent to which matter can cluster (roughly speaking, dark energy behaves like antigravity, and pushes things apart, stopping them from falling together.)
Of course, weak lensing is just one of the things this guy is meant to do -- there are lots of other neat things that hopefully someone more awake than I can describe.
Mostly complexity: designing a circuit to both charge a small battery and power the light while moving, and then to switch over when the bicycle stops.
There are some companies that build such a circuit (the backup light is actually a set of low-power LEDs.) I haven't seen any that give a bright enough beam when stopped.
In general, it is quite hard to get a bright enough light out of a dynamo on a city street, stopped or no. Even at night, there is a lot of ambient light shining in to drivers' eyes, and you need a somewhat powerful beam to cut through that (at least 10 W, maybe 20) so you can be seen.
For country roads, a dynamo is more than sufficient.
1. Lead acid is somewhat forgiving, and can theoretically last forever if you are mostly careful not to do a deep discharge. Most other designs have a finite number of cycles.
2. Price. It's an old technology. Car manufacturing has driven the development, and you are pretty certain to get a functional battery that does what it's supposed to.
There are two downsides.
1. No deep discharge. Once the voltage starts to drop a little, you better get back home to recharge or the battery will be dead (not sure of the chemistry involved.)
2. Low temperature functioning. Lead acid batteries cool down as you draw current from them. If you take them out for a midnight ride in the winter, you will find your voltage dropping much quicker than you expect. NiCads actually generate heat as you discharge them, and so can keep functioning even in freezing conditions.
As I understand, for these second two reasons, most commerically available bicycle lights are now NiCad. This should mean you can go for a three hour bicycle ride and draw twenty watts of light. However, it does mean that you have to replace the batteries every other year or so (depending on usage.)