There is an article , The Outsiders, that explores the social adjustment of extremely intelligent people. I'm not sure that it will provide the answers you're seeking, but it gives some insight into the nature of the problem.
Kernel panics generally mean hardware problems
on
Is Windows Worth $45?
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· Score: 1
Its really the damnedest thing, runs great, soon as he steps within ten feet of it, it goes stupid.
Maybe it doesn't like the magnet in his pocket.
Seriously though, I've seen quite a few kernel panics, on the machine I'm using at this moment. Every last one of them was a direct or indirect result of bad RAM. I'll take this opportunity to point out a wonderful tool called Memtest86. It diagnosed the problem in minutes.
The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.
ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.
I'm one of the contributors to the Esperanto Wikipedia. One thing that I have seen is that there are a number of people who scan the list of latest changes. I know I do it. Most of the time, we make minor corrections to typos, but I've certainly been taken to task for more serious mistakes.
This article discussed some of the questions concerning articles on the Wikipedia. It pointed out exactly the behavior I have described, along with other factors. Aside from the stated requirement of a neutral tone, it turns out that a neutral tone is self-enforcing. The only way you can get an article to stand up to repeated editing is to make you points in a way that your fellow contributors can accept.
This can certainly result in criticisms and praise getting watered down a bit. But it actually has some side-effects that are obvious after you consider them. For example, because the Esperanto Wikipedia is not tied strongly to any particular country, there is a concerted effort to make geographical references neutral. References to Southeast Asia are neutral. References to the Far East aren't.
There's another book occupying this niche
on
Pragmatic JUnit Testing
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Kent Beck's book Test-Driven Development does a nice job of presenting where unit testing fits into Extreme Programming. It comes off as a bit of a cookbook and some of the examples are in Smalltalk, but even so I consider it a valuable addition to my bookshelf.
Yes, but if you go through the paperwork, you will notice that the contract is in your name. You are on the hook for the bill for the next 15 months. Have a nice day.
Actually, there are variations on this that do work wonders. One rule of thumb I read years ago is that a satisfied customer refers 5 people to you, a dissatisfied customer refers 20 people away. Most of the businesses I encounter don't fall far enough into either category for me to care. For the few that do, I tell my friends, my family, and everyone else who asks. Think about it every time you recommend something to someone. Say things like, "Definitely try X, I absolutely love mine. And stay away from Y, they suck, and here's why."
Also, there are times when having the free time is worthwhile. If you are dealing with some place with a local office, call. If they hang up, show up in person to ask them why they hung up. It really scares people when you show up at their office and ask to speak to the manager about an employee who hung up on you a hour ago.
There are other things you can do. Right now, telemarketting is illegal in the US except for charities, surveys, political campaigns and people you are already doing business with. That's easy enough. I tell the charities that they shouldn't expect another dime from me until they haven't called for two years. I lie on surveys. And I'm really good at saying, "As a matter of fact, if I don't do business with you, you aren't allowed to call me, so I'd like to cancel my account. Can you process that for me right now?" So far the politicians aren't bothering me much.
Re:And regarding the so-called singularity
on
Singularity Sky
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't get the impression from what I've read of Vinge that he views the singularity as a discontinuity. The problem is that we understand progress and innovation based on models of their first and second derivatives that simply won't apply beyond the singularity.
An interesting point to consider is that singularities have happened to humanity before, but on a greater time scale. Speech made it possible to convey information from one individual to another abstractly. Writing made it possible to convey information across distances and time. Each of these advances changed the nature of what is required for humans to acquire skills and knowledge and push beyond the boundaries of what is already known.
There are a couple of points that really should be made here. First, when the federal government mandated that subscribers could take their numbers with them from one provider to another, they created a de facto property right. It is somewhat limited because it is indeed contingent on continuing to lease it from someone. To the best of my knowledge, they have done nothing to clarify the full extent of that right, in particular whether it is transferable.
Second, vanity numbers have existed for quite some time. Many companies have 800 numbers that spell something. It is quite clear that there is a market for them. And since individuals have wanted portable numbers for some time, it is also clear that the market exists at a number of levels. I'm not willing to pay what a business would pay for 1-800-OUR-NAME, but continuing to use the same number I've had for years means not reprinting business cards and not sending out letters all of my friends, family and business contacts to tell them my number has changed.
My point here is that this was completely predictable. Honestly, I'd love to see one of the phone companies issue a statement to the effect that they will provide transferral of phone numbers and that they charge a one-time processing fee to transfer from one account holder to another. All of the other phone companies would have to join in. There would be no need to regulate it. And there would be no problem with people auctioning off an agreement to transfer a desirable number they already hold. This way, the phone companies could get a cut. The processing fee would mean that it wouldn't be desirable to auction off numbers that would go for less than the price of the fee.
Actually, when Intercal was internationalized, Elvish was rejected as one of the target languages because it lacked a word for zero. Esperanto was rejected because there are too many speakers. After all, this was Intercal.
As much as I appreciate the humor in your comment, Esperanto is not one of the languages that is in danger of going extinct. There are new people learning it. I even know a number of people teaching it to their children. There are quite a few magazines published in Esperanto and there are new books (translated and original) published fairly regularly.
Language extinction is not entirely a bad thing. In a sense, it indicates that the people most likely to learn and use those languages consider other activities to be more important. There are other languages that meet their needs better. But with each language that goes extinct, some portion of the cultural riches of our species is lost. I doubt that most of the languages currently in existence will survive another couple of generations. But it would be good to save a record of them.
I had a math prof who used his own textbook for the class. The copies we used were photocopies of his printout of the latest version. I think we got them as handouts. It was a pretty good text, even if the illustrations were still a bit crude.
First of all, the same size is never the same size is never the same size. If you really want to know whether the clothes fit, you have to put them on. A second, related point is whether the clothes are comfortable. No matter how good they look, in the end you need to wear them.
Damn, does this guy have too much time on his hands or what?
Or maybe he didn't have enough free time for years which is why he's been working on it for nearly a quarter of a century. Okay, model railroading isn't my personal hobby. But I spend enough time pursuing hobby interests to respect someone's ability to go beyond just puttering and create something on an impressive scale. Having too much free time on your hands often has dramatically different results.
However the Debian people usually count on their user-base preffering choice and precision during installation (isn't that what GNU/Linux is all about?).
There's nothing preventing someone who is interested in writing a front-end installer that will select groups of packages for you. Debian already has tasksel which does some of that. I suspect that all it would require is creating some additional options for tasksel.
Any package manager with a good command line interface lends itself reasonably well to creating a nice front-end to install groups of packages. I can't vouch for RPM at the moment because my copy of Maximum RPM is out of reach, but Debian actually contains.deb packages that are just place-holders for dependencies. That way you can install the main package and it will require all of the pieces it need. That's a really good first step to providing dirt-simple installation of groups of packages.
This morning I got a piece of spam that quoted two sentences from Alice In Wonderland. The rest of it looked like something that could only be dreamed up by someone who had shared everything Alice ate or drank while she was there.
C? You gotta be kidding. Compiling each time you make a change to page? C would be like using nanotech to create a new material from wich you can cast a hammer to insert a thumbtack. Overkill doesn't even begin to describe it.
Actually, C or C++ is not completely wrong for generating web content. But your point defines exactly where to draw the line. If you are writing an engine that parses some special purpose templating language of your own, C/C++ may be the right way to go. Frankly, I'd lean toward Java for the task, but there can be good arguments either way. The key reason to do it is to access some C API to get at your data.
I worked on something like this a couple years ago. We were putting a web interface into a server process that was written in C++. Adding the ability to handle HTTP & HTML for a limited range of requests was easiest by extending what was already there because it gave us access to all of the internal data structures. Doing anything else would have required building an interface that provided that access anyway.
Ah, I love the smell of legacy systems in the morning.
That's an excellent policy. There are times when you do help family and friends for free because of who they are. There are others where it is a paying gig. Know what you expect before you start. Make sure they know it too.
Think back to the online world of the early 90's. People with access to the Internet were mostly at universities and the corporations who had gotten onto the net. The online services weren't connected yet. It was not unusual for someone to provide multiple e-mail addresses on multiple service providers because they were separate worlds.
The analogy with SMS interoperability is not a perfect one. However, there is one important similarity. The end-users want to talk to each other. The network effect becomes pretty obvious when you see it repeated so many times. At this point, it seems like a losing proposition to set up any service that is isolated regardless of what you are providing.
Ordinary headache remedies will reduce the severity of the headache during caffeine withdrawl. However, some of them include caffeine. Check the label.
Also, dehydration isn't going to help anything. Make specific plans for what you are going to drink. Caffeine-free sodas work okay if that's what you're looking for. Water and juice are fine. I switched to seltzer. I lost the caffeine and the caleries at the same time. And it tastes better than the tap water.
Slashdot Mirror
It's odd that someone would mention Esperanto in the context of a machine translation project and not mention this project. It was designed to use Esperanto as its pivot language.
There is an article , The Outsiders, that explores the social adjustment of extremely intelligent people. I'm not sure that it will provide the answers you're seeking, but it gives some insight into the nature of the problem.
Its really the damnedest thing, runs great, soon as he steps within ten feet of it, it goes stupid.
Maybe it doesn't like the magnet in his pocket.
Seriously though, I've seen quite a few kernel panics, on the machine I'm using at this moment. Every last one of them was a direct or indirect result of bad RAM. I'll take this opportunity to point out a wonderful tool called Memtest86. It diagnosed the problem in minutes.
The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.
ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.
I'm one of the contributors to the Esperanto Wikipedia. One thing that I have seen is that there are a number of people who scan the list of latest changes. I know I do it. Most of the time, we make minor corrections to typos, but I've certainly been taken to task for more serious mistakes.
This article discussed some of the questions concerning articles on the Wikipedia. It pointed out exactly the behavior I have described, along with other factors. Aside from the stated requirement of a neutral tone, it turns out that a neutral tone is self-enforcing. The only way you can get an article to stand up to repeated editing is to make you points in a way that your fellow contributors can accept.
This can certainly result in criticisms and praise getting watered down a bit. But it actually has some side-effects that are obvious after you consider them. For example, because the Esperanto Wikipedia is not tied strongly to any particular country, there is a concerted effort to make geographical references neutral. References to Southeast Asia are neutral. References to the Far East aren't.
Kent Beck's book Test-Driven Development does a nice job of presenting where unit testing fits into Extreme Programming. It comes off as a bit of a cookbook and some of the examples are in Smalltalk, but even so I consider it a valuable addition to my bookshelf.
That I get to keep my company cell phone?
Yes, but if you go through the paperwork, you will notice that the contract is in your name. You are on the hook for the bill for the next 15 months. Have a nice day.
Actually, there are variations on this that do work wonders. One rule of thumb I read years ago is that a satisfied customer refers 5 people to you, a dissatisfied customer refers 20 people away. Most of the businesses I encounter don't fall far enough into either category for me to care. For the few that do, I tell my friends, my family, and everyone else who asks. Think about it every time you recommend something to someone. Say things like, "Definitely try X, I absolutely love mine. And stay away from Y, they suck, and here's why."
Also, there are times when having the free time is worthwhile. If you are dealing with some place with a local office, call. If they hang up, show up in person to ask them why they hung up. It really scares people when you show up at their office and ask to speak to the manager about an employee who hung up on you a hour ago.
There are other things you can do. Right now, telemarketting is illegal in the US except for charities, surveys, political campaigns and people you are already doing business with. That's easy enough. I tell the charities that they shouldn't expect another dime from me until they haven't called for two years. I lie on surveys. And I'm really good at saying, "As a matter of fact, if I don't do business with you, you aren't allowed to call me, so I'd like to cancel my account. Can you process that for me right now?" So far the politicians aren't bothering me much.
I don't get the impression from what I've read of Vinge that he views the singularity as a discontinuity. The problem is that we understand progress and innovation based on models of their first and second derivatives that simply won't apply beyond the singularity.
An interesting point to consider is that singularities have happened to humanity before, but on a greater time scale. Speech made it possible to convey information from one individual to another abstractly. Writing made it possible to convey information across distances and time. Each of these advances changed the nature of what is required for humans to acquire skills and knowledge and push beyond the boundaries of what is already known.
There are a couple of points that really should be made here. First, when the federal government mandated that subscribers could take their numbers with them from one provider to another, they created a de facto property right. It is somewhat limited because it is indeed contingent on continuing to lease it from someone. To the best of my knowledge, they have done nothing to clarify the full extent of that right, in particular whether it is transferable.
Second, vanity numbers have existed for quite some time. Many companies have 800 numbers that spell something. It is quite clear that there is a market for them. And since individuals have wanted portable numbers for some time, it is also clear that the market exists at a number of levels. I'm not willing to pay what a business would pay for 1-800-OUR-NAME, but continuing to use the same number I've had for years means not reprinting business cards and not sending out letters all of my friends, family and business contacts to tell them my number has changed.
My point here is that this was completely predictable. Honestly, I'd love to see one of the phone companies issue a statement to the effect that they will provide transferral of phone numbers and that they charge a one-time processing fee to transfer from one account holder to another. All of the other phone companies would have to join in. There would be no need to regulate it. And there would be no problem with people auctioning off an agreement to transfer a desirable number they already hold. This way, the phone companies could get a cut. The processing fee would mean that it wouldn't be desirable to auction off numbers that would go for less than the price of the fee.
Actually, when Intercal was internationalized, Elvish was rejected as one of the target languages because it lacked a word for zero. Esperanto was rejected because there are too many speakers. After all, this was Intercal.
Mi ne pensas ke gxi estas. Mozilla, Mandrake, partoj de aliaj programoj, sed ne jam OpenOffice.
Though more likely is the fact that their 'itch' is likely internationalization/localization issues which we [dumb Westerners] don't care about.
There are plenty of i18n/l10n projects out there. Gnome, KDE, Mandrake, OpenOffice and Mozilla all have active projects going. The FSF has the Translation Project. Get out there and localize!
What I said is that it isn't in danger of extinction.
As much as I appreciate the humor in your comment, Esperanto is not one of the languages that is in danger of going extinct. There are new people learning it. I even know a number of people teaching it to their children. There are quite a few magazines published in Esperanto and there are new books (translated and original) published fairly regularly.
Language extinction is not entirely a bad thing. In a sense, it indicates that the people most likely to learn and use those languages consider other activities to be more important. There are other languages that meet their needs better. But with each language that goes extinct, some portion of the cultural riches of our species is lost. I doubt that most of the languages currently in existence will survive another couple of generations. But it would be good to save a record of them.
I had a math prof who used his own textbook for the class. The copies we used were photocopies of his printout of the latest version. I think we got them as handouts. It was a pretty good text, even if the illustrations were still a bit crude.
First of all, the same size is never the same size is never the same size. If you really want to know whether the clothes fit, you have to put them on. A second, related point is whether the clothes are comfortable. No matter how good they look, in the end you need to wear them.
Damn, does this guy have too much time on his hands or what?
Or maybe he didn't have enough free time for years which is why he's been working on it for nearly a quarter of a century. Okay, model railroading isn't my personal hobby. But I spend enough time pursuing hobby interests to respect someone's ability to go beyond just puttering and create something on an impressive scale. Having too much free time on your hands often has dramatically different results.
However the Debian people usually count on their user-base preffering choice and precision during installation (isn't that what GNU/Linux is all about?).
.deb packages that are just place-holders for dependencies. That way you can install the main package and it will require all of the pieces it need. That's a really good first step to providing dirt-simple installation of groups of packages.
There's nothing preventing someone who is interested in writing a front-end installer that will select groups of packages for you. Debian already has tasksel which does some of that. I suspect that all it would require is creating some additional options for tasksel.
Any package manager with a good command line interface lends itself reasonably well to creating a nice front-end to install groups of packages. I can't vouch for RPM at the moment because my copy of Maximum RPM is out of reach, but Debian actually contains
I think the USPO could really do with being staffed by people with Common Sense(tm).
Yeah, but these days, there's a better than even chance that Common Sense is also patented.
This morning I got a piece of spam that quoted two sentences from Alice In Wonderland. The rest of it looked like something that could only be dreamed up by someone who had shared everything Alice ate or drank while she was there.
C? You gotta be kidding. Compiling each time you make a change to page? C would be like using nanotech to create a new material from wich you can cast a hammer to insert a thumbtack. Overkill doesn't even begin to describe it.
Actually, C or C++ is not completely wrong for generating web content. But your point defines exactly where to draw the line. If you are writing an engine that parses some special purpose templating language of your own, C/C++ may be the right way to go. Frankly, I'd lean toward Java for the task, but there can be good arguments either way. The key reason to do it is to access some C API to get at your data.
I worked on something like this a couple years ago. We were putting a web interface into a server process that was written in C++. Adding the ability to handle HTTP & HTML for a limited range of requests was easiest by extending what was already there because it gave us access to all of the internal data structures. Doing anything else would have required building an interface that provided that access anyway.
Ah, I love the smell of legacy systems in the morning.
That's an excellent policy. There are times when you do help family and friends for free because of who they are. There are others where it is a paying gig. Know what you expect before you start. Make sure they know it too.
Think back to the online world of the early 90's. People with access to the Internet were mostly at universities and the corporations who had gotten onto the net. The online services weren't connected yet. It was not unusual for someone to provide multiple e-mail addresses on multiple service providers because they were separate worlds.
The analogy with SMS interoperability is not a perfect one. However, there is one important similarity. The end-users want to talk to each other. The network effect becomes pretty obvious when you see it repeated so many times. At this point, it seems like a losing proposition to set up any service that is isolated regardless of what you are providing.
Ordinary headache remedies will reduce the severity of the headache during caffeine withdrawl. However, some of them include caffeine. Check the label.
Also, dehydration isn't going to help anything. Make specific plans for what you are going to drink. Caffeine-free sodas work okay if that's what you're looking for. Water and juice are fine. I switched to seltzer. I lost the caffeine and the caleries at the same time. And it tastes better than the tap water.