I have a few things to say, both about your choice of major and choice of school.
Choice of major Electrical Engineering is a practical field of study, so it trains you to become a tinkerer, as opposed to theory majors like Math, Physics and Computer Science that train you to become a thinker. If you've always been a tinkerer, you should consider being trained as a thinker, so go for a theoretical science major.
Choice of school You should decide your school by merit, not by reputation. CMU is a great school for Computer Science. For example, Chronicle's Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index 2005 is a helpful guide (the link shows ranking for Computer Science, but you can find ranking for other disciplines). As faculties are productive with the help of their graduate students, that means you get better education from both professors and teaching assistants (who are typically graduate students).
What you may have considered as "safety" school might, ironically, rank higher in that index. Remember that any ranking (especially well-known ones) will be subject to political maneuvering, so you should not take these seriously. When you turn on the radio, do you think their "weekly top 100 chart" reflects listener interest, or record labels PR interest?
A better way to rank the school is by visiting the school, attending a few classes if you have the time. This way, its environment and facilities make it a more personal appeal to you, and you are more likely going to be a happier college student that way. As always, you should only consider a school an option if you're accepted.
Another perspective to what you just said is how successful dot-com companies have traditional business counter-parts. Google and Yahoo are media/entertainment companies; Amazon is a retail company; E-trade is a financial company. These dot-com companies are also facing competition from traditional businesses that are now increasingly software based. It's more visible in the finance sector, but less so in the media/entertainment sector where most companies are too stubborn to embrace new technology.
Are you wearing tinfoil hat? That's a conspiracy theorist and denialist argument.
Don't worry, I can relate to you because I've also been labeled that way by saying men never landed on the moon. I can also say you've been lied to all your life about moon landing. What justifies you better than I?
Moderators, kindly take your paws off my posts. I have enough karma to burn.
The word "debunk" may not appear in your posts, but it's all over talkorigins.org website. What are you trying to deny here?
I agree with you that creationism is not a scientific theory. I disagree with you because I also think evolutionism is not a scientific theory. Even though creationism and evolutionism appear to contradict, you can't justify one by proving another to be false. There is no theorem that says creationism holds if and only if evolutionism is false.
It's funny how you accuse me of ignoring rules of science---I explicitly mentioned that scientific theories must predict something that is reproducible by experiment under controlled conditions. Evolutionist all like to accuse others of being unscientific. You guys are just as awful as Christian Science.
My personal belief has nothing to do with this argument. Your attempt to drift discussion that way is argument ad hominem.
talkorigins is not a scientific publication, respectable or not. Their main assertion is that evolution theory holds, and creation theory does not; they cite scientific research work that support their assertion and go on even greater length to ridicule those that contradict.
Strange why you guys are obsessed with the word "debunk" so much. The hallmark of any scientific theory is that you can predict the outcome of some experiment (say, abiogenesis) and produce the same results under controlled conditions; there would be nothing contrary to your theory that you need to debunk because facts speak for itself. It is for evolution theory's lack of scientific quality that evolutionists need to defend their faith as a religion.
You are right that most yogurt packaged in a small cup with fruit flavors are diluted. However, supermarkets also carry "plain" yogurt in a pint sized container. It's mostly solid, have strong odor, and is very sour.
Not to mention, you can create a folder of tags. Each tag is also a folder that contains hard links to files that have a particular tag. You can still keep the file elsewhere in the file system. Furthermore, you can move the document around without affecting the hard link inside the tagging folder.
However, I'll also point out a number of problems with this approach.
When you delete a file, you must also untag it, or it would stay on the file system. A file is only removed when all references to it are gone.
An application could overwrite a file by first unlinking the original, then create a new file under the same name. The link in the tagging folder would still point to an old version, while the intended document is now a new, distinct file that is not tagged. This breaks the tagging system although fault is the application that manipulates files in that manner.
How to find a file that has a number of tags? I suppose one can write a shell script using "find -ls" (prints inode) and "sort -n" (sort number) and only print the files that appear in all the tagging folders (possibly using awk). It may be possible to do all this in one line, piping output from one program to the input of another.
My point is to concur with parent that directory hierarchy is a very flexible system; we might just lack creative ways to make it work for us.
A DTD (document type definition) is a file that describes how an SGML document is structured. In this case, the DTD that went missing defines RSS 0.91, which is used by Navigator 4 for "channel" subscription.
It is expected that DTDs are hotlinked. For example, if you ever look at html source of a web page, you would see:
<!DOCTYPE...>
on the top, and the hotlink goes to somewhere on w3.org. That is because W3 is the authority body that defines the html.
Since Netscape is the authority body that defines RSS 0.91, it is a bit strange how they stopped hosting the definition.
In any case, the missing definition won't affect software that processes RSS feeds. It only affects software that checks whether a SGML document is structured properly according to that missing DTD.
The main interest to this article seems to be the speculation how a deprecated web 1.0 company could end up hiring a clueless webmaster who deletes important files without recognizing its importance.
A link between Taiwan and U.S. appears to be working. I'm writing this in Singapore. Since the earthquake, data packets originating from Singapore have been routed through some hops in the U.S. before finally reaching sites in Taiwan, getting 400ms+ latency for traveling half of the world and back.
I think it is not possible at this moment for Asia to communicate north to south.
One advantage of running off a live CD is that it doesn't, under normal circumstances, touch your hard drive. This is why the author claims that you don't have to worry about trojan, viruses, spyware, etc. It's not that you don't get infected, but these malware programs are erased from main memory everytime you turn off the computer. However, the author assumes that a malware doesn't scan your computer and mount existing physical hard drives to infect. This could conceivably happen.
There is a better way. Get VMware player and an Ubuntu virtual machine appliance, and run Firefox off it. That also protects your host computer, and you can always revert your disk image to a pristine stage if you were infected. At least with great likelihood, malware from a guest OS does not penetrate virtual machine.
At some point in your lifetime, 100G Ethernet will be available on the market, and you will be willing to pay for it. Would you ever be willing to pay for a supermodel, which has been on the market since known human history?
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
There is nothing to fear. It is just a small fragment of MS-DOS assembly code. "B8 00 4C" is "mov ax, 4c00h", and "CD 21" is "int 21h". It is a MS-DOS system call that exits your program (system call number 4c) with a status 00 (the lower byte of ax). Now everyone knows...
I haven't used Windows for a long time, but I wonder if it still comes with an MS-DOS debugger?
I don't consider these human-assisting technologies "for the future." Here are more important criteria than that: (1) being energy efficient (electricity and heat), and (2) being environment friendly (allow natural vegetation to grow around it especially in an urban setting, adapting to the landscape rather than adapt landscape to it).
These OLPC devices only have 640x480 resolution, the same as a pocket PC. If you can work with fullscreen applications on PDA or cellphone, then there is no reason why you should complain about OLPC's use of the same paradigm. OLPC is more like a PDA than a personal computer. It's just more rigged, and its architecture is open.
In theory, you can't, but many virtual machine managers (VMMs) leave apparent traces. For example, it allows screen drawing to be accelerated via a trap mechanism, which essentially lets a guest OS talk to the VMM. VMMs also provide CPUID, hard drive, and PCI device identification that reveal the fact that these devices are virtual. These measures allow you to detect a number of selected VMMs.
For every table in an SQL database, you can create a number of indices. A singly linked list is like a table with one index. A double linked list is like a table with two indices, with the invariant that they're in reversed order of each other. In general, an n-ary linked list is like a table with a number of indices.
However, why settle for linear linked lists when a database can have better data structures like balanced trees and hash table?
Being able to do the same thing by different means is not the problem here. The concern is how many choices are too similar but marginally different.
Imagine you have a computer designed for word processing, with three keyboards. One is used to enter normal letters. Second one is used to enter boldface letters. A third one is for italic letters. This is more like the situation described by the article. These keyboards have similar functions (i.e., for input letters), nonetheless they're different choices.
Back when I used Windows 2000, there used to be three different ways to format a disk: quick format, normal format, and format with verification (I'm not including low-level hard disk geometry formatting, because this option is usually not available to end-users). Quick format only writes a fresh super-block on the disk but does not erase data area. Normal format goes through the entire disk and erases data. Format with verification has a last stage that also tries to detect bad sectors.
Nowadays, format with verification is arguably redundant. Any hard disk now can detect bad sectors and map them to good ones transparently. If a sector cannot be mapped, disk drive returns an error code right away, and the operating system would have the opportunity to mark the bad sector and allocate another sector. Marking bad sectors can be deferred until the disk is actually used. The user doesn't need to know this.
Normal formatting is also redundant. When you write new super-blocks, you effectively end up with a brand-new file-system to work with. If you want to erase your disk drive before throwing it away, formatting is not enough.
The only sane option left is quick format. This is the only option that anyone would ever need. This is essentially how mkfs on unix formats a disk. If you want disk erasure, there are other programs to do that.
Amazingly, I think iTunes and iPhoto on Mac OS X are also confusing. We already have Finder that manages organization of files. Why do I need iTunes to manage my music files and iPhoto to manage my picture files? I can do pretty much the same thing with Finder + Quicktime for iTunes, or Finder + Preview for iPhoto (Finder can display thumbnail icon).
In Tiger, the line between Finder and iTunes/iPhoto blurs even more with Spotlight---now searching your music and pictures are done as if you're using specialized application that manages metadata about files. You now also have Front Row which combines iTunes and iPhoto, and Photo Booth which should really be part of iPhoto. These are an explosion of options. I don't know if Apple is aware of that.
Whenever Richard Stallman is invited to a talk, he would walk around and scrutinize whoever has a laptop running proprietary operating systems---not only Windows but also Mac OS X. He would point his finger right at your face and say "shame on you." I feel sorry for his "victims" and not so much for him. He deserves the infamy because of his attitude. On a side note, he is not only against computers running proprietary software, but he is also against PDA and cellphone running proprietary software. That pretty much means we're all "lusers" in his opinion. Who doesn't have a cellphone nowadays?
Also, most low-end HDTVs that you see at Wal-Mart implement really poor deblocking algorithm, so macro-blocks in a frame are very visible and distracting. Even though it's digital and HD, it just looks bad on the screen. In such contrived case, HDTV can look much worse than analog. However, maybe this is not too contrived, because people are probably going to buy their first HDTV from Wal-Mart where they can actually afford it.
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I have a few things to say, both about your choice of major and choice of school.
Choice of major Electrical Engineering is a practical field of study, so it trains you to become a tinkerer, as opposed to theory majors like Math, Physics and Computer Science that train you to become a thinker. If you've always been a tinkerer, you should consider being trained as a thinker, so go for a theoretical science major.
Choice of school You should decide your school by merit, not by reputation. CMU is a great school for Computer Science. For example, Chronicle's Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index 2005 is a helpful guide (the link shows ranking for Computer Science, but you can find ranking for other disciplines). As faculties are productive with the help of their graduate students, that means you get better education from both professors and teaching assistants (who are typically graduate students).
What you may have considered as "safety" school might, ironically, rank higher in that index. Remember that any ranking (especially well-known ones) will be subject to political maneuvering, so you should not take these seriously. When you turn on the radio, do you think their "weekly top 100 chart" reflects listener interest, or record labels PR interest?
A better way to rank the school is by visiting the school, attending a few classes if you have the time. This way, its environment and facilities make it a more personal appeal to you, and you are more likely going to be a happier college student that way. As always, you should only consider a school an option if you're accepted.
"nobody" user can still listen for and establish connections over network, so an OpenMacGrid node can participate in DDoS attack and spam delivery.
Grid computing is essentially botnet, trying to use that concept for good scientific purpose.
Another perspective to what you just said is how successful dot-com companies have traditional business counter-parts. Google and Yahoo are media/entertainment companies; Amazon is a retail company; E-trade is a financial company. These dot-com companies are also facing competition from traditional businesses that are now increasingly software based. It's more visible in the finance sector, but less so in the media/entertainment sector where most companies are too stubborn to embrace new technology.
Are you wearing tinfoil hat? That's a conspiracy theorist and denialist argument.
Don't worry, I can relate to you because I've also been labeled that way by saying men never landed on the moon. I can also say you've been lied to all your life about moon landing. What justifies you better than I?
Your arrogant assertion is what pisses me off.
Moderators, kindly take your paws off my posts. I have enough karma to burn. The word "debunk" may not appear in your posts, but it's all over talkorigins.org website. What are you trying to deny here? I agree with you that creationism is not a scientific theory. I disagree with you because I also think evolutionism is not a scientific theory. Even though creationism and evolutionism appear to contradict, you can't justify one by proving another to be false. There is no theorem that says creationism holds if and only if evolutionism is false. It's funny how you accuse me of ignoring rules of science---I explicitly mentioned that scientific theories must predict something that is reproducible by experiment under controlled conditions. Evolutionist all like to accuse others of being unscientific. You guys are just as awful as Christian Science. My personal belief has nothing to do with this argument. Your attempt to drift discussion that way is argument ad hominem.
talkorigins is not a scientific publication, respectable or not. Their main assertion is that evolution theory holds, and creation theory does not; they cite scientific research work that support their assertion and go on even greater length to ridicule those that contradict.
Strange why you guys are obsessed with the word "debunk" so much. The hallmark of any scientific theory is that you can predict the outcome of some experiment (say, abiogenesis) and produce the same results under controlled conditions; there would be nothing contrary to your theory that you need to debunk because facts speak for itself. It is for evolution theory's lack of scientific quality that evolutionists need to defend their faith as a religion.
You are right that most yogurt packaged in a small cup with fruit flavors are diluted. However, supermarkets also carry "plain" yogurt in a pint sized container. It's mostly solid, have strong odor, and is very sour.
Not to mention, you can create a folder of tags. Each tag is also a folder that contains hard links to files that have a particular tag. You can still keep the file elsewhere in the file system. Furthermore, you can move the document around without affecting the hard link inside the tagging folder.
However, I'll also point out a number of problems with this approach.
My point is to concur with parent that directory hierarchy is a very flexible system; we might just lack creative ways to make it work for us.
It is expected that DTDs are hotlinked. For example, if you ever look at html source of a web page, you would see: on the top, and the hotlink goes to somewhere on w3.org. That is because W3 is the authority body that defines the html.
Since Netscape is the authority body that defines RSS 0.91, it is a bit strange how they stopped hosting the definition.
In any case, the missing definition won't affect software that processes RSS feeds. It only affects software that checks whether a SGML document is structured properly according to that missing DTD.
The main interest to this article seems to be the speculation how a deprecated web 1.0 company could end up hiring a clueless webmaster who deletes important files without recognizing its importance.
A link between Taiwan and U.S. appears to be working. I'm writing this in Singapore. Since the earthquake, data packets originating from Singapore have been routed through some hops in the U.S. before finally reaching sites in Taiwan, getting 400ms+ latency for traveling half of the world and back.
I think it is not possible at this moment for Asia to communicate north to south.
One advantage of running off a live CD is that it doesn't, under normal circumstances, touch your hard drive. This is why the author claims that you don't have to worry about trojan, viruses, spyware, etc. It's not that you don't get infected, but these malware programs are erased from main memory everytime you turn off the computer. However, the author assumes that a malware doesn't scan your computer and mount existing physical hard drives to infect. This could conceivably happen.
There is a better way. Get VMware player and an Ubuntu virtual machine appliance, and run Firefox off it. That also protects your host computer, and you can always revert your disk image to a pristine stage if you were infected. At least with great likelihood, malware from a guest OS does not penetrate virtual machine.
According to man wget, you can use -i or --input-file options to read URLs from a file.
At some point in your lifetime, 100G Ethernet will be available on the market, and you will be willing to pay for it. Would you ever be willing to pay for a supermodel, which has been on the market since known human history?
See, that's the problem.
There is nothing to fear. It is just a small fragment of MS-DOS assembly code. "B8 00 4C" is "mov ax, 4c00h", and "CD 21" is "int 21h". It is a MS-DOS system call that exits your program (system call number 4c) with a status 00 (the lower byte of ax). Now everyone knows...
I haven't used Windows for a long time, but I wonder if it still comes with an MS-DOS debugger?
I don't consider these human-assisting technologies "for the future." Here are more important criteria than that: (1) being energy efficient (electricity and heat), and (2) being environment friendly (allow natural vegetation to grow around it especially in an urban setting, adapting to the landscape rather than adapt landscape to it).
These OLPC devices only have 640x480 resolution, the same as a pocket PC. If you can work with fullscreen applications on PDA or cellphone, then there is no reason why you should complain about OLPC's use of the same paradigm. OLPC is more like a PDA than a personal computer. It's just more rigged, and its architecture is open.
In theory, you can't, but many virtual machine managers (VMMs) leave apparent traces. For example, it allows screen drawing to be accelerated via a trap mechanism, which essentially lets a guest OS talk to the VMM. VMMs also provide CPUID, hard drive, and PCI device identification that reveal the fact that these devices are virtual. These measures allow you to detect a number of selected VMMs.
Links in a list are an implementation of an index. Lists are a special case of a tree.
For every table in an SQL database, you can create a number of indices. A singly linked list is like a table with one index. A double linked list is like a table with two indices, with the invariant that they're in reversed order of each other. In general, an n-ary linked list is like a table with a number of indices.
However, why settle for linear linked lists when a database can have better data structures like balanced trees and hash table?
Being able to do the same thing by different means is not the problem here. The concern is how many choices are too similar but marginally different.
Imagine you have a computer designed for word processing, with three keyboards. One is used to enter normal letters. Second one is used to enter boldface letters. A third one is for italic letters. This is more like the situation described by the article. These keyboards have similar functions (i.e., for input letters), nonetheless they're different choices.
Back when I used Windows 2000, there used to be three different ways to format a disk: quick format, normal format, and format with verification (I'm not including low-level hard disk geometry formatting, because this option is usually not available to end-users). Quick format only writes a fresh super-block on the disk but does not erase data area. Normal format goes through the entire disk and erases data. Format with verification has a last stage that also tries to detect bad sectors.
Nowadays, format with verification is arguably redundant. Any hard disk now can detect bad sectors and map them to good ones transparently. If a sector cannot be mapped, disk drive returns an error code right away, and the operating system would have the opportunity to mark the bad sector and allocate another sector. Marking bad sectors can be deferred until the disk is actually used. The user doesn't need to know this.
Normal formatting is also redundant. When you write new super-blocks, you effectively end up with a brand-new file-system to work with. If you want to erase your disk drive before throwing it away, formatting is not enough.
The only sane option left is quick format. This is the only option that anyone would ever need. This is essentially how mkfs on unix formats a disk. If you want disk erasure, there are other programs to do that.
Amazingly, I think iTunes and iPhoto on Mac OS X are also confusing. We already have Finder that manages organization of files. Why do I need iTunes to manage my music files and iPhoto to manage my picture files? I can do pretty much the same thing with Finder + Quicktime for iTunes, or Finder + Preview for iPhoto (Finder can display thumbnail icon).
In Tiger, the line between Finder and iTunes/iPhoto blurs even more with Spotlight---now searching your music and pictures are done as if you're using specialized application that manages metadata about files. You now also have Front Row which combines iTunes and iPhoto, and Photo Booth which should really be part of iPhoto. These are an explosion of options. I don't know if Apple is aware of that.
It stands for "Amazing Misuse of Resources," and this acronym comes from a KDE toy that features little roaming characters on screen.
Whenever Richard Stallman is invited to a talk, he would walk around and scrutinize whoever has a laptop running proprietary operating systems---not only Windows but also Mac OS X. He would point his finger right at your face and say "shame on you." I feel sorry for his "victims" and not so much for him. He deserves the infamy because of his attitude. On a side note, he is not only against computers running proprietary software, but he is also against PDA and cellphone running proprietary software. That pretty much means we're all "lusers" in his opinion. Who doesn't have a cellphone nowadays?
Also, most low-end HDTVs that you see at Wal-Mart implement really poor deblocking algorithm, so macro-blocks in a frame are very visible and distracting. Even though it's digital and HD, it just looks bad on the screen. In such contrived case, HDTV can look much worse than analog. However, maybe this is not too contrived, because people are probably going to buy their first HDTV from Wal-Mart where they can actually afford it.
- Cost of film SLR: $200
- Cost of digital SLR: $800
- 20 rolls of Velvia film: $100.00 / or $25 for 5 rolls.
- Cost to develop 5 rolls of film: $25
- The number of weddings you need to attend to break even: 12
Remind you that Velvia films are much better than $800 DSLR can hope to accomplish.Humm, I'm under the impression that Phase One medium format digital backs are made to be portable. But anyway, I like film. :)