Don't piss off your customers. Even honest people can be cranky and impatient, so go easy on them.
I was surprised by an expiration date on a piece of "shareware" (vendor's term, no expiry mentioned before it failed.) After the timebomb went off, I went to enough trouble reinstall their software to extract the data I had in it, and bought their competitor's more complex, more expensive product.
Another story: A dev team wanted to examine Oracle 8i enterprise, and the free eval didn't include some of the features they wanted to evaluate. I purchased the full product with a small license. A week or two later, I got a call from an Oracle rep who explained to me that I hadn't purchased sufficient licenses, and needed to spend tens of thousands more dollars. He was uninterested in the fact that we were not using this in production, but hoped to develop with it if it provided the functionality we needed. After a conversation with the dev team about alternatives, I called him back and told him we wouldn't need _any_ licenses.
I'm sure he was confident that he wasn't losing any future sales. I'm confident that he did. Regardless, don't do that if you're not Oracle.
What happened to the folks who were booting linux on commercial wireless access points?
There was a Slashdot article about access points that were already no longer available commercially, and I found one old pointer to someone who was building a kernel for the airport too, but haven't found anything else.
The important news is that there are eight new holes, not that they're fixed. Are they fixed on all your company's instances of IIS, or are they holes?
If it was anyone but Microsoft, it would be the same headline, remember "Open SSH Local Root Hole" http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0 3/07/1617211&mode=nested
If it were any Free Software, it would be taken for granted that fixes would be out immedeately.
Why do you say "K-12 Education is a sector you'd NEVER want to work IT in."?
I'm looking into a position at a charter school, and while it would mean a 1/3 pay cut, I'm very excited about education in general, and losing my 10-12 hour days and hours of commuting. Besides, the whole summer break thing is compelling.
I'll bet that while it might be possible to send a single subatomic particle through time with a huge energy cost, time travel in any way that would be interesting to us is impossible.
This is just a hunch, but look at the EPR paradox. Experiments demonstrate that two particles can be linked in such a way that you get action at a distance, or non-local behavior, which has implications for communication through time, because you're talking about faster than light effects.
Guess what though: You don't know the initial state of the particles, and you can only change their state, but not merely read their state. You can't actually send any information with them. So you can't actually them use for faster than light communication. No tomorrow's lottery results today for you.
My bet is that this is a consequence of some fundamental rule of our universe, and the paradoxes that pop up with time travel also support this.
Maybe you can bring matter from a parallel timeline into our world, but only at an energy cost greater than mc^2.
Oh, and to the guy who said there is no time, and are only individual human experiences: No point in my talking to you then, is there? Solipsim implies an extremely dull universe. Why should my world be limited by my imagination?
I talked to some of these folks at LinuxWorld Expo, and it looked like they had things working. Somebody was even selling NICs and boot PROMs. They would be the logical starting point.
Unfortunately, I don't have my bag 'o swag with me here at work, or I might even be able to find the docs.
Also look at the Linux Journal article on LinuxBIOS http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4888
http://ltsp.org Linux Terminal Server Project who were using NetBoot, if I remember correctly.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/netboot/
and not sure if you got the netboot howto http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/DisklessHOWTO.html (netboot is linux based, etherboot is bsd based)
My girlfriend taught me a voice recognition algorithm for her landlord's cat Ella. Listen when Ella asks to be let in. Well articulated sounds are OK. Poorly articulated noises, that would indicate a mouth full of mouse or lizard, mean don't open the door.
Eventually my girlfriend trained me to use this algorithm. My training was assisted by a 2:30 am hunt for the completely alive mouse that the cat dragged in. Ella dropped the mouse for us, and I tore the house apart to capture & eject it, competing with Ella the cat.
Married the girlfriend who demonstrated the astonishing ability to train even me.
I've been thinking about this for awhile. It started in earnest with the Mindstorms DLT drive, but I've always been an analog hardware sort of guy. I like the Tinkertoy tic-tac-toe player.
My idea was two mechanisms: an injector or loader, and an ejector or unloader. They'd be driven by the cd tray popping out.
The ejector would probably just be some sort of lever arrangement to dump discs into a chute to stack in a box. The ejector would finish and trigger the injector.
The injector would be an escapement of similar design to the one on an old record player where you'd stack the discs on a spindle, and it would drop one at a time.
Consulting with a fellow maker of silly things, he reminded me that I could never inflict such a solution on my employer, having lived with other people's painful hacks far too often.
Now maybe I'll get back to it, now that you mention it. It's more fun to make stuff than build servers or study perl & regexps, or work late.
A carbon microphone doesn't work as a speaker, because it isn't generating a signal.
The resistance of carbon granules changes based on compression by sound waves. Running current through the device is it's normal mode, running a varied current (sound signal) through it would only warm it up.
The referred article (link to a lecture to the CS Lewis society) claims to provide examples of structures so complex & singular in purpose as to have to have been intentionally designed, and not to have evolved. They must have all their component parts to function at all, and so could have no evolutionary predecessor.
Unfortunately, this article and its examples are inadequate. Just because you cannot imagine how something could have evolved, doesn't mean that it couldn't have done so.
The author of the referred article insists that we understand each part of the structures which he describes as irreducibly complex, but he also implicitly presumes that he completely understands their history, and that it's completely linear. In fact, his whole argument hinges on his understanding the entire history of these "irreducibly complex" structures. That actually begs the question. You can't presume history to prove that same history.
I'd like to use his own mousetrap example (of something that couldn't have evolved) to counter his point.
Imagine a springlike structure with a completely different function, perhaps a stiff spine for protection. Imagine then that there are circumstances where that structure catches slightly while under tension, but can be released with some force. Ever had a sticky accelerator pedal?
Once that catching proves evolutionarily useful, then it might eventually develops into a relatively sophisticated release mechanism.
The mousetrap would not have been only a mousetrap through all of its evolutionary history.
In fact, I suspect that there are multiple mousetrap like structures out there in the biological world.
In the game of Life, there are what is known as Garden of Eden patterns, because there is provably no way that these things could have developed from any predecesor structure based on the rules of the game. In real life, we don't know all the rules.
Oh, and: Fundmentalist materialist? Are you trying to be insulting by calling me a fundamentalist? I'm certainly foolish for indulging in a scientific argument with someone for whom religious tenets are postulated as facts.
Boil hot dogs in the microwave. You just need a glass of water.
A friend of mine dropped by while I was having lunch. He grabbed the water glass in which I'd boiled my hotdog off of the table & saying "Damn I'm thirsty!" drank it down. "What the HELL was that?" I had to admit it wasn't my urine sample eventually, to keep him from hosing down my kitchen with vomit.
Re:The reason I click "Read More..." on Anything
on
Review: Orange County
·
· Score: 1
The "stories" are usually trivial. The comments are what makes it worthwhile. Often some of the comments if from people who know the subject better than the journalist who wrote the story. This is not just Katz. It's all of Slashdot.
Here's a quote from the Marvin Minsky article referenced in the Slashdot article _It's 2001, Where is HAL?
Recent discoveries in learning skills has revealed a very strange fact - suppose you work very hard on something and then you're tested later that day on the same thing. It's interesting, you won't be much better. If you're tested the next day, you may be a lot better. If you're tested the third day, you may be considerably better than you were on the second day without having done the thing in between. Guess what's the largest factor in influencing to what extent that's true? It's whether you got 8 hours of sleep or 6
I fix my own cars. Probably beyond the point of sense, occasionally beyond my own ability, for example breaking something else in the process.
Being comfortable working with your hands & getting messy is probably the main difference.
It took me years to be truly comfortable with cars, just as with computers. I had lots of cars that were so crappy that it was unlikely I could make things worse.
They both share:
I take pleasure in their design & execution. Who doesn't like a good hack?
I like understanding how things work, and using that understanding. The question of "why doesn't it work?" is a way to further understanding of how it does work. I also enjoy working with my hands and my mind at the same time.
I have on rare occasion made trivial parts that I needed, and on other occasions used hideous hacks. I have also irreparably broken things.
It's fun looking at something and figuring out "why the hell did they do _that_?" whether the answer is finally money, or a fit of perverse originality.
It's a secure feeling knowing that if you don't understand a problem, it is very unlikely that the professionals will be able to do any better.
Not true of software:
Physical stuff if fun to play with.
Break things. Perhaps only things that can't be used otherwise. They break in interesting ways, if you're paying attention. Besides, they make a great noise.
You'll need something to convert the Analog signal to a Digital signal for you computer to display it. That's what your sound card was doing. Not a lot of inexpensive commodity level A/D converters I can think of. I don't think software sampling will help much, otherwise you wouldn't have specialized hardware on the sound card.
You're right. What we really need is one giant software vendor to rescue us from all these damned incompatible competing programs. They're obviously inadequate tools because they don't speak microsoft's private language.
We need to be rescued from this pathetic situation where people make what tools they need, because they can. Don't worry though, Bill is trying to save us, if he's allowed to.
I always imagined such things running on narrow but _very_ long traces of explosive or rocket fuel. Solids are a more space efficient way to store fuel than gas phase. That's what I wanted to power MY electronic bumblebee with. If you didn't need to include your own oxidizer, even better. If you could make it refillable, great. Batteries are pretty expensive in terms of materials alone. Ultimately, this might be cheap to manufacture.
The AirPort basestation is a x86 single board computer. I've been trying to find out about rolling a Linux distribution to get VPN running on the device. That would solve the 802.11b security problems and make it _much_ more useful. The RADIUS server is nice, though.
As the multinationals talk nations out of ever more of their sovereignty, they will define globalism for you, and define it as corporate feudalism, because these multinantionals are already more powerful than many nations, and merely covet more power as the organisms they are.
Globalization is a euphemism for streamlining trade at the expense of national sovereignty. There is no cultural aspect, except the culture of consumerism.
Democracy died in this country when the supreme court ruled that a corporation had the same rights as a person. Never mind that these people already had & retained their rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Jackpot!
Don't piss off your customers. Even honest people can be cranky and impatient, so go easy on them.
I was surprised by an expiration date on a piece of "shareware" (vendor's term, no expiry mentioned before it failed.) After the timebomb went off, I went to enough trouble reinstall their software to extract the data I had in it, and bought their competitor's more complex, more expensive product.
Another story: A dev team wanted to examine Oracle 8i enterprise, and the free eval didn't include some of the features they wanted to evaluate. I purchased the full product with a small license. A week or two later, I got a call from an Oracle rep who explained to me that I hadn't purchased sufficient licenses, and needed to spend tens of thousands more dollars. He was uninterested in the fact that we were not using this in production, but hoped to develop with it if it provided the functionality we needed. After a conversation with the dev team about alternatives, I called him back and told him we wouldn't need _any_ licenses.
I'm sure he was confident that he wasn't losing any future sales. I'm confident that he did. Regardless, don't do that if you're not Oracle.
What happened to the folks who were booting linux on commercial wireless access points?
There was a Slashdot article about access points that were already no longer available commercially, and I found one old pointer to someone who was building a kernel for the airport too, but haven't found anything else.
Not at all.
0 3/07/1617211&mode=nested
The important news is that there are eight new holes, not that they're fixed. Are they fixed on all your company's instances of IIS, or are they holes?
If it was anyone but Microsoft, it would be the same headline, remember "Open SSH Local Root Hole" http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/
If it were any Free Software, it would be taken for granted that fixes would be out immedeately.
Why do you say "K-12 Education is a sector you'd NEVER want to work IT in."?
I'm looking into a position at a charter school, and while it would mean a 1/3 pay cut, I'm very excited about education in general, and losing my 10-12 hour days and hours of commuting. Besides, the whole summer break thing is compelling.
I'll bet that while it might be possible to send a single subatomic particle through time with a huge energy cost, time travel in any way that would be interesting to us is impossible.
This is just a hunch, but look at the EPR paradox. Experiments demonstrate that two particles can be linked in such a way that you get action at a distance, or non-local behavior, which has implications for communication through time, because you're talking about faster than light effects.
Guess what though: You don't know the initial state of the particles, and you can only change their state, but not merely read their state. You can't actually send any information with them. So you can't actually them use for faster than light communication. No tomorrow's lottery results today for you.
My bet is that this is a consequence of some fundamental rule of our universe, and the paradoxes that pop up with time travel also support this.
Maybe you can bring matter from a parallel timeline into our world, but only at an energy cost greater than mc^2.
Oh, and to the guy who said there is no time, and are only individual human experiences: No point in my talking to you then, is there? Solipsim implies an extremely dull universe. Why should my world be limited by my imagination?
A friend of mine was sleeping on the floor, in my guest room, when he heard something by his head.
When he turned on the light, he saw that the huge hideous Jerusalem Cricket that he had heard crawling.
Yow! They are big and ugly, and this is from someone who finds tarantulas pretty.
Since the Sysadm couldn't manage to maintain the systems, he timebombed them to ensure their reliability.
I talked to some of these folks at LinuxWorld Expo, and it looked like they had things working. Somebody was even selling NICs and boot PROMs. They would be the logical starting point.
l
Unfortunately, I don't have my bag 'o swag with me here at work, or I might even be able to find the docs.
Also look at the Linux Journal article on LinuxBIOS
http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4888
http://ltsp.org Linux Terminal Server Project who were using NetBoot, if I remember correctly.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/netboot/
and not sure if you got the netboot howto
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/DisklessHOWTO.htm
(netboot is linux based, etherboot is bsd based)
My girlfriend taught me a voice recognition algorithm for her landlord's cat Ella. Listen when Ella asks to be let in.
Well articulated sounds are OK.
Poorly articulated noises, that would indicate a mouth full of mouse or lizard, mean don't open the door.
Eventually my girlfriend trained me to use this algorithm. My training was assisted by a 2:30 am hunt for the completely alive mouse that the cat dragged in. Ella dropped the mouse for us, and I tore the house apart to capture & eject it, competing with Ella the cat.
Married the girlfriend who demonstrated the astonishing ability to train even me.
I've been thinking about this for awhile. It started in earnest with the Mindstorms DLT drive, but I've always been an analog hardware sort of guy. I like the Tinkertoy tic-tac-toe player.
My idea was two mechanisms: an injector or loader, and an ejector or unloader. They'd be driven by the cd tray popping out.
The ejector would probably just be some sort of lever arrangement to dump discs into a chute to stack in a box. The ejector would finish and trigger the injector.
The injector would be an escapement of similar design to the one on an old record player where you'd stack the discs on a spindle, and it would drop one at a time.
Consulting with a fellow maker of silly things, he reminded me that I could never inflict such a solution on my employer, having lived with other people's painful hacks far too often.
Now maybe I'll get back to it, now that you mention it. It's more fun to make stuff than build servers or study perl & regexps, or work late.
A carbon microphone doesn't work as a speaker, because it isn't generating a signal.
The resistance of carbon granules changes based on compression by sound waves. Running current through the device is it's normal mode, running a varied current (sound signal) through it would only warm it up.
Just being obtuse
When I want to read in the bathtub, I just put my palmpilot into a ziplock. IR transparent too.
So, put your entire boat into a big ziplock baggie, and you'll be fine. Everything on board will remain dry.
The referred article (link to a lecture to the CS Lewis society) claims to provide examples of structures so complex & singular in purpose as to have to have been intentionally designed, and not to have evolved. They must have all their component parts to function at all, and so could have no evolutionary predecessor.
Unfortunately, this article and its examples are inadequate. Just because you cannot imagine how something could have evolved, doesn't mean that it couldn't have done so.
The author of the referred article insists that we understand each part of the structures which he describes as irreducibly complex, but he also implicitly presumes that he completely understands their history, and that it's completely linear. In fact, his whole argument hinges on his understanding the entire history of these "irreducibly complex" structures. That actually begs the question. You can't presume history to prove that same history.
I'd like to use his own mousetrap example (of something that couldn't have evolved) to counter his point.
Imagine a springlike structure with a completely different function, perhaps a stiff spine for protection. Imagine then that there are circumstances where that structure catches slightly while under tension, but can be released with some force. Ever had a sticky accelerator pedal?
Once that catching proves evolutionarily useful, then it might eventually develops into a relatively sophisticated release mechanism.
The mousetrap would not have been only a mousetrap through all of its evolutionary history.
In fact, I suspect that there are multiple mousetrap like structures out there in the biological world.
In the game of Life, there are what is known as Garden of Eden patterns, because there is provably no way that these things could have developed from any predecesor structure based on the rules of the game. In real life, we don't know all the rules.
Oh, and: Fundmentalist materialist? Are you trying to be insulting by calling me a fundamentalist? I'm certainly foolish for indulging in a scientific argument with someone for whom religious tenets are postulated as facts.
It's not a Metapad, it's a Meatpad. Think portable 3x5 steak. The biggest hurdle was the maggots.
Boil hot dogs in the microwave. You just need a glass of water.
A friend of mine dropped by while I was having lunch. He grabbed the water glass in which I'd boiled my hotdog off of the table & saying "Damn I'm thirsty!" drank it down. "What the HELL was that?" I had to admit it wasn't my urine sample eventually, to keep him from hosing down my kitchen with vomit.
The "stories" are usually trivial. The comments are what makes it worthwhile. Often some of the comments if from people who know the subject better than the journalist who wrote the story. This is not just Katz. It's all of Slashdot.
Then there are the trolls.
Here's a quote from the Marvin Minsky article referenced in the Slashdot article _It's 2001, Where is HAL?
Recent discoveries in learning skills has revealed a very strange fact - suppose you work very hard on something and then you're tested later that day on the same thing. It's interesting, you won't be much better. If you're tested the next day, you may be a lot better. If you're tested the third day, you may be considerably better than you were on the second day without having done the thing in between. Guess what's the largest factor in influencing to what extent that's true? It's whether you got 8 hours of sleep or 6
I fix my own cars. Probably beyond the point of sense, occasionally beyond my own ability, for example breaking something else in the process.
Being comfortable working with your hands & getting messy is probably the main difference.
It took me years to be truly comfortable with cars, just as with computers. I had lots of cars that were so crappy that it was unlikely I could make things worse.
They both share:
I take pleasure in their design & execution. Who doesn't like a good hack?
I like understanding how things work, and using that understanding. The question of "why doesn't it work?" is a way to further understanding of how it does work. I also enjoy working with my hands and my mind at the same time.
I have on rare occasion made trivial parts that I needed, and on other occasions used hideous hacks. I have also irreparably broken things.
It's fun looking at something and figuring out "why the hell did they do _that_?" whether the answer is finally money, or a fit of perverse originality.
It's a secure feeling knowing that if you don't understand a problem, it is very unlikely that the professionals will be able to do any better.
Not true of software:
Physical stuff if fun to play with.
Break things. Perhaps only things that can't be used otherwise. They break in interesting ways, if you're paying attention. Besides, they make a great noise.
You'll need something to convert the Analog signal to a Digital signal for you computer to display it. That's what your sound card was doing. Not a lot of inexpensive commodity level A/D converters I can think of. I don't think software sampling will help much, otherwise you wouldn't have specialized hardware on the sound card.
You're right. What we really need is one giant software vendor to rescue us from all these damned incompatible competing programs. They're obviously inadequate tools because they don't speak microsoft's private language.
We need to be rescued from this pathetic situation where people make what tools they need, because they can. Don't worry though, Bill is trying to save us, if he's allowed to.
So make it disposable.
I always imagined such things running on narrow but _very_ long traces of explosive or rocket fuel. Solids are a more space efficient way to store fuel than gas phase. That's what I wanted to power MY electronic bumblebee with. If you didn't need to include your own oxidizer, even better. If you could make it refillable, great. Batteries are pretty expensive in terms of materials alone. Ultimately, this might be cheap to manufacture.
You'll find lots of etymology in the Jargon file, including the origin many words taken from literature.
I own a copy of the printed book, because I enjoy browsing it so much.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/
Hitachi says it's only 32 bits.
look at specs for the SH7750 at
http://semiconductor.hitachi.com/superh.htm
The AirPort basestation is a x86 single board computer. I've been trying to find out about rolling a Linux distribution to get VPN running on the device. That would solve the 802.11b security problems and make it _much_ more useful. The RADIUS server is nice, though.
Enjoy life, eat out more often.
SE Rykoff
As the multinationals talk nations out of ever more of their sovereignty, they will define globalism for you, and define it as corporate feudalism, because these multinantionals are already more powerful than many nations, and merely covet more power as the organisms they are.
Globalization is a euphemism for streamlining trade at the expense of national sovereignty. There is no cultural aspect, except the culture of consumerism.
Democracy died in this country when the supreme court ruled that a corporation had the same rights as a person. Never mind that these people already had & retained their rights.