I was told (by someone who should know) that Apple only has the images Akamaized, and they always serve the html themselves. They really did have a heck of a bottleneck in there.
You know, I'd pretty much kill for a piece of presentation software that can do two things: inline PDFs and save as PPT (for my advisor).
Power* computers already come with OmniGraffle, which is rather nice for vector drawing (to me, this means "like XFig, but better", but I'm told it's more like something called "Visio"). Clip art is quite findable on the web nowadays, so I don't see the need.
But hey, I'm part of a very specialized market. But if anyone knows of a piece of presentation software for the mac that can inline PDFs and save to PPT....
I'd add to that "He has never written up a math-heavy document." The pain and suffering that people go through to achieve an inferior result is amazing. I've seen more than one person literally screaming at the screen. LaTeX is, hands down, the best piece of software I have ever used. It has a suprisingly shallow learning curve, and you can typeset anything you want. Generally, it Just Works. When you compile it on a differnt computer, you don't get new and interesting leaves and flowers replacing your greek symbols, like certain other pieces of software I could name.
I hear tell that microsoft is going to come out with some sort of software which can typeset equations, but I seriously doubt they can compete.
Regarding printed documents, Dec/5 (a group of grad students who do departmental service) produces a useful "Guide to Living in Pittsburgh" for incoming grad students (and whoever else wants to buy them. The printing house said they'd have to charge them $5000 (iirc) to go through their postscript and align everything correctly and clean it up before printing. They opened up the document and were absolutely stunned by how clean and correct it was; they're now reccomending LaTeX. (They also refunded the $5000.)
eh, who cares if they sniff your packets, just proxy through ssh.
There is one exception, though: I'd be careful about typing passwords in interactive sessions. Type them with strange timing (so they can't get timing data from the one-packet-per-character interactive thing), or just use keys. Problem solved.
I'd not connect to other people's net that didn't want to, but that person's just asking to be amused by trolling around in their logs.:)
Oh, I believe you. I just think that in this case, the civvies aren't the people in the FBI or CIA, who have been rightly burned for using these tactics in the past.
> Wht is your point? That I think to fast, that I type too fast?
I think his point was that you were attempting to make a point (rather superciliously, I thought), and that the entire basis for your argument was incorrect. That has nothing to do with typos.
> It is like people who put down folks who speak in the dialect of Ebonics. They don't care what the person is saying, they just hate black people.
Personally, I have trouble understanding quite a few people who speak Ebonics, or with speech laden with modern slang. Quite a few of the grammatical conventions used are ambiguous. I fail to "hate black people", however.
> Modern English grammer is a perscription that was created by the English elites so that they could keep their subjects down.
Modern English grammar was, if I remember correctly, instituted by clergy who were trying to revive the language, which had nearly died out, as part of a struggle to end French domination. The `elites' of the time spoke French. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>You'll be branded a terrorist, halled off to gitmo (or worse) and cornholed by our men in green (or worse, perhaps by other men in dark suits).
I currently would be more afraid of the boys in green. The unit at gitmo seems to have been instructed to use torture, and were even flown to iraq to teach it to others. The FBI and CIA, on the other hand, have been freaking out about this (rightly), because information gathered through torture has a long history of being extremely inaccurate ("yes, yes, whatever you say, sure"-type confessions), not to mention illegal.
>WTF? Once in a while I like to blow 300 bucks at the titty bar. Work all night? No way in hell.
There are times when it is very much worth it. Back in high school, I was on a FIRST robotics team. I worked for a week straight. (I wasn't very coherent after the first few days, but the robot worked at the end of this.) As an undergrad I'd stay up with a few friends and work on theory problem sets, which were really quite interesting. As a grad student I try to sleep, eat, and exercise regularly, but I work quite long hours, which sometimes includes all-nighters.
I love what I do. Sometimes, it's wonderful to give myself over entirely to that.
I believe the state of CA requires all high school students to take a basic course that includes that information, as well as how to be wary of advertising, how people lie with statistics, and how the stock market works. It's rather basic, but useful information.
In GF_2 (aka Z_2, aka {0,1} under multiplication and addition as you usually think of them), 1+1=0. I assume that's what you meant.
Lea
Re:How to find a programmer on Slashdot
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
What's a low ID number? It may be more of an age metric than anything. Personally, I'm not a programmer, I'm a PhD student, and I don't do programming, I do math.
I know, all caveats apply. Also, quite a few people didn't bother registering for quite a while; there really wasn't a compelling reason until the S/N ratio in the AC posts went way down, so "low" is also relative there.
>I can't count how many times I have read "...will take longer than the age of the Universe itself to brute force this/insert encryption scheme of choice here/..." when reading about some new fangled encryption scheme.
Unless you are using information-theoretically secure cryptography, it's impossible to make such a statement. We can say that the curernt best known attack takes such and such time, which is impossible, but that does not rule out improvements in mathematical knowledge.
A concrete example might be RSA. If factoring the product of two large primes is efficient, RSA cannot be secure. We currently think that factoring is hard, but it's not something anyone knows for sure. This holds for ALL one-way functions; we just don't know for sure yet.
There are of course more, but I just wanted to mention one: Congo. They managed to finally wrest their freedom from Belgium, and the CIA shows up trying to put poison in the president's toothpaste (seriously). It's unclear as to whether the US or Belgium actually were responsible for killing him, but the US has certainly admitted it was going to.
Sorry, I haven't actually watched the movie myself (can't, the network here bites, and I'm routing my traffic through school). My dad (pilot, yadda yadda) does claim that there is a video of the crash I mention that he has seen, and I just assumed that this was it. He may be wrong, it's been known to happen.
If it makes you feel better, I'd heard about that crash as well.:P
I don't have much information readily available (but send me email if you're interested, my dad is a pilot), but I do have a link to a video of the first public demo from Airbus. Note that the plane crashes.
I'm told that a) they fixed it and b) Boeing had it first, but this video is relatively old. In any case, by googling around, you can find sales announcements of airplanes with autoland, like this one:
Airbus' ACJ family features unmatched cabin width, comfort and spaciousness, unmatched payload/range flexibility, and an unmatched modern design - all for about the same price as its competitors. It is the only business jet certificated for the public transport of over 30 fare-paying passengers, the only one with fly-by-wire, Category 3B autoland and fuel-saving wingtip fences as standard, and is backed by an unparalleled worldwide network of spares, training and support centres.
There is also a (google cached) discussion of it here: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Kvfjhdn15DMJ: www.luchtzak.be/postt5393.html+airbus+autoland&hl= en
Boeing and Airbus have had autolanding capability since the 1970s, I believe. They certainly have it now. It's just now becoming more prevalent because a) airliners are replaced slowly, as their useful lifetimes are quite long and b) it's expensive. It's most useful for landing in places with consistently low visability, where one might not be able to land according to regulations when using a pilot.
They don't find it in a general population. I, personally, would try it among the people who get real migranes from it (aura and the works). The "dry mouth" reaction might just be a taste thing, but I couldn't speculate, as I have to avoid it. I have had severe reactions to it without knowing it was in the food (how the hell do "nacho" chips have it as the 5th ingredient?!?!?), which I would take as a reasonable indication that it's not psychosomatic. Avoiding MSG and a few other things cut out my migranes entirely. (I do cheat, though, and eat some of the things I can have in moderation, which brings them to a controllable level.)
Congratulations on misreading the press release and only looking at part of the 1800 troops. You can't even claim there are only 950 ground troops, as "Operation Enduring Freedom on the ground (special forces)" is not included.
> I think the fear of the language barrier might be a good thing, because it keeps the people most likely not to even TRY to be good, respectful visitors from visiting.
Have you SEEN the Ugly American Stereotype in his native (foreign) habitat? They think that speaking English louder will somehow make it comprehensible. These people aren't stopped by anything but the threat of dirty toilets or bullets.
(I have to admit that my own parents have been known to do this, without even prefacing it with "do you speak english?" in any language.)
It depends on where you are, it looks like. I eventually unsubscribed from my local list because people were DEMANDING anything from "anything needed for a baby" to "a car" to "complete home furnishings". I also offered some sheets and various home items to a woman who asked for quite a list of things, and had them refused becasue I am a "godless heathen".
I didn't mind the volume of polite requests, but the demands are a bit much.
Believe it or not, the ones who I know are just like other researchers. We do not in fact wear tight black leather to work. I, at least, don't have any condoms in my wallet. I don't think I've managed to be "creepy" yet, but I can work on it once I'm teaching classes.
I do have to admit, however, that, being researchers, I don't know any cryptographer rockstars. Nikita and Ian are quite interesting, cool people in their own right, however.
It's hard not to know who has written any given exam, after you've graded some of their homework... At the very least, you will become infuriatingly familiar with those with bad handwriting.
>Now, I don't think that will happen "within a few years", but it seems like a very real trend. Perhaps within a few decades, the only brick-and-mortar stores around will have hideous prices and only exist to cater to wealthy retro-luddites.
I did my holiday shopping over the Internet, sure, but I find it very difficult to buy a pair of pants that way. (Yes, I know men's pants have numbers that are supposed to tell you how big they are, but that doesn't work well on women's clothing.)
I could see fewer stores, mostly devoted to things like clothing, which is very, very hard to buy over the internet (don't say custom-fit, that's also very hard), groceries (smell before you buy!), and things where the shipping is simply not worth it, like dog food.
Slashdot Mirror
I was told (by someone who should know) that Apple only has the images Akamaized, and they always serve the html themselves. They really did have a heck of a bottleneck in there.
Lea
You know, I'd pretty much kill for a piece of presentation software that can do two things: inline PDFs and save as PPT (for my advisor).
Power* computers already come with OmniGraffle, which is rather nice for vector drawing (to me, this means "like XFig, but better", but I'm told it's more like something called "Visio").
Clip art is quite findable on the web nowadays, so I don't see the need.
But hey, I'm part of a very specialized market. But if anyone knows of a piece of presentation software for the mac that can inline PDFs and save to PPT....
Lea
I'd add to that "He has never written up a math-heavy document." The pain and suffering that people go through to achieve an inferior result is amazing. I've seen more than one person literally screaming at the screen. LaTeX is, hands down, the best piece of software I have ever used. It has a suprisingly shallow learning curve, and you can typeset anything you want. Generally, it Just Works. When you compile it on a differnt computer, you don't get new and interesting leaves and flowers replacing your greek symbols, like certain other pieces of software I could name.
I hear tell that microsoft is going to come out with some sort of software which can typeset equations, but I seriously doubt they can compete.
Regarding printed documents, Dec/5 (a group of grad students who do departmental service) produces a useful "Guide to Living in Pittsburgh" for incoming grad students (and whoever else wants to buy them. The printing house said they'd have to charge them $5000 (iirc) to go through their postscript and align everything correctly and clean it up before printing. They opened up the document and were absolutely stunned by how clean and correct it was; they're now reccomending LaTeX. (They also refunded the $5000.)
Lea
eh, who cares if they sniff your packets, just proxy through ssh.
:)
There is one exception, though: I'd be careful about typing passwords in interactive sessions. Type them with strange timing (so they can't get timing data from the one-packet-per-character interactive thing), or just use keys. Problem solved.
I'd not connect to other people's net that didn't want to, but that person's just asking to be amused by trolling around in their logs.
Lea
Oh, I believe you. I just think that in this case, the civvies aren't the people in the FBI or CIA, who have been rightly burned for using these tactics in the past.
Lea
> Wht is your point? That I think to fast, that I type too fast?
I think his point was that you were attempting to make a point (rather superciliously, I thought), and that the entire basis for your argument was incorrect. That has nothing to do with typos.
> It is like people who put down folks who speak in the dialect of Ebonics. They don't care what the person is saying, they just hate black people.
Personally, I have trouble understanding quite a few people who speak Ebonics, or with speech laden with modern slang. Quite a few of the grammatical conventions used are ambiguous. I fail to "hate black people", however.
> Modern English grammer is a perscription that was created by the English elites so that they could keep their subjects down.
Modern English grammar was, if I remember correctly, instituted by clergy who were trying to revive the language, which had nearly died out, as part of a struggle to end French domination. The `elites' of the time spoke French. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Lea
>if something went wrong a reassuring man would arrive very quickly and fix it
Wow, you can get this level of support without sleeping with someone? Impressive!
Lea
>You'll be branded a terrorist, halled off to gitmo (or worse) and cornholed by our men in green (or worse, perhaps by other men in dark suits).
I currently would be more afraid of the boys in green. The unit at gitmo seems to have been instructed to use torture, and were even flown to iraq to teach it to others. The FBI and CIA, on the other hand, have been freaking out about this (rightly), because information gathered through torture has a long history of being extremely inaccurate ("yes, yes, whatever you say, sure"-type confessions), not to mention illegal.
Lea
>WTF? Once in a while I like to blow 300 bucks at the titty bar. Work all night? No way in hell.
There are times when it is very much worth it. Back in high school, I was on a FIRST robotics team. I worked for a week straight. (I wasn't very coherent after the first few days, but the robot worked at the end of this.) As an undergrad I'd stay up with a few friends and work on theory problem sets, which were really quite interesting. As a grad student I try to sleep, eat, and exercise regularly, but I work quite long hours, which sometimes includes all-nighters.
I love what I do. Sometimes, it's wonderful to give myself over entirely to that.
Lea
I believe the state of CA requires all high school students to take a basic course that includes that information, as well as how to be wary of advertising, how people lie with statistics, and how the stock market works. It's rather basic, but useful information.
Lea
In GF_2 (aka Z_2, aka {0,1} under multiplication and addition as you usually think of them), 1+1=0. I assume that's what you meant.
Lea
What's a low ID number? It may be more of an age metric than anything. Personally, I'm not a programmer, I'm a PhD student, and I don't do programming, I do math.
I know, all caveats apply. Also, quite a few people didn't bother registering for quite a while; there really wasn't a compelling reason until the S/N ratio in the AC posts went way down, so "low" is also relative there.
Lea
>I can't count how many times I have read "...will take longer than the age of the Universe itself to brute force this /insert encryption scheme of choice here/..." when reading about some new fangled encryption scheme.
Unless you are using information-theoretically secure cryptography, it's impossible to make such a statement. We can say that the curernt best known attack takes such and such time, which is impossible, but that does not rule out improvements in mathematical knowledge.
A concrete example might be RSA. If factoring the product of two large primes is efficient, RSA cannot be secure. We currently think that factoring is hard, but it's not something anyone knows for sure. This holds for ALL one-way functions; we just don't know for sure yet.
Lea
There are of course more, but I just wanted to mention one: Congo. They managed to finally wrest their freedom from Belgium, and the CIA shows up trying to put poison in the president's toothpaste (seriously). It's unclear as to whether the US or Belgium actually were responsible for killing him, but the US has certainly admitted it was going to.
Lea
Sorry, I haven't actually watched the movie myself (can't, the network here bites, and I'm routing my traffic through school). My dad (pilot, yadda yadda) does claim that there is a video of the crash I mention that he has seen, and I just assumed that this was it. He may be wrong, it's been known to happen.
:P
If it makes you feel better, I'd heard about that crash as well.
Lea
I don't have much information readily available (but send me email if you're interested, my dad is a pilot), but I do have a link to a video of the first public demo from Airbus. Note that the plane crashes.
s /A irbus320_trees.mpg
: www.luchtzak.be/postt5393.html+airbus+autoland&hl= en
http://www.alexisparkinn.com/photogallery/Video
I'm told that a) they fixed it and b) Boeing had it first, but this video is relatively old. In any case, by googling around, you can find sales announcements of airplanes with autoland, like this one:
Airbus' ACJ family features unmatched cabin width, comfort and spaciousness, unmatched payload/range flexibility, and an unmatched modern design - all for about the same price as its competitors. It is the only business jet certificated for the public transport of over 30 fare-paying passengers, the only one with fly-by-wire, Category 3B autoland and fuel-saving wingtip fences as standard, and is backed by an unparalleled worldwide network of spares, training and support centres.
There is also a (google cached) discussion of it here: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Kvfjhdn15DMJ
Lea
Boeing and Airbus have had autolanding capability since the 1970s, I believe. They certainly have it now. It's just now becoming more prevalent because a) airliners are replaced slowly, as their useful lifetimes are quite long and b) it's expensive. It's most useful for landing in places with consistently low visability, where one might not be able to land according to regulations when using a pilot.
Lea
They don't find it in a general population. I, personally, would try it among the people who get real migranes from it (aura and the works). The "dry mouth" reaction might just be a taste thing, but I couldn't speculate, as I have to avoid it. I have had severe reactions to it without knowing it was in the food (how the hell do "nacho" chips have it as the 5th ingredient?!?!?), which I would take as a reasonable indication that it's not psychosomatic. Avoiding MSG and a few other things cut out my migranes entirely. (I do cheat, though, and eat some of the things I can have in moderation, which brings them to a controllable level.)
Lea
Congratulations on misreading the press release and only looking at part of the 1800 troops. You can't even claim there are only 950 ground troops, as "Operation Enduring Freedom on the ground (special forces)" is not included.
Lea
> I think the fear of the language barrier might be a good thing, because it keeps the people most likely not to even TRY to be good, respectful visitors from visiting.
Have you SEEN the Ugly American Stereotype in his native (foreign) habitat? They think that speaking English louder will somehow make it comprehensible. These people aren't stopped by anything but the threat of dirty toilets or bullets.
(I have to admit that my own parents have been known to do this, without even prefacing it with "do you speak english?" in any language.)
Lea
It depends on where you are, it looks like. I eventually unsubscribed from my local list because people were DEMANDING anything from "anything needed for a baby" to "a car" to "complete home furnishings". I also offered some sheets and various home items to a woman who asked for quite a list of things, and had them refused becasue I am a "godless heathen".
I didn't mind the volume of polite requests, but the demands are a bit much.
Lea
Believe it or not, the ones who I know are just like other researchers. We do not in fact wear tight black leather to work. I, at least, don't have any condoms in my wallet. I don't think I've managed to be "creepy" yet, but I can work on it once I'm teaching classes.
I do have to admit, however, that, being researchers, I don't know any cryptographer rockstars. Nikita and Ian are quite interesting, cool people in their own right, however.
Lea
It's hard not to know who has written any given exam, after you've graded some of their homework... At the very least, you will become infuriatingly familiar with those with bad handwriting.
Lea
>There is no sane reason that you could up with to justify that speed limit.
The reason was originally to increase fuel efficiency. Remember when the national speed limit was imposed, with the fuel price crisis and all...
This was the first link I found when I googled, but it's well-documented.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/a-why55.html
Lea
>Now, I don't think that will happen "within a few years", but it seems like a very real trend. Perhaps within a few decades, the only brick-and-mortar stores around will have hideous prices and only exist to cater to wealthy retro-luddites.
I did my holiday shopping over the Internet, sure, but I find it very difficult to buy a pair of pants that way. (Yes, I know men's pants have numbers that are supposed to tell you how big they are, but that doesn't work well on women's clothing.)
I could see fewer stores, mostly devoted to things like clothing, which is very, very hard to buy over the internet (don't say custom-fit, that's also very hard), groceries (smell before you buy!), and things where the shipping is simply not worth it, like dog food.
Lea