Aside from being a bright guy Edison was a businessman. The lightbulb was an attempt to make a freaking pile of money (successful) by taking an existing profitable industry (oil-fired lamps) and destroying it utterly, then transferring the proceeds to Edison and company. He also attempted to capitalize on that whole inventing-several-related-industries thing by founding the Edison Electric Light Company, among others, and as those are capital intensive businesses absent the initial outlay of a large amount of money from his backers (including some of the robber barons, like JP Morgan) it never would have gotten off the ground. This followed previous successful deals such as solving a business problem for Western Union by producing a quadruplex telegraph, which saved them enough money to license the rights to the invention for $10,000, which was a considerable sum of money at the time.
1. Use Ruby on Rails to create a P2P friend code sharing site in 30 minutes. 2. Add copious abouts of AJAX and call it Miir or something. 3. ??? 4. Profit!
If things start shaking, I follow the advice on my safety pamphlet: go straight to the kitchen (room in the house with the least things to fall from above in my circumstance), get under the table, and stay there until the shaking stops plus a few minutes to ride out the aftershock and any settling of objects in the cabinets. Unfortunately the earthquake always seems to happen when I've in the bath or otherwise naked. I remember being scared out of my wits during my first earthquake (grew up in Illinois) and wondering "Now how will this look if the police come and find a stark-naked dripping white corpse under my kitchen table. The neighbors will be talking for months."
I'm rather glad my doctor can do it, but I certainly couldn't. Learning how to is not a rational use of my time. Teaching a fourth-grade English teacher what HAL is and why blocking port 25 on a residential internet connection then disabling open relays is key to stopping spam is like teaching me how to do a tracheotomy. Keep it to what she needs to actually do her job -- work the gradebook, discuss the latest trends in pedagogy online with her teacher buddies*, write emails home about little Johnny's progress, and write up assignments in Word.
* OK, so perhaps education would be better off without this. Oh well.
... I have yet to see any evidence that Spore is *cough* fun to play. Seriously beautiful technology. Top-notch designer, has done a lot for the industry. Intriguing as an intellectual proposition. All of these things were true of Black&White, which I plunked $55 down for and got burned, burned, burned for an unfinished tech demo which sort of forgot to ship the game with the box. Spore worries the heck out of me because its essentially going to be, hmm, six mini games in one, right? Not to put too fine a point on it, but plenty of people have trouble making ONE fun game, and I expect many of those games to be grindy purgatory which I have to suffer through to get to the (presumably fun) Populous-with-critters clone.
You know, the thing you have extinguishers around the office to deal with? And that you train with once a year to deal with? You call the fire department if the building is going to go up or if there is a danger to human life. If some idiot drops his cigarette on a plush seat causing a minor blaze you freaking deal with it yourself. I know, I know, the typical sysadmin is at risk from dying from the physical activity. Find the copy girl then, she's man enough to handle the job.
They already spotted you about four letters more in that function name than most C programmers would be comfortable with. Count yourself lucky -- most would have made it something like isr(x). Of course, I'm a crankly Java programmer and it would have been public static double InverseSquareRoot(double number) had I had my druthers. And the code would have been "return 1.0 / Math.sqrt(x);" because I am a Java programmer and if I wanted speed I would be using a language which thinks 7 characters is too long for an identifier.
You can't search on them, you don't have any incentive to tag them for yourself (since everyone is limited to the same 5 tags or so), and you can't get "More articles like this". Is it any shocker that they've turned into a veritable festival of in-jokes which provide no information you couldn't get from reading the summary? Heck, after you've read the headline you can provide all the tags:
"Is Linux ready for desktop?"
yes, no, fud, notfud -- and it would be marked omgponies, dupe, and thistagisfreakinguseless if any of those options weren't automatically stripped.
Its almost like tags are designed to be useless here, in a way that they're not with delicious (put the periods in wherever you want them -- I use www.delicious.com and I am so very glad it works). I can use delicious as a "Hmm, I want to read this later" bookmark-shared-across-machines, to categorize Java samples for my own use later, and to do things which are of use to *me*. The social aspect grows naturally from the personal uses, because when you mark Sun's whitepaper as being about Java or this photo on flickr as being of sakura everyone else gets to piggyback on your diligence. But if there isn't any personal use possible then tagging is just textual autoeroticism.
If you're talking about spam as in email, rather than blog spam or something, POPFile (or your Bayes-based solution of choice) will essentially end spam as a problem for you. I get two thousand spams a week and, on a bad week, see maybe three to four. This took perhaps an hour of my life worth of training over a week to achieve, and I reclassify all of the ones that are mistaken (thirty seconds worth of work a week). Saves me literally hours of deleting emails and I lose a heck of a lot less now that I'm not stuck stabbing the delete key a few hundred times a day, accidentally poofing emails from clients and family members. I think I temporarily lost one really important email in the last 6 months and about 3 that weren't of any consequence (password reminders, Amazon notifications, and the like that I knew were coming and was able to rescue easily).
Another is using markets. For decisions which are repeatable and judgeable on the basis of external results, markets kick the hindquarters of taking the majority vote. Who cares what the majority of Americans (or of Slashdotters) think of Sony's chances at making a profit on the PS3 -- the market, disproportionately lead by people who a) have been successful in the past and b) are particularly interested in Sony (for good or for ill) has already long since incorporated that information into Sony's share price, which is basically a hard-to-read numerical guesttimate of Sony's future profit potential. Are markets wrong sometimes? Yep, we get irrational behavior there, too. But they are ruthlessly efficient most of the time.
I got my Wii pre-ordered but went to the store (in a decent sized city in rural Japan -- allocation was 40 consoles + pre-orders, everyone in line got one). Fully half of the people lined up were of the fairer sex. Some were there with their boyfriends, there were a lot of families with the kids in toe, and at least two groups of high school girls were getting Wiis for themselves.
The launch was, incidentally, as smooth as silk. 45 minutes before the door opened they gave everyone in line a "you are guaranteed to get a Wii when we open, no need to rush" ticket. There were only about 20 people in the store when I picked mine up, most browsing the Nintendo sections while two queues proceeded in a very orderly manner.
Take a potshot at Microsoft. There's nobody the moderators here will more zealously defend from petty slights, aside from perhaps the RIAA or a convicted serial child rapist.
Their expectation of the shrink rate has already been calculated into their everyday low, low pricing. If America had a sudden attack of conscience and retail theft dropped 50% they'd happily cut another two pennies off that pack of Oreos and laugh loudly in the general direction of all the stores trying to sell it 5 cents higher. No guarantee that their theft premium was 4 cents or less to begin with, of course.
... I will sell my freaking spleen if I can use my Wiimote as a drumstick for something like DrumMania. Make it all Nintendo theme and put in the theme to Zelda or something as a bonus track. It will also sell more Wiimotes than anything since you just KNOW people are going to be chucking them at walls in a cymbal-crashing frenzy. Then again, knowing Nintendo, the Wiimote would probably emerged unscathed.
... if a fray boy attempts to cross a room without planning his route carefully. I don't see what the magnet has to do with it.
(Actually, one of my best friends in college was a frat guy, and really bright. So my comment is exclusive of him. Now, the frat boy who in a drunken stupor stepped on my head when I was a visiting high school senior, yep, thats the guy who needs the warning label tatooed on his keister.)
I like smart-alecky comments as much as the next guy but that article is like the perfect blend of geek and genius with a bit of CS thrown in. Let's have everyone see it.
... the RFC lets your mail server do whatever the heck it wants to the stuff after the + part. In GMail's case, if you strip off the +whatever you end up with the base mail address. In my case, if you strip off the +whatever you just got/dev/nulled (trashaccount+trustedmailer@mydomain.com gets redirected to my inbox, trashaccount@mydomain.com does not) I really hope GMail keeps doing it their way because mydomain.com receives a heck of a lot less email than they do and if the spammers ignore me to focus on their bigger fish, yay. Anyhow, my GMail address doesn't get any spam and I don't see that changing as I take care to protect it.
Sidenote: does.this.screw.people.up.or.what@gmail.com Honestly, its like they can't write regular expressions which will process a period in the user name. That isn't my real address, incidentally.
... but I was under the impression that most "brand new expensive computers" would be running Windows XP with SP2 pre-installed, and that comes with a firewall which, while not exactly a suit of platemail, will certainly suffice to make sure that any security vulnerability exploited on your own machine came in from a connection you authorized.
Somebody tell the security writer what "trojan" means, by the way. I mean, I might have abandoned my history major halfway through, but I don't remember the moral of the story being "Beware when large wooden horses are outside your wall, because that means when you go on a coffee break the large wooden horse will teleport inside your wall, and then disgorge Greeks".
MP3 players existed before the iPod and they were *commodity hardware* no less. Apple said "Screw that, this is a style item, not a pocket radio", and made the MP3 player *cool*, then charged a couple hundred dollars more than the Asian consumer electronics giants were charging. And proceeded to beat the living who-hah out of them. (The original iPod was $400 back in 2001. The Nomad Jukebox, which also had a hard drive, sold for about $250. Ever heard of it? Me neither. There were dozens of flash-based MP3 players, all capping at $250. Some of the popular models were in the $160 range.)
So here is the problem for Zune: there was a "portable MP3 player market". It was tiny. There is still a "portable MP3 player market", and its still tiny. And then there is an iPod market. Apple owns the concept like Nintendo used to own "video game console" (come on, how many of you have mothers who said that the Playstation was "The new Nintendo?").
I've been using that to send in credit disputes from overseas. At $2.33 a letter (technically a lot less but their minimum for one "mailing" is $2, plus postage) its a wee bit steep. Then again I don't have to buy a printer or go out to the post office, and my time has value...
... move a supertanker or container ship with sails. Container ships make the US's biggest aircraft carriers look tiny: 317 meters for the Nimitz vs. 390+ for some of the largest container ships. By comparison, Google says the largest sailboat in the world is about 120m long. You might as well get behind the Nimitz and push, it would do about as much good.
When you don't have enough money to eat every day, the prospect that some point removed from your house has, egads, gasses and metals at it doesn't seem quite as frightening. The nations of Africa, like many before them, will start caring about environmentalism when they have a high enough standard of living for it to be a pressing concern. China is starting to get greener as their economy improves (note "greener": they're still dirty, but if you were there 15 years ago you would be amazed people could live in their cities), and many late industrializing countries (Japan, Taiwan, etc) have high levels of environmental consciousness (I hate that word, incidentally) after decades of less-than-Greenpeace-approved actions taken to bolster their economies.
Incidentally, the other reason the whole "We'll take your junk if you pay us for it" works is that NIMBY-ites in rich Western democracies don't want the stuff anywhere near them, so they pay to have it dumped somewhere far out of sight. Then the same folks cluck-cluck about how we're exploiting the Third World.
But if there is anything on the ballot marked "Check here to kill Night Elves", sign me up for that. I'll even donate some gold for the lobbying efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from being a bright guy Edison was a businessman. The lightbulb was an attempt to make a freaking pile of money (successful) by taking an existing profitable industry (oil-fired lamps) and destroying it utterly, then transferring the proceeds to Edison and company. He also attempted to capitalize on that whole inventing-several-related-industries thing by founding the Edison Electric Light Company, among others, and as those are capital intensive businesses absent the initial outlay of a large amount of money from his backers (including some of the robber barons, like JP Morgan) it never would have gotten off the ground. This followed previous successful deals such as solving a business problem for Western Union by producing a quadruplex telegraph, which saved them enough money to license the rights to the invention for $10,000, which was a considerable sum of money at the time.
>>
It's damned impossible to do it for free.
>>
Yep, which is why Blizzard took a total loss when they created the national sport of Korea.
1. Use Ruby on Rails to create a P2P friend code sharing site in 30 minutes.
2. Add copious abouts of AJAX and call it Miir or something.
3. ???
4. Profit!
If things start shaking, I follow the advice on my safety pamphlet: go straight to the kitchen (room in the house with the least things to fall from above in my circumstance), get under the table, and stay there until the shaking stops plus a few minutes to ride out the aftershock and any settling of objects in the cabinets. Unfortunately the earthquake always seems to happen when I've in the bath or otherwise naked. I remember being scared out of my wits during my first earthquake (grew up in Illinois) and wondering "Now how will this look if the police come and find a stark-naked dripping white corpse under my kitchen table. The neighbors will be talking for months."
I'm rather glad my doctor can do it, but I certainly couldn't. Learning how to is not a rational use of my time. Teaching a fourth-grade English teacher what HAL is and why blocking port 25 on a residential internet connection then disabling open relays is key to stopping spam is like teaching me how to do a tracheotomy. Keep it to what she needs to actually do her job -- work the gradebook, discuss the latest trends in pedagogy online with her teacher buddies*, write emails home about little Johnny's progress, and write up assignments in Word.
* OK, so perhaps education would be better off without this. Oh well.
... I have yet to see any evidence that Spore is *cough* fun to play. Seriously beautiful technology. Top-notch designer, has done a lot for the industry. Intriguing as an intellectual proposition. All of these things were true of Black&White, which I plunked $55 down for and got burned, burned, burned for an unfinished tech demo which sort of forgot to ship the game with the box. Spore worries the heck out of me because its essentially going to be, hmm, six mini games in one, right? Not to put too fine a point on it, but plenty of people have trouble making ONE fun game, and I expect many of those games to be grindy purgatory which I have to suffer through to get to the (presumably fun) Populous-with-critters clone.
You know, the thing you have extinguishers around the office to deal with? And that you train with once a year to deal with? You call the fire department if the building is going to go up or if there is a danger to human life. If some idiot drops his cigarette on a plush seat causing a minor blaze you freaking deal with it yourself. I know, I know, the typical sysadmin is at risk from dying from the physical activity. Find the copy girl then, she's man enough to handle the job.
They already spotted you about four letters more in that function name than most C programmers would be comfortable with. Count yourself lucky -- most would have made it something like isr(x). Of course, I'm a crankly Java programmer and it would have been public static double InverseSquareRoot(double number) had I had my druthers. And the code would have been "return 1.0 / Math.sqrt(x);" because I am a Java programmer and if I wanted speed I would be using a language which thinks 7 characters is too long for an identifier.
You can't search on them, you don't have any incentive to tag them for yourself (since everyone is limited to the same 5 tags or so), and you can't get "More articles like this". Is it any shocker that they've turned into a veritable festival of in-jokes which provide no information you couldn't get from reading the summary? Heck, after you've read the headline you can provide all the tags:
"Is Linux ready for desktop?"
yes, no, fud, notfud -- and it would be marked omgponies, dupe, and thistagisfreakinguseless if any of those options weren't automatically stripped.
Its almost like tags are designed to be useless here, in a way that they're not with delicious (put the periods in wherever you want them -- I use www.delicious.com and I am so very glad it works). I can use delicious as a "Hmm, I want to read this later" bookmark-shared-across-machines, to categorize Java samples for my own use later, and to do things which are of use to *me*. The social aspect grows naturally from the personal uses, because when you mark Sun's whitepaper as being about Java or this photo on flickr as being of sakura everyone else gets to piggyback on your diligence. But if there isn't any personal use possible then tagging is just textual autoeroticism.
You can mark me fud and omgponies if you want.
If you're talking about spam as in email, rather than blog spam or something, POPFile (or your Bayes-based solution of choice) will essentially end spam as a problem for you. I get two thousand spams a week and, on a bad week, see maybe three to four. This took perhaps an hour of my life worth of training over a week to achieve, and I reclassify all of the ones that are mistaken (thirty seconds worth of work a week). Saves me literally hours of deleting emails and I lose a heck of a lot less now that I'm not stuck stabbing the delete key a few hundred times a day, accidentally poofing emails from clients and family members. I think I temporarily lost one really important email in the last 6 months and about 3 that weren't of any consequence (password reminders, Amazon notifications, and the like that I knew were coming and was able to rescue easily).
Another is using markets. For decisions which are repeatable and judgeable on the basis of external results, markets kick the hindquarters of taking the majority vote. Who cares what the majority of Americans (or of Slashdotters) think of Sony's chances at making a profit on the PS3 -- the market, disproportionately lead by people who a) have been successful in the past and b) are particularly interested in Sony (for good or for ill) has already long since incorporated that information into Sony's share price, which is basically a hard-to-read numerical guesttimate of Sony's future profit potential. Are markets wrong sometimes? Yep, we get irrational behavior there, too. But they are ruthlessly efficient most of the time.
I got my Wii pre-ordered but went to the store (in a decent sized city in rural Japan -- allocation was 40 consoles + pre-orders, everyone in line got one). Fully half of the people lined up were of the fairer sex. Some were there with their boyfriends, there were a lot of families with the kids in toe, and at least two groups of high school girls were getting Wiis for themselves.
The launch was, incidentally, as smooth as silk. 45 minutes before the door opened they gave everyone in line a "you are guaranteed to get a Wii when we open, no need to rush" ticket. There were only about 20 people in the store when I picked mine up, most browsing the Nintendo sections while two queues proceeded in a very orderly manner.
Take a potshot at Microsoft. There's nobody the moderators here will more zealously defend from petty slights, aside from perhaps the RIAA or a convicted serial child rapist.
Their expectation of the shrink rate has already been calculated into their everyday low, low pricing. If America had a sudden attack of conscience and retail theft dropped 50% they'd happily cut another two pennies off that pack of Oreos and laugh loudly in the general direction of all the stores trying to sell it 5 cents higher. No guarantee that their theft premium was 4 cents or less to begin with, of course.
... I will sell my freaking spleen if I can use my Wiimote as a drumstick for something like DrumMania. Make it all Nintendo theme and put in the theme to Zelda or something as a bonus track. It will also sell more Wiimotes than anything since you just KNOW people are going to be chucking them at walls in a cymbal-crashing frenzy. Then again, knowing Nintendo, the Wiimote would probably emerged unscathed.
... if a fray boy attempts to cross a room without planning his route carefully. I don't see what the magnet has to do with it.
(Actually, one of my best friends in college was a frat guy, and really bright. So my comment is exclusive of him. Now, the frat boy who in a drunken stupor stepped on my head when I was a visiting high school senior, yep, thats the guy who needs the warning label tatooed on his keister.)
I like smart-alecky comments as much as the next guy but that article is like the perfect blend of geek and genius with a bit of CS thrown in. Let's have everyone see it.
... the RFC lets your mail server do whatever the heck it wants to the stuff after the + part. In GMail's case, if you strip off the +whatever you end up with the base mail address. In my case, if you strip off the +whatever you just got /dev/nulled (trashaccount+trustedmailer@mydomain.com gets redirected to my inbox, trashaccount@mydomain.com does not) I really hope GMail keeps doing it their way because mydomain.com receives a heck of a lot less email than they do and if the spammers ignore me to focus on their bigger fish, yay. Anyhow, my GMail address doesn't get any spam and I don't see that changing as I take care to protect it.
Sidenote: does.this.screw.people.up.or.what@gmail.com Honestly, its like they can't write regular expressions which will process a period in the user name. That isn't my real address, incidentally.
... but I was under the impression that most "brand new expensive computers" would be running Windows XP with SP2 pre-installed, and that comes with a firewall which, while not exactly a suit of platemail, will certainly suffice to make sure that any security vulnerability exploited on your own machine came in from a connection you authorized.
Somebody tell the security writer what "trojan" means, by the way. I mean, I might have abandoned my history major halfway through, but I don't remember the moral of the story being "Beware when large wooden horses are outside your wall, because that means when you go on a coffee break the large wooden horse will teleport inside your wall, and then disgorge Greeks".
MP3 players existed before the iPod and they were *commodity hardware* no less. Apple said "Screw that, this is a style item, not a pocket radio", and made the MP3 player *cool*, then charged a couple hundred dollars more than the Asian consumer electronics giants were charging. And proceeded to beat the living who-hah out of them. (The original iPod was $400 back in 2001. The Nomad Jukebox, which also had a hard drive, sold for about $250. Ever heard of it? Me neither. There were dozens of flash-based MP3 players, all capping at $250. Some of the popular models were in the $160 range.)
i ons/2100-1040_3-274821.html for a blast from the past.
See generally http://news.com.com/Apples+iPod+spurs+mixed+react
So here is the problem for Zune: there was a "portable MP3 player market". It was tiny. There is still a "portable MP3 player market", and its still tiny. And then there is an iPod market. Apple owns the concept like Nintendo used to own "video game console" (come on, how many of you have mothers who said that the Playstation was "The new Nintendo?").
I've been using that to send in credit disputes from overseas. At $2.33 a letter (technically a lot less but their minimum for one "mailing" is $2, plus postage) its a wee bit steep. Then again I don't have to buy a printer or go out to the post office, and my time has value...
... move a supertanker or container ship with sails. Container ships make the US's biggest aircraft carriers look tiny: 317 meters for the Nimitz vs. 390+ for some of the largest container ships. By comparison, Google says the largest sailboat in the world is about 120m long. You might as well get behind the Nimitz and push, it would do about as much good.
When you don't have enough money to eat every day, the prospect that some point removed from your house has, egads, gasses and metals at it doesn't seem quite as frightening. The nations of Africa, like many before them, will start caring about environmentalism when they have a high enough standard of living for it to be a pressing concern. China is starting to get greener as their economy improves (note "greener": they're still dirty, but if you were there 15 years ago you would be amazed people could live in their cities), and many late industrializing countries (Japan, Taiwan, etc) have high levels of environmental consciousness (I hate that word, incidentally) after decades of less-than-Greenpeace-approved actions taken to bolster their economies.
Incidentally, the other reason the whole "We'll take your junk if you pay us for it" works is that NIMBY-ites in rich Western democracies don't want the stuff anywhere near them, so they pay to have it dumped somewhere far out of sight. Then the same folks cluck-cluck about how we're exploiting the Third World.
Please, this is Slashdot. On Slashdot, little brother destroys you.
But if there is anything on the ballot marked "Check here to kill Night Elves", sign me up for that. I'll even donate some gold for the lobbying efforts.