I run a Rails site. There is a particular action on the site which, at the moment, sits in my password protected admin's area. Two people accessing it simultaneously would lock the server for 2 seconds. That isn't a problem for me when I get about 1,000 users a day and the action is only accessible to a single admin, but it would not be unreasonable to push that action to the public site, because the chances of temporal collision between users are low and the cost for a collision is negligible.
However, if you were sucking down 10k pages from my site with a spider, you could DOS my site pretty trivially. (Call it the Googlebot effect.) Thats why you let me say "If you are capable of routinely generating page views with scale, feel free to go anywhere but Door #1."
Mitsubishi made a hell of a lot more than engines
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The DIY Tank
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· Score: 2, Informative
You know the Zero, the iconic Japanese fighter plane? Its full name is "Mitsubishi A6M", with the Zero bit coming from the Imperial Navy's designation (and not, as I mistakenly believed for a while, from a Mitsubishi part number). Mitsubishi, like a number of the largest firms in Japanese, used to be a zaibatsu (think sort of a megaconglomerate of businesses which the government propped up during the rapid industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries). Almost all of the zaibatsu were heavily involved in war production, as was almost any American company of any size for the duration of the war.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is still one of Japan's leading armaments makers, incidentally. I live a few miles from one of their fighter plane factories. Its related to Mitsubishi Motors, which is probably the company most Westerners think about when they think Mitsubishi. Other companies in the group do banking, insurance, nuclear power plant construction, food services, etc etc.
While I don't have direct experience with it, I hear tell that Windows 2000 actually runs Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer pretty reliably. Going from 98 to Windows 2000 doesn't mean "Everything you know is wrong" like going from 98 to Ubuntu does.
My CS teacher used to say "If the future of AI is going to be on the Internet, not in robots, then the future language of AI is going to be the one that can open and parse a URL most easily."
There are many possible choices for that language. C++ is not one of them.
Similarly, the future of solving business problems for most people is taking a small set of data from a big honking set of data, doing some business logic on it of trivial complexity relative to one's computational capacity, and displaying it in a comprehensible form to the user. There are probably languages less suited to this task than C++, but I'd have difficulty coming up with one off the top of my head.
I want to see someone do the Ruby on Rails "15 minutes to a weblog" demonstration in C++. Take however much time you need. Use whatever framework floats your boat. And take a screen recording while doing itShow us how easy it is to create a fairly typical, conceptually trivial application in your favorite tool.
My guess if I tried it? Somewhere around the 4 hour mark after hitting ANOTHER seg fault I'd commit suicide. Or start reimplimenting it in Perl. Which is really just more violent suicide -- there is more than one way to do yourself in!
... my buddy, who got a hamburger with a phone number written on the top bun with ketchup, was able to interpret the signal successfully. (I'm told it took three tries to get it right, though, because the resolution of smeared ketchup leaves a little to be desired.)
I asked his wife once what possessed her to do that. "I know we're supposed to play games and all but, frankly, there were six people in line behind him. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do."
I asked why she didn't just write it on a napkin.
"Please, I work in a fast food restaraunt. We might as well not give them to you."
WORD DOESN'T WORK!! Can't open book report START BUTTON NOT THERE THE iNTERNET IS BROKEN Excuse me, could u help me? URGENT!!1 Gradebook software broken!! Need fix asap thx1
If you think I jest, I sell educational software to elementary school teachers. They're wonderful people but, as a generalization, not Slashdot readers when it comes to operating their PCs. I have had to respond, I kid you not, to email suggesting that my software has broken their ability to send email. Which, on investigation, appears to actual refer to AIM ("you know, email, geez, I thought you knew computers") and which still has absolutely nothing to do with the Java application they just downloaded. And you want to sic Linux boxes on these people? Be my guest, I will retreat to my castle and stock the moat with voracious alligators before the torch-bearing mob arrives.
Yeah yeah, I know, we've all by now heard a one-hit wonder who was NOT signed by a label. (Like the "Chocolate Rain" guy, who probably will go down for the most overplayed 3 notes in history. Choc-late Raaaaaain...) The thing is, when we buy (or listen to, ya dirty scallywags) music, who do we overwhelmingly choose? The same old Britstreet Boy , the same old Sir 50 Snoopenem, the same-old Avrilguilera. For every play, download, or purchase that the long tail Code Monkey type songs get, the #1 (and, for that number, the #40) pick up tens of thousands. That is taken *in aggregate*.
The labels didn't just get a lock on the market because they control distribution. They've got a lock because they realize that music is an experience people want to share, music is a status symbol, and thus people want to listen to the music that other people are listening to. This has the same network effects that a Facebook or AIM or Microsoft Office does. The core music consumer is a high school or college student, and God forbid you listen to something nobody else in your circle of friends does at that age.
(Look at the P2P networks, too -- people are not downloading the Collected Traditional Swahili Spirituals Remixed To The Tune of "Waterworks" Compilation. The top downloads almost invariably track, in lockstep, the top selling songs/movies/games which appeal to teenage males.)
You've been playing too much ForumWarz. (http://www.forumwarz.com, browser-based MMORPG about trolling message boards, and one character class has a "Drool on Keyboard" attack)
Hmm. A Communist dicatorship, perhaps. I hear they sort of get off on that.
>> Do the Chinese not understand free association? >>
I think you will find that the Chinese government understand counterrevolutionary activity quite well, Comrade. It is the West who doesn't understand China, because its intellectual class has been self-deceptive for decades about Communism. ("You can't say that! We're just as bad!") China is a one-party totalitarian state where genocide at home and abroad is explicit government policy when it serves their objectives. ("Stop saying that! Iraq! War is bad! Viva la revolution and smash imperialism!")
* Life expectancy measured from birth for US males is up 10 years. For some other nations the gain has been more dramatic (typically the ones who got to the development party late).
* You know those radios, TVs, electronics, and computers? Yeah, you don't have to be a middle-class white American to own them any more.
* There are plenty of quality of life drugs (one of the reasons for constantly increasing health care costs is that our standard of care is constantly increasing). Acne, allergies, and decline in virility as a function of age are now essentially optional. Give us another decade or three and we'll add senility to the list.
* No major new form of transportation, but passenger air travel has been greatly democratized. Most Slashdotters can get a roundtrip ticket to Japan for a week's wages. It used to cost more than a month's. Domestic air travel is now price competitive with *bus fares* in many instances. It now strictly dominates passenger rail service in the US.
* Improvements in efficiency in banking, of all things, means that many, many more Americans have access to credit. No need to know the loan officer, no need to pass the "Is this man a responsible Christian gentleman?" test, no direct restriction based on income, even. This would have been a fairly radical notion in 1958. This has increased home ownership (*mostly* a good thing even with the current debacle which, it bears noting, is affecting less than a 10th of homes), made life much easier for many entrepeneurs, and greatly increased access to higher education. There are some downsides (folks going into debt to get plasma TVs), but the economist in me says "Well, they have a plasma TV now, and its clear they wanted it".
* I talk 2 hours on the phone every week to my family, across the Pacific Ocean, and pay about $10 a month for the privilege. Adjusting for inflation, that would buy less than an hour of call time to the house next door. A person from 1958 would be shocked, shocked that many phone calls are free. (I predict that a person from 2018 will be shocked, shocked that many weren't back in the dark ages of 2008! Imagine, you still pay for something as prosaic as speaking to someone in Japan! Why, its just bits?!)
* I can send a letter to anyone in the world, instantaneously, for free. If I actually want that letter to involve paper, I can send it now (2 PM) and have it arrive at 8 AM *just about anywhere on earth, without fail, tomorrow morning* for about two hours wages.
* In 1958, cheap prepared food was not a reality for most people. It now is. (I almost can't remember the last time I cooked, which is a little weird at the moment but I don't think this will remain weird forever. My mother remembers people sewing.)
* Most consumer products are so cheap that replacement is cheaper than repair. (TV shorts? Pants rip? Telephone on the fritz? Buy a new one.)
* Your main health problems are caused by an overabundance of cheap food and a dearth of manual labor taxing you every day. These are, in terms of human history, "high class problems".
... to sit in front of the front gate and smoke the first 40 kids who come out of it. Now, fast forward to the next day: "You KNEW there was a TERRORIST IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD and you LET OUR CHILDREN GO OUT THE FRONT GATE?!?" Instant loss of job at a minimum.
This is why we have elaborate terror defense scenarios: because if the scenario didn't work, well then, it is that wily terrorist's fault. If an improvised plan doesn't work, then it is fault of whoever was on the scene at the time.
(Interesting question: what would happen to the security professional who said "Assuming an armed assault on an American public school, significant student fatalities are inevitable. We should accept their inevitability and try to rescue as many students as possible rather than using loss-prevention policies which increase the likelihood that the loss will be total.")
... smashing your hard drive and thumb drive, or detonating the thermite charge on them, or clicking the button labeled In Case The FBI Catches Me With My Kiddy Porn Collection, is probably not the best move.
Yeah, yeah... I know, I know, he was probably just excercizing his constitutional right to privacy, software is not a crime, blah blah yadda yadda. And you know what? He also probably, as a factual matter, masturbates to photos of four year olds. It takes a pretty amazing string of coincidences for someone's next door neighbor to log onto your unsecured wireless router and attempt to download kiddie porn AND for you to have it on your hard drive without knowing it AND when the FBI is banging on the door your first actual is "Aww f---" instead of "WTF is going on?"
No tactical need for anti-tank or self-detonating
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New BigDog Robot Video
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There is no reason to use a robot to deliver an anti-tank round when a) the enemy doesn't use tanks and b) if he did, we have 46,000 cheaper, more reliable, and less risky ways of killing the tanks. Similarly, explosive robots have all the ROI of "firing a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hitting a camel in the butt"*, which we have been trying to get away from.
A cluster of wolves around a 4 year odl in Second Life.
Widespread use != high paying jobs
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Advanced Rails
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· Score: 1
I would rather be where the commodity programmers aren't than where they are, all else being equal...
Really boring example of Rails money $100/hr
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Advanced Rails
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· Score: 3, Informative
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ sells a Java application that I wrote. The site itself, while it doesn't look like it, is written in Rails. Nothing really fancy -- it is essentially a purpose-built CMS which allows me to scale one very niche form of content writing horizontally. More content written more efficiently means more visitors, more prospects to sell my product to, and more money for me. Previously, it was just a static HTML site, which was harder to expand and extraordinarily difficult to make efficient sitewide tests and changes to (e.g. does moving the menu around on all the pages cause conversion to the free trial to increase).
Could I have written it in PHP? Sure. Could I have done it as quickly? Probably not. The problem screams Rails Me -- little application, not all that much complexity (probably under 500 LOC outside of the view templates, which are 99% HTML), and its performance requirements are quite modest. (It typically deals with about a thousand visitors a day, although the application could chug through that in about 10 seconds in my tests, with caching turned off.) As for the exhorbitant hardware costs of the system, I was forced to move up from $7 shared hosting to a $20 VPS so that I could continue doing $1,500 in sales every month. Oh noes.
Anyhow, like I said, pretty boring. I anticipate, on the basis of the increase in traffic and trial downloads that I've had since launching, that the rewrite will be worth about $100 in additional profits for every hour I worked within the first two months. I keep adding new little features, too -- spent an hour yesterday adding Javascript graphs on the back end -- and it is some of the easiest web programming I've ever done. (I do Big Freaking Enterprise Apps in Java by day.)
Incidentally, a big "Heck yes" to parent when they said "The real money, however, is in developing your own stuff and then selling it on as a going concern." Why take a fraction of the revenue of your client's website once when you can operate the website yourself and take all of it on an ongoing basis. (And if it gets to be too much work, you hire out the boring stuff to folks who think $10, $50, or $100 an hour is a lot of money.)
* Largest hospital system in the country, accounting for over 20% of visits in 20 states. 5.4 million patients, 100 million visits (15 million of them emergency room). Includes some amusing trivia like "treats more AIDS patients in NYC than anyone else" * Largest non-governmental primary/secondary education provider in country. Educates about 2.5 million students (including about 320k non-Catholic kids), many of them poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Routinely outperforms local public schools, but subsidized almost entirely from those donors, not from the public purse. * 9th largest charity in country is closely affiliated * Second largest donor to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, after government. * Various other accomplishments which you could fill a book with. Universities, museums, immigrant rights lawyering, food banks, conservation programs, urban renewal, subsidized housing, child care, adoption, foster homes, yadda yadda yadda.
That's just the Catholic Church. Yeah, some of the property the Church owns is worth gazillions because it was cheap to buy stuff in downtown Chicago over a hundred years ago. And the Church certainly isn't immune to mismanaging money. But would you really want to spite them just to win a few points against Scientology? And, non-trivial question, if you successfully caused the donations to the Catholic Church to drop like a rock, are you willing to pay to educate those kids, patch up those patients, and feed those hungry? Because all of them are going to end up backstopped by public assistance, and the bill for that goes to you, not to me.
Whales are important to whales, and they're important to Western environmentalists for whom they are an object of pseudo-religious devotion, but personally, my life would be unaffected if they were to all simultaneously be teleported to Jupiter. (So long and thanks for all the plankton?) Arguably, the "petty local concern" proves that Japan is *most* impacted by the prescence or absence of whales, since they actually put them to human use, without which they're just a sea sponge which is a few orders of magnitude bigger.
I have yet to hear an argument that whales/dolphins/cows are important and cockroaches/protazoa/the malaria parasite/sea cucumbers are not which is not, at its core, religious.
Result #1, without leaving the search engine page: "Coke uses their own color, Coca-Cola Red, for their package designs"
Result #2, again without leaving the search engine page: "A touch of blue will ornament traditional red-and-white"
If you could actually do the language processing to tie those two into coherent thoughts, that would not just be good answer, it would be an amazing answer.
I can brute force the whole plaintext space in, like, 5 seconds. Unless they start creating an arbitrary number of wrong doors leading to distintegration chambers.
It would appear that their priorities lie in "generating cheap, reliable power", something which has not happened with solar despite us being "really close now!" for the last 25 years and billions in federal R&D. ($159 million in 2007 alone.)
The Department of Energy estimates that, in 15 years, America will get a whopping 2-3% of its electricity generation from solar power. It isn't hard to understand why: it is expensive, the technology takes a stupidly long time to go energy-positive (and longer to achieve ROI), and solar is and *always will be* hostage to weather conditions which make it impossible to as a main power source in the overwhelming majority of this country.
If you want cheap energy, go coal. If you want cheap clean energy, go nuclear. If you want the undying love of people who understand neither engineering or economics and are not willing to learn either, go solar.
Evolution-denying Chinese employees of Microsoft illegally tapping the iPhones of Scientologists causes Global Warming
(Oh, best flamebait ever: "Linux-using Scientologist: Friend or Foe?" Its like strapping buttered toast to the back of a kitten and pushing him off a table.)
Hiya, Internet advertiser here with response to young, idealistic blogger.
Here's the brass tacks: your blog is worthless.
You have:
* no significant traffic * an audience which is blind to advertising * an audience which, like you, has no money to spend and couldn't consumate an Internet transaction if they did because they don't have a credit card or Paypal (whoops!) * an audience which consists of your Slashdot-reading freeloading peers who have had AdBlock installed for forever * an audience which hates the very idea of advertising
You are proposing to give Wikipedia:
* an unobtrusive textual advertisement * in a poorly optimized corner of your blog * placed by an amateur with no incentive to get the placement right or tweak the ad to attract clicks * which will, most probably, be seen by less than 10 individuals per month, one of them being you, when we need to deal in the quantities of hundreds of thousands per day
Come back when you're willing to actually spend time or money on the causes you support and/or you have something of value to exchange.
Much love,
The Folks Who Pay For "Free"
P.S. Many folks think that AdSense has solved this problem, but a) it has only solved it for Google and b) Google actually makes the overwhelming majority of their AdSense revenue first from their own search engine, second from Content Network partners you have actually heard about, and only a tiny, tiny fraction comes from summing over hundreds of thousands of micro-size publishers and blogs on the long tail.
Slashdot Mirror
I run a Rails site. There is a particular action on the site which, at the moment, sits in my password protected admin's area. Two people accessing it simultaneously would lock the server for 2 seconds. That isn't a problem for me when I get about 1,000 users a day and the action is only accessible to a single admin, but it would not be unreasonable to push that action to the public site, because the chances of temporal collision between users are low and the cost for a collision is negligible.
However, if you were sucking down 10k pages from my site with a spider, you could DOS my site pretty trivially. (Call it the Googlebot effect.) Thats why you let me say "If you are capable of routinely generating page views with scale, feel free to go anywhere but Door #1."
You know the Zero, the iconic Japanese fighter plane? Its full name is "Mitsubishi A6M", with the Zero bit coming from the Imperial Navy's designation (and not, as I mistakenly believed for a while, from a Mitsubishi part number). Mitsubishi, like a number of the largest firms in Japanese, used to be a zaibatsu (think sort of a megaconglomerate of businesses which the government propped up during the rapid industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries). Almost all of the zaibatsu were heavily involved in war production, as was almost any American company of any size for the duration of the war.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is still one of Japan's leading armaments makers, incidentally. I live a few miles from one of their fighter plane factories. Its related to Mitsubishi Motors, which is probably the company most Westerners think about when they think Mitsubishi. Other companies in the group do banking, insurance, nuclear power plant construction, food services, etc etc.
While I don't have direct experience with it, I hear tell that Windows 2000 actually runs Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer pretty reliably. Going from 98 to Windows 2000 doesn't mean "Everything you know is wrong" like going from 98 to Ubuntu does.
My CS teacher used to say "If the future of AI is going to be on the Internet, not in robots, then the future language of AI is going to be the one that can open and parse a URL most easily."
There are many possible choices for that language. C++ is not one of them.
Similarly, the future of solving business problems for most people is taking a small set of data from a big honking set of data, doing some business logic on it of trivial complexity relative to one's computational capacity, and displaying it in a comprehensible form to the user. There are probably languages less suited to this task than C++, but I'd have difficulty coming up with one off the top of my head.
I want to see someone do the Ruby on Rails "15 minutes to a weblog" demonstration in C++. Take however much time you need. Use whatever framework floats your boat. And take a screen recording while doing itShow us how easy it is to create a fairly typical, conceptually trivial application in your favorite tool.
My guess if I tried it? Somewhere around the 4 hour mark after hitting ANOTHER seg fault I'd commit suicide. Or start reimplimenting it in Perl. Which is really just more violent suicide -- there is more than one way to do yourself in!
... my buddy, who got a hamburger with a phone number written on the top bun with ketchup, was able to interpret the signal successfully. (I'm told it took three tries to get it right, though, because the resolution of smeared ketchup leaves a little to be desired.)
I asked his wife once what possessed her to do that. "I know we're supposed to play games and all but, frankly, there were six people in line behind him. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do."
I asked why she didn't just write it on a napkin.
"Please, I work in a fast food restaraunt. We might as well not give them to you."
OK, so there might be a bit of a point there.
Inbox:
WORD DOESN'T WORK!!
Can't open book report
START BUTTON NOT THERE
THE iNTERNET IS BROKEN
Excuse me, could u help me?
URGENT!!1 Gradebook software broken!! Need fix asap thx1
If you think I jest, I sell educational software to elementary school teachers. They're wonderful people but, as a generalization, not Slashdot readers when it comes to operating their PCs. I have had to respond, I kid you not, to email suggesting that my software has broken their ability to send email. Which, on investigation, appears to actual refer to AIM ("you know, email, geez, I thought you knew computers") and which still has absolutely nothing to do with the Java application they just downloaded. And you want to sic Linux boxes on these people? Be my guest, I will retreat to my castle and stock the moat with voracious alligators before the torch-bearing mob arrives.
exaggerated.
Yeah yeah, I know, we've all by now heard a one-hit wonder who was NOT signed by a label. (Like the "Chocolate Rain" guy, who probably will go down for the most overplayed 3 notes in history. Choc-late Raaaaaain...) The thing is, when we buy (or listen to, ya dirty scallywags) music, who do we overwhelmingly choose? The same old Britstreet Boy , the same old Sir 50 Snoopenem, the same-old Avrilguilera. For every play, download, or purchase that the long tail Code Monkey type songs get, the #1 (and, for that number, the #40) pick up tens of thousands. That is taken *in aggregate*.
The labels didn't just get a lock on the market because they control distribution. They've got a lock because they realize that music is an experience people want to share, music is a status symbol, and thus people want to listen to the music that other people are listening to. This has the same network effects that a Facebook or AIM or Microsoft Office does. The core music consumer is a high school or college student, and God forbid you listen to something nobody else in your circle of friends does at that age.
(Look at the P2P networks, too -- people are not downloading the Collected Traditional Swahili Spirituals Remixed To The Tune of "Waterworks" Compilation. The top downloads almost invariably track, in lockstep, the top selling songs/movies/games which appeal to teenage males.)
You've been playing too much ForumWarz. (http://www.forumwarz.com, browser-based MMORPG about trolling message boards, and one character class has a "Drool on Keyboard" attack)
... who other people talk to?
Hmm. A Communist dicatorship, perhaps. I hear they sort of get off on that.
>>
Do the Chinese not understand free association?
>>
I think you will find that the Chinese government understand counterrevolutionary activity quite well, Comrade. It is the West who doesn't understand China, because its intellectual class has been self-deceptive for decades about Communism. ("You can't say that! We're just as bad!") China is a one-party totalitarian state where genocide at home and abroad is explicit government policy when it serves their objectives. ("Stop saying that! Iraq! War is bad! Viva la revolution and smash imperialism!")
Some of them are heterosexual.
* Life expectancy measured from birth for US males is up 10 years. For some other nations the gain has been more dramatic (typically the ones who got to the development party late).
* You know those radios, TVs, electronics, and computers? Yeah, you don't have to be a middle-class white American to own them any more.
* There are plenty of quality of life drugs (one of the reasons for constantly increasing health care costs is that our standard of care is constantly increasing). Acne, allergies, and decline in virility as a function of age are now essentially optional. Give us another decade or three and we'll add senility to the list.
* No major new form of transportation, but passenger air travel has been greatly democratized. Most Slashdotters can get a roundtrip ticket to Japan for a week's wages. It used to cost more than a month's. Domestic air travel is now price competitive with *bus fares* in many instances. It now strictly dominates passenger rail service in the US.
* Improvements in efficiency in banking, of all things, means that many, many more Americans have access to credit. No need to know the loan officer, no need to pass the "Is this man a responsible Christian gentleman?" test, no direct restriction based on income, even. This would have been a fairly radical notion in 1958. This has increased home ownership (*mostly* a good thing even with the current debacle which, it bears noting, is affecting less than a 10th of homes), made life much easier for many entrepeneurs, and greatly increased access to higher education. There are some downsides (folks going into debt to get plasma TVs), but the economist in me says "Well, they have a plasma TV now, and its clear they wanted it".
* I talk 2 hours on the phone every week to my family, across the Pacific Ocean, and pay about $10 a month for the privilege. Adjusting for inflation, that would buy less than an hour of call time to the house next door. A person from 1958 would be shocked, shocked that many phone calls are free. (I predict that a person from 2018 will be shocked, shocked that many weren't back in the dark ages of 2008! Imagine, you still pay for something as prosaic as speaking to someone in Japan! Why, its just bits?!)
* I can send a letter to anyone in the world, instantaneously, for free. If I actually want that letter to involve paper, I can send it now (2 PM) and have it arrive at 8 AM *just about anywhere on earth, without fail, tomorrow morning* for about two hours wages.
* In 1958, cheap prepared food was not a reality for most people. It now is. (I almost can't remember the last time I cooked, which is a little weird at the moment but I don't think this will remain weird forever. My mother remembers people sewing.)
* Most consumer products are so cheap that replacement is cheaper than repair. (TV shorts? Pants rip? Telephone on the fritz? Buy a new one.)
* Your main health problems are caused by an overabundance of cheap food and a dearth of manual labor taxing you every day. These are, in terms of human history, "high class problems".
... to sit in front of the front gate and smoke the first 40 kids who come out of it. Now, fast forward to the next day: "You KNEW there was a TERRORIST IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD and you LET OUR CHILDREN GO OUT THE FRONT GATE?!?" Instant loss of job at a minimum.
This is why we have elaborate terror defense scenarios: because if the scenario didn't work, well then, it is that wily terrorist's fault. If an improvised plan doesn't work, then it is fault of whoever was on the scene at the time.
(Interesting question: what would happen to the security professional who said "Assuming an armed assault on an American public school, significant student fatalities are inevitable. We should accept their inevitability and try to rescue as many students as possible rather than using loss-prevention policies which increase the likelihood that the loss will be total.")
... smashing your hard drive and thumb drive, or detonating the thermite charge on them, or clicking the button labeled In Case The FBI Catches Me With My Kiddy Porn Collection, is probably not the best move.
Yeah, yeah... I know, I know, he was probably just excercizing his constitutional right to privacy, software is not a crime, blah blah yadda yadda. And you know what? He also probably, as a factual matter, masturbates to photos of four year olds. It takes a pretty amazing string of coincidences for someone's next door neighbor to log onto your unsecured wireless router and attempt to download kiddie porn AND for you to have it on your hard drive without knowing it AND when the FBI is banging on the door your first actual is "Aww f---" instead of "WTF is going on?"
There is no reason to use a robot to deliver an anti-tank round when a) the enemy doesn't use tanks and b) if he did, we have 46,000 cheaper, more reliable, and less risky ways of killing the tanks. Similarly, explosive robots have all the ROI of "firing a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hitting a camel in the butt"*, which we have been trying to get away from.
* Best Dubya line ever. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bush.asp
A cluster of wolves around a 4 year odl in Second Life.
I would rather be where the commodity programmers aren't than where they are, all else being equal...
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ sells a Java application that I wrote. The site itself, while it doesn't look like it, is written in Rails. Nothing really fancy -- it is essentially a purpose-built CMS which allows me to scale one very niche form of content writing horizontally. More content written more efficiently means more visitors, more prospects to sell my product to, and more money for me. Previously, it was just a static HTML site, which was harder to expand and extraordinarily difficult to make efficient sitewide tests and changes to (e.g. does moving the menu around on all the pages cause conversion to the free trial to increase).
Could I have written it in PHP? Sure. Could I have done it as quickly? Probably not. The problem screams Rails Me -- little application, not all that much complexity (probably under 500 LOC outside of the view templates, which are 99% HTML), and its performance requirements are quite modest. (It typically deals with about a thousand visitors a day, although the application could chug through that in about 10 seconds in my tests, with caching turned off.) As for the exhorbitant hardware costs of the system, I was forced to move up from $7 shared hosting to a $20 VPS so that I could continue doing $1,500 in sales every month. Oh noes.
Anyhow, like I said, pretty boring. I anticipate, on the basis of the increase in traffic and trial downloads that I've had since launching, that the rewrite will be worth about $100 in additional profits for every hour I worked within the first two months. I keep adding new little features, too -- spent an hour yesterday adding Javascript graphs on the back end -- and it is some of the easiest web programming I've ever done. (I do Big Freaking Enterprise Apps in Java by day.)
Incidentally, a big "Heck yes" to parent when they said "The real money, however, is in developing your own stuff and then selling it on as a going concern." Why take a fraction of the revenue of your client's website once when you can operate the website yourself and take all of it on an ongoing basis. (And if it gets to be too much work, you hire out the boring stuff to folks who think $10, $50, or $100 an hour is a lot of money.)
* Largest hospital system in the country, accounting for over 20% of visits in 20 states. 5.4 million patients, 100 million visits (15 million of them emergency room). Includes some amusing trivia like "treats more AIDS patients in NYC than anyone else"
* Largest non-governmental primary/secondary education provider in country. Educates about 2.5 million students (including about 320k non-Catholic kids), many of them poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Routinely outperforms local public schools, but subsidized almost entirely from those donors, not from the public purse.
* 9th largest charity in country is closely affiliated
* Second largest donor to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, after government.
* Various other accomplishments which you could fill a book with. Universities, museums, immigrant rights lawyering, food banks, conservation programs, urban renewal, subsidized housing, child care, adoption, foster homes, yadda yadda yadda.
That's just the Catholic Church. Yeah, some of the property the Church owns is worth gazillions because it was cheap to buy stuff in downtown Chicago over a hundred years ago. And the Church certainly isn't immune to mismanaging money. But would you really want to spite them just to win a few points against Scientology? And, non-trivial question, if you successfully caused the donations to the Catholic Church to drop like a rock, are you willing to pay to educate those kids, patch up those patients, and feed those hungry? Because all of them are going to end up backstopped by public assistance, and the bill for that goes to you, not to me.
When you want to custom-mod your Apple products, you just have to accept that everything is going to be expensive squared.
Whales are important to whales, and they're important to Western environmentalists for whom they are an object of pseudo-religious devotion, but personally, my life would be unaffected if they were to all simultaneously be teleported to Jupiter. (So long and thanks for all the plankton?) Arguably, the "petty local concern" proves that Japan is *most* impacted by the prescence or absence of whales, since they actually put them to human use, without which they're just a sea sponge which is a few orders of magnitude bigger.
I have yet to hear an argument that whales/dolphins/cows are important and cockroaches/protazoa/the malaria parasite/sea cucumbers are not which is not, at its core, religious.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=color+of+a+coke+can
Result #1, without leaving the search engine page: "Coke uses their own color, Coca-Cola Red, for their package designs"
Result #2, again without leaving the search engine page: "A touch of blue will ornament traditional red-and-white"
If you could actually do the language processing to tie those two into coherent thoughts, that would not just be good answer, it would be an amazing answer.
I can brute force the whole plaintext space in, like, 5 seconds. Unless they start creating an arbitrary number of wrong doors leading to distintegration chambers.
It would appear that their priorities lie in "generating cheap, reliable power", something which has not happened with solar despite us being "really close now!" for the last 25 years and billions in federal R&D. ($159 million in 2007 alone.)
The Department of Energy estimates that, in 15 years, America will get a whopping 2-3% of its electricity generation from solar power. It isn't hard to understand why: it is expensive, the technology takes a stupidly long time to go energy-positive (and longer to achieve ROI), and solar is and *always will be* hostage to weather conditions which make it impossible to as a main power source in the overwhelming majority of this country.
If you want cheap energy, go coal. If you want cheap clean energy, go nuclear. If you want the undying love of people who understand neither engineering or economics and are not willing to learn either, go solar.
Evolution-denying Chinese employees of Microsoft illegally tapping the iPhones of Scientologists causes Global Warming
(Oh, best flamebait ever: "Linux-using Scientologist: Friend or Foe?" Its like strapping buttered toast to the back of a kitten and pushing him off a table.)
Hiya, Internet advertiser here with response to young, idealistic blogger.
Here's the brass tacks: your blog is worthless.
You have:
* no significant traffic
* an audience which is blind to advertising
* an audience which, like you, has no money to spend and couldn't consumate an Internet transaction if they did because they don't have a credit card or Paypal (whoops!)
* an audience which consists of your Slashdot-reading freeloading peers who have had AdBlock installed for forever
* an audience which hates the very idea of advertising
You are proposing to give Wikipedia:
* an unobtrusive textual advertisement
* in a poorly optimized corner of your blog
* placed by an amateur with no incentive to get the placement right or tweak the ad to attract clicks
* which will, most probably, be seen by less than 10 individuals per month, one of them being you, when we need to deal in the quantities of hundreds of thousands per day
Come back when you're willing to actually spend time or money on the causes you support and/or you have something of value to exchange.
Much love,
The Folks Who Pay For "Free"
P.S. Many folks think that AdSense has solved this problem, but a) it has only solved it for Google and b) Google actually makes the overwhelming majority of their AdSense revenue first from their own search engine, second from Content Network partners you have actually heard about, and only a tiny, tiny fraction comes from summing over hundreds of thousands of micro-size publishers and blogs on the long tail.