Justifiably, there are a lot of comments here along the line of "too many results". Apparently, search engines think that lots of results are preferable to few results. In a way that makes sense because if you get the right answer (more properly, a right answer) early on, what do you care about the following million irrelevancies?
The/. mindset seems to be "...if only I could enter the right (possibly nonexistent today) command or switch or whatever, then I'd get the right results early in the results list, and to heck with the rest." Personally I think this "forward" approach is unsolvable. If it were doable I think we'd be a lot closer to it today.
Instead of the "forward" approach I suggest a "back-end" approach: if the best a browser can do is hand you a boatload of possibilities, maybe the browser should supply you with tools to refine those possibilities. One idea along these lines is to consider your list of results as a series of entries in a relational database, and let you refine the list with, say, SQL-like commands. For example:
DELETE ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.sequence > 1000;
-- Limits further operations to the first 1000 results. Note this doesn't delete the actual pages (!), just the entries in the "database" of search results.
FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF "clinton" IN ENTRY.url AND "Hillary" IN ENTRY.text THEN DELETE ENTRY;
-- Gets rid of all pages containing "Hillary" if the url contains "clinton". Yes, it's a lot of typing but the browser saves all commands and you can create a file that is auto-executed for every search result, if it means that much to you.
FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.date > '2014/06/20' and ENTRY.date < '2014/12/21' THEN PASS ELSE DELETE ENTRY;
-- Removes everything except pages made in Summer/Fall of 2014. It must have been a very good year.
And so on.
About half of the/. community is about ready to pounce on this as being unworkable. Commands that require searching lots of url's, even if limited to 1000, can take a long time to execute. At the moment this is true but that doesn't mean things will stay that way. "All" it takes are support hooks in the master database. E.g., "Is 'Hillary' in <url0>,<url1>,<url2>,<url3>,<url4>,etc." Presumably the search index can answer this without any network I/O.
Probably what's needed is a research project that identifies what kind of properties are useful in the "results database". No need to build your own search engine -- just send a search command to Google (under program control) and harvest the results, building the "results database". It's not that hard. Building an SQL-like command parser isn't that difficult either, assuming knowledge of lex and yacc, or the like. It's a bit more difficult to figure out what properties and commands are useful. (If any!)
> You do realize that the colour spectrum of LEDs is a solved problem, right?
But that doesn't mean MY problem is solved. It's not clear to me I'll be able to find a bulb of the right size with all the features, such as 50-100-150 3-way, good color spectrum, dimmability etc.
Imagine all the Yahoos at Home Depot who will tell you this or that bulb will work for whatever purpose you specify, when in fact they're just following their training: sell first and leave the returns for the insensitive clods at the returns desk.
As an aside, does anyone know if there exists a software package that lets you perform securely encrypted incremental remote backups?
I have EaseUS Todo Backup and it looks like it can do all that, but it costs money (~$30) and probably only runs on Windows. I've got a Linksys Slug with 3TB storage and use EaseUS for weekly full and nightly differential backups. But I don't use encryption...hmm, I wonder why?
I'd like to propose home schooling aids. No, home schooling is not new. What is new is the large amount of help now available for parents who are willing and able to teach their own kids.
Also: education vouchers, where parents can choose to send their children to schools outside their district.
Both of these are politically charged innovations that try to address some problems with American education. So was Brown.
Not everybody needs to approve of an innovation for it to have an impact.
Re:To bad that non college education does not resp
on
MOOC Mania
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· Score: 1
[...] My point? Shakespeare possibly would get marks on his paper in a modern school for 'bad spelling.' The nattering pedants who fuss excessively about spelling are a modern phenomenon.[...]
I suspect if Shakespeare knew he had a standard to follow, he most likely would have followed it and only gotten good marks. Especially with the spelling correctors available today.
IIRC, tiny PCs use a single 1GB DRAM chip soldered (not socketed) to the mainboard. You might want to toss in a few carefully-wrapped spares. And a soldering iron if you're really concerned.
If everybody knows there's a PC with Linux / USB / SATA then you've got a good storage standard all can adhere to.
I didn't see Grammar Nazis when I read this article. I misread "gaffes" as "giraffes", and thus pictured that "grammar gaffes have invaded the office", which is quite an amusing thought when you try to envision it, especially the commotion when they walk in through the lobby yelling at everyone who ends a sentence with a preposition. My grammar giraffes might have been German nonetheless though because they were wearing kaiser helmets and spoke with a German accent. Come to think of it, now when I picture them they're wearing Nazi armbands around their legs and are sentencing office workers who confuse "lose" and "loose" to labor camps where they'll toil in the sun picking acacia leaves.
Except giraffes can't speak, except for grunts and the like... so you can't fault their grammar.
Forty years ago I was in much the same position. One day, after the lecture (I dunno, chi-square maybe) a student came up and wanted to know what the formula was. I explained how there wasn't a standalone formula, this was a procedure that involved several formulas...but understanding the whole procedure was required.
To make a long story short, he didn't get it. I don't know how many other students didn't get it either; they seem to think the course was all about regurgitating formulas. Maybe that's the psych students' view of math.
Maybe I was just a lousy teacher, but I got high ratings from the class after the semester, so that seems unlikely.
I went to a public university (University of Arizona) in the US.
Wow, now there's a coincidence. I went to the University of Arizona too. My in-state tuition was only a few hundred bucks. But that was back when Nixon was president, probably long before you matriculated...
Compared to the US, German universities are essentially free.
Of course you don't mean "free" as in beer. Most of your tuition is paid for by the good taxpayers of Germany who presumably view a well-educated citizenry as an overall win relative to the cost involved.
Of course if the devices had a USB interface so you could save your favorite pics to your flash drive, you might have a point.
As noted above, a cell phone camera will soon become a TSA voyeur's constant companion.
And of course, it is inevitable these machines will grow in sophistication and one day will be able to render faces and genitalia with far higher resolution than now shown to the public.
(of course you'll have to regularly close the browser for it to be effective).
With Firefox 3.5.x I get browser crashes all the time, but I doubt that clears Flash Cookies. It would be nice if they got cleared on FF startup as well, before any page loads.
6) Let her do things her way, even if suboptimal. When I heat a can of soup, I pour the can into the soup bowl and microwave for a few minutes. My wife insists on heating the soup in a saucepan, then ladling it into a bowl, thereby using more energy to cook and clean (and serve less soup). I've tried explaining the physics involved but it doesn't take. Live with it.
unfortunetly[sic] you will hear us pitching about cell phones more than we will about a transistor
Most of the/. community understand why it works that way. What THE SHACK apparently fails to understand is that without those transistors you're not gonna get any customer traffic to pitch phones to. In fact, I just shorted RSH at 16 even, and also ended a sentence with a preposition.
I went in to a local Shack to buy a soldering iron a couple months ago. They don't have them. They do have cell phones, and boy do they love to pitch them. I have no idea who sells soldering irons any more, though I'm sure I could use Bing to google around.
Is it proper English to use "google" intransitively?
"But how does this kind of stock trading benefit anyone other than the traders themselves?"
I think your question speaks (to me at least) of a more basic question. Do all actions have to be to benefit 'others' in your opinion? [...]
Well put. The burden of proof is not on the actor to justify his actions, but on the observer to demonstrate why the actions are bad.
Actually, I happen to agree that there's something wrong with this. Basically it results in an uneven playing field. Some subset of dealers can engage in "algo" behavior while others cannot. Plus, it looks a lot like front-running, except you're front-running somebody else's order. Plus, the exchanges should realize this just looks bad to a lot of their customers, and their reputation and eventual regulation is at stake.
Actually, I'm not. I just wish that anyone who still showed an interest in my book would be shown directly to a place where they could actually pay for it. And I wish that they wouldn't be tempted with all of the Torrent sites.
Put up a web page that (1) offers the first few chapters for free and (2) offers the entire book for 25 cents, or whatever value you think people will judge to be low enough to make paying preferable to pirating. You may need to spiff up the book a bit to widen its appeal.
All it takes is a viable micropayment system, which you may need to invent first.
the newspaper needs to be current info, so online material is actually superior to thrown on your doorstep the next morning. so newspapers are withering and dying
OTOH, it's quite possible your Kindle could contain current copy, delivered fresh every few minutes as reporters rewrite / update their stories. Rather like newspapers in the Harry Potter series, or headlines changing at the end of "Early Edition" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Edition) (for those who remember it).
Well said, hairyfeet. I was an early GC adopter, back when you could use unclosed HTML comments to delete the crap they appended to your upload.
There's so little storage involved, and surely bandwidth must be miniscule too. Makes me wonder about Yahoo's motives -- expense control? Things are that bad at Yahoo?
Why yes, I do have a/WallStreet address. A tip of the hat to the Archive Team!
Slashdot Mirror
The /. mindset seems to be "...if only I could enter the right (possibly nonexistent today) command or switch or whatever, then I'd get the right results early in the results list, and to heck with the rest." Personally I think this "forward" approach is unsolvable. If it were doable I think we'd be a lot closer to it today.
Instead of the "forward" approach I suggest a "back-end" approach: if the best a browser can do is hand you a boatload of possibilities, maybe the browser should supply you with tools to refine those possibilities. One idea along these lines is to consider your list of results as a series of entries in a relational database, and let you refine the list with, say, SQL-like commands. For example:
DELETE ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.sequence > 1000;
-- Limits further operations to the first 1000 results. Note this doesn't delete the actual pages (!), just the entries in the "database" of search results.
FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF "clinton" IN ENTRY.url AND "Hillary" IN ENTRY.text THEN DELETE ENTRY;
-- Gets rid of all pages containing "Hillary" if the url contains "clinton". Yes, it's a lot of typing but the browser saves all commands and you can create a file that is auto-executed for every search result, if it means that much to you.
FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.date > '2014/06/20' and ENTRY.date < '2014/12/21' THEN PASS ELSE DELETE ENTRY;
-- Removes everything except pages made in Summer/Fall of 2014. It must have been a very good year.
And so on.
About half of the /. community is about ready to pounce on this as being unworkable. Commands that require searching lots of url's, even if limited to 1000, can take a long time to execute. At the moment this is true but that doesn't mean things will stay that way. "All" it takes are support hooks in the master database. E.g., "Is 'Hillary' in <url0>,<url1>,<url2>,<url3>,<url4>,etc." Presumably the search index can answer this without any network I/O.
Probably what's needed is a research project that identifies what kind of properties are useful in the "results database". No need to build your own search engine -- just send a search command to Google (under program control) and harvest the results, building the "results database". It's not that hard. Building an SQL-like command parser isn't that difficult either, assuming knowledge of lex and yacc, or the like. It's a bit more difficult to figure out what properties and commands are useful. (If any!)
Summer Of Code, anyone?
> You do realize that the colour spectrum of LEDs is a solved problem, right?
But that doesn't mean MY problem is solved. It's not clear to me I'll be able to find a bulb of the right size with all the features, such as 50-100-150 3-way, good color spectrum, dimmability etc.
Imagine all the Yahoos at Home Depot who will tell you this or that bulb will work for whatever purpose you specify, when in fact they're just following their training: sell first and leave the returns for the insensitive clods at the returns desk.
BTW, What you *should* be watching today is http://animal.discovery.com/tv-shows/puppy-bowl
I did, for a few minutes. Pathetic.
As an aside, does anyone know if there exists a software package that lets you perform securely encrypted incremental remote backups?
I have EaseUS Todo Backup and it looks like it can do all that, but it costs money (~$30) and probably only runs on Windows. I've got a Linksys Slug with 3TB storage and use EaseUS for weekly full and nightly differential backups. But I don't use encryption...hmm, I wonder why?
Very nice list.
I'd like to propose home schooling aids. No, home schooling is not new. What is new is the large amount of help now available for parents who are willing and able to teach their own kids.
Also: education vouchers, where parents can choose to send their children to schools outside their district.
Both of these are politically charged innovations that try to address some problems with American education. So was Brown. Not everybody needs to approve of an innovation for it to have an impact.
[...] My point? Shakespeare possibly would get marks on his paper in a modern school for 'bad spelling.' The nattering pedants who fuss excessively about spelling are a modern phenomenon.[...]
I suspect if Shakespeare knew he had a standard to follow, he most likely would have followed it and only gotten good marks. Especially with the spelling correctors available today.
IIRC, tiny PCs use a single 1GB DRAM chip soldered (not socketed) to the mainboard. You might want to toss in a few carefully-wrapped spares. And a soldering iron if you're really concerned.
If everybody knows there's a PC with Linux / USB / SATA then you've got a good storage standard all can adhere to.
I didn't see Grammar Nazis when I read this article. I misread "gaffes" as "giraffes", and thus pictured that "grammar gaffes have invaded the office", which is quite an amusing thought when you try to envision it, especially the commotion when they walk in through the lobby yelling at everyone who ends a sentence with a preposition. My grammar giraffes might have been German nonetheless though because they were wearing kaiser helmets and spoke with a German accent. Come to think of it, now when I picture them they're wearing Nazi armbands around their legs and are sentencing office workers who confuse "lose" and "loose" to labor camps where they'll toil in the sun picking acacia leaves.
Except giraffes can't speak, except for grunts and the like ... so you can't fault their grammar.
To make a long story short, he didn't get it. I don't know how many other students didn't get it either; they seem to think the course was all about regurgitating formulas. Maybe that's the psych students' view of math.
Maybe I was just a lousy teacher, but I got high ratings from the class after the semester, so that seems unlikely.
FORTRAN man, eh? No wonder you posted as AC.
Lose a PSU and you lose half your box. Is that a "reliable" solution?
I went to a public university (University of Arizona) in the US.
Wow, now there's a coincidence. I went to the University of Arizona too. My in-state tuition was only a few hundred bucks. But that was back when Nixon was president, probably long before you matriculated...
Compared to the US, German universities are essentially free.
Of course you don't mean "free" as in beer. Most of your tuition is paid for by the good taxpayers of Germany who presumably view a well-educated citizenry as an overall win relative to the cost involved.
Of course if the devices had a USB interface so you could save your favorite pics to your flash drive, you might have a point.
As noted above, a cell phone camera will soon become a TSA voyeur's constant companion.
And of course, it is inevitable these machines will grow in sophistication and one day will be able to render faces and genitalia with far higher resolution than now shown to the public.
(of course you'll have to regularly close the browser for it to be effective).
With Firefox 3.5.x I get browser crashes all the time, but I doubt that clears Flash Cookies. It would be nice if they got cleared on FF startup as well, before any page loads.
6) Let her do things her way, even if suboptimal. When I heat a can of soup, I pour the can into the soup bowl and microwave for a few minutes. My wife insists on heating the soup in a saucepan, then ladling it into a bowl, thereby using more energy to cook and clean (and serve less soup). I've tried explaining the physics involved but it doesn't take. Live with it.
unfortunetly[sic] you will hear us pitching about cell phones more than we will about a transistor
Most of the /. community understand why it works that way. What THE SHACK apparently fails to understand is that without those transistors you're not gonna get any customer traffic to pitch phones to. In fact, I just shorted RSH at 16 even, and also ended a sentence with a preposition.
I went in to a local Shack to buy a soldering iron a couple months ago. They don't have them. They do have cell phones, and boy do they love to pitch them. I have no idea who sells soldering irons any more, though I'm sure I could use Bing to google around.
Is it proper English to use "google" intransitively?
"But how does this kind of stock trading benefit anyone other than the traders themselves?"
I think your question speaks (to me at least) of a more basic question. Do all actions have to be to benefit 'others' in your opinion? [...]
Well put. The burden of proof is not on the actor to justify his actions, but on the observer to demonstrate why the actions are bad.
Actually, I happen to agree that there's something wrong with this. Basically it results in an uneven playing field. Some subset of dealers can engage in "algo" behavior while others cannot. Plus, it looks a lot like front-running, except you're front-running somebody else's order. Plus, the exchanges should realize this just looks bad to a lot of their customers, and their reputation and eventual regulation is at stake.
There. Fixed it for you.
The Stars My Destination, too. ("Tiger, Tiger" in the UK). Too complex for a big screen movie; possibly doable as an HBO miniseries.
Put up a web page that (1) offers the first few chapters for free and (2) offers the entire book for 25 cents, or whatever value you think people will judge to be low enough to make paying preferable to pirating. You may need to spiff up the book a bit to widen its appeal.
All it takes is a viable micropayment system, which you may need to invent first.
OTOH, it's quite possible your Kindle could contain current copy, delivered fresh every few minutes as reporters rewrite / update their stories. Rather like newspapers in the Harry Potter series, or headlines changing at the end of "Early Edition" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Edition) (for those who remember it).
Well said, hairyfeet. I was an early GC adopter, back when you could use unclosed HTML comments to delete the crap they appended to your upload.
There's so little storage involved, and surely bandwidth must be miniscule too. Makes me wonder about Yahoo's motives -- expense control? Things are that bad at Yahoo?
Why yes, I do have a /WallStreet address. A tip of the hat to the Archive Team!
String ... or nothing!