One of my favorite articles on the web
about regular expressions is How Regexes Work
by Mark-Jason Dominus. It's a great article if you're at the
point where you already have some experienceusing regular
expressions, but you want to gain some insight into how
they do what they do. I found that after I read this
article it was easier for me to come up with cleaner regexps
more quickly.
I haven't read the book being discussed. It probably covers
the same stuff, but I found M-J D's article easy to read,
short, and very informative.
Short version in English: Harvard says that because MS has more market share, it will have more market share.
I think there is a lot of validity to this reasoning.
This is Slashdot, so I think it's safe to assume many/most people
here know what a flip-flop is. Now, what's the most interesting
thing about a flip-flop? Yes, that's right -- it's bistable.
There are two possible stable states that it could be in, and
whichever one it starts in (or is forced into), it is stable in
and it stays in.
Linux and Windows, in the OS market (not in the technical arena),
are like a flip-flop. The flip-flop is in the
"Windows" state right now. For this to change, one of two things
has to happen: either (a) the circuit has to be reset, at which
point there may not be bias towards one state or another and it
can stabilize on something different, or (b) something has to
force it to the other state.
And (b) is possible, but it's not the kind of thing that happens
easily. It's more like the type of thing that takes a confluence
of random factors.
Hardly. A pure carb diet is very unhealthy, and a great ticket to obesity and diabetes.
I'm highly skeptical of that claim. I've never seen any evidence
that avoiding meat causes weight gain.
From what I can dig up, apparently being a vegan not only does not cause diabetes, it's
actually an effective treatment for diabetes. Oh yeah, and vegetarianism is a
treatment for obesity. Read this summary from the American Dietetic Association and see if you can
find any evidence in it that abstaining from meat results in weight
gain.
Also, my sister is the only one in my family who
is a vegetarian, and guess what: she's also the only one who isn't
overweight. (Yes, I'm overweight. Not by a lot, but I am.)
I've seen a few overweight vegetarians, but honestly, being overweight
is less common from my experience, and apparently studies
agree with that.
Eating meat is simply not necessary to maintain a healthy weight. Eat a reasonable, healthy diet with reasonable portions, and exercise some, and you should be fine. If you have a medical problem, that's different and you may need to spend some cash to pay for a special
diet, but for most people with weight problems, the cause is
behavioral and not medical.
Many forms of exercise are free, and eating reasonable portions
instead of overeating would actually save you money.
Also, for what it's worth, there isn't really any reason you can't
have a little meat and still eat for very cheap. Buy meat in bulk
and go for the cheap cuts of meat, and you can get the prices down
under $1.00/lb sometimes. In fact, in general, you can eat pretty
healthy for pretty cheap. For example, try pricing skim milk
compared to 2%
or whole milk sometime. The skim milk is cheaper.
The real reason most people spend too
much on food is that they're going for convenience foods, which
are often double or triple the price.
Just the other day, there was a/. story about opposition to HS students having laptops [slashdot.org], which pointed out the obvious: the students are using the technology to send IMs and play on networking sites like myspace. The laptops get beat to the ground and loaded full of spyware, the kids don't learn, and it becomes a giant waste of money.
You've definitely hit a peeve of mine there. Every time
I hear this whole line about how students have to
have laptops, otherwise they will be left behind and never
be able to keep up with the technological elite, I always
think, "Gee, that's funny. I've managed to get a degree in
computer science and have held a number of high-tech jobs
including one at NASA, and I don't own a laptop."
Back when Dijkstra was alive and was a professor at
The University of Texas,
he even advocated disallowing undergrad computer science
majors from using computers in their coursework for the
first year or two, on the theory that this would make
them better at computer science in the long run. He wasn't
able to push such a radical change through, but the point
is that one of the brightest minds in technology actually
believed less exposure to computers might be more
beneficial. And I might also mention Donald Knuth's
opinion
of e-mail (or email, as he would spell it), namely that
he doesn't have an e-mail account and doesn't want one.
I'm not sure if I would go as far as Dijkstra, but one thing
is for sure: I think it's very poor reasoning to
conclude that laptops are going to have any kind of magical
positive effect on students. I can see how they're helpful
tools for information retrieval and for computation, but I
don't know that I see why they would
help with learning.
The thing that makes me horribly depressed by all this is
that so many educators (or school officials or whatever)
seem to think they can just throw laptops at the problem,
and suddenly the students will have what it takes to compete
in today's high-tech world. It's a shallow, cargo-cult
approach, and it makes me wonder if educators have any
understanding at all of technology.
I'm not against and don't mean to offend
old people -- at 35 I'm rapidly becoming one --
but I wonder if part of the problem may be that many of the
people in charge of the schools are old. There are older
people who have kept current, but many old people simply
don't want to do that, and they have no freakin' idea about
anything having to do with technology. And they're the
ones making the decisions. (It takes a decade or two to
work your way up into management in a school district...)
Actually, I might be off track with the old people thing
there, but the point is that there has to be some sort
of reason why school districts make such completely
boneheaded decisions about technology so often.
OK, so people are circumventing CAPTCHAs. One possible solution to
this is to use some of the same techniques that are used for fighting
e-mail spam. One such technology is real-time DNS-based blacklists.
If a particular IP address is sending out spam, several people report
it, and it gets added to a DNS-based blacklist. Then other servers
know to refuse messages from addresses on that blacklist (or to give
them a greater spam score if you want to take that info with a grain
of salt). The same thing could be done with paid employees
circumventing CAPTCHAs: if you run a web server where someone
has entered a CAPTCHA and then gone on to post spam on your forum
or whatever, report it to a realtime blacklist. Then other web
sites can check the blacklist before they let you sign up for an
account. Presumably these people being paid $0.60/hour won't be
able to switch IP addresses several times an hour, so that should
slow them down pretty good.
Another similar technique for fighting e-mail spam is another type
of blacklist: blacklists of URIs contained in messages. With
that type of blacklist, it doesn't matter where the message is
coming from; what matters is what link they're trying to refer you
to. The links in spam get listed in the blacklist, and then on your
mail server, you can block all messages that link to that same
site. This e-mail spam fighting technique could be adapted to
the web: if someone makes a post to a forum and it contains a
link to a blacklisted site, remove the post. Disable the
entire account if they do it more than some number of times.
Probably some other spam-fighting techniques could be used to fight
CAPTCHA abuse as well. There are some distributed databases that
take checksums of spam e-mail messages (or of portions of the message)
and publish the checksum; if you get a message that matches one of
those checksums, it is either the same or has large substrings in
common with known spam. You could do the same thing with posts
to web forums, because presumably these bots are pasting in some
standard text when they post crap to web sites.
You could possibly even use a naive Bayes system for keywords in
web forums, then automatically hide any messages that appear to
be spam based on the keywords. Of course, you'd have to train the
Bayes database, but that might not be so hard (maybe even have your
users do it).
The one and only Windows program I use is City of Heroes/Villains. I've can get the updater running, which downloads the patches, but then it goes to "Loading", and while my fans go nuts, it never actually produces anything interesting.
Well, at least you know your public loves you even if you can't get that particular piece of software to do what you'd like. Personally, I never get much attention when I'm installing software, but then maybe I don't do it with enough verve and flair.
And then, there's the bottom line for all universities. Are they still paying for the class? Then get off their fuckin' backs about showing up all the time.
College is, I hate to say, a little bit like fat camp. Yeah, there are
responsible people there who want to learn and who will do so without
people hounding them on things, but there's also an element
of paying for the service of people riding your ass until you get
things done because you wouldn't otherwise.
Fat people can pay someone (at fat camp) to deprive them of food until
they get their heads around the concept of depriving themselves for
their own reasons, and college students are paying, whether they
realize it or not, for a somewhat similar service.
Part of what you get out of college is the ability
to function according to some set of rules you wouldn't have chosen
on your own. That's a useful skill in life (because in real life,
you don't have absolute freedom to set up the world the way you
want it). Part of what you're paying them for is to teach you that skill.
For what it's worth, I'm not saying college students are bad people
who need extra encouragement to be responsible. What I'm saying is
that, by and large, most people are bad about that and need
extra encouragement and accountability to be responsible; college
students are people who are willing to pay someone to help them in
that area, so they have the same weaknesses as other people, but are
more willing to do something about it.
Someone else already mentioned that the ACLU is going to jump on this
like white on rice, and they're probably right. In fact, just about
every time some totally apeshit crap like this happens, the ACLU is
right there, providing free legal help to someone, and 99% of the
time, at least in my opinion, the ACLU is helping out the right side.
Along the same lines, somewhat recently a friend of a friend was
arrested for walking too near a local dam (terrorism, you know),
which is patently absurd. I suggested to my friend that she should
tell her friend (the one who is arrested) to call the ACLU. I didn't
even have to think about it; I'm sure they would gladly represent her
for free.
All of this got me thinking: when is the last time I gave money to
support the ACLU? Never. Granted, last several years haven't been
too great for me financially, but this year, I could afford to give
something. And I ought to, because as far as I can tell, the ACLU
is serving a vital purpose, for free, and I've never helped them
out with that. Which is silly.
So, the point of posting this? It's just in case someone else
feels the same way. Maybe I can give them a few bucks and motivate
1 or 2 other people to do the same. It seems like a worthwhile
thing to do.
They (the telco/cables) are claiming that by not being able to charge source providers money, that they can not grow. There arguments are that costs are passed to us because the large sources have not paid them money.
Well, here is the other side.
You forgot:
4. The main reason telcos have a marketable product to sell in the first
place when they sell "internet access" is that there are useful web
sites you can get to once you've paid for this 'internet access' thing.
In other words, customer have already paid for this. Customers are paying
for the privilege of being connected to these sites. Without "internet
access", they can't access www.nfl.com or www.slashdot.org or whatever;
with it, they can. So the point of paying money to the telco or cable
company is to get access to those sites.
As an analogy, it's a little bit like running a
movie theater where third parties provide the movie. The telcos'
and cable companies' complaints are akin to saying, "Hey, those people
that made the movie are getting to use our movie screens and our
movie projects for free!". All the while, they're ignoring the
fact that, if the movies didn't exist, they'd have never sold any
tickets to the moviegoers! Telcos, all these web sites like google.com are
actually adding value to the product you sell. So you want to charge
them money to add value to your product?
The main reason I am not engaging in any PC-based home theatre appliance is the 350-500 Watt power consumption.
I am always looking for energy saving, and I think it's insane to use that much power for playing/recording DVDs, music, compared to CD or DVD players/recorders, which consume much less energy.
I think it should be possible to do a home theater PC without drawing anywhere near that kind of wattage. I went on a power saving kick a year or two ago, and I discovered my Mac Mini only draws about 40W continuously. I haven't researched it carefully (though I did do a quick google), but it seems possible to build a home theater PC out of a Mini or a similar machine. Sure, you'd need USB peripherals for video capture and everything, but it could be done.
I would have thought the photo eyes would have been the first thing replaced if they weren't switching.
We were discussing diagnostics and troubleshooting a few months
back, and it turns out checking photo eyes (and barcode scanners)
is one of the first items on the list in an engineer's mind, in
many cases. The reason isn't so much that they fail on their
own. Instead, the problem is that factories are extremely dusty
and dirty places, in most cases. Even if you're working with
electronics or something relatively clean-sounding, there is still
a huge amount of dust from cardboard boxes used to ship things in
and out.
And it turns out that photo eyes and barcode scanners don't work as
well as you might like if they are covered with dust. So if things
aren't reading right, one of the first questions out of an engineer's
mouth is, "Have you checked the photo eyes for dust?". One would
hope that in the process of checking it for dust, you'd find any
stray Scotch tape that might also be on the lense...
Hey, at least they are taking care of their upper management with up to 36 weeks of severence pay. Otherwise, they might have to actually give up a whole week of vacation in the Bahamas! Who cares about the nameless masses below them. That's why they are nameless masses!
They might be nameless masses, but we know one thing for sure: each
individual one of them has his very own, totally unique e-mail address.
I do know of a guy who was fired at some company (not nameing names) and was left to finish his shift. He wasn't escorted out or monitored and decided to place clear scotch tape over a few dozen opticle sensors on the production line after his shift. This was on friday and it took three weeks to get the production line going again. Every section was registering an obstruction when there wasn't, the computer was replaced two times and you couldn't see the tape on the sensor heads. Eventualy someoen decided to replace everthing on the control and safety circuits and found the causes later. I don't know how much it ended up costing them.
As it happens, I work for an engineering company that does control
systems for production lines, and we use a lot of photo eyes. Three
weeks sounds like kind of a long period of time to diagnose this
problem. I'm not saying it didn't happen. But maybe the business
should've hired some professionals to come look at it sooner.
That is, if keeping the production line going was important to
them...
On the other hand, maybe the guy who was fired was smart enough
to know the management at the company wasn't smart enough to get
anyone out there and just fix it, so maybe it was a good move.
(Even if it was childish and vindictive.)
My god says you shouldn't get your ethics out of 2000 year old books. What does your god have to say about that?
My brain says that human beings haven't changed much in the
last 2000 years, so 2000 year old ethics might be perfectly
applicable today just like mathematics and philosophy from
thousands of years ago still are. Would you think someone
is wrong for getting their mathematical knowledge about the
lengths of the sides of right triangles out of the ancient
writings of Pythagoras? Either the shit is true or it's
not. It doesn't matter how old the book is.
You know what the problem with this "What is a Planet?" debate. There is no metric. It is the case, and always has been, that whether or not something is a "planet" is a matter of almost complete subjectivity. There is still no objective, measurable and testable model under which an object can be said to be a planet.
It's an arbitrary term. It is by nature subjective. It's
just a convention. The problem is not that it's subjective.
The problem is that there
are many possible definitions and there is no truly compelling
argument for why one is better than the rest. And there
never will be, because it's just a categorization.
Sort of like the different kingdoms of life. When I was a
kid, it was plants, animals, and other. Or plants, animals,
fungi, bacteria, viruses, and other. Or something.
Speaking of which, is a virus truly alive? What about a
prion? What about a computer virus?
500+ years of modern astronomy and still no definition for a planet. Is this professionalism? Look at the difference in comparision to other scientific fields. The SI units give precise, unambiguous definitions of every observable quantity in the universe. Can we get something similar in astronomy please?
That's a positively nutty comparison. As I mentioned before,
biology has similar problems. So does chemistry: ask a chemist
what the definition of "acid" really is. Is it necessary for
it to have hydrogen ions? (Hint: no.) Also, which elements
are really "inert"? Hey, let's not leave out physics. Is a
photon a particle or wave? If the physicists can't answer
that question, they need to get their act together, right?
Seriously, an eight year old could have come up with this. "Well, it's kinda round!". What if it's elliptical?
Not a planet, because ellipses are 2-dimensional and planets
would have to be 3-dimensional. But if you mean to ask
what if it's an ellipsoid, that's allowable, because "round"
isn't the main criterion. "Round" is a rough description of
what it means to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium due to
the object's own gravity.
What if it's a cylinder?
Not a planet because of "(b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium". A cylinder has very sharp edges, is very far
from a sphere, and as such is really far from the low-energy
state that would result from its gravity breaking down the
rigid structure.
Elliptical cylinder?
Even less like a planet than a cylinder.
What about Dyson Sphere's? Ringworld's?
Dysan Sphere? The damn thing is hollow. Since it isn't full of pressurized
air or something to keep it from collapsing, that's very
obviously not hydrostatic equilibrium. Similar for Ringworld.
What if it has bumps? Depressions? Great big crater holes?
Well, that is a little bit subjective. It doesn't say
"perfect hydrostatic equilibrium", so I guess you could
argue that if something is not entirely liquified, it's
not a planet. Luckily, there are a few obvious
counterexamples (the Earth), so it's not hard to see
that this wasn't the intent.
Gentlemen What about the Death Star?
Once again, the Death Star is a rigid structure. It is
spherical (at least v. 1.0 is), but that's not because
it has achieved hydrostatic equilibrium due to its mass
and the resulting gravity. So that means it's not a planet.
I would argue that, while "choice" is not a good definition
of "freedom", it could be one of its meanings. The best
definition I can give for "freedom" is "lack of restrictions"
or "lack of a specific restriction". Consider the following
different senses of "free":
freehand -- this means drawn without the aid of
a stencil, ruler, compass, etc.; the various aids for
drawing straight lines or whatever are what it's free from
free love -- this means sex without the restriction
of a romantic relationship; the "strings attached" are what
it's free from
free oxygen -- oxygen that is not part of a
molecule (even a diatomic one), which is the normal stable
state of oxygen, usually; the chemical bond is what the
oxygen atom is free of
free jazz -- a style of jazz where rules of harmony
and rhythm can be ignored, or where a harmonic/melodic/rhythmic
structure may not even exist in a particular case; the regular
musical structure is what the performance is free of (to a
greater or lesser degree)
free verse -- a form of poetry that does not necessary
have rhymes or follow a meter; the regular rules of poetry
is what free verse is free from
free man -- a man who has been found
not guilty of a crime or who has served his sentence; the
legal requirement to serve a sentence is what the man is
free of
freedman -- (in the US) a person who is no longer
a slave; the legal status of being a slave is what he is
free from
I could go on, but hopefully a pattern is emerging.
In each of these cases, there is a different thing that
the person or thing is free from. So what is my point?
Freedom doesn't mean just one thing. It could mean several
different things.
And why am I bringing this up, and why is it relevant?
Because it's possible to have one kind of freedom but
not another, all at the same time. For example, a
person who just traded his 15-year-old Porsche in for
a new Toyota Corolla is probably now free of expensive
repairs, but he is not free to effortlessly go 100 mph.
John Madden (a US football announcer who rides a train
or a bus instead of flying) is free of the worry that
he might be in a plane crash, but he can't travel as
freely as those who do make the choice to take a plane,
because it requires more time and planning for him to
get somewhere.
In fact, in may cases, it's impossible to have total freedom.
You often trade one kind of freedom for another. That's
why I think "software freedom", by itself and without any
other context or clarification, is a nearly meaningless
term. If you want to talk about freedom, in most cases
you have to say what you're free to do, or what you're
free from.
I am only talking about terminology here and
not trying to say proprietary software is good or bad, but
you could make a reasonable argument that because a Cathedral
approach allows the vendor lots of control, they can make
things work together all that much better (whether they
are too lazy or incompetent to do this is not the issue).
A lot of users find that the endless tweaking that you can
wind up doing when you start mixing and matching things from
different sources is a kind of lack of freedom itself. By
going with a monolithic approach where everything comes
from one party, in a sense you have a kind of freedom from
having to tweak things. To some, that's more valuable
than other kinds of freedom. But again, my point isn't
the value of it. My point is, it is a kind of freedom,
so it would be a valid definition of "software freedom".
Now, it may not be the kind of software freedom you think
is best for everybody. Maybe non-prorietary freedom
is more important to you than free-from-having-to-tweak
freedom. But in that case, one ought to say, "freedom
from proprietary software is the most important kind of
software freedom to me" or something rather than "th
google.com - Duh.. Why isn't this number 1?
yahoo.com - Really? Yahoo?
Have you not been on the internet very long!? Yahoo deserves
to be on the list more than Google does, in my opinion, for
two reasons:
Yahoo was the first site to try to index
the web; sure, at first it was manually (by hiring
people to read e-mail suggestions that they should list a
site and then categorizing it by hand), and that
failed to scale (SLIGHTLY), but they were the first
site that tried to scratch the "I think this might be on
the web, but I need help finding it" itch. They were
doing it back in 1994, from a stanford.edu server.
Prior to them, the only ways of finding links were
(a) guessing, (b) word of mouth. So Yahoo's contribution
is major, so major that I think they deserve at least
top 2 or 3 for it.
Yahoo was one of the first sites to try the portal
thing and get behind it seriously.
Sure, I think portals are annoying, and I
prefer about:blank as my
home page, but many people use portals and, apparently,
like them, and they are a major force on the web.
Because nothing says "free" (liber, not gratis) like imposing seemingly arbitrary limits upon what one can do with the "free" software in question.
So, then how do you feel about the GPL restrictions that limit you
from doing other things with the free software, like selling it,
forking and releasing binaries of your fork but not source code,
etc.? Aren't those restrictions on what you can do with the
software?
Not trying to be contrary or negative, but if it's OK to have
restrictions in there that promote the cause of free software,
why isn't it OK to have restrictions that promote the cause
of nonviolence?
On a side note, this particular license in question is written
in broken English and fails to define a number of important
terms. Software developers may intuitively know what a "patch"
is and what it means to patch the GPL, but the term isn't defined,
so does it have any meaning when lawyers and courts start getting
involved? I don't think it's likely that this language would
stand up to any kind of legal challenge.
But now your batteries will last really long now!!
I'm sure it won't have a positive effect, but it may not have as
much of a negative effect as you'd think. Back when I was doing
Palm OS programming, I kept track of the trends in Palm hardware,
and most of their machines are battery-powered devices using
320x480 displays (so half this resolution). Hardware review
sites would do various battery life tests on new units, including
various combinations of display off and on, CPU running and idle
(and therefore halted and using very little power), backlight
off and on, etc. And what I remember noticing is that the LCD
really doesn't take up nearly as much power as you'd think.
It's mostly the other parts of the device that use up the real
power.
Also, I'm not really sure that a higher-res display will use
much more power at all. Most of the power used is from the
backlight, if I recall correctly, and that is going to be
proportional mainly to the total area -- it shouldn't matter
much how many pixels there are in that are. As for brightness
increases, if this means a brighter backlight, then it might
use more power (assuming all other things are equal), but
with an LCD, there are two ways to increase brightness: one
is to brighten up the backlight, and the other is to reduce
the amount of light that the LCD blocks. The latter means
you can get a brighter screen with the same backlight. If
they do that, then it wouldn't necessarily increase power
usage at all.
Considerable detail has already been released and it's still the first day of the operation.
We have been told:
* Liquid explosives were planned to be hidden in soft drinks bottles (hence the ban on liquids).
* The explosives would be detonated over the atlantic (to ensure maximum fatalities).
* The attack would come in waves. As things start to clam down after the first wave, another wave was to be launched.
[ emphasis mine ]
My god! Can it be?! Yes, it must be: they were planning on attacking
us using Diet Coke and Mentos!!
Dell 49.04B market cap
IBM 114.64B market cap
Dell 56.74B revenue
IBM 88.50B revenue
Dell's market share in the PC market: 32%
IBM's market share in the PC market: sold its PC business
And, incidentally:
HP's market share in the PC market: 18.9%
Yes, there are other computers besides PCs, but do you really
think RS/6000 machines (and AS/400 and whatever else IBM sells
these days) compare in volume to PCs? "Number one
computer company" just means "sells the most computers", not
"has the highest market capitalization and does things related
to computers".
Of course - maybe some ppl think IBM is not a computer company.
You mean like my old upstairs neighbor, who worked at IBM, and
who said on more than one occasion, "IBM is no longer computer company. IBM is
a services company."?
His skill was in streamlining a business model. AFAIK he hasn't done anything directly to improve computers. He helped lower the cost to consumers. He deserves a lot of business credit, but I'm not sure he deserves any geek cred.
Way back in the day, when I was in high school, Dell was known as a
premium computer vendor, with designs that were better than most
PC clones.
Or at least so said my high-school computer science teacher, Dr.
McPherson (who also taught CS at the college down the street),
when he bought an 80286-based Dell machine in what must've
been around 1987 or 1988. I've forgotten the exact details,
but apparently due to their design, the Dell machine actually
ran real programs faster than competitors' models
with similar processors. I'm not sure what
that entailed, maybe a faster memory bus or something, but
I specifically remember that Dr. McPherson did lots of research
and finally settled on the Dell machine as the superior choice.
First, people like to overcompensate for things they could never use but for status. Why buy a car that can go 150mph when its illegal and unfeasible to drive it at that speed?
Illegal? Yeah.
Unfeasible? After owning a Toyota Corolla for 13
years, I recently bought a car which is electronically limited to
130 mph, and which I have no doubt would otherwise be capable of
150 mph. And here's the funny thing
about it: the handling on this car (an Audi A3) is sooooo much
better than on my old car that I feel comfortable going much
higher speeds. In the Corolla, I could safely
cruise at 70 mph or 75 mph, but any faster and I felt that I
was pushing the limits. In the new car, everything feels absolutely
rock solid at 80 mph or 90 mph or even 100 mph. So much so that
I've found myself going 100 mph while passing someone on the
highway without really realizing it.
I haven't experimented with anything over 100 mph. (I am not a
speed demon. I haven't had a traffic ticket in 7 years.) But
if I
were on a road trip out in the desert with ideal conditions
on a straight, flat road and very little traffic (such as out
in west Texas), I don't know that it would be that much of a
stretch to think of cruising at 100 mph as safe. Or maybe
even faster speeds.
And this is just an Audi A3,
the bottom-of-the-line Audi that you can buy for
under $30,000.
If I had a true sports car, I might feel safe
cruising at 125 mph or even at 150 mph. (They do that in
Germany, after all.)
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So, let's see if I can nail down the chain of events now that we have the benefit of hindsight:
Wow, it is so difficult to imagine this could've happened...
One of my favorite articles on the web about regular expressions is How Regexes Work by Mark-Jason Dominus. It's a great article if you're at the point where you already have some experienceusing regular expressions, but you want to gain some insight into how they do what they do. I found that after I read this article it was easier for me to come up with cleaner regexps more quickly.
I haven't read the book being discussed. It probably covers the same stuff, but I found M-J D's article easy to read, short, and very informative.
I think there is a lot of validity to this reasoning.
This is Slashdot, so I think it's safe to assume many/most people here know what a flip-flop is. Now, what's the most interesting thing about a flip-flop? Yes, that's right -- it's bistable. There are two possible stable states that it could be in, and whichever one it starts in (or is forced into), it is stable in and it stays in.
Linux and Windows, in the OS market (not in the technical arena), are like a flip-flop. The flip-flop is in the "Windows" state right now. For this to change, one of two things has to happen: either (a) the circuit has to be reset, at which point there may not be bias towards one state or another and it can stabilize on something different, or (b) something has to force it to the other state. And (b) is possible, but it's not the kind of thing that happens easily. It's more like the type of thing that takes a confluence of random factors.
[ whether things are necessities... ]
I'm highly skeptical of that claim. I've never seen any evidence that avoiding meat causes weight gain. From what I can dig up, apparently being a vegan not only does not cause diabetes, it's actually an effective treatment for diabetes. Oh yeah, and vegetarianism is a treatment for obesity. Read this summary from the American Dietetic Association and see if you can find any evidence in it that abstaining from meat results in weight gain. Also, my sister is the only one in my family who is a vegetarian, and guess what: she's also the only one who isn't overweight. (Yes, I'm overweight. Not by a lot, but I am.) I've seen a few overweight vegetarians, but honestly, being overweight is less common from my experience, and apparently studies agree with that.
Eating meat is simply not necessary to maintain a healthy weight. Eat a reasonable, healthy diet with reasonable portions, and exercise some, and you should be fine. If you have a medical problem, that's different and you may need to spend some cash to pay for a special diet, but for most people with weight problems, the cause is behavioral and not medical. Many forms of exercise are free, and eating reasonable portions instead of overeating would actually save you money.
Also, for what it's worth, there isn't really any reason you can't have a little meat and still eat for very cheap. Buy meat in bulk and go for the cheap cuts of meat, and you can get the prices down under $1.00/lb sometimes. In fact, in general, you can eat pretty healthy for pretty cheap. For example, try pricing skim milk compared to 2% or whole milk sometime. The skim milk is cheaper. The real reason most people spend too much on food is that they're going for convenience foods, which are often double or triple the price.
You've definitely hit a peeve of mine there. Every time I hear this whole line about how students have to have laptops, otherwise they will be left behind and never be able to keep up with the technological elite, I always think, "Gee, that's funny. I've managed to get a degree in computer science and have held a number of high-tech jobs including one at NASA, and I don't own a laptop."
Back when Dijkstra was alive and was a professor at The University of Texas, he even advocated disallowing undergrad computer science majors from using computers in their coursework for the first year or two, on the theory that this would make them better at computer science in the long run. He wasn't able to push such a radical change through, but the point is that one of the brightest minds in technology actually believed less exposure to computers might be more beneficial. And I might also mention Donald Knuth's opinion of e-mail (or email, as he would spell it), namely that he doesn't have an e-mail account and doesn't want one.
I'm not sure if I would go as far as Dijkstra, but one thing is for sure: I think it's very poor reasoning to conclude that laptops are going to have any kind of magical positive effect on students. I can see how they're helpful tools for information retrieval and for computation, but I don't know that I see why they would help with learning.
The thing that makes me horribly depressed by all this is that so many educators (or school officials or whatever) seem to think they can just throw laptops at the problem, and suddenly the students will have what it takes to compete in today's high-tech world. It's a shallow, cargo-cult approach, and it makes me wonder if educators have any understanding at all of technology.
I'm not against and don't mean to offend old people -- at 35 I'm rapidly becoming one -- but I wonder if part of the problem may be that many of the people in charge of the schools are old. There are older people who have kept current, but many old people simply don't want to do that, and they have no freakin' idea about anything having to do with technology. And they're the ones making the decisions. (It takes a decade or two to work your way up into management in a school district...)
Actually, I might be off track with the old people thing there, but the point is that there has to be some sort of reason why school districts make such completely boneheaded decisions about technology so often.
OK, so people are circumventing CAPTCHAs. One possible solution to this is to use some of the same techniques that are used for fighting e-mail spam. One such technology is real-time DNS-based blacklists. If a particular IP address is sending out spam, several people report it, and it gets added to a DNS-based blacklist. Then other servers know to refuse messages from addresses on that blacklist (or to give them a greater spam score if you want to take that info with a grain of salt). The same thing could be done with paid employees circumventing CAPTCHAs: if you run a web server where someone has entered a CAPTCHA and then gone on to post spam on your forum or whatever, report it to a realtime blacklist. Then other web sites can check the blacklist before they let you sign up for an account. Presumably these people being paid $0.60/hour won't be able to switch IP addresses several times an hour, so that should slow them down pretty good.
Another similar technique for fighting e-mail spam is another type of blacklist: blacklists of URIs contained in messages. With that type of blacklist, it doesn't matter where the message is coming from; what matters is what link they're trying to refer you to. The links in spam get listed in the blacklist, and then on your mail server, you can block all messages that link to that same site. This e-mail spam fighting technique could be adapted to the web: if someone makes a post to a forum and it contains a link to a blacklisted site, remove the post. Disable the entire account if they do it more than some number of times.
Probably some other spam-fighting techniques could be used to fight CAPTCHA abuse as well. There are some distributed databases that take checksums of spam e-mail messages (or of portions of the message) and publish the checksum; if you get a message that matches one of those checksums, it is either the same or has large substrings in common with known spam. You could do the same thing with posts to web forums, because presumably these bots are pasting in some standard text when they post crap to web sites.
You could possibly even use a naive Bayes system for keywords in web forums, then automatically hide any messages that appear to be spam based on the keywords. Of course, you'd have to train the Bayes database, but that might not be so hard (maybe even have your users do it).
Well, at least you know your public loves you even if you can't get that particular piece of software to do what you'd like. Personally, I never get much attention when I'm installing software, but then maybe I don't do it with enough verve and flair.
College is, I hate to say, a little bit like fat camp. Yeah, there are responsible people there who want to learn and who will do so without people hounding them on things, but there's also an element of paying for the service of people riding your ass until you get things done because you wouldn't otherwise. Fat people can pay someone (at fat camp) to deprive them of food until they get their heads around the concept of depriving themselves for their own reasons, and college students are paying, whether they realize it or not, for a somewhat similar service. Part of what you get out of college is the ability to function according to some set of rules you wouldn't have chosen on your own. That's a useful skill in life (because in real life, you don't have absolute freedom to set up the world the way you want it). Part of what you're paying them for is to teach you that skill.
For what it's worth, I'm not saying college students are bad people who need extra encouragement to be responsible. What I'm saying is that, by and large, most people are bad about that and need extra encouragement and accountability to be responsible; college students are people who are willing to pay someone to help them in that area, so they have the same weaknesses as other people, but are more willing to do something about it.
Someone else already mentioned that the ACLU is going to jump on this like white on rice, and they're probably right. In fact, just about every time some totally apeshit crap like this happens, the ACLU is right there, providing free legal help to someone, and 99% of the time, at least in my opinion, the ACLU is helping out the right side. Along the same lines, somewhat recently a friend of a friend was arrested for walking too near a local dam (terrorism, you know), which is patently absurd. I suggested to my friend that she should tell her friend (the one who is arrested) to call the ACLU. I didn't even have to think about it; I'm sure they would gladly represent her for free.
All of this got me thinking: when is the last time I gave money to support the ACLU? Never. Granted, last several years haven't been too great for me financially, but this year, I could afford to give something. And I ought to, because as far as I can tell, the ACLU is serving a vital purpose, for free, and I've never helped them out with that. Which is silly.
So, the point of posting this? It's just in case someone else feels the same way. Maybe I can give them a few bucks and motivate 1 or 2 other people to do the same. It seems like a worthwhile thing to do.
You forgot:
4. The main reason telcos have a marketable product to sell in the first place when they sell "internet access" is that there are useful web sites you can get to once you've paid for this 'internet access' thing.
In other words, customer have already paid for this. Customers are paying for the privilege of being connected to these sites. Without "internet access", they can't access www.nfl.com or www.slashdot.org or whatever; with it, they can. So the point of paying money to the telco or cable company is to get access to those sites.
As an analogy, it's a little bit like running a movie theater where third parties provide the movie. The telcos' and cable companies' complaints are akin to saying, "Hey, those people that made the movie are getting to use our movie screens and our movie projects for free!". All the while, they're ignoring the fact that, if the movies didn't exist, they'd have never sold any tickets to the moviegoers! Telcos, all these web sites like google.com are actually adding value to the product you sell. So you want to charge them money to add value to your product?
I think it should be possible to do a home theater PC without drawing anywhere near that kind of wattage. I went on a power saving kick a year or two ago, and I discovered my Mac Mini only draws about 40W continuously. I haven't researched it carefully (though I did do a quick google), but it seems possible to build a home theater PC out of a Mini or a similar machine. Sure, you'd need USB peripherals for video capture and everything, but it could be done.
We were discussing diagnostics and troubleshooting a few months back, and it turns out checking photo eyes (and barcode scanners) is one of the first items on the list in an engineer's mind, in many cases. The reason isn't so much that they fail on their own. Instead, the problem is that factories are extremely dusty and dirty places, in most cases. Even if you're working with electronics or something relatively clean-sounding, there is still a huge amount of dust from cardboard boxes used to ship things in and out.
And it turns out that photo eyes and barcode scanners don't work as well as you might like if they are covered with dust. So if things aren't reading right, one of the first questions out of an engineer's mouth is, "Have you checked the photo eyes for dust?". One would hope that in the process of checking it for dust, you'd find any stray Scotch tape that might also be on the lense...
They might be nameless masses, but we know one thing for sure: each individual one of them has his very own, totally unique e-mail address.
As it happens, I work for an engineering company that does control systems for production lines, and we use a lot of photo eyes. Three weeks sounds like kind of a long period of time to diagnose this problem. I'm not saying it didn't happen. But maybe the business should've hired some professionals to come look at it sooner. That is, if keeping the production line going was important to them...
On the other hand, maybe the guy who was fired was smart enough to know the management at the company wasn't smart enough to get anyone out there and just fix it, so maybe it was a good move. (Even if it was childish and vindictive.)
My brain says that human beings haven't changed much in the last 2000 years, so 2000 year old ethics might be perfectly applicable today just like mathematics and philosophy from thousands of years ago still are. Would you think someone is wrong for getting their mathematical knowledge about the lengths of the sides of right triangles out of the ancient writings of Pythagoras? Either the shit is true or it's not. It doesn't matter how old the book is.
It's an arbitrary term. It is by nature subjective. It's just a convention. The problem is not that it's subjective. The problem is that there are many possible definitions and there is no truly compelling argument for why one is better than the rest. And there never will be, because it's just a categorization. Sort of like the different kingdoms of life. When I was a kid, it was plants, animals, and other. Or plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and other. Or something. Speaking of which, is a virus truly alive? What about a prion? What about a computer virus?
That's a positively nutty comparison. As I mentioned before, biology has similar problems. So does chemistry: ask a chemist what the definition of "acid" really is. Is it necessary for it to have hydrogen ions? (Hint: no.) Also, which elements are really "inert"? Hey, let's not leave out physics. Is a photon a particle or wave? If the physicists can't answer that question, they need to get their act together, right?
Not a planet, because ellipses are 2-dimensional and planets would have to be 3-dimensional. But if you mean to ask what if it's an ellipsoid, that's allowable, because "round" isn't the main criterion. "Round" is a rough description of what it means to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium due to the object's own gravity.
Not a planet because of "(b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium". A cylinder has very sharp edges, is very far from a sphere, and as such is really far from the low-energy state that would result from its gravity breaking down the rigid structure.
Even less like a planet than a cylinder.
Dysan Sphere? The damn thing is hollow. Since it isn't full of pressurized air or something to keep it from collapsing, that's very obviously not hydrostatic equilibrium. Similar for Ringworld.
Well, that is a little bit subjective. It doesn't say "perfect hydrostatic equilibrium", so I guess you could argue that if something is not entirely liquified, it's not a planet. Luckily, there are a few obvious counterexamples (the Earth), so it's not hard to see that this wasn't the intent.
Once again, the Death Star is a rigid structure. It is spherical (at least v. 1.0 is), but that's not because it has achieved hydrostatic equilibrium due to its mass and the resulting gravity. So that means it's not a planet.
I would argue that, while "choice" is not a good definition of "freedom", it could be one of its meanings. The best definition I can give for "freedom" is "lack of restrictions" or "lack of a specific restriction". Consider the following different senses of "free":
I could go on, but hopefully a pattern is emerging. In each of these cases, there is a different thing that the person or thing is free from. So what is my point? Freedom doesn't mean just one thing. It could mean several different things.
And why am I bringing this up, and why is it relevant? Because it's possible to have one kind of freedom but not another, all at the same time. For example, a person who just traded his 15-year-old Porsche in for a new Toyota Corolla is probably now free of expensive repairs, but he is not free to effortlessly go 100 mph. John Madden (a US football announcer who rides a train or a bus instead of flying) is free of the worry that he might be in a plane crash, but he can't travel as freely as those who do make the choice to take a plane, because it requires more time and planning for him to get somewhere.
In fact, in may cases, it's impossible to have total freedom. You often trade one kind of freedom for another. That's why I think "software freedom", by itself and without any other context or clarification, is a nearly meaningless term. If you want to talk about freedom, in most cases you have to say what you're free to do, or what you're free from.
I am only talking about terminology here and not trying to say proprietary software is good or bad, but you could make a reasonable argument that because a Cathedral approach allows the vendor lots of control, they can make things work together all that much better (whether they are too lazy or incompetent to do this is not the issue). A lot of users find that the endless tweaking that you can wind up doing when you start mixing and matching things from different sources is a kind of lack of freedom itself. By going with a monolithic approach where everything comes from one party, in a sense you have a kind of freedom from having to tweak things. To some, that's more valuable than other kinds of freedom. But again, my point isn't the value of it. My point is, it is a kind of freedom, so it would be a valid definition of "software freedom".
Now, it may not be the kind of software freedom you think is best for everybody. Maybe non-prorietary freedom is more important to you than free-from-having-to-tweak freedom. But in that case, one ought to say, "freedom from proprietary software is the most important kind of software freedom to me" or something rather than "th
Have you not been on the internet very long!? Yahoo deserves to be on the list more than Google does, in my opinion, for two reasons:
So, then how do you feel about the GPL restrictions that limit you from doing other things with the free software, like selling it, forking and releasing binaries of your fork but not source code, etc.? Aren't those restrictions on what you can do with the software?
Not trying to be contrary or negative, but if it's OK to have restrictions in there that promote the cause of free software, why isn't it OK to have restrictions that promote the cause of nonviolence?
On a side note, this particular license in question is written in broken English and fails to define a number of important terms. Software developers may intuitively know what a "patch" is and what it means to patch the GPL, but the term isn't defined, so does it have any meaning when lawyers and courts start getting involved? I don't think it's likely that this language would stand up to any kind of legal challenge.
I'm sure it won't have a positive effect, but it may not have as much of a negative effect as you'd think. Back when I was doing Palm OS programming, I kept track of the trends in Palm hardware, and most of their machines are battery-powered devices using 320x480 displays (so half this resolution). Hardware review sites would do various battery life tests on new units, including various combinations of display off and on, CPU running and idle (and therefore halted and using very little power), backlight off and on, etc. And what I remember noticing is that the LCD really doesn't take up nearly as much power as you'd think. It's mostly the other parts of the device that use up the real power.
Also, I'm not really sure that a higher-res display will use much more power at all. Most of the power used is from the backlight, if I recall correctly, and that is going to be proportional mainly to the total area -- it shouldn't matter much how many pixels there are in that are. As for brightness increases, if this means a brighter backlight, then it might use more power (assuming all other things are equal), but with an LCD, there are two ways to increase brightness: one is to brighten up the backlight, and the other is to reduce the amount of light that the LCD blocks. The latter means you can get a brighter screen with the same backlight. If they do that, then it wouldn't necessarily increase power usage at all.
[ emphasis mine ]
My god! Can it be?! Yes, it must be: they were planning on attacking us using Diet Coke and Mentos!!
(Yes, Diet Coke and Mentos.)
Dell's market share in the PC market: 32%
IBM's market share in the PC market: sold its PC business
And, incidentally:
HP's market share in the PC market: 18.9%
Yes, there are other computers besides PCs, but do you really think RS/6000 machines (and AS/400 and whatever else IBM sells these days) compare in volume to PCs? "Number one computer company" just means "sells the most computers", not "has the highest market capitalization and does things related to computers".
You mean like my old upstairs neighbor, who worked at IBM, and who said on more than one occasion, "IBM is no longer computer company. IBM is a services company."?
Way back in the day, when I was in high school, Dell was known as a premium computer vendor, with designs that were better than most PC clones. Or at least so said my high-school computer science teacher, Dr. McPherson (who also taught CS at the college down the street), when he bought an 80286-based Dell machine in what must've been around 1987 or 1988. I've forgotten the exact details, but apparently due to their design, the Dell machine actually ran real programs faster than competitors' models with similar processors. I'm not sure what that entailed, maybe a faster memory bus or something, but I specifically remember that Dr. McPherson did lots of research and finally settled on the Dell machine as the superior choice.
Illegal? Yeah.
Unfeasible? After owning a Toyota Corolla for 13 years, I recently bought a car which is electronically limited to 130 mph, and which I have no doubt would otherwise be capable of 150 mph. And here's the funny thing about it: the handling on this car (an Audi A3) is sooooo much better than on my old car that I feel comfortable going much higher speeds. In the Corolla, I could safely cruise at 70 mph or 75 mph, but any faster and I felt that I was pushing the limits. In the new car, everything feels absolutely rock solid at 80 mph or 90 mph or even 100 mph. So much so that I've found myself going 100 mph while passing someone on the highway without really realizing it.
I haven't experimented with anything over 100 mph. (I am not a speed demon. I haven't had a traffic ticket in 7 years.) But if I were on a road trip out in the desert with ideal conditions on a straight, flat road and very little traffic (such as out in west Texas), I don't know that it would be that much of a stretch to think of cruising at 100 mph as safe. Or maybe even faster speeds. And this is just an Audi A3, the bottom-of-the-line Audi that you can buy for under $30,000. If I had a true sports car, I might feel safe cruising at 125 mph or even at 150 mph. (They do that in Germany, after all.)