Actually, my first reaction on reading the article was "holy *&#$&*#*$, this is amazingly good for an automated translation."
Looks like Google's making some serious statistical-translation progress. Mindblowing.
6. If it's free, how does Google make money off Google Health?
Much like other Google products we offer, Google Health is free to anyone who uses it. There are no ads in Google Health. Our primary focus is providing a good user experience and meeting our users' needs.
I've heard enough. I don't know what their long-term plan for monetizing Google Health is, and I don't really care now. I don't trust Google enough to consider even for a second entrusting my health care information to them (and I say this as someone who has thought very highly of the company since the beginning). And their weasly answer to the obvious question above, I think, justifies my mistrust.
Every for-profit company's primary focus is - making a profit. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with this, and the ideal situation arises when "providing a good user experience and meeting [...] users' needs" is aligned with the profit motive.
So why they can't be honest about their motivations in undertaking an expensive, large-scale project like this -- whatever those motivations are -- instead of trying to make us believe that they're doing it "out of the goodness of their hearts?" All their mealy-mouthedness accomplishes is to raise the suspicion that they've got something nasty up their sleeves. And that ensures that many users, including me, will never entrust their most private of private data to Google.
Vásárhelyi was a civil engineer (and professor of engineering at the Technical University of Budapest), who was responsible for a great deal of the modernization of Hungary's road system in the early and mid 20th century. He wrote some classic works on transportation and roads. So he's not a bad choice for naming a bridge, when it comes to that.
Well they are a country that is civilized enough to include the name of the national wine (Tokaji Aszu) in thier national anthem.
Well, not exactly. The lines [note: ö will stand in here for a long ö, which doesn't seem to be showing up in preview] Tokaj szölövesszein / Nektárt csepegtettél ("you dripped nectar on the grapevines of Tokaj") do appear in the third stanza of the full Himnusz (not that anyone, ever, sings the whole thing). Tokaj is a wine-growing region, justly famous for the wines that are internationally known under the Tokay name (including the sweet dessert wine type called aszú, made with a proportion of moldy grapes:-)
Someone thought it would be cool to teach network programming to sophmores. Great. We had to filter those and other known bad stuff, lest students gain control of the grading, scheduling, and payroll systems.
You had your grading, scheduling, and payroll systems on the same local network as the student lab computers? Sheesh.
Having the administrative systems on the same network as the computer lab and worrying about network hacking is sort of like teaching chemistry classes in the school cafeteria and worrying that students will poison the lunch.
It's a pity that an insecure setup like that made it necessary to be so paranoid about your students -- whose education, after all, the computer lab exists to serve. I for one think it is cool to teach network programming to sophomores (or freshmen, for that matter). Isn't teaching the whole point?
Oddly, there are multiple bars doing good business in cheap beer on the campus of every single university in the US that I've attended (three) or visited (many), too. Despite the fact that the large majority of the undergraduate population presumably is under 21 and thus not allowed to drink
In my experience the on-campus bars nowadays are pretty serious about keeping underage students out*, too, and faculty and staff seem to stay out on their own. I guess most of their business must be of-age senior undergraduates and grad students, although I have to say that when I was a grad student I generally avoided the on-campus places like the plague because they always seemed to be filled with loud undergrads, and because I prefer expensive beer:-) When I was an *undergrad* -- well, they weren't quite so strict back then; I looked mature and never once got "carded."
*the one time I went to a bar at my postdoc institution, they carded me, and me 32 years old at the time!
Why did you wait 8 months to resolve it with scores of "managers."
Why, because that's the only option they offered me. They weren't exactly forthcoming with avenues of higher appeal. They had a very specific dispute resolution process, which consisted, basically, of the following:
(01) calling the main support number (the only one they would every give you, on pain of death), (02) waiting on hold for half an hour, (03) getting a first-line support person, (04) asking to speak to the manager you talked to last time, (05) being told that no such person existed, (06) asking to speak to any manager, (07) being told that you would have to go through the whole process with the first-line person first, (08) asking the first-line person to please review your extensive call record so you wouldn't have to recap the whole painful story for the fiftieth time, (09) being told that she could not find any record of your past 49 calls, (10) recapping the whole painful story for the fiftieth time, (11) being told, for the fiftieth time, that the computer doesn't make mistakes so you must pay the $1000 in excess charges, (12) asking to speak to a manager since the first-line person can't resolve your dispute, (13) waiting on hold for a manager, (14) asking the manager to please review your extensive call record, etc., etc., (15) recapping the whole painful story for the fifty-first time, (16) being told, for the fifty-first time, that the computer doesn't make mistakes etc. etc., (17) repeatedly insisting that there was indeed a problem, (18) finally being told that you would have to call back again tomorrow and ask for (manager's name), (19) pleading for a direct number that you could use to avoid steps (1)-(13) next time, (20) being told that no such number existed, (21) going back to (01)
In my case this routine was varied, occasionally, by sending in voluminous faxes or registered letters in which every single disputed call (i.e. hundreds, because of the nature of the problem I was experiencing) had to be individually listed. There would either be no response to these missives, or else several weeks would pass and I would be told that there was no evidence that any of the calls were in error.
First, making threatening telephone calls and disturbing the peace at a sales outlet, no matter what your justification might be, is probably a crime where you live. You don't have the right to do it. And, if you do that sort of thing, you're nothing more than an asshole who makes his|her ignorance the problem of some innocent party. What did the poor sales person or rep you're abusing do to you? Instead of being a jerk, use the system we have in place to deal with disputes in a peacable, fair way.
What on earth makes you think that I ever made "threatening telephone calls" (or "disturb[ed] the peace at a sales outlet", for that matter -- not that AT&TWS even had a sales outlet where I lived then). I endeavoured to remain extremely calm with them at all times. The only "threat" that was ever heard during a phone conversation between me and AT&T was on their part, when one of their representatives told me I had better pay the disputed $1000 (and then keep trying to get it back from them -- heh, heh, heh) or AT&T would, in his words, "destroy my credit record."
I wonder sometimes if I would have had more success if I had lost my temper at some point. Instead, I just tried to behave reasonably in the face of such inconceivable obstinacy that I still can't quite believe it. My stomach still churns when I think about AT that's how much mental anguish the experience caused me.
Using the courts probably would have been a good idea, but I guess I just had an inherent bias against getting tangled up with legal action. I've never sued anyone, or been sued, even in small-claims court, in my life. I know it's not that big a deal and probably wo
Nitpick: that wasn't new in 1998, either. Sprint had that at least as early as 1996, when I signed up with them.
True, but AT&T had something Sprint PCS couldn't match then: free roaming meant free roaming, anywhere you went, whether you were using AT&T's own towers or not. As I recall, with Sprint PCS (back then) either you were in range of their CDMA signal, which was widely available in major metropolitan areas but not out in the boonies, or you were simply out of luck. With AT&T, if you weren't in range of an AT&T signal, you'd roam onto another carrier's TDMA signal, or if that failed, onto plain old AMPS (analog 800MHz). AT&T charged you one rate regardless. That's the way it worked in theory, at least - in practice, there were sometimes problems (most memorably, your calls on off-carrier systems would often be billed months late, so if you travelled a lot one month you might find yourself using far below your minutes allotment that month, and then get a giant bill as you went way over your allotment several cycles later -- this didn't happen to me on a large scale as the majority of my usage was still on AT&T's systems).
I used to travel a lot to places like Montana and Colorado that didn't have any digital cellular service, so Sprint wouldn't have cut it for me. My AT&T phone just worked, almost everywhere. Actually, apart from the unbelievably torturous experience I described above, I was quite happy with the actual AT&T phone service (I know, I know: "aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"). I was living in California and my fiancée was in New York. We talked about 30-60 minutes a day; that amounted to 1500 minutes a month, which cost $150 on AT&T. At the time, long distance on a land-line was 10 cents a minute, so AT&T's service was a great deal -- I didn't bother with a land-line. I was totally dependent on that phone, which is why I didn't just cancel when they started misbilling me.
My wife and I have Cingular now (which was once Pacific Bell Mobile Services -- the first wireless service I ever had, back in 96 or so). We're moderately happy with them. Call quality seems much worse than I remember back in the AT&T days, and dropped calls are more frequent, although part of that might be that my wife's phone seems to be kind of flaky. I use my EDGE data connection all the time -- it's a bargain at $20 a month for unlimited use. But more à propos to the current topic, their customer service doesn't suck. We've had one major problem -- we got a phone under our family plan for my mother-in-law, and each month we'd have $20 or $30 in mysterious extra charges on that line attributed to things like "flycell" and "jamster" and, I forget what else. Turned out they were for ring-tone and wallpaper and game downloads which, of course, my mother-in-law had nothing to do with. Apparently, the previous owner of that phone number had signed up for all sorts of third-party services which bill the customer through the phone bill. Over the course of several months, Cingular couldn't do anything about it -- they kept promising to set a flag on the line that would prevent third-party billing from going through, but never managed to fix it. In the end, we canceled the line (with no early-termination penalty), partly because of the problem, and partly because my mother-in-law dropped her phone into the toilet by accident:-)
The point I'm making is that I do not hate Cingular with a raging, burning hatred, the way I hate AT&T (whose wireless division is, granted, now a part of Cingular). In fact, I feel rather postive towards them. Why? Even though they couldn't fix the billing problem and I had to call their customer service line at least 6 or 7 times for the same problem, they were always kind, courteous, and helpful on the phone. They readily admitted that there was a problem (no "if the computer says you
I had a similar problem with AT&T Wireless a long time ago (ca. 1998), when they first introduced their "one-rate" service (no extra charges for long distance or roaming, a major innovation back then). For about three months, every single call I made or received appeared twice on my bill: once listed under the actual time I made or received it, and once listed precisely three hours later. That is, for every 17-minute call at 8:53, say, there'd be a corresponding 17-minute call at 11:53. I immediately recognized that this had to have something to do with the fact that I was using a phone with a New York number in California (three-hour time difference). The net result was close to a thousand dollars in overage charges -- while I was careful to keep all my usage under the 1500 minutes per month included in my plan, I was getting charged for more like 3000 minutes at a ridiculous overage rate of 25 cents a minute.
The first month the problem showed up I thought it would be a quick fix -- obviously no rational human being could think that I was studiously duplicating every single one of my hundreds of calls exactly three hours apart.
Silly me.
I went through eight months of hell trying to get an AT&T representative to acknowledge there was a problem. I must have made at least 100 calls, sent numerous faxes and letters, and spoken to at least 20 different "supervisors" -- they kept "disappearing," forcing me to start telling the story all over again each time I called.
To a man/woman, they all kept insisting that if the calls appeared on my bill, I had to have made them (since we all know computerized billing systems never have bugs). Until the very end I never got a single one of them to admit that there just MIGHT be a problem if every single one of my hundreds of calls appeared precisely twice, 3 hours apart, on each bill. No, I simply had to have made those calls, there was no other explanation.
Naturally were flatly unwilling to refund the overage charges which, as I mentioned, reached almost $1000 by the third bill. (I didn't cancel the service because I was dependent on it - it was my only phone line, there was no number portability back then, no other service offered "free" roaming/LD which I needed as a New Yorker stuck in California). They did agree to let me pay only the non-disputed charge until the dispute process was over, but soon started sending me dunning letters anyway.
The problem stopped happening after the third month, but I spent most of the rest of the year trying to get them to reverse the excess charges. It was hell, no other word for it. It wasn't the prospect of having to pay a thousand dollars that scared and angered me, it was the simple fact that a large and respected (!) company like AT&T obviously had a policy for its customer support people that went "no matter how obvious it is that the customer is right, you must insist that he is wrong." I don't see how any rational person could fail to recognize that what happened was a massive computer billing error, but as I mentioned before, I never got *anyone* to admit it. By the end, my conversations with them were so psychologically draining that I was starting to wonder if it really could be my mistake somehow.
The very end of the saga -- eight months later - was that I finally managed to talk to a manager who agreed there was a problem, told me that many others had experienced it, and canceled all the excess charges, just like that. So, basically, they'd known all along that there was a problem. and just kept stonewalling in the hopes that I'd break down and pay them.
That experience marked the end of my innocence about big, respectable business. In a very real sense, I "grew up" over those 8 months.
Umm, why would you want to import a database into a spreadsheet? Just leave it in a database where it belongs.
Quite right. I don't maintain the above-mentioned collections in a spreadsheet. Actually, all the information is in idiosyncratically formatted text files (I've been doing this since the early 90's -- if I were starting over it'd be XML no doubt). I've written a fair amount of code over the years to keep it organized although I still haven't written the One Ultimate Cataloguing System that I've dreamt about all that time, just a bunch of separate tools.
The key here, however, is display and interchange. If you wanted to browse my collection I'd have to give you the files, and the accompanying code (although even sans code they're fairly human-readable and greppable), and it would just be a pain. (I've written a dynamic browser for Web access, though.)
If Google Spreadsheet could import a reasonably-sized database, however, I could just use my CSV exporter, upload the file, and share the spreadsheet with you. The tabular format of a spreadsheet isn't too bad for simple browsing though it loses a lot of structure that I've built into those text files.
That's what I found attractive about the idea of a Google spreadsheet when it was first announced -- also that I imagined they, being Google, would integrate search into it in some neat way, although that doesn't seem to be the case.
Please read the help that is neatly bundled with the app. It describes the limitations in size and cell/row count nicely.
Yes, this was a nice way of saying RTFM
I did read the help - before even trying the application, in fact. It says that each spreadsheet may contain (I quote) "up to 20 tabs, 50,000 cells, 256 columns or 10,000 rows - whichever comes first". My puny movie list contains roughly 2,000 rows and 1 column, so it's well under that limit. The numbers given are absolute limits, but my impression is that the performance of the AJAX application imposes much smaller practical limits.
I thought it might be interesting to import into Google Spreadsheets the database I keep of my movie collection. That's about 2,000 lines long, by a few columns, but first I just tried a single column of titles. Nothing fancy -- just a sorted list. I made a.csv file and uploaded it -- it was only about 50K, so that step was plenty fast.
When I tried to actually open the imported spreadsheet with Google Spreadsheet, however, it just hung. I waited about an hour then killed Firefox. Tried twice with the same result.
That was with 2,000 lines; I guess I'm not going to be trying the application out with my 30,000-line book collection database or my 25,000-line record collection database any time soon:-) A pity, 'cause having these online from anywhere I can get to Google was an intriguing idea (although I have my own site for that). My impression of Google Spreadsheet is "neat, but basically toy." I don't use Excel very often either, but I do know it has no trouble with spreadsheets that are tens of thousands of lines long (nor would I expect any modern standalone spreadsheet to).
A fuel efficient Prius has the same impact as a far less efficient Toyota Echo on the road surface.
It's just a side point, but I'm not sure that I'd describe the Toyota Echo as "far less efficient" than the Prius. My wife has one and regularly gets 45 MPG with it in mostly highway driving. My sister's been getting more like 40 MPG with her Prius (admittedly, a first-generation Prius, but still...)
Me, I'm happy with the high 40's-low 50's MPG (depending on percentage of highway driving) that my VW Jetta TDI wagon gets. On 100% biodiesel -- minimal pollution, no greenhouse gas emission. Even at $3.00 a gallon I'm paying less in fuel costs per mile than most people....
That's not true. 'thou' is the regular development of the Old English second person singular pronoun 'thu' \thorn\'u (cognate with, for example, the modern German 'du', not to mention the 'tu's of modern Romance languages -- indeed most Indo-European languages retain a "thou" with a dental (d,t,th,dh..) initial).
'you' on the other hand comes form the Old English 'eow' which was the accusative form of the second person plural pronoun. The nominative was 'ge' which gave us 'ye' -- originally the case distinction was kept in both singular and plural: thou (sg) art/ye (pl) are I see thee (sg)/I see you (pl). These forms are cognate with German ihr/euch and Dutch gij/juw. I believe they represent otherwise vanished Indo-European dual forms but I might be wrong.
These words are ancient, long predating printing (and even writing). None of this had anything to do with the confusion of thorn/y graphemes, which at most might have confused people into mispronouncing titles like "ye olde booke shoppe" (there the 'ye' properly represents 'the').
Just goes to show that the SzTAKI dictionary (which is built on user contributions, not by professional lexicographers) isn't perfect. "dundi" doesn't mean 'crummy' under any possible interpretation of that word. It means 'fat' (applied e.g. to a person, or animal - I met a cat named Dundi once). A more nuanced translation would be 'chubby' or 'plump.'
By the way, the Hungarian equivalents given by the SzTAKI dictionary for the English word "crummy" all mean 'rich,' 'chubby,' or 'pretty.' Strangely, the actual meaning of the word ('of poor quality') is not reflected by any of the definitions.
SzTAKI's dictionary is a great resource but its entries, especially for more colloquial words such as this, should be taken cum grano salis!
As I sit here in a restaurant awaiting a friend, I am writing this (OK, don't know if that counts as doing "something useful":-) on a Dell Axim PDA connected to the net via my cell phone, which is 3 feet away from me, in my field bag. The two gadgets are communicating by Bluetooth.
I found my way here using GPS navigation software on this same PDA. When I get into my car I merely slip the PDA into its cradle. The GPS unit is hidden in the back of my car. There's no need to fiddle with cables: the GPS and PDA communicate by Bluetooth.
I don't have a Bluetooth headset yet, but I intend to get one as soon as the prices come down on the new stereo ones. I don't have an iPod, but my Axim with its 1GB flash card makes a fair substitute (and plays oggs too). It will be nice to keep the Axim (with the screen off to save power) safe and sound in my field bag when I'm biking, while I listen on the Bluetooth headset. And if a call comes in on my Bluetooth phone, I will be able to take it on the same headset. (Anyone have any recommendations for a headset that can handle this?)
When I get home I will sync my PDA to my PC via Bluetooth, since I'll probably use it a bit before I stick it in its charging cradle overnight. I could use WiFi, but it sucks the battery on my Axim, so I don't enable it unless I need it. Bluetooth works fine for syncing.
Oh, and my PC itself has a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Anyway, my point is, Bluetooth is already damn useful.
I keep seeing these figures for the size of the entire Windows source code base, "40GB and 40 million lines of code." Unless I'm missing something, this just doesn't add up. ~40 billion characters / 40 million lines implies that the average length of a line of code in the Windows source is 1000 characters. Even if the comments are terribly verbose, I highly doubt that is correct.
Now, I haven't looked at the leaked (putative) Windows source code yet, but I did check some of the Linux kernel source, and the average seems to be more on the order of 20-30 characters per line.
If Windows source is statistically similar, 40 million lines would be close to 1 gigabyte (not 40), so the 650 or so megs of leaked code might indeed be a significant chunk of it. (I saw at least one claim that the leaked code comprises 13 million lines, which would be in line with these estimates.)
I find the "40 million lines" claim for Windows source code, even including all the drivers etc., a lot more credible than the "40 gigabytes" (which would imply something like a billion lines of code). Even then, it's a lot. For comparison, a recent Linux kernel on my machine is about 5 million lines of source code (and 150 megs), and an entire Linux distribution of around the same vintage as W2K, namely Redhat 7.1, is about 30 million lines. The total functionality of W2K is arguably significantly less than that of an entire Linux distribution.
Funny you should mention that Anguish Languish site. Now there is an OCR'd text in need of some serious proofreading. Already in the introduction we read:
Egervescent further delerent saturations an witch way harem, wade hei[er haliver tam sang [...]
which should of course read:
Effervescent further deferent saturations an witch way harem, wade heifer haliver tam sang [...]
Proofreading that e-text might be a little bit of a challenge without the original book (which I happen to own, though I'm not volunteering for the job!), given the nature of the text...
Interesting points, but I just have to say that most jetliners cannot truly glide. With all engines out, the average jetliner has all the the flight capacity of a brick.
Jetliners can glide just fine with all their engines out -- sure, the glide ratio stinks (maybe 10:1) but most flights are planned so that an airport is always within the all-engines-out glide distance.
Read about the "Gimli Glider", a Boeing 767 which made a safe landing after both engines flamed out due to fuel exhaustion.
The question isn't phrased very well. A serial-line BREAK signal isn't a "character" -- it's sent by switching from mark to space level for longer than a character's length. By asking for the break "character" you are implying that you do in fact want an ASCII value. Seems to me that almost any value could be justified on some system or another -- certainly 0x03, 0x00, 0x19, 0x1A, 0x1B and so on come to mind.
Of course maybe that's the point -- the variety of values you get might give you an idea of the platforms your candidate has used before...
What's the point of getting this if you already have a cell phone? You can already get unlimited minutes for $40 a month. Why pay a total of $80 for a $40 service?
Long distance. No cell phone plan gives you unlimited long distance minutes for $40 a month. And even plans that give you unlimited, unrestricted "local" minutes must be pretty rare -- there certainly don't seem to be any in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and New York. Most ~$40 plans in NY or LA give you a few hundred "anytime" minutes (that includes long distance of course) and a few thousand (not unlimited) "night and weekend" minutes. In many plans your "anytime" minutes are used up, even at night and on the weekends, before your "night and weekend" minutes take effect, rendering the whole deal little better than an advertising scam.
If you make lots of long distance calls, Vonage is fantastic. I am on the phone, LA-NY, at least an hour or two every day. With my AT&T "One Rate" cell phone, I was paying almost $200 a month (with taxes, fees, etc.) for 1500 minutes, with frequent billing errors, every one-minute dropped call charged for, plus outrageous overage fees of $0.25/minute if I went over the 1500 minutes -- some months I had a $350 bill. And AT&T Wireless is one of the slimiest companies I've hever had the displeasure of dealing with. Sprint, Verizon, etc. aren't much better.
Now I have Vonage and never have to worry about how long I'm on the phone. Of course I've kept my cell phone, on the minimum plan, for when I'm on the road, but I'm looking forward to giving AT&TWS the finger -- with wireless number portability, it should soon be possible to keep my phone number and switch to a wireless provider I hate less.
Vonage is particularly good for my purposes. Most of the people I talk to are in New York, whereas I'm in Los Angeles most of the time. Since I can have my 212 number while I'm in LA (I did this with my cell phone too, of course), there are no toll charges for anyone whether I'm calling or being called by my New York friends and relatives. I can take the Cisco box anywhere there's a broadband connection, so nothing has to change if I move. And the ability to forward calls is a major advantage. When I travel, I forward the phone to (e.g.) my hotel number -- I can do this on the webpage from anywhere. Then, instead of wasting cell phone minutes or using a calling card or (God forbid!) paying inflated hotel toll charges, I simply tell people to call me on my Vonage number and it rings for me in the hotel!
Vonage might not be for everyone, but I would argue that anyone who makes a lot of long distance calls should consider it seriously. I know that there are other alternatives -- even "traditional" long-distance companies such as MCI seem to be getting into the act, with package deals including unlimited domestic long distance. I for one would rather deal with Vonage than with MCI! (Vonage's plan is also cheaper, has no installation fees, and no contract period. On the downside, if your broadband connection goes down, your "dialtone" does too -- so it's not for "five-nines" telco-style reliability).
I imagine that, sooner or later, there will be cell phone plans out there with unlimited long distance. But right now, Vonage is arguably the single best option out there for the heavy long-distance user.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, my first reaction on reading the article was "holy *&#$&*#*$, this is amazingly good for an automated translation."
Looks like Google's making some serious statistical-translation progress. Mindblowing.
6. If it's free, how does Google make money off Google Health?
Much like other Google products we offer, Google Health is free to anyone who uses it. There are no ads in Google Health. Our primary focus is providing a good user experience and meeting our users' needs.
I've heard enough. I don't know what their long-term plan for monetizing Google Health is, and I don't really care now. I don't trust Google enough to consider even for a second entrusting my health care information to them (and I say this as someone who has thought very highly of the company since the beginning). And their weasly answer to the obvious question above, I think, justifies my mistrust.
Every for-profit company's primary focus is - making a profit. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with this, and the ideal situation arises when "providing a good user experience and meeting [...] users' needs" is aligned with the profit motive.
So why they can't be honest about their motivations in undertaking an expensive, large-scale project like this -- whatever those motivations are -- instead of trying to make us believe that they're doing it "out of the goodness of their hearts?" All their mealy-mouthedness accomplishes is to raise the suspicion that they've got something nasty up their sleeves. And that ensures that many users, including me, will never entrust their most private of private data to Google.
... what a bunch of OS-holes.
Vásárhelyi was a civil engineer (and professor of engineering at the Technical University of Budapest), who was responsible for a great deal of the modernization of Hungary's road system in the early and mid 20th century. He wrote some classic works on transportation and roads. So he's not a bad choice for naming a bridge, when it comes to that.
Kiscica
Well, not exactly. The lines [note: ö will stand in here for a long ö, which doesn't seem to be showing up in preview] Tokaj szölövesszein / Nektárt csepegtettél ("you dripped nectar on the grapevines of Tokaj") do appear in the third stanza of the full Himnusz (not that anyone, ever, sings the whole thing). Tokaj is a wine-growing region, justly famous for the wines that are internationally known under the Tokay name (including the sweet dessert wine type called aszú, made with a proportion of moldy grapes
Kiscica
You had your grading, scheduling, and payroll systems on the same local network as the student lab computers? Sheesh.
Having the administrative systems on the same network as the computer lab and worrying about network hacking is sort of like teaching chemistry classes in the school cafeteria and worrying that students will poison the lunch.
It's a pity that an insecure setup like that made it necessary to be so paranoid about your students -- whose education, after all, the computer lab exists to serve. I for one think it is cool to teach network programming to sophomores (or freshmen, for that matter). Isn't teaching the whole point?
Kiscica
Oddly, there are multiple bars doing good business in cheap beer on the campus of every single university in the US that I've attended (three) or visited (many), too. Despite the fact that the large majority of the undergraduate population presumably is under 21 and thus not allowed to drink
:-) When I was an *undergrad* -- well, they weren't quite so strict back then; I looked mature and never once got "carded."
In my experience the on-campus bars nowadays are pretty serious about keeping underage students out*, too, and faculty and staff seem to stay out on their own. I guess most of their business must be of-age senior undergraduates and grad students, although I have to say that when I was a grad student I generally avoided the on-campus places like the plague because they always seemed to be filled with loud undergrads, and because I prefer expensive beer
*the one time I went to a bar at my postdoc institution, they carded me, and me 32 years old at the time!
Why, because that's the only option they offered me. They weren't exactly forthcoming with avenues of higher appeal. They had a very specific dispute resolution process, which consisted, basically, of the following:
(01) calling the main support number (the only one they would every give you, on pain of death),
(02) waiting on hold for half an hour,
(03) getting a first-line support person,
(04) asking to speak to the manager you talked to last time,
(05) being told that no such person existed,
(06) asking to speak to any manager,
(07) being told that you would have to go through the whole process with the first-line person first,
(08) asking the first-line person to please review your extensive call record so you wouldn't have to recap the whole painful story for the fiftieth time,
(09) being told that she could not find any record of your past 49 calls,
(10) recapping the whole painful story for the fiftieth time,
(11) being told, for the fiftieth time, that the computer doesn't make mistakes so you must pay the $1000 in excess charges,
(12) asking to speak to a manager since the first-line person can't resolve your dispute,
(13) waiting on hold for a manager,
(14) asking the manager to please review your extensive call record, etc., etc.,
(15) recapping the whole painful story for the fifty-first time,
(16) being told, for the fifty-first time, that the computer doesn't make mistakes etc. etc.,
(17) repeatedly insisting that there was indeed a problem,
(18) finally being told that you would have to call back again tomorrow and ask for (manager's name),
(19) pleading for a direct number that you could use to avoid steps (1)-(13) next time,
(20) being told that no such number existed,
(21) going back to (01)
In my case this routine was varied, occasionally, by sending in voluminous faxes or registered letters in which every single disputed call (i.e. hundreds, because of the nature of the problem I was experiencing) had to be individually listed. There would either be no response to these missives, or else several weeks would pass and I would be told that there was no evidence that any of the calls were in error.
What on earth makes you think that I ever made "threatening telephone calls" (or "disturb[ed] the peace at a sales outlet", for that matter -- not that AT&TWS even had a sales outlet where I lived then). I endeavoured to remain extremely calm with them at all times. The only "threat" that was ever heard during a phone conversation between me and AT&T was on their part, when one of their representatives told me I had better pay the disputed $1000 (and then keep trying to get it back from them -- heh, heh, heh) or AT&T would, in his words, "destroy my credit record."
I wonder sometimes if I would have had more success if I had lost my temper at some point. Instead, I just tried to behave reasonably in the face of such inconceivable obstinacy that I still can't quite believe it. My stomach still churns when I think about AT that's how much mental anguish the experience caused me.
Using the courts probably would have been a good idea, but I guess I just had an inherent bias against getting tangled up with legal action. I've never sued anyone, or been sued, even in small-claims court, in my life. I know it's not that big a deal and probably wo
True, but AT&T had something Sprint PCS couldn't match then: free roaming meant free roaming, anywhere you went, whether you were using AT&T's own towers or not. As I recall, with Sprint PCS (back then) either you were in range of their CDMA signal, which was widely available in major metropolitan areas but not out in the boonies, or you were simply out of luck. With AT&T, if you weren't in range of an AT&T signal, you'd roam onto another carrier's TDMA signal, or if that failed, onto plain old AMPS (analog 800MHz). AT&T charged you one rate regardless. That's the way it worked in theory, at least - in practice, there were sometimes problems (most memorably, your calls on off-carrier systems would often be billed months late, so if you travelled a lot one month you might find yourself using far below your minutes allotment that month, and then get a giant bill as you went way over your allotment several cycles later -- this didn't happen to me on a large scale as the majority of my usage was still on AT&T's systems).
:-)
I used to travel a lot to places like Montana and Colorado that didn't have any digital cellular service, so Sprint wouldn't have cut it for me. My AT&T phone just worked, almost everywhere. Actually, apart from the unbelievably torturous experience I described above, I was quite happy with the actual AT&T phone service (I know, I know: "aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"). I was living in California and my fiancée was in New York. We talked about 30-60 minutes a day; that amounted to 1500 minutes a month, which cost $150 on AT&T. At the time, long distance on a land-line was 10 cents a minute, so AT&T's service was a great deal -- I didn't bother with a land-line. I was totally dependent on that phone, which is why I didn't just cancel when they started misbilling me.
My wife and I have Cingular now (which was once Pacific Bell Mobile Services -- the first wireless service I ever had, back in 96 or so). We're moderately happy with them. Call quality seems much worse than I remember back in the AT&T days, and dropped calls are more frequent, although part of that might be that my wife's phone seems to be kind of flaky. I use my EDGE data connection all the time -- it's a bargain at $20 a month for unlimited use. But more à propos to the current topic, their customer service doesn't suck. We've had one major problem -- we got a phone under our family plan for my mother-in-law, and each month we'd have $20 or $30 in mysterious extra charges on that line attributed to things like "flycell" and "jamster" and, I forget what else. Turned out they were for ring-tone and wallpaper and game downloads which, of course, my mother-in-law had nothing to do with. Apparently, the previous owner of that phone number had signed up for all sorts of third-party services which bill the customer through the phone bill. Over the course of several months, Cingular couldn't do anything about it -- they kept promising to set a flag on the line that would prevent third-party billing from going through, but never managed to fix it. In the end, we canceled the line (with no early-termination penalty), partly because of the problem, and partly because my mother-in-law dropped her phone into the toilet by accident
The point I'm making is that I do not hate Cingular with a raging, burning hatred, the way I hate AT&T (whose wireless division is, granted, now a part of Cingular). In fact, I feel rather postive towards them. Why? Even though they couldn't fix the billing problem and I had to call their customer service line at least 6 or 7 times for the same problem, they were always kind, courteous, and helpful on the phone. They readily admitted that there was a problem (no "if the computer says you
I had a similar problem with AT&T Wireless a long time ago (ca. 1998), when they first introduced their "one-rate" service (no extra charges for long distance or roaming, a major innovation back then). For about three months, every single call I made or received appeared twice on my bill: once listed under the actual time I made or received it, and once listed precisely three hours later. That is, for every 17-minute call at 8:53, say, there'd be a corresponding 17-minute call at 11:53. I immediately recognized that this had to have something to do with the fact that I was using a phone with a New York number in California (three-hour time difference). The net result was close to a thousand dollars in overage charges -- while I was careful to keep all my usage under the 1500 minutes per month included in my plan, I was getting charged for more like 3000 minutes at a ridiculous overage rate of 25 cents a minute.
The first month the problem showed up I thought it would be a quick fix -- obviously no rational human being could think that I was studiously duplicating every single one of my hundreds of calls exactly three hours apart.
Silly me.
I went through eight months of hell trying to get an AT&T representative to acknowledge there was a problem. I must have made at least 100 calls, sent numerous faxes and letters, and spoken to at least 20 different "supervisors" -- they kept "disappearing," forcing me to start telling the story all over again each time I called.
To a man/woman, they all kept insisting that if the calls appeared on my bill, I had to have made them (since we all know computerized billing systems never have bugs). Until the very end I never got a single one of them to admit that there just MIGHT be a problem if every single one of my hundreds of calls appeared precisely twice, 3 hours apart, on each bill. No, I simply had to have made those calls, there was no other explanation.
Naturally were flatly unwilling to refund the overage charges which, as I mentioned, reached almost $1000 by the third bill. (I didn't cancel the service because I was dependent on it - it was my only phone line, there was no number portability back then, no other service offered "free" roaming/LD which I needed as a New Yorker stuck in California). They did agree to let me pay only the non-disputed charge until the dispute process was over, but soon started sending me dunning letters anyway.
The problem stopped happening after the third month, but I spent most of the rest of the year trying to get them to reverse the excess charges. It was hell, no other word for it. It wasn't the prospect of having to pay a thousand dollars that scared and angered me, it was the simple fact that a large and respected (!) company like AT&T obviously had a policy for its customer support people that went "no matter how obvious it is that the customer is right, you must insist that he is wrong." I don't see how any rational person could fail to recognize that what happened was a massive computer billing error, but as I mentioned before, I never got *anyone* to admit it. By the end, my conversations with them were so psychologically draining that I was starting to wonder if it really could be my mistake somehow.
The very end of the saga -- eight months later - was that I finally managed to talk to a manager who agreed there was a problem, told me that many others had experienced it, and canceled all the excess charges, just like that. So, basically, they'd known all along that there was a problem. and just kept stonewalling in the hopes that I'd break down and pay them.
That experience marked the end of my innocence about big, respectable business. In a very real sense, I "grew up" over those 8 months.
Umm, why would you want to import a database into a spreadsheet? Just leave it in a database where it belongs.
Quite right. I don't maintain the above-mentioned collections in a spreadsheet. Actually, all the information is in idiosyncratically formatted text files (I've been doing this since the early 90's -- if I were starting over it'd be XML no doubt). I've written a fair amount of code over the years to keep it organized although I still haven't written the One Ultimate Cataloguing System that I've dreamt about all that time, just a bunch of separate tools.
The key here, however, is display and interchange. If you wanted to browse my collection I'd have to give you the files, and the accompanying code (although even sans code they're fairly human-readable and greppable), and it would just be a pain. (I've written a dynamic browser for Web access, though.)
If Google Spreadsheet could import a reasonably-sized database, however, I could just use my CSV exporter, upload the file, and share the spreadsheet with you. The tabular format of a spreadsheet isn't too bad for simple browsing though it loses a lot of structure that I've built into those text files.
That's what I found attractive about the idea of a Google spreadsheet when it was first announced -- also that I imagined they, being Google, would integrate search into it in some neat way, although that doesn't seem to be the case.
Kiscica
Please read the help that is neatly bundled with the app. It describes the limitations in size and cell/row count nicely. Yes, this was a nice way of saying RTFM
I did read the help - before even trying the application, in fact. It says that each spreadsheet may contain (I quote) "up to 20 tabs, 50,000 cells, 256 columns or 10,000 rows - whichever comes first". My puny movie list contains roughly 2,000 rows and 1 column, so it's well under that limit. The numbers given are absolute limits, but my impression is that the performance of the AJAX application imposes much smaller practical limits.
Kiscica
I thought it might be interesting to import into Google Spreadsheets the database I keep of my movie collection. That's about 2,000 lines long, by a few columns, but first I just tried a single column of titles. Nothing fancy -- just a sorted list. I made a .csv file and uploaded it -- it was only about 50K, so that step was plenty fast.
:-) A pity, 'cause having these online from anywhere I can get to Google was an intriguing idea (although I have my own site for that). My impression of Google Spreadsheet is "neat, but basically toy." I don't use Excel very often either, but I do know it has no trouble with spreadsheets that are tens of thousands of lines long (nor would I expect any modern standalone spreadsheet to).
When I tried to actually open the imported spreadsheet with Google Spreadsheet, however, it just hung. I waited about an hour then killed Firefox. Tried twice with the same result.
That was with 2,000 lines; I guess I'm not going to be trying the application out with my 30,000-line book collection database or my 25,000-line record collection database any time soon
Kiscica
A fuel efficient Prius has the same impact as a far less efficient Toyota Echo on the road surface.
It's just a side point, but I'm not sure that I'd describe the Toyota Echo as "far less efficient" than the Prius. My wife has one and regularly gets 45 MPG with it in mostly highway driving. My sister's been getting more like 40 MPG with her Prius (admittedly, a first-generation Prius, but still...)
Me, I'm happy with the high 40's-low 50's MPG (depending on percentage of highway driving) that my VW Jetta TDI wagon gets. On 100% biodiesel -- minimal pollution, no greenhouse gas emission. Even at $3.00 a gallon I'm paying less in fuel costs per mile than most people....
And also because, in some states, one must declare a party affiliation in order to vote in that party's primary elections.
Kiscica
That's not true. 'thou' is the regular development of the Old English second person singular pronoun 'thu' \thorn\'u (cognate with, for example, the modern German 'du', not to mention the 'tu's of modern Romance languages -- indeed most Indo-European languages retain a "thou" with a dental (d,t,th,dh..) initial).
'you' on the other hand comes form the Old English 'eow' which was the accusative form of the second person plural pronoun. The nominative was 'ge' which gave us 'ye' -- originally the case distinction was kept in both singular and plural: thou (sg) art/ye (pl) are I see thee (sg)/I see you (pl). These forms are cognate with German ihr/euch and Dutch gij/juw. I believe they represent otherwise vanished Indo-European dual forms but I might be wrong.
These words are ancient, long predating printing (and even writing). None of this had anything to do with the confusion of thorn/y graphemes, which at most might have confused people into mispronouncing titles like "ye olde booke shoppe" (there the 'ye' properly represents 'the').
Kiscica
Just goes to show that the SzTAKI dictionary (which is built on user contributions, not by professional lexicographers) isn't perfect. "dundi" doesn't mean 'crummy' under any possible interpretation of that word. It means 'fat' (applied e.g. to a person, or animal - I met a cat named Dundi once). A more nuanced translation would be 'chubby' or 'plump.'
By the way, the Hungarian equivalents given by the SzTAKI dictionary for the English word "crummy" all mean 'rich,' 'chubby,' or 'pretty.' Strangely, the actual meaning of the word ('of poor quality') is not reflected by any of the definitions.
SzTAKI's dictionary is a great resource but its entries, especially for more colloquial words such as this, should be taken cum grano salis!
Kiscica
More like "doondi," but the "oo" is short.
As I sit here in a restaurant awaiting a friend, I am writing this (OK, don't know if that counts as doing "something useful" :-) on a Dell Axim PDA connected to the net via my cell phone, which is 3 feet away from me, in my field bag. The two gadgets are communicating by Bluetooth.
I found my way here using GPS navigation software on this same PDA. When I get into my car I merely slip the PDA into its cradle. The GPS unit is hidden in the back of my car. There's no need to fiddle with cables: the GPS and PDA communicate by Bluetooth.
I don't have a Bluetooth headset yet, but I intend to get one as soon as the prices come down on the new stereo ones. I don't have an iPod, but my Axim with its 1GB flash card makes a fair substitute (and plays oggs too). It will be nice to keep the Axim (with the screen off to save power) safe and sound in my field bag when I'm biking, while I listen on the Bluetooth headset. And if a call comes in on my Bluetooth phone, I will be able to take it on the same headset. (Anyone have any recommendations for a headset that can handle this?)
When I get home I will sync my PDA to my PC via Bluetooth, since I'll probably use it a bit before I stick it in its charging cradle overnight. I could use WiFi, but it sucks the battery on my Axim, so I don't enable it unless I need it. Bluetooth works fine for syncing.
Oh, and my PC itself has a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Anyway, my point is, Bluetooth is already damn useful.
Kiscica
I keep seeing these figures for the size of the entire Windows source code base, "40GB and 40 million lines of code." Unless I'm missing something, this just doesn't add up. ~40 billion characters / 40 million lines implies that the average length of a line of code in the Windows source is 1000 characters. Even if the comments are terribly verbose, I highly doubt that is correct.
Now, I haven't looked at the leaked (putative) Windows source code yet, but I did check some of the Linux kernel source, and the average seems to be more on the order of 20-30 characters per line.
If Windows source is statistically similar, 40 million lines would be close to 1 gigabyte (not 40), so the 650 or so megs of leaked code might indeed be a significant chunk of it. (I saw at least one claim that the leaked code comprises 13 million lines, which would be in line with these estimates.)
I find the "40 million lines" claim for Windows source code, even including all the drivers etc., a lot more credible than the "40 gigabytes" (which would imply something like a billion lines of code). Even then, it's a lot. For comparison, a recent Linux kernel on my machine is about 5 million lines of source code (and 150 megs), and an entire Linux distribution of around the same vintage as W2K, namely Redhat 7.1, is about 30 million lines. The total functionality of W2K is arguably significantly less than that of an entire Linux distribution.
Kiscica
Funny you should mention that Anguish Languish site. Now there is an OCR'd text in need of some serious proofreading. Already in the introduction we read:
Egervescent further delerent saturations an witch way harem, wade hei[er haliver tam sang [...]
which should of course read:
Effervescent further deferent saturations an witch way harem, wade heifer haliver tam sang [...]
Proofreading that e-text might be a little bit of a challenge without the original book (which I happen to own, though I'm not volunteering for the job!), given the nature of the text...
Kiscica
Interesting points, but I just have to say that most jetliners cannot truly glide. With all engines out, the average jetliner has all the the flight capacity of a brick.
Jetliners can glide just fine with all their engines out -- sure, the glide ratio stinks (maybe 10:1) but most flights are planned so that an airport is always within the all-engines-out glide distance.
Read about the "Gimli Glider", a Boeing 767 which made a safe landing after both engines flamed out due to fuel exhaustion.
Kiscica
Sorry, being up at 2:00 AM is *not* "being up all night. :-)
The question isn't phrased very well. A serial-line BREAK signal isn't a "character" -- it's sent by switching from mark to space level for longer than a character's length. By asking for the break "character" you are implying that you do in fact want an ASCII value. Seems to me that almost any value could be justified on some system or another -- certainly 0x03, 0x00, 0x19, 0x1A, 0x1B and so on come to mind.
Of course maybe that's the point -- the variety of values you get might give you an idea of the platforms your candidate has used before...
What's the point of getting this if you already have a cell phone? You can already get unlimited minutes for $40 a month. Why pay a total of $80 for a $40 service?
Long distance. No cell phone plan gives you unlimited long distance minutes for $40 a month. And even plans that give you unlimited, unrestricted "local" minutes must be pretty rare -- there certainly don't seem to be any in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and New York. Most ~$40 plans in NY or LA give you a few hundred "anytime" minutes (that includes long distance of course) and a few thousand (not unlimited) "night and weekend" minutes. In many plans your "anytime" minutes are used up, even at night and on the weekends, before your "night and weekend" minutes take effect, rendering the whole deal little better than an advertising scam.
If you make lots of long distance calls, Vonage is fantastic. I am on the phone, LA-NY, at least an hour or two every day. With my AT&T "One Rate" cell phone, I was paying almost $200 a month (with taxes, fees, etc.) for 1500 minutes, with frequent billing errors, every one-minute dropped call charged for, plus outrageous overage fees of $0.25/minute if I went over the 1500 minutes -- some months I had a $350 bill. And AT&T Wireless is one of the slimiest companies I've hever had the displeasure of dealing with. Sprint, Verizon, etc. aren't much better.
Now I have Vonage and never have to worry about how long I'm on the phone. Of course I've kept my cell phone, on the minimum plan, for when I'm on the road, but I'm looking forward to giving AT&TWS the finger -- with wireless number portability, it should soon be possible to keep my phone number and switch to a wireless provider I hate less.
Vonage is particularly good for my purposes. Most of the people I talk to are in New York, whereas I'm in Los Angeles most of the time. Since I can have my 212 number while I'm in LA (I did this with my cell phone too, of course), there are no toll charges for anyone whether I'm calling or being called by my New York friends and relatives. I can take the Cisco box anywhere there's a broadband connection, so nothing has to change if I move. And the ability to forward calls is a major advantage. When I travel, I forward the phone to (e.g.) my hotel number -- I can do this on the webpage from anywhere. Then, instead of wasting cell phone minutes or using a calling card or (God forbid!) paying inflated hotel toll charges, I simply tell people to call me on my Vonage number and it rings for me in the hotel!
Vonage might not be for everyone, but I would argue that anyone who makes a lot of long distance calls should consider it seriously. I know that there are other alternatives -- even "traditional" long-distance companies such as MCI seem to be getting into the act, with package deals including unlimited domestic long distance. I for one would rather deal with Vonage than with MCI! (Vonage's plan is also cheaper, has no installation fees, and no contract period. On the downside, if your broadband connection goes down, your "dialtone" does too -- so it's not for "five-nines" telco-style reliability).
I imagine that, sooner or later, there will be cell phone plans out there with unlimited long distance. But right now, Vonage is arguably the single best option out there for the heavy long-distance user.
Kiscica