Uh, this is a reply to the 8th post down from the top (remember to use this like an array and zero reference). Yes, I'm talking to you, admdrew.
You claim that the 16,777,216th comment would have broke it but I contest that actually the 16,777,217th comment poster would be the culprit. Since it should be able to handle that many comments if it is zero referenced, and it would actually be the one after that one that would break it. You laugh but these kinds of problems plague a lot of coders?
If you don't agree with me, please respond below and reference my comment ID.
By the end of this day, SUSE Linux will no longer soil my hard drive. I'm taking a stand. How about you?
All I can answer this with is another quote:
And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. - Matthew 5:30 NIV
Funny, I've always found this to be a little extreme and Old Testament. I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather respond with open arms and understanding/forgiveness than a knife. Is it really that bad that Microsoft and Novell made this deal?
Attorney John Lear's new offices in the Major George Downey Mansion will be the testing ground for the system. Lear, who specializes in gas and oil law, stumbled upon the idea last year while investigating alternatives to traditional heating and cooling systems.
Does anyone else find it odd that a gas & oil law official is proposing this? I mean, I hope he did his research to make sure that the extra cash spent ensures that this energy is return is worth it. Also, I find it odd that this would be held in a mansion basement and not the local sewage treatment plant where it could eventually done en masse. Aside from watering the lawn, is there a proximity requirement for this particular method of harvesting energy from waste? I wish they would delve more into details but unfortunately all we seem to get is "Simply put, the system would transfer energy from one place to another."
It sounds like it works similar to the biomass ideas I've heard that are constantly arising. I would like to see a formal unbiased study done on what process applied to X renewable resources (in this case, waste) is the most efficient in net energy return.
The project includes each utility installing a new boiler, fuel handling system and auxiliary equipment to tie into existing turbine generators. The project will use biomass from a tree farm in Aitkin, as well as right of way clearings.
Biomass is organic matter (such as wood) that can be processed into energy for heat, liquid fuels or power generation. Biomass can be combusted directly to produce steam for electricity or it can be converted into a gas to power a turbine.
The boilers will produce 20 megawatts of biomass electricity in Hibbing and 15 megawatts in Virginia.
The two utilities, working jointly as the Laurentian Energy Authority, hold a contract to sell 35 megawatts of biomass power to Xcel Energy.
You might laugh but Biomass is important in Minnesota--although I realize that the current process isn't as BTU profitable as some Brazilian sugar cane plants, but hopefully they can squeeze more and more useful resources out of what was normally considered waste.
I wonder if it would be possible in the future to engineer plants which when harvested produce an optimal BTU return... and then make them resistant to the cold cold winters & insanely hot summers of Minnesota. I suppose it wouldn't be safe growing something that's potentially as unstable as impure oil or gasoline though!
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - DARPA - is working on the ultimate speech translation engine that would be capable of real-time interpretation of television and radio programs as well as printed or online textual information in order to be summarized, abstracted, and presented to human analysts emphasizing points of particular interest.
In unrelated news, a user named DARPABOT has made the Slashdot Hall of Fame under most active submitters at over 1000 in under a few weeks time, crushing prostoalex.
If combined with the tower of babel project we discussed earlier, it could only lead to awesomeness.
By 'lead to awesomeness' do you mean 'lead to you not having to attempt to edit summaries and fail at both grammar and spelling'?
Yes, it's good for everyone, even the citizens that call themselves Republican.
Let me explain what was happening before. The Republicans owned all three branches of the government--House, Senate & Presidential seat. They didn't have 2/3 majority in both the House & Senate but it put the rest of the country in a really bad spot. You see, the three branches were put in place so that no one party/person could go nuts and foul up the country.
What has been happening as of late, is that bills are flying through all three branches and being approved. Some of these are good for Republicans, some aren't. Some of the things George W. Bush has been doing are aligned with his party and some weren't. The problem is that since "his party" was the majority, they were expected to pass whatever he proposed.
Compounding on these problems, it seems the Democrats were resigned that this would happen after their defeat in a lot of prior elections.
The fact is, I don't want anything to fly through the process of passing bills. I want there to be a large discussion before it becomes law. Recently, I've seen headings that say, "Bill passed that allows president to do X" and my response was, "When the hell was that even proposed? Oh, six days ago? That's aweful fast!"
The Democrats have a majority in one branch now, I don't care who gets the Senate. Let's just keep a nice balanced government. I'm not naive enough to think that this process actually works but I do know that as of late it's been really crappy--probably for both parties. I'd like to see the Republicans take the Senate, the Democrats have the House & let whatever nut jobs we want to be president.
So if you call yourself Republican, just remember that the other half of the country is Democrat--and it benefits you to keep them happy. A balanced government is more important for my health than balanced meals.
have just started to learn bass. How can I strip out the low end in audacity?
Well, honestly, it's a bit tricky to do in Audacity. If you're using Linux, an easier way to do it is to just open up the mixer in XMMS and fiddle with the low end until the bass is pretty well hidden. You lose some of the bass drums and sometimes it's tough to do but it suits me just fine. There's also plug-ins that help you achieve this.
If you're using Windows, Winamp will do the same thing and when I was in high school, there were some plugins that would slow down the tune without distorting the pitch (though it would click a bit) and I heavily recommend that for learning the bass line.
Enjoy it and have fun, don't be afraid to ask people questions, I'm entirely self taught on bass and have enjoyed it to no end! What's your system setup so I can offer you some free apps to play with?
Now, I know what you're going to say, you're going to say this is a dupe of last week's story, Bot Nets Behind Recent Spam Surge, but it's not. You see, this is Aggressive Botnet Activities Behind Spam Incease. And it's no longer recent--it's a week old.
So you can call this a dupe, but as you can see, this has clearly changed status from recent to aggressive. Or maybe like code orange to code red, DHS style.
But please, feel free to karma whore the comments from the old discussion into this one. Seriously, anyone get any new information on this? We've got a named virus but is there anything else new?
Hello, nice to meet you. Well, Zonk decided to post this so I decided to open the discussion up with my opinion.
This article was not written to talk about the bands in question and their love of playing a video game. It was written to give exposure to the Guitar Hero franchise of games, and bring attention to the impending release of the game's sequel, which is now an MTV property (who incited the writing of this article to generate sales).
Insightful note, and I agree with you. You seem to agree with me to the point of it-doesn't-make-sense-that-these-guys-would-play-i t.
Now that you realize your error for even giving it attention,
Like I said, this is Slashdot and the story was posted, so I commented on it.
please take your haughty "Hi I'm a real musician, allow me to tell you how much better I am than you" attitude elsewhere.
Well, I never claimed to be a real musician. And I recall saying, "to each their own." I never said I was better than you, I merely suggested trying a cheap guitar if you enjoy Guitar Hero. I've tried Guitar Hero, so I am in a position to say I don't like it. Have you tried playing a real guitar? If you haven't, you're in no position to comment on it.
It's really worse than the brainwashing corporations responsible for this kind of media in the first place.
Well, you're entitled to your own opinion and that's certainly an interesting one but I simply don't agree with it. I don't know what I said that made me sound like an ass but if it made me sound like I was on my high horse, I apologize.
Thanks.
No, thank you. The high rating of your comment opens up my eyes about the what the Slashdot community values--people who tear other people apart and make quick judgments are pretty much modded up. I apologize for trying to add the conversation, I won't let it happen again.
Because it's a fun game? Rhythm games are popular for a reason, because it's an extremely easy concept to grasp but can be extremely hard to pull off perfectly. Doesn't matter if you're a musician or a mill worker, if it's fun, there's no reason not to play it.
It in no way threatans or diminishes "real" music production, it's simply binding together two popular activities: Being a rock star, and playing video games.
Good answer! Seriously, for the average person, this is a great game. But this article is talking about real musicians (whose music just happens to be in the game). Sounds really stupid to me. Sounds like these musicians are just promoting it because they get a dime for every copy sold. I hate to be cynical but that's why my initial post apparently made me sound like an ass.
Once again, I wasn't saying no one should play this game, I was just confused why a musician with unlimited resources would play it.
Honestly, if you love guitar hero, I don't know why you would be crazy for playing a real guitar. That's just my opinion, mod me as flamebait if you want...
I'm an electric bassist and personally, I care not for Guitar Hero.
I mean, I've got a freaking bass & a computer with Linux & audacity in my living room... why play guitar hero? To play with the bands? If I want to do that, I strip the low end out of an MP3 on my computer and just play along with it.
I find it odd that someone who probably has their pick of basses/guitars & effect pedals would prefer the not as rewarding feeling of playing Guitar Hero. Well, to each their own I guess. I think the guitarist of Korn should go buy some Rickenbacker guitars... I can't imagine ever getting tired of those.
The funniest thing is that my friend wants to play guitar... so he buys Guitar Hero. Which provides you with no guitar skills whatsoever. This summary hits it right on the head that it improves your rhythm but does nothing for your melody or style of playing.
PS2 + Guitar Hero = $300. Decent acoustic starter Yamaha guitar is about the same. Take your choice. I suspect Guitar Hero would be a great toy for working on your sense of tempo... but it's still a far cry from the coordination to play any other instrument.
I think we're going to see a lot more initiatives between International Business Machines & the Department of Homeland Security. One thing I submitted a while ago but wasn't accepted was IBM & Heineken's Beer Living Lab which is essentially a proof of concept demonstration of automating and simplifying the process of international beer shipments from 31 paper documents across many countries to a single SOA solution in conjunction with satellite and cellular technology. From what I understand, the shipments are tracked via a Tamper Resistant Embedded Controller (TREC). Net effect is boosted security for countries & a reduction in tracking costs. From the article,
This pilot project is part of the Information Technology for Analysis and Intelligent Design for E-government (ITAIDE) research project funded by the European Commission, in an effort to help reduce security concerns and tax fraud. Implementing the European objectives of Single-Window Access Points (SWA) and Authorized Economic Operators (AEO), this project is expected to lead to significant reductions in the administrative burden and hence a reduction in costs.
I'm not surprised they're working on video analysis software (with the hardware resources they can produce to automate it) but I am surprised that it would be considered to be 'impressive' as a lot of the stuff I've seen is heuristics, pattern recognition & mosaicking... which I can't really call 'impressive.'
I just saw a project called Tamarin (AVM2 open source) Flash9_DotReleases_Branch initial revision checked into the Mozilla CVS repository.
While you may know more than you put in the summary, I suspect you are jumping the gun here. The fact that a Flash9_DotReleases_Branch tag shows up in an open source CVS repository is certainly no reason to infer that they will "open source Flash." Perhaps that tag referred to a point at which the project was compatible/comparable with Flash 9?
In fact, after reading the project site, nowhere do they claim to be trying to open up Flash. Instead, it looks like they're going to re-implement the engine (tried before):
The goal of the "Tamarin" project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification.
ECMAScript version four is the language used by Flash, buy it could possibly be a derivative of Flash or an attempt to emulate Flash. Flex is an example of Adobe coaxing developers to use MXML and ActionScript and I suspect that this open source engine is no different. I imagine that it will lack the libraries and features of the licensed Flash Studio so that the developers will have to code a lot of the normal effect engines from scratch. Net effect, developers are given a little more freedom in coding and Adobe becomes the standard like they did with PDF. It looks like they're losing money on Studio licenses but instead they're cementing their stake in technology by offering basic services free and premium services at a... well... premium. Similar to what Google is doing and what Microsoft is learning. You know, like a heroin dealer the first few tricks are free but to get extra you gotta pony up.
After reading the article, it sounds like this is a case of some fanatics in power over exaggerating the effects of global warming. But you won't be able to convince people until the average yearly temperature about the world has passed the previously recorded high temperature. Then some more people will believe and then some more and maybe it will be too late. If we steadily head upwards of 0.1C per ten years, it will get there though. I guess only time will tell.
Statistics & empirical evidence is all we have for this case. Present confidence figures, not "+0.3C by 2000, for sure!" If you're a scientist, why not give them the raw data & your conclusions?
If your cat plays your character is that unattended macroing?
Well, now that you mention it, my character did unexpectedly have his tier two helm when I returned from a night shift. When I got on vent to ask how it happened, my guild was calling me a "pussy" a lot more than usual.
That would also explain the bags under Boots' eyes and his extreme irritability during the day.
I've violate TOS & EULAs like Michael Jackson at a daycare center.
I'm not too worried about the click through TOS/EULA being used against me in a court of law. For you see, I was installing Warcraft and then the phone rang and I got up to answer it. Meanwhile my cat walked across the keyboard that was unattended and when I came back, the game was ready to play.
What's that? You have multiple screens that prompt me everytime a new patch comes out? Well, I guess I should remind you that my keyboard is laced with catnip & I have many cats which are very active animals.
Either way, I certainly never read or understood the TOS/EULA so how could I violate it?
Well, I haven't read the other three pieces of this line of blogs but after skimming over them and reading the fourth, it looks like this guy is concerned with a media mogul not realizing everything about his industry all the way down to Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX. I would counter this with just always being sure you're utilizing the edge of technology to the fullest.
What's A Media Mogul To Do
The fact is that the real big media moguls out there (like this guy) don't worry about these things--if you're a mogul, you have money so pay some geeks to advise you and listen to them.
Secondly, the whole point of this fourth piece is to "go wide" and then the spin on horizontal integration and "layerfication" comes back into the discussion. Well, I'm going to offer a simpler and more general rule of thumb for media moguls: Bring your services and information to your consumers with the latest/cheapest/fastest technology. Just because newspapers have been around for hundreds of years doesn't mean you shouldn't change it. I wake up, go to work and click on the Washington Post link... nearly zero waste and it's searchable.
Most importantly, don't skimp on a website. Consumers take seconds to decide if they're going to do business with you based on your site. The more tech savvy society becomes, the faster we'll decide. Don't forget that. Hire someone who's good, shop around for people who can make your site interactive and fresh. That's it.
The recipe for success these days isn't hard but requires a lot of money and sometimes you already have to be the leader in that market. Take something that everyone loves (music, TV, movies have been done) and streamline the process of delivering to consumers by going digital.
I buy my loose leaf tea online.
Why? Because it's easy. E-commerce is obviously good for a business. Media moguls are no different. Offering goods & services through an online store is good. Automating your good or service and its delivery through "The Pipes" is great. Control the pipes, control the world. The same was said of news some time ago (and in a James Bond film).
The P2P part of this article makes a lot of sense though. If you could simplify/automate something like BitTorrent for your consumer, you'd on to something big. The big problem then becomes securing/controlling the spread of it by protecting your consumers and raking in their cash in some way.
What confuses me about electronic voting is that we constantly do commerce daily through electronic means (ATMs, credit cards online, etc) yet we cannot hammer down a viable scheme for voting. I am a programmer and very familiar with model view controller applications and it's always caused me great confusion of why we don't simply use a web based application for voting. For instance, if I built a secure website that required a local official to access through a terminal (with possible hardware verification methods*) and then asked for people to input their SSN and vote, that could be sent to a controller that could provide this information to three or four third party vendors. The vendors would verify the SSN against a government data base through very secure lines. They then would accumulate the data from each client terminal and be able to privately verify their data against each others. The gain from this? Ability to use asymmetric encryption standards (which are already used by our browsers in online commerce) with redundant data sources (so someone would have to identically hack all third party systems in order to compromise the data). You have a PhD so I'm hoping this question isn't too technologically oriented for you but what's wrong with this approach?
*What I mean by hardware verification is using a PCI card or even serial port dongle with specific hardware and firmware that verifies a machine as an untampered voting box. You would simply have to keep these cards (instead of entire machines) as a controlled commodity and keep them locked up until voting day and then analyzed for tampering afterwards.
Your bio kind of paints you as an academic with tons of authoring and training but no real deep diving into implementing an E-voting system. Have you worked on any physical systems or only the theory behind it?
I ask this because of a quote, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut. Which occasionally appears at the bottom of Slashdot. I interpret it that the theoretical side of the world is constantly criticizing the part of the world left to implement it. But in implementation, flaws naturally arise and often we just have to deal with it in order to gain the benefit of the technology. For instance, although you theoretically should be able to make a voting machine impervious to tampering, the possibility of a machine being purchased or stolen is always there. And once people with malicious intent have it in their hands, anything goes.
What I'm wondering is if the implementation of an E-voting scheme must inherently have security issues which are simply mitigated and dealt with similar to security issues on the internet? Have you thought of ways to avoid every security concern all the way down to the actual implementation of E-voting?
In your opinion, what is the largest inherent flaw within electronic voting systems today? Diebold's been in the news of having many potential problems ranging from securing the physical hardware to the ability to hack the software or firmware. I'm sure you're quite prepared to pose a case against implementations but can you think of a more intuitive scheme (encryption, network layout, verification scheme) to protect against "hacking our democracy?"
Other countries are embracing E-voting despite the massive concern here in the United States. My simple question is, in your opinion, will E-voting ever reach standards rigorous enough to satisfy the American populace? If not, why?
What?! Issue the alert for all iPod owners to report immediately to Sector Woz for re-Jobsification!
You know, it's crazy when a consumer tells you that if another product is better they would probably switch to it. Pure madness. Everyone knows that when you buy an electronics device, you have committed to a long term relationship to the manufacturer! The world is awash with computing hussies! How many times must we stress monogamous relationships with your MP3 players? And now you can walk down the street and people are just giving it away for free! I try to warn everyone but this is exactly how you get infected!
I dated a girl once and she had the gall to own three or for different brands of music players. Yeah, I know it's disgusting. I eventually had to break up with her--I kept having nightmares of her with just ear buds and headphones sticking out of her ears... and the whole time Bill Gates was standing there with a coffee mug snorting and laughing. I just couldn't look at her the same anymore... and then when she bought a third party docking station, I just had to break it off. Don't worry, nothing of mine ever touched her ears. Whore.
BusinessWeek takes a look at how political campaigns are taking the time-honored tradition of political mudslinging digital. One notable example: In the Virginia Senate race incumbent Republican George Allen held a comfortable lead over challenger Jim Webb until one of Webb's camera-toting aides captured footage of Allen making a racial slur during a campaign stop.
How is that 'mudslinging?' The definition of mudslinger is "one that uses offensive epithets and abuse/insult especially against a political opponent." I mean, if you show a video (without doctoring it) of your opponent saying "macaca" and it really happened, how are you mudslinging? I'd sure like to know if the guy I'm voting for is willing to call a group of people something offensive.
I haven't been able to see the video but if it's accompanied by some commentary like, "... George Allen's typical closed minded Republican speak..." then I could classify this as mudslinging because not all Republicans are like this. What's truly unfortunate is that the people who were going to vote for him as a viable candidate may now have no where to turn in time for the election. Jim Webb could have all the wrong stances on issues and he might win by default for an ignorant use of a word by his opponent. Well, I guess that's American politics.
Muslinging still is rampant and there still are videos... but when they're not lies or aren't pertinent, I'm interested in seeing them. A lot of the time, I don't believe what I see/hear unless it's verifiable or (as in this case) it's coming from the candidates mouth. It doesn't matter if it's TV, the radio, the internet or even my best friend, I'd still want verification.
It's not about the amount that comes to you, but rather the tactics being used. I think the spammers have learned to make it past Bayesian filters and, as a result, we can't just automatically dispose of mail. More and more of it is making into mailboxes whether it's attaching dummy text to fool the filters or just making the pitch come in the form of an image and using good text to get that image to the user.
Are your mailbox counts filtered or unfiltered? If so, what strategy is used?
I know it's an old article, but Paul Graham's A Plan for Spam seems as applicable now as it ever has. It's not the best but even when international alliances (albeit recently formed) can't stop spam, you have to start using your imagination.
But this Bayesian strategy has been overcome by the spammers. They use hilariously strange word ordering trick the spam filter and lower their threshold (see Graham's Lisp code) down to an acceptable range. Here's a piece of text from some spam that made it into my mailbox this morning:
However 'Beyond' is also butt ugly, the first week's worth of posts are a bit boring and the blogroll is narcissistic.
And it goes on for about 7 paragraphs with absolutely nothing to do with its pitch. It's because of this nonsense that it makes it into my mailbox in the first place.
How do we eradicate this problem? What strategies do we use next?
Well, I would suggest that we stick to the Bayesian approach but instead of tokenizing via Paul Graham's proposed algorithm, we could investigate tokenizing the text based on letter groups (divide 'words' into 2-3 letter groups and test for those frequencies) or even natural language parsing. Yes, I know it sounds absurd but I really think that an engine could be written in Prolog using WordNet or another dictionary with some basic English rules in an attempt to parse and analyze incoming text.
Who knows? Perhaps our need for a spam filtering engine could breed innovation in the AI community?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, this is a reply to the 8th post down from the top (remember to use this like an array and zero reference). Yes, I'm talking to you, admdrew.
You claim that the 16,777,216th comment would have broke it but I contest that actually the 16,777,217th comment poster would be the culprit. Since it should be able to handle that many comments if it is zero referenced, and it would actually be the one after that one that would break it. You laugh but these kinds of problems plague a lot of coders?
If you don't agree with me, please respond below and reference my comment ID.
At any rate, I'll make some statements to start a conversation and if the rest of Slashdot agrees with them, do not respond or refute them:
- Microsoft is the awesomenest company ever--assimilating Novell's SUSE is just another sign that we need to worship MS.
- Vote Republican or you kill babies.
- Linux is a deformed version of something I threw up last night after too much whiskey.
Once again, remember that silence is complacency, I await your responses if you disagree with me!It sounds like it works similar to the biomass ideas I've heard that are constantly arising. I would like to see a formal unbiased study done on what process applied to X renewable resources (in this case, waste) is the most efficient in net energy return.
There have been some recent minor achievements by a research team at the University of Minnesota (my alma mater).
I'm not sure if it's related to an effort to introduce it to the public. From that article You might laugh but Biomass is important in Minnesota--although I realize that the current process isn't as BTU profitable as some Brazilian sugar cane plants, but hopefully they can squeeze more and more useful resources out of what was normally considered waste.
I wonder if it would be possible in the future to engineer plants which when harvested produce an optimal BTU return
By 'lead to awesomeness' do you mean 'lead to you not having to attempt to edit summaries and fail at both grammar and spelling'?
Yes, it's good for everyone, even the citizens that call themselves Republican.
Let me explain what was happening before. The Republicans owned all three branches of the government--House, Senate & Presidential seat. They didn't have 2/3 majority in both the House & Senate but it put the rest of the country in a really bad spot. You see, the three branches were put in place so that no one party/person could go nuts and foul up the country.
What has been happening as of late, is that bills are flying through all three branches and being approved. Some of these are good for Republicans, some aren't. Some of the things George W. Bush has been doing are aligned with his party and some weren't. The problem is that since "his party" was the majority, they were expected to pass whatever he proposed.
Compounding on these problems, it seems the Democrats were resigned that this would happen after their defeat in a lot of prior elections.
The fact is, I don't want anything to fly through the process of passing bills. I want there to be a large discussion before it becomes law. Recently, I've seen headings that say, "Bill passed that allows president to do X" and my response was, "When the hell was that even proposed? Oh, six days ago? That's aweful fast!"
The Democrats have a majority in one branch now, I don't care who gets the Senate. Let's just keep a nice balanced government. I'm not naive enough to think that this process actually works but I do know that as of late it's been really crappy--probably for both parties. I'd like to see the Republicans take the Senate, the Democrats have the House & let whatever nut jobs we want to be president.
So if you call yourself Republican, just remember that the other half of the country is Democrat--and it benefits you to keep them happy. A balanced government is more important for my health than balanced meals.
If you're using Windows, Winamp will do the same thing and when I was in high school, there were some plugins that would slow down the tune without distorting the pitch (though it would click a bit) and I heavily recommend that for learning the bass line.
Enjoy it and have fun, don't be afraid to ask people questions, I'm entirely self taught on bass and have enjoyed it to no end! What's your system setup so I can offer you some free apps to play with?
Now, I know what you're going to say, you're going to say this is a dupe of last week's story, Bot Nets Behind Recent Spam Surge, but it's not. You see, this is Aggressive Botnet Activities Behind Spam Incease. And it's no longer recent--it's a week old.
So you can call this a dupe, but as you can see, this has clearly changed status from recent to aggressive. Or maybe like code orange to code red, DHS style.
But please, feel free to karma whore the comments from the old discussion into this one. Seriously, anyone get any new information on this? We've got a named virus but is there anything else new?
Insightful note, and I agree with you. You seem to agree with me to the point of it-doesn't-make-sense-that-these-guys-would-play-
Like I said, this is Slashdot and the story was posted, so I commented on it.
Well, I never claimed to be a real musician. And I recall saying, "to each their own." I never said I was better than you, I merely suggested trying a cheap guitar if you enjoy Guitar Hero. I've tried Guitar Hero, so I am in a position to say I don't like it. Have you tried playing a real guitar? If you haven't, you're in no position to comment on it.
Well, you're entitled to your own opinion and that's certainly an interesting one but I simply don't agree with it. I don't know what I said that made me sound like an ass but if it made me sound like I was on my high horse, I apologize.
No, thank you. The high rating of your comment opens up my eyes about the what the Slashdot community values--people who tear other people apart and make quick judgments are pretty much modded up. I apologize for trying to add the conversation, I won't let it happen again.
Once again, I wasn't saying no one should play this game, I was just confused why a musician with unlimited resources would play it.
Honestly, if you love guitar hero, I don't know why you would be crazy for playing a real guitar. That's just my opinion, mod me as flamebait if you want
I'm an electric bassist and personally, I care not for Guitar Hero.
... why play guitar hero? To play with the bands? If I want to do that, I strip the low end out of an MP3 on my computer and just play along with it.
... I can't imagine ever getting tired of those.
... so he buys Guitar Hero. Which provides you with no guitar skills whatsoever. This summary hits it right on the head that it improves your rhythm but does nothing for your melody or style of playing.
... but it's still a far cry from the coordination to play any other instrument.
I mean, I've got a freaking bass & a computer with Linux & audacity in my living room
I find it odd that someone who probably has their pick of basses/guitars & effect pedals would prefer the not as rewarding feeling of playing Guitar Hero. Well, to each their own I guess. I think the guitarist of Korn should go buy some Rickenbacker guitars
The funniest thing is that my friend wants to play guitar
PS2 + Guitar Hero = $300. Decent acoustic starter Yamaha guitar is about the same. Take your choice. I suspect Guitar Hero would be a great toy for working on your sense of tempo
In fact, after reading the project site, nowhere do they claim to be trying to open up Flash. Instead, it looks like they're going to re-implement the engine (tried before): ECMAScript version four is the language used by Flash, buy it could possibly be a derivative of Flash or an attempt to emulate Flash. Flex is an example of Adobe coaxing developers to use MXML and ActionScript and I suspect that this open source engine is no different. I imagine that it will lack the libraries and features of the licensed Flash Studio so that the developers will have to code a lot of the normal effect engines from scratch. Net effect, developers are given a little more freedom in coding and Adobe becomes the standard like they did with PDF. It looks like they're losing money on Studio licenses but instead they're cementing their stake in technology by offering basic services free and premium services at a
After reading the article, it sounds like this is a case of some fanatics in power over exaggerating the effects of global warming. But you won't be able to convince people until the average yearly temperature about the world has passed the previously recorded high temperature. Then some more people will believe and then some more and maybe it will be too late. If we steadily head upwards of 0.1C per ten years, it will get there though. I guess only time will tell.
Statistics & empirical evidence is all we have for this case. Present confidence figures, not "+0.3C by 2000, for sure!" If you're a scientist, why not give them the raw data & your conclusions?
That would also explain the bags under Boots' eyes and his extreme irritability during the day.
I've violate TOS & EULAs like Michael Jackson at a daycare center.
I'm not too worried about the click through TOS/EULA being used against me in a court of law. For you see, I was installing Warcraft and then the phone rang and I got up to answer it. Meanwhile my cat walked across the keyboard that was unattended and when I came back, the game was ready to play.
What's that? You have multiple screens that prompt me everytime a new patch comes out? Well, I guess I should remind you that my keyboard is laced with catnip & I have many cats which are very active animals.
Either way, I certainly never read or understood the TOS/EULA so how could I violate it?
The fact is that the real big media moguls out there (like this guy) don't worry about these things--if you're a mogul, you have money so pay some geeks to advise you and listen to them.
Secondly, the whole point of this fourth piece is to "go wide" and then the spin on horizontal integration and "layerfication" comes back into the discussion. Well, I'm going to offer a simpler and more general rule of thumb for media moguls: Bring your services and information to your consumers with the latest/cheapest/fastest technology. Just because newspapers have been around for hundreds of years doesn't mean you shouldn't change it. I wake up, go to work and click on the Washington Post link
Most importantly, don't skimp on a website. Consumers take seconds to decide if they're going to do business with you based on your site. The more tech savvy society becomes, the faster we'll decide. Don't forget that. Hire someone who's good, shop around for people who can make your site interactive and fresh. That's it.
The recipe for success these days isn't hard but requires a lot of money and sometimes you already have to be the leader in that market. Take something that everyone loves (music, TV, movies have been done) and streamline the process of delivering to consumers by going digital.
I buy my loose leaf tea online.
Why? Because it's easy. E-commerce is obviously good for a business. Media moguls are no different. Offering goods & services through an online store is good. Automating your good or service and its delivery through "The Pipes" is great. Control the pipes, control the world. The same was said of news some time ago (and in a James Bond film).
The P2P part of this article makes a lot of sense though. If you could simplify/automate something like BitTorrent for your consumer, you'd on to something big. The big problem then becomes securing/controlling the spread of it by protecting your consumers and raking in their cash in some way.
What confuses me about electronic voting is that we constantly do commerce daily through electronic means (ATMs, credit cards online, etc) yet we cannot hammer down a viable scheme for voting. I am a programmer and very familiar with model view controller applications and it's always caused me great confusion of why we don't simply use a web based application for voting. For instance, if I built a secure website that required a local official to access through a terminal (with possible hardware verification methods*) and then asked for people to input their SSN and vote, that could be sent to a controller that could provide this information to three or four third party vendors. The vendors would verify the SSN against a government data base through very secure lines. They then would accumulate the data from each client terminal and be able to privately verify their data against each others. The gain from this? Ability to use asymmetric encryption standards (which are already used by our browsers in online commerce) with redundant data sources (so someone would have to identically hack all third party systems in order to compromise the data). You have a PhD so I'm hoping this question isn't too technologically oriented for you but what's wrong with this approach?
*What I mean by hardware verification is using a PCI card or even serial port dongle with specific hardware and firmware that verifies a machine as an untampered voting box. You would simply have to keep these cards (instead of entire machines) as a controlled commodity and keep them locked up until voting day and then analyzed for tampering afterwards.
Your bio kind of paints you as an academic with tons of authoring and training but no real deep diving into implementing an E-voting system. Have you worked on any physical systems or only the theory behind it?
I ask this because of a quote, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut. Which occasionally appears at the bottom of Slashdot. I interpret it that the theoretical side of the world is constantly criticizing the part of the world left to implement it. But in implementation, flaws naturally arise and often we just have to deal with it in order to gain the benefit of the technology. For instance, although you theoretically should be able to make a voting machine impervious to tampering, the possibility of a machine being purchased or stolen is always there. And once people with malicious intent have it in their hands, anything goes.
What I'm wondering is if the implementation of an E-voting scheme must inherently have security issues which are simply mitigated and dealt with similar to security issues on the internet? Have you thought of ways to avoid every security concern all the way down to the actual implementation of E-voting?
In your opinion, what is the largest inherent flaw within electronic voting systems today? Diebold's been in the news of having many potential problems ranging from securing the physical hardware to the ability to hack the software or firmware. I'm sure you're quite prepared to pose a case against implementations but can you think of a more intuitive scheme (encryption, network layout, verification scheme) to protect against "hacking our democracy?"
Other countries are embracing E-voting despite the massive concern here in the United States. My simple question is, in your opinion, will E-voting ever reach standards rigorous enough to satisfy the American populace? If not, why?
What?! Issue the alert for all iPod owners to report immediately to Sector Woz for re-Jobsification!
... and the whole time Bill Gates was standing there with a coffee mug snorting and laughing. I just couldn't look at her the same anymore ... and then when she bought a third party docking station, I just had to break it off. Don't worry, nothing of mine ever touched her ears. Whore.
You know, it's crazy when a consumer tells you that if another product is better they would probably switch to it. Pure madness. Everyone knows that when you buy an electronics device, you have committed to a long term relationship to the manufacturer! The world is awash with computing hussies! How many times must we stress monogamous relationships with your MP3 players? And now you can walk down the street and people are just giving it away for free! I try to warn everyone but this is exactly how you get infected!
I dated a girl once and she had the gall to own three or for different brands of music players. Yeah, I know it's disgusting. I eventually had to break up with her--I kept having nightmares of her with just ear buds and headphones sticking out of her ears
I haven't been able to see the video but if it's accompanied by some commentary like, "... George Allen's typical closed minded Republican speak
Muslinging still is rampant and there still are videos
It's not about the amount that comes to you, but rather the tactics being used. I think the spammers have learned to make it past Bayesian filters and, as a result, we can't just automatically dispose of mail. More and more of it is making into mailboxes whether it's attaching dummy text to fool the filters or just making the pitch come in the form of an image and using good text to get that image to the user.
Are your mailbox counts filtered or unfiltered? If so, what strategy is used?
But this Bayesian strategy has been overcome by the spammers. They use hilariously strange word ordering trick the spam filter and lower their threshold (see Graham's Lisp code) down to an acceptable range. Here's a piece of text from some spam that made it into my mailbox this morning: And it goes on for about 7 paragraphs with absolutely nothing to do with its pitch. It's because of this nonsense that it makes it into my mailbox in the first place.
How do we eradicate this problem? What strategies do we use next?
Well, I would suggest that we stick to the Bayesian approach but instead of tokenizing via Paul Graham's proposed algorithm, we could investigate tokenizing the text based on letter groups (divide 'words' into 2-3 letter groups and test for those frequencies) or even natural language parsing. Yes, I know it sounds absurd but I really think that an engine could be written in Prolog using WordNet or another dictionary with some basic English rules in an attempt to parse and analyze incoming text.
Who knows? Perhaps our need for a spam filtering engine could breed innovation in the AI community?