It's easy to fault Bush and to make him sound like a two year old. Oftentimes, it just requires you to copy and paste something he said.
But I would like to point out that there is a good article regarding this matter and it happens to take a look at it without political bias (if you believe that's possible).
Essentially what I'm asking you is, "Would a Democratic president be doing anything differently?" That's hard to decide--both sides are all talk and no action on this subject.
In college, my professor had a class of a couple hundred freshmen and the problem of making sure no one was copying anyone else's code for trivial homework assignments. It's a similar problem, how do we solve it?
His solution was a simple edit distance program that checked every pair-wise set of homework assignment's source code. You could thus find the highest areas of similar work between two pieces of code or even documents. A simple algorithm--it's the engineer way.
When I took a course in computational biology (or bioinformatics), I was enlightened to the BLAST and FASTA algorithms that could be useful in this case. Basically, you could search by global alignment or some form of local alignment (reducing and increasing complexity of the algorithm, respectively). These algorithms work already with protein chains and DNA so they are more than capable of large sets of data computed quickly and effectively.
The article lists SCO submitting 45,000 pages of evidence and materials--of which I assume is SCO's own work. What IBM could choose to do is have them scanned and provide the court with the alleged infringing documents to check against. The localized areas that score the highest could then be inspected by IBM and give their lawyers ample time to start a defense against points in the documents that will probably be areas of attack for SCO. In fact, it's entirely possible that SCO used this method to quickly identify what it thought to be points of infringement in code.
But of course, like most Slashdot posters, I'd rather just see the judge turn to SCO and say, "Bullshit, case dismissed..." and proceed to tell them off like Judge Judy giving a deadbeat father a taste of the back o' her hand.
Ok, so I know I'm going to get a lot of AMD people agreeing with me and a lot of Intel people outright ripping me to shreds. But I'm going to speak my thoughts come hell or high water and you can choose to be a yes-man (or woman) with nothing to add to the conversation or just beat me with a stick.
I believe that AMD had this technology before Intel ever started in on it. Yes, I know it wasn't really commercially available on PCs but it was there. And I would also like to point out a nifty little agreement between IBM and AMD that certainly gives them aid in the development of chips. Let's face it, IBM's got research money coming out of their ears and I'm glad to see AMD benefit off it and vice versa. I think that these two points alone show that AMD has had more time to refine the multicore technology and deliver a superior product.
As a disclaimer, I cannot say I've had the ability to try an Intel dual core but I'm just ever so happy with my AMD processor that I don't see why I should.
There's a nice little chart in the article but I like AMD's explanation along with their pdf a bit better. As you can see, AMD is no longer too concerned with dual core but has moved on to targeting multi core.
Do I want to see Intel evaporate? No way. I want to see these two companies go head to head and drive prices down. You may mistake me for an AMD fanboi but I simply was in agony in high school when Pentium 100s costed an arm and a leg. Then AMD slowly climbed the ranks to be a major competitor with Intel--and thank god for that! Now Intel actually has to price their chips competitively and I never want that to change. I will now support the underdog even if Intel drops below AMD just to insure stiff competition. You can call me a young idealist about capitalism!
I understand this article also tackles execution types and I must admit I'm not too up to speed on that. It's entirely possible that OOOE could beat out the execution scheme that AMD has going but I wouldn't know enough to comment on it. I remember that there used to be a lot of buzz about IA-64's OOOE processing used on Itanium. But I'm not sure that was too popular among programmers.
The article presents a compelling argument for OOOE. And I think that with a tri-core or higher processor, we could really start to see a big increase in sales using OOOE. Think about it, a lot of IA-64 code comes to a point where the instruction stalls as it waits for data to be computed (most cases, a branch). If there are enough cores to compute both branches from the conditional (and third core to evaluate the conditional) then where is the slowdown? This will only break down on a switch style statement or when several if-thens follow each other successively.
In any case, it's going to be a while before I switch back to Intel. AMD has won me over for the time being.
The Technology Hasn't Been Up To Snuff
on
How Bill Gates Works
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· Score: 4, Informative
I use a digital whiteboard at work. It's placed on top of a multi-thousand dollar plasma screen and and the whiteboard itself cost thousands also. I think the company that makes it is called Smarttech. It's a nice thing but there are many frustration/time consuming aspects of it. If I were a billionaire, I wouldn't want to waste my time fiddling with a whiteboard that--in the end--would give me a little better control over my demos and presentations.
What I'm trying to say is that I bet he was waiting for this technology to get to a point where maybe the two units came as one and were more sleekly integrated. The maintenance/recalibration of this thing is a pain and there are times when we have customers sitting in front of us and we're trying to present to them but we have to run through some diagnostics.
Not cool.
Now imagine those customers were interested in million dollar contracts with you.
RunBot currently walks around the edge of a circular room and is connected the centre of the room by a boom.
Yeah, you see the boom in the videos.
It can walk but can't maintain verticality? Is it there to stabilize it? That's pretty lame if they don't even have to worry about keeping its center of balance... that's the hardest thing to figure out about fluid bipedal motion!
You don't need a research paper to tell you where the traffic is going.
Check out Alexa's Society Category. It's rife with the named blogging machines and even Slashdot!
All the report provides is the sheer visiting numbers and the rate of increase over the past year. And give proof that Tom over at MySpace is laughing all the way to the bank. You may call me a karma whore but that man has 68475709 friends!
"An overwhelming number of adults in this country (80%) say that they have a favorable impression of PBS and NPR as a whole. Additionally, there are several indicators throughout the survey that demonstrate the extent to which the public values public broadcasting. For example, only 1-in-10 Americans (10%) would say that a per capita expenditure of $1.30 in taxpayer funds is 'too much' for the government to be spending on public broadcasting. Nearly half (48%) say the amount is 'too little' and roughly 1/3 (35%) say the amount is 'about right.'"
Ok, so $1.30 per capita and the population of the US is 295,734,134 so point out to me where $1.30 * 295,734,134 = $384,454,374.20 is on their balance sheets.
I'm waiting.
Three hundred million dollars? Riiiiiight.
My point is that the $0.02 per American that is being spent is negligible. It's not longer even considered a "red cent" it's so minute. Secondly, people like you spread information that is flat out wrong about how much of your money is being sent to NPR.
I'm guessing that survey about $1.30 per American just picked an arbitrary value and went around asking people to make them think that they are paying $1.30 per year to NPR when they really aren't! It's wrong!
Well, I'd like to say that this is an issue rarely addressed--which is alarming considering how widely AJAX is used these days.
In the article, he addresses a token used to generate random strings:
One should let the page, or some include javascript, generated on the server side, include some token that the performs some operation on which gives a result which is used in any consecutive request to the webserver. The webserver should not allow any request with another 'sequence number', so to speak.
The servers' 'challenge-string' should be as random as possible in order to make it non-predictable: if one could guess what the next sequence number will be, it is again wide open for abuse.
And I think one of the most commonly used Universally Unique IDentifiers (UUID) generators is Java UUID Generator (JUG) which can be used by any type of application that can communicate with Java libraries (most apps capable of XML messaging can anyways).
Of course, this can be no better than pseudorandom as we all remember from our courses.:-)
Damn. We were almost lucky enough to lose a CNET columnist. Oh well, I guess the life insurance policy I took out on him will never come to fruition...
I don't care how valuable NPR is or thinks it is -- as long as they are funded through coercion (taxation), then I will treat them as an organization which is funded through coercion. That is, I will never so much as consider helping them, no matter how much they need it.
As you can see from their website not a goddamn red cent comes from your taxes. Look through their income sheets and point out where your money is going in. They're a non-profit organization delivering free information to anyone with a radio.
Anyone who wants to know what is going on in the world need only tune to their channel. In my opinion, they're taking a stab at eliminating ignorance in our nation by bathing everyone in nearly free (and unbiased) information and I'd consider that more valuable than cable TV.
I grew up in Minnesota where the land is flat and it would take me three and half hours to drive between my parent's house and the University of Minnesota. My car was a complete junker and therefore wasn't worth the two hundred or so dollars it would take to equip it with a CD player. So instead, I listened to the many programs that NPR and MPR had to offer.
Two of my absolute favorites were This American Life and Car Talk. Oftentimes, I would find myself in a parking lot listening to Ira Glass as the episode he was doing had me hooked and I couldn't even get out of my car to buy groceries.
My senior year of college found me looking up TAL episodes online and using Total Recorder to compress the Real Audio feeds directly to MP3. Was I stealing from TAL? I didn't really feel like it, I was a poor college student and I had heard the program on the radio--I just wanted it on my computer to listen to it time after time.
I'll never forget the time I heard the two part series of Come Back to Afghanistan and it's sequel. What really happened and is happening in Afghanistan never hit home until I heard it through the voice of a young teenager named Hyder Akbar.
I have made a few contributions to NPR since I've graduated but I can see where they'd be strapped financially. I think NPR could take advantage of the modern media formats that all of us seek. I have purchased Car Talk CDs and I'd purchase TAL CDs too. Even more importantly, I'd be more than willing to pay a dollar through iTunes or Napster or whatever service you choose to have a random episode of TAL or Car Talk on my MP3 player. They seem to have the audio book version of Poultry Slam but not every episode, correct me if I'm wrong but I don't have any kind of service to check on hand.
Quinn: "You CAN'T HANDLE the hydraulic penis!" Robo-Marco (Alligator robot): "Hey! I dont see two down there!!!"
-- Murphy: "D-cups, full of JUSTICE!"
-- Sparks: "Sparkomus Prime"
--
Taken from "I, Robot, Really" the last episode to feature the voice of the great, late Harry Goz (Captain Murphy).
Let's hope that the HAL suits don't consider the quadriplegic a threat to the mission. Might see the suit eject the body in an effort to achieve success and reach the top.
Not only can they communicate, but they also have a staunch work ethic. They've been known to make every attempt to get to work on time regardless of whatever transformations may happen to them over night.
Poor Gregor, no matter how hard he released pheromones, his parents just wouldn't listen... er... smell to him.
A late attempt to keep the secret of printed word hidden from the peasants and the surfs.
Those uprisings do cause ever so much trouble.
-Lord Rove II
It's Always Going to Work
on
Why Phishing Works
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why Phishing Works
Phishing will always work. The intelligence and cautiousness of the population who use the internet is represented by some form of a normal curve. On the far left, a line falls for those users who will (out of innocence or ignorance) 'bite' on a phishing site. Thanks to e-mail, it is increasingly easier for phishermen (and phisherwomen) to select a random sample from this normal curve and those that fall to the left of the threshold will invariably become victims.
To disrupt or completely stop this from happening is currently an impossible Herculean task.
Even netting one person can result in thousands of dollars worth of damages. If one in every one million phishing works, of course they'll keep doing it.
Hurray for Movie Technology!
on
ILM's Datacenter
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· Score: 5, Funny
With 3000 disks, it can shift 170Tb to 5000 rendernodes over 10GbE and 1GbE network links. It's an impressive system, for impressive films.
Unfortunately, all that storage can't provide decent acting, quality humor or plot lines without holes for their movies.
I bet I could make a graph that represents how the quality of movies is characteristically inversely proportionate to the amount of CGI effects in them. Oftentimes, eye candy is used to shroud the plot and mask the bad acting/directing. American audiences especially just go looking for explosion sequences and CGI in the annual summer action flick hunt. We often fear a movie that might prove to be too cerebral and that pretty much disgusts me. Way to reinforce bad movies that are only good for one viewing with volume set to 'loud' and TV set to 'huge.'
ILM is responsible for making movies like The Mask (of which there are seven films) and characters like Jar-Jar Binks possible. Be sure to thank them for that.
We've seen the media get over-excited about an Apple launch before, but one CNET columnist is 'threatening suicide' if Apple don't announce something for their 30th Anniversary this Saturday.
I hope Chris Stevens and his wife don't have any anniversaries coming up. I guess she could always 'forget one' after taking out a lucrative life insurance policy on him.
The move is a shift for the Hotmail business, which in the past, has charged users who wanted to read their mail using desktop software, rather than a Web browser.
You might not have known this but there's already a tool out there that lets you connect and check mail from AOL, Libero, Gmail, MailDotCom, Lycos, Yahoo and (the seemingly "impossible") Hotmail. It's called Thunderbird with the Webmail extension. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there's even a Webmail plugin for Firefox that would allow you to check it automatically through your browser.
So when I saw the headline of "Hotmail On Your Desktop" I thought to myself, "So what?" I pulled up Thunderbird and there it was, Hotmail on my desktop. Am I some sort of sorcerer? No, but if this is news then I must have madd haXX0rz skillz to be able to do this when it's not possible. Or perhaps it's just another lame Slashdot article brought to us by a Microsoft employee that encouraged samzenpus to post it with a nominal paypal transaction? I'm not implying anything, of course...
But I suppose now, you have a choice:
Check your Hotmail (and Gmail and Windows Life Mail) through a new proprietary (malware issues?) client that will most likely bombard you with advertisements or
Check your Hotmail (and many other mail systems) through good old Thunderbird with no advertisements and source code that you can alter yourself if you ever feel the need to.
Pretty tough choice...
Remember, Microsoft owns Hotmail and, according to the article:
It's part of the company's broader Windows Live effort and could eventually serve as a hub, not just for Windows Live Mail, but for other Microsoft Web-based services as well.
That's right, "other Web-based services as well" like the following possibilities:
The "Genuine Advantage" checker Web-based service. There to report you for anything you've done to Windows that in any way violates the EULA you blindly clicked during the install.
Microsofty Ads! The Web-based service that brings advertisements to your desktop so that you can get all the cool new Microsoft products cheaper!
Member Updates. The client application that annoyingly pops up in the bottom right of your screen as a paper clip to alert you of cool new Microsoft products!
The Blue Screen of Death inducer--a service that allows Microsoft to trigger your machine remotely to BSOD on you. Why try to recover from an error when you can just reboot?
The Friendly Survey Service, a program that just tallies up what you got on your machine and phones home to Microsoft so Mr. Gates can have charts presented to him that realistically show the threat of OOo against Office.
Et cetera...
Yeah, I pretty much can't wait to install something on my machine that's going to be a catalyst for other Microsoft programs.
So I couldn't help but notice that this article is just a dupe.
Apparently, a link to a blog with a couple paragraphs and screenshots of a service that has been covered before is newsworthy. Not in my opinion.
Oh, and if you go to that blog that's linked in the article, there is a "Contact Us" tab which results in the same e-mail that the author of this article (Tam Hanna) linked to their name. This isn't a review, it's a "Oooh, this is neat" article which is odd considering I have a Google Pages account and it's not that neat--it's functional and simplistic but limiting. And please do notice the ads (some by Google) surrounding Tam Hanna's blog. So they'll be making some cash off the Slashdot effect. What a tool Slashdot has become.
If you want an example of something they rejected to bring you a duped article, here's one I submitted this morning that some of you may or may not care about:
About a week ago, Robert Jordan wrote a letter to Locus in which he stated he has amyloidosis. Amyloidosis is a rare blood disease that leaves patients with a median of one (no treatment) to four (with treatment) years left to live. He confirmed this on his publisher's website. This is devastating news for fantasy enthusiasts but on his blog he spoke about the Wheel of Time series: "Worse comes to worst, I will finish A Memory of Light, so the main story arc, at least, will be completed." Let us all wish him a permanent recovery--if he can write the epic tomes of the Wheel of Time, surely beating amyloidosis will be trivial.
Weeks after his first auction went live, Blizzard, Vivendi, and the ESA began sending repeated takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), asking eBay to yank the auctions because of copyright and trademark infringement concerns.
At some point, everyone has to start to wonder where the DMCA's boundaries begin. I don't believe I've ever seen any single act or bill used in the court of law more than this. Basically, if you are low on funds, wave the DMCA in front of someone's face and take them to court. I'm not a lawyer but this piece of trash is written in the most convoluted legalese I've ever seen. Everyone and their dog are using the DMCA like a damaged crop in a witch hunt. I can't even get through a summary of it without getting lost--a sure fire sign that if you have the money, you can get those fancy lawyers that are essentially 'truthsmiths.'
I don't think everything about the DMCA is wrong. But I do think that it has no boundaries and can be openly interpreted. I believe this Act needs to be reformed before it is renewed and that it should be better defined. The internet has developed far past our wildest imaginations and no act passed in 1998 could account for all the legal caveats of it.
I believe my hatred for the DMCA falls just under my hatred for the Patriot Act.
And that's saying a lot.
In effect, if the video game industry's actions are upheld, "then selling a how-to book about Microsoft Word would infringe Microsoft's copyright, especially if the book contained one or more screenshots of Word's user interface," said Paul Levy...
Hey, with the DMCA, anything's possible! Well, what do you say Microsoft? O'Reilly's got deep pockets!
I'll remember him for his stories of Ijon Tichy and the satire he would write about regarding anything from governments to advertisements.
One of the first science fiction authors to truly show us that science fiction is more than just a genre of space novels, it's a way to place one's self outside of reality so that it can be safely analyzed and commented on from a distance.
Rest in peace. I eagerly await the day you raise to the ranks of Asimov & Tolkien when the world will remember you as more than "that guy who wrote a story for a George Clooney movie."
I believe the problem with tech books is that they are books of ideas. They are pure raw ideas and usually can lead the way to making a lot of money.
So you gamble and throw away a nominal sum in hopes that it helps you get your job done (which is invaluable to you because it provides the resources for living). Fifty dollars is worth it for a tool that keeps me employed.
What I don't understand is why there isn't a discount for students. In college, I once ordered a book only to find it was the "overseas" paperback edition. Beware of these, not only are they fake but they will not last to heavy use and have no color/durability.
What confuses me are the most is that some of my favorite books are the most the expensive. Among them:
Why? These books are standards and needed by everyone. They should be able to capitalize off the popularity by lowering the price. Surely it doesn't take $120 to make Mitchell's Machine Learning--it's such a tiny book!
I guess all I can do is blame the presses like John Wiley & Sons or McGraw Hill that seem to be the perpetrators of selling such expensive paper. Perhaps these are the results of botched initial contracts between author and publisher?
I would wager that, upon the initial deal, a lot of authors agree to anything. One of these conditions might be that the before hand assumption is that the tech book will not sell well. And therefore, they charge a lot to make up for possible losses. If the book sells well, then why lower the price? Just keep it high and rake in the profits while the author gets what his contract says.
A friend who worked at B&N once told me that tech books are the most abused books. People would "buy" the technology of the month book, then return it days later saying it wasn't what they were looking for. I think the volatility of technology and the fact that it changes almost monthly tends to cause problems for publishers. So they price them high in an effort to preemptively curb their losses.
Note: the following post has been graciously hosted by AT&T.
This [Connecting...] is [Authenticating... ] absurd. I [Authenticating... ] demand that all of [Authenticating... ] these false [Authenticating... ] allegations be stopped. There [Retrieving character list... ] is no way [Retrieving character list... ] in hell [Retrieving character list... ] that anyone [Retrieving character list... ] has ever [Retrieving character list... ] suffered [Retrieving character list... ] from any kind of [Loading... ] lag [Loading... ] while playing [Loading... ] World of Warcraft. The [Loading... ] hosting has been [Loading... ] meticulously [Loading... ] perfect and infallible. ["Ok, I'm in game, why don't I see anyone in Org?"]
When will you learn that if a company takes your money, they are providing a service that cannot fail? [/console reloadui]
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to fault Bush and to make him sound like a two year old. Oftentimes, it just requires you to copy and paste something he said.
But I would like to point out that there is a good article regarding this matter and it happens to take a look at it without political bias (if you believe that's possible).
Essentially what I'm asking you is, "Would a Democratic president be doing anything differently?" That's hard to decide--both sides are all talk and no action on this subject.
In college, my professor had a class of a couple hundred freshmen and the problem of making sure no one was copying anyone else's code for trivial homework assignments. It's a similar problem, how do we solve it?
His solution was a simple edit distance program that checked every pair-wise set of homework assignment's source code. You could thus find the highest areas of similar work between two pieces of code or even documents. A simple algorithm--it's the engineer way.
When I took a course in computational biology (or bioinformatics), I was enlightened to the BLAST and FASTA algorithms that could be useful in this case. Basically, you could search by global alignment or some form of local alignment (reducing and increasing complexity of the algorithm, respectively). These algorithms work already with protein chains and DNA so they are more than capable of large sets of data computed quickly and effectively.
The article lists SCO submitting 45,000 pages of evidence and materials--of which I assume is SCO's own work. What IBM could choose to do is have them scanned and provide the court with the alleged infringing documents to check against. The localized areas that score the highest could then be inspected by IBM and give their lawyers ample time to start a defense against points in the documents that will probably be areas of attack for SCO. In fact, it's entirely possible that SCO used this method to quickly identify what it thought to be points of infringement in code.
But of course, like most Slashdot posters, I'd rather just see the judge turn to SCO and say, "Bullshit, case dismissed..." and proceed to tell them off like Judge Judy giving a deadbeat father a taste of the back o' her hand.
Ok, so I know I'm going to get a lot of AMD people agreeing with me and a lot of Intel people outright ripping me to shreds. But I'm going to speak my thoughts come hell or high water and you can choose to be a yes-man (or woman) with nothing to add to the conversation or just beat me with a stick.
I believe that AMD had this technology before Intel ever started in on it. Yes, I know it wasn't really commercially available on PCs but it was there. And I would also like to point out a nifty little agreement between IBM and AMD that certainly gives them aid in the development of chips. Let's face it, IBM's got research money coming out of their ears and I'm glad to see AMD benefit off it and vice versa. I think that these two points alone show that AMD has had more time to refine the multicore technology and deliver a superior product.
As a disclaimer, I cannot say I've had the ability to try an Intel dual core but I'm just ever so happy with my AMD processor that I don't see why I should.
There's a nice little chart in the article but I like AMD's explanation along with their pdf a bit better. As you can see, AMD is no longer too concerned with dual core but has moved on to targeting multi core.
Do I want to see Intel evaporate? No way. I want to see these two companies go head to head and drive prices down. You may mistake me for an AMD fanboi but I simply was in agony in high school when Pentium 100s costed an arm and a leg. Then AMD slowly climbed the ranks to be a major competitor with Intel--and thank god for that! Now Intel actually has to price their chips competitively and I never want that to change. I will now support the underdog even if Intel drops below AMD just to insure stiff competition. You can call me a young idealist about capitalism!
I understand this article also tackles execution types and I must admit I'm not too up to speed on that. It's entirely possible that OOOE could beat out the execution scheme that AMD has going but I wouldn't know enough to comment on it. I remember that there used to be a lot of buzz about IA-64's OOOE processing used on Itanium. But I'm not sure that was too popular among programmers.
The article presents a compelling argument for OOOE. And I think that with a tri-core or higher processor, we could really start to see a big increase in sales using OOOE. Think about it, a lot of IA-64 code comes to a point where the instruction stalls as it waits for data to be computed (most cases, a branch). If there are enough cores to compute both branches from the conditional (and third core to evaluate the conditional) then where is the slowdown? This will only break down on a switch style statement or when several if-thens follow each other successively.
In any case, it's going to be a while before I switch back to Intel. AMD has won me over for the time being.
I use a digital whiteboard at work. It's placed on top of a multi-thousand dollar plasma screen and and the whiteboard itself cost thousands also. I think the company that makes it is called Smarttech. It's a nice thing but there are many frustration/time consuming aspects of it. If I were a billionaire, I wouldn't want to waste my time fiddling with a whiteboard that--in the end--would give me a little better control over my demos and presentations.
What I'm trying to say is that I bet he was waiting for this technology to get to a point where maybe the two units came as one and were more sleekly integrated. The maintenance/recalibration of this thing is a pain and there are times when we have customers sitting in front of us and we're trying to present to them but we have to run through some diagnostics.
Not cool.
Now imagine those customers were interested in million dollar contracts with you.
It can walk but can't maintain verticality? Is it there to stabilize it? That's pretty lame if they don't even have to worry about keeping its center of balance
You don't need a research paper to tell you where the traffic is going.
Check out Alexa's Society Category. It's rife with the named blogging machines and even Slashdot!
All the report provides is the sheer visiting numbers and the rate of increase over the past year. And give proof that Tom over at MySpace is laughing all the way to the bank. You may call me a karma whore but that man has 68475709 friends!
I'm waiting.
Three hundred million dollars? Riiiiiight.
My point is that the $0.02 per American that is being spent is negligible. It's not longer even considered a "red cent" it's so minute. Secondly, people like you spread information that is flat out wrong about how much of your money is being sent to NPR.
I'm guessing that survey about $1.30 per American just picked an arbitrary value and went around asking people to make them think that they are paying $1.30 per year to NPR when they really aren't! It's wrong!
In the article, he addresses a token used to generate random strings: And I think one of the most commonly used Universally Unique IDentifiers (UUID) generators is Java UUID Generator (JUG) which can be used by any type of application that can communicate with Java libraries (most apps capable of XML messaging can anyways).
Of course, this can be no better than pseudorandom as we all remember from our courses.
Damn. We were almost lucky enough to lose a CNET columnist. Oh well, I guess the life insurance policy I took out on him will never come to fruition ...
Anyone who wants to know what is going on in the world need only tune to their channel. In my opinion, they're taking a stab at eliminating ignorance in our nation by bathing everyone in nearly free (and unbiased) information and I'd consider that more valuable than cable TV.
I grew up in Minnesota where the land is flat and it would take me three and half hours to drive between my parent's house and the University of Minnesota. My car was a complete junker and therefore wasn't worth the two hundred or so dollars it would take to equip it with a CD player. So instead, I listened to the many programs that NPR and MPR had to offer.
Two of my absolute favorites were This American Life and Car Talk. Oftentimes, I would find myself in a parking lot listening to Ira Glass as the episode he was doing had me hooked and I couldn't even get out of my car to buy groceries.
My senior year of college found me looking up TAL episodes online and using Total Recorder to compress the Real Audio feeds directly to MP3. Was I stealing from TAL? I didn't really feel like it, I was a poor college student and I had heard the program on the radio--I just wanted it on my computer to listen to it time after time.
I'll never forget the time I heard the two part series of Come Back to Afghanistan and it's sequel. What really happened and is happening in Afghanistan never hit home until I heard it through the voice of a young teenager named Hyder Akbar.
I have made a few contributions to NPR since I've graduated but I can see where they'd be strapped financially. I think NPR could take advantage of the modern media formats that all of us seek. I have purchased Car Talk CDs and I'd purchase TAL CDs too. Even more importantly, I'd be more than willing to pay a dollar through iTunes or Napster or whatever service you choose to have a random episode of TAL or Car Talk on my MP3 player. They seem to have the audio book version of Poultry Slam but not every episode, correct me if I'm wrong but I don't have any kind of service to check on hand.
Quinn: "You CAN'T HANDLE the hydraulic penis!"
Robo-Marco (Alligator robot): "Hey! I dont see two down there!!!"
--
Murphy: "D-cups, full of JUSTICE!"
--
Sparks: "Sparkomus Prime"
--
Taken from "I, Robot, Really" the last episode to feature the voice of the great, late Harry Goz (Captain Murphy).
Let's hope that the HAL suits don't consider the quadriplegic a threat to the mission. Might see the suit eject the body in an effort to achieve success and reach the top.
Not only can they communicate, but they also have a staunch work ethic. They've been known to make every attempt to get to work on time regardless of whatever transformations may happen to them over night.
... er ... smell to him.
Poor Gregor, no matter how hard he released pheromones, his parents just wouldn't listen
Nobody likes to register so try this link.
I apologize for the karma whoring.
A late attempt to keep the secret of printed word hidden from the peasants and the surfs.
Those uprisings do cause ever so much trouble.
-Lord Rove II
To disrupt or completely stop this from happening is currently an impossible Herculean task.
Even netting one person can result in thousands of dollars worth of damages. If one in every one million phishing works, of course they'll keep doing it.
I bet I could make a graph that represents how the quality of movies is characteristically inversely proportionate to the amount of CGI effects in them. Oftentimes, eye candy is used to shroud the plot and mask the bad acting/directing. American audiences especially just go looking for explosion sequences and CGI in the annual summer action flick hunt. We often fear a movie that might prove to be too cerebral and that pretty much disgusts me. Way to reinforce bad movies that are only good for one viewing with volume set to 'loud' and TV set to 'huge.'
ILM is responsible for making movies like The Mask (of which there are seven films) and characters like Jar-Jar Binks possible. Be sure to thank them for that.
I hope Chris Stevens and his wife don't have any anniversaries coming up. I guess she could always 'forget one' after taking out a lucrative life insurance policy on him.
You might not have known this but there's already a tool out there that lets you connect and check mail from AOL, Libero, Gmail, MailDotCom, Lycos, Yahoo and (the seemingly "impossible") Hotmail. It's called Thunderbird with the Webmail extension. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there's even a Webmail plugin for Firefox that would allow you to check it automatically through your browser.
So when I saw the headline of "Hotmail On Your Desktop" I thought to myself, "So what?" I pulled up Thunderbird and there it was, Hotmail on my desktop. Am I some sort of sorcerer? No, but if this is news then I must have madd haXX0rz skillz to be able to do this when it's not possible. Or perhaps it's just another lame Slashdot article brought to us by a Microsoft employee that encouraged samzenpus to post it with a nominal paypal transaction? I'm not implying anything, of course...
But I suppose now, you have a choice:
- Check your Hotmail (and Gmail and Windows Life Mail) through a new proprietary (malware issues?) client that will most likely bombard you with advertisements or
- Check your Hotmail (and many other mail systems) through good old Thunderbird with no advertisements and source code that you can alter yourself if you ever feel the need to.
Pretty tough choice...Remember, Microsoft owns Hotmail and, according to the article: That's right, "other Web-based services as well" like the following possibilities:
- The "Genuine Advantage" checker Web-based service. There to report you for anything you've done to Windows that in any way violates the EULA you blindly clicked during the install.
- Microsofty Ads! The Web-based service that brings advertisements to your desktop so that you can get all the cool new Microsoft products cheaper!
- Member Updates. The client application that annoyingly pops up in the bottom right of your screen as a paper clip to alert you of cool new Microsoft products!
- The Blue Screen of Death inducer--a service that allows Microsoft to trigger your machine remotely to BSOD on you. Why try to recover from an error when you can just reboot?
- The Friendly Survey Service, a program that just tallies up what you got on your machine and phones home to Microsoft so Mr. Gates can have charts presented to him that realistically show the threat of OOo against Office.
- Et cetera...
Yeah, I pretty much can't wait to install something on my machine that's going to be a catalyst for other Microsoft programs.So I couldn't help but notice that this article is just a dupe.
Apparently, a link to a blog with a couple paragraphs and screenshots of a service that has been covered before is newsworthy. Not in my opinion.
Oh, and if you go to that blog that's linked in the article, there is a "Contact Us" tab which results in the same e-mail that the author of this article (Tam Hanna) linked to their name. This isn't a review, it's a "Oooh, this is neat" article which is odd considering I have a Google Pages account and it's not that neat--it's functional and simplistic but limiting. And please do notice the ads (some by Google) surrounding Tam Hanna's blog. So they'll be making some cash off the Slashdot effect. What a tool Slashdot has become.
If you want an example of something they rejected to bring you a duped article, here's one I submitted this morning that some of you may or may not care about:
About a week ago, Robert Jordan wrote a letter to Locus in which he stated he has amyloidosis. Amyloidosis is a rare blood disease that leaves patients with a median of one (no treatment) to four (with treatment) years left to live. He confirmed this on his publisher's website. This is devastating news for fantasy enthusiasts but on his blog he spoke about the Wheel of Time series: "Worse comes to worst, I will finish A Memory of Light, so the main story arc, at least, will be completed." Let us all wish him a permanent recovery--if he can write the epic tomes of the Wheel of Time, surely beating amyloidosis will be trivial.
I don't think everything about the DMCA is wrong. But I do think that it has no boundaries and can be openly interpreted. I believe this Act needs to be reformed before it is renewed and that it should be better defined. The internet has developed far past our wildest imaginations and no act passed in 1998 could account for all the legal caveats of it.
I believe my hatred for the DMCA falls just under my hatred for the Patriot Act.
And that's saying a lot.
Hey, with the DMCA, anything's possible! Well, what do you say Microsoft? O'Reilly's got deep pockets!
I'll remember him for his stories of Ijon Tichy and the satire he would write about regarding anything from governments to advertisements.
One of the first science fiction authors to truly show us that science fiction is more than just a genre of space novels, it's a way to place one's self outside of reality so that it can be safely analyzed and commented on from a distance.
Rest in peace. I eagerly await the day you raise to the ranks of Asimov & Tolkien when the world will remember you as more than "that guy who wrote a story for a George Clooney movie."
I know it will happen.
So you gamble and throw away a nominal sum in hopes that it helps you get your job done (which is invaluable to you because it provides the resources for living). Fifty dollars is worth it for a tool that keeps me employed.
What I don't understand is why there isn't a discount for students. In college, I once ordered a book only to find it was the "overseas" paperback edition. Beware of these, not only are they fake but they will not last to heavy use and have no color/durability.
What confuses me are the most is that some of my favorite books are the most the expensive. Among them:
Why? These books are standards and needed by everyone. They should be able to capitalize off the popularity by lowering the price. Surely it doesn't take $120 to make Mitchell's Machine Learning--it's such a tiny book!
I guess all I can do is blame the presses like John Wiley & Sons or McGraw Hill that seem to be the perpetrators of selling such expensive paper. Perhaps these are the results of botched initial contracts between author and publisher?
I would wager that, upon the initial deal, a lot of authors agree to anything. One of these conditions might be that the before hand assumption is that the tech book will not sell well. And therefore, they charge a lot to make up for possible losses. If the book sells well, then why lower the price? Just keep it high and rake in the profits while the author gets what his contract says.
A friend who worked at B&N once told me that tech books are the most abused books. People would "buy" the technology of the month book, then return it days later saying it wasn't what they were looking for. I think the volatility of technology and the fact that it changes almost monthly tends to cause problems for publishers. So they price them high in an effort to preemptively curb their losses.
Note: the following post has been graciously hosted by AT&T.
This [Connecting...] is [Authenticating... ] absurd. I [Authenticating... ] demand that all of [Authenticating... ] these false [Authenticating... ] allegations be stopped. There [Retrieving character list... ] is no way [Retrieving character list... ] in hell [Retrieving character list... ] that anyone [Retrieving character list... ] has ever [Retrieving character list... ] suffered [Retrieving character list... ] from any kind of [Loading... ] lag [Loading... ] while playing [Loading... ] World of Warcraft. The [Loading... ] hosting has been [Loading... ] meticulously [Loading... ] perfect and infallible. ["Ok, I'm in game, why don't I see anyone in Org?"]
When will you learn that if a company takes your money, they are providing a service that cannot fail? [/console reloadui]