Yes, I snipe often - keeps me from bidding against sheeple who just bid ever higher instead of simply setting a bid and forgetting...
I know that sniping can be used to defend against shill bidding, but I don't see the value in using the technique against people who don't understand that eBay auctions are designed for proxy bidding.
Whether a legitimate bidder places one or one hundred bids is irrelevent; they will ultimately reach their final price. I don't see how the number of bids that it takes them to reach their final price affects your bid.
I tend to believe that people will recycle if you make it convenient for them to do so.
As an example of what not to do, take a look at Chicago's Blue Bag program. Rather than deploying special vehicles to collect recyclables, the City decided to simply use their existing garbage trucks. Instead of giving residents bins for glass, paper and plastic, the City requires them to buy special blue bags. Residents are supposed to throw all of their recyclable materials into these bags which are then disposed of in the trash bins and are picked up by garbage trucks. The result is that many residents balk at paying extra to recycle their waste and some see that the bags are going in garbage trucks and assume it's just getting tossed anyway. The City has been in denial for _years_ about why their recycling program doesn't work, although I seem to recall reading some Chicago Tribune articles about dedicated recycling trucks being deployed in some neighborhoods.
Regarding the sorting of garbage intended for landfills, I though the garbage _was_ sorted? The last time I was in Sarasota, Florida I saw a newspaper article (Herald Tribune?) about a new landfill the was being constructed. I believe the diagram of the site included areas where the garbage was separated. If you're so inclined, I believe the article below is the one I read:
From a landfill to a public park
Published on December 27, 2006, Article 4 of 20 found.
(Sarasota Herald-Tribune (FL){PUBLICATION2, 1727 words.)}
It's a unique view in the flat lands of the Southwest Florida coastline: At the end of Bee Ridge Road, perched nearly 100 feet above sea level, you can see the county's expanse, even catching a glimmer of Sarasota Bay just past the buildings downtown.
And it would be a developer's dream but for one thing: It sits on 5 million cubic yards of garbage. Still, the county doesn't plan to let that mountain of garbage go to waste.
You can order a reprint on the Sarasota Herald Tribune's website for $2.95.
I'm old enough to have used some of SGI's systems. I'd imagine that knowing that you're on SGI's old property would freak some of the Google employees out, but it sounds like a lot of them are too young to remember SGI.
That sounds like the job I just left. My question to you is are you stagnating or are you growing?
I've found that it gets to be pretty depressing showing up for a job that's no real challenge. Sure the pay might be nice, but each day that you're doing the same thing as yesterday is another day spent falling behind those that are learning something new each day.
Some people actually do like being seat warmers, but I'm not one of them. If I'm not doing or learning something new at work I'm wondering why I'm wasting my time at the place. I expect to be paid, yes, but more importantly I expect to grow.
Back in the day, I attended the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Daniel Bernstein is a member of their MSCS department.
In 1995 (IIRC), Bernstein taught a course on cryptography in which a friend of mine had enrolled. Naturally the government (I forget which agency specifically) flipped out and tried to shut him down. I believe this led to Bernstein's lawsuit against the Federal Government. Anyway, students in his class were forbidden from speaking to others about material covered in the course, were forbidden from showing their notebooks to others and also had their notebooks confiscated (okay, turned in) at the end of the semester. I believe the students also underwent background checks prior to their enrollment in the class, but I could be mistaken about that.
I was more than a little surprised about all of the commotion. I mean, this is the United States; aren't we supposed to have academic freedom? I suppose the big concern was that foreign nationals would be taught cryptography, but again, the Constitution guarantees those freedoms.
More information about all of this is available at Berstein's website, linked to above.
We had very similar technology, although it didn't allow you to reposition text and, depending on the particular model, didn't allow easy creation of PDF files. The technology was an overhead_projector!
The old models had two spools, one that held a roll of transparent film and a second one that accepted the used (written on) film. When the professor got to the bottom of the project screen, he just rolled out some more film to write on. If he need to go back to something, he rolled the film the other way.
The modern models were basically a platform with an arm and an optical head. You placed a sheet of paper on the platform and the optical head converted the image into an electric signal that's passed out via a VGA or S-video connection. To create a PDF you just ran your pieces of paper through a scanner which created a PDF file and emailed the output to you.
I had no issues using whiteboards, projectors, pens and sheets of paper on a clipboard for my classes; I suppose computer demonstrations could be useful in certain situations. I've never used a clicker and frankly don't understand the point. What's wrong with a show of hands, or calling someone out individually?
I _highly_ recommend the HP LaserJet models, those things are tanks! I used the black and white models (4si/mx) for years in high school and college, and finally picked up a Color LaserJet 4550N for home use. It's awesome. You can buy them used for about $600 and the toner cartridges (CMYK) are less than $100 each. They last a _long_ time and the ink doesn't fade like it does with crappy inkjet printers.
Who yearns for the days of old when the ESRB did not exist?
Back in the day, I got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. I was five. When the Nintendo NES came out I bought that, then the Sega Genesis, etc. There was no ESRB and we liked it!
Why do we need an ESRB now? To prevent the government from stepping in and censoring games? If the government did it, we'd at least be able to sue them for violating citizens' civil rights. What's the problem with a retailer carrying Adult Only rated titles? If that's what the people want to buy, then sell it to them!
Also, what's with this crap about the console makers dictating which games they will and will not allow console owners to play? The VCR and DVD manufacturers don't get to tell you which videos you can and cannot view on their devices. Why should Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have the privilege?
I imagine it's unlikely, but I really wish Take2 would simply sell the game directly to consumers. With all of the controversy surrounding it, I'm sure it would sell like mad. Hell, I own the first Manhunt and found the gameplay boring, but would buy two copies of this game out of protest.
The sections talking about a la carte service are there to distract people from the real meat of the legislation, allowing the FCC to censor cable channels. Currently the FCC's able to censor over the air broadcasters quite well, restricting the information that they are allowed to push to their viewers. They do not have this ability with cable channels and I suspect that they desperately want it.
Just think about it, over the air broadcasters are unable to show or talk about certain things (eg. horrors of war, human sexuality). As a result, it becomes much easier to control what people believe about certain things. Cable channels do not have this sort of restriction, so they're able to get this information out to their subscribers/viewers/listeners.
If the FCC is allowed to censor cable and satellite (and Internet?) content along with traditional television and radio broadcasts, then they will become the information gatekeepers for the majority of Americans.
What I don't understand is how one would plant the virus in the first place. Assuming you're running a locked down UNIX system, what's the attack vector? Maybe I'm just naive in thinking that people would _never_ run Windows based systems in sensitive environments?
Dude, you are seriously deluded. I suggest you stop using labels like "liberal", "right-wingers" and "conservatives" and start following current events.
Based on the article, it sounds like identity theft is quite lucractive. 40 days in jail for $9,000 sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and that's assuming you're going to be caught.
That's probably because the PSP actually does a better job at being a portable media center than a portable gaming system.
I own both a PSP and DS; I use the DS to play games while the PSP is mostly used for watching movies, listening to music and browsing the web. While the DS has a large library of exclusives, a lot of the PSP games are simply portable versions of the game I already own for the PS2.
Zeno Colaço mentions this in the article,
One of our biggest challenges was PlayStation 2 games could easily be ported to PSP because of the raw processing power of the PSP. We went to all our publishers and developers and said, 'You're not going to set the world alight if you effectively take your PlayStation 2 projects onto PSP'. In reality, that's happened on a lot of early games. Where we have seen successes were games developed specifically for PSP - the GTA games are a classic example.
Playboy is hardly a softcore porn magazine; it's just a bunch of articles about fashion, food and drink, electronics, humor, etc. with three pictorials consisting of nude and semi-nude photographs of women. No big deal.
Softcore porn implies depictions of simulated sexual contact and cheesy light jazz music. It's an abomination and should be eliminated at all costs!
The cynic in me says that you need to either get more friends, or become more comfortable with having people over.
LOL. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to have people over, but my friends typically live about 30 minutes away and I'm extremely time poor during the week. Some of them have finally been able to pick up a Wii so we have started getting together to play some tennis, etc.
During the week I've only got about two hours of "free" time per night. It's much quicker for me to simply go online and find a game than to kill half of my time driving to and from someone's house.
Does anyone here actually use online banking? If you do, aren't you worried about your account being compromised? What measures do you take to address the numerous security issues?
Personally, there's no way I'd sign up for online banking, there's just too much risk. I prefer to either visit my bank in person or (rarely) speak to someone at the bank over the phone. I understand that the phone is also risky, but I figure that there's much more risk for an attacker since there will be a record of from where the call was placed.
I do place quite a few orders online using my credit card, but that's because it offers some legal protections, like only being responsible for the first $50 of a fraudulent charge.
I hear you regarding online play. I'm starting to get extremely frustrated with Nintendo and the lack of network support.
The GameCube did have network support, but only two or three games actually used it.
The Wii has built-in wireless, a web-browser, newsreader, etc. but no support for actual games. WTF? What's the point of purchasing a sports or racing game if I can't play against other people over the network? I'm in my thirties and almost never have people over to play games. If I want to game with others I have to do it online; Nintendo's basically telling me to turn off the Wii and fire up the PS2.
The cynic in me is saying that the lack of online gaming is simply due to Nintendo's focus on kiddie gamers and "family friendly" titles. Nintendo has always denied it, but everyone knows that it's true. If Nintendo allowed Wii owners to play with and meet new people online, some parents would be absolutely freaked out about someone reaching through the television and molesting their little Timmy. So, rather than having to deal with these sorts of people, Nintendo ruins it for everyone by refusing to allow online gaming with the Wii.
I really wish Nintendo would allow developers to include their own network support like was done on the PS2 with Tonyhawk Pro-Skater 3. Sony hadn't yet developed an online portal for the PS2, so they simply allowed the game developer to include support for certain network adapters. I'm guessing that we're going to be forced to play Flash games via the Opera browser on the Wii if we want to play online with others.
LOL, I used to work for a couple of companies (Learning Curve International and RC2) that manufactured Thomas toys. We did the wood and diecast trains, track and destinations. When I left, the Thomas brand was doing something like 60M in annual sales.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought a mutator (as in accessors and mutators) was something that changed the state of the object? Typically a method called something like setProperty() in Java. Also doesn't the synchronized keyword simply mark the entire method as a critical region? The JVM obtains a lock on the object, executes the method and then releases the lock.
Microcode? It's not too tough assuming you understand the architecture you're working with. It's also extremely simple. You're basically messing with the data and control lines on the underlying digital logic devices.
My first course in computer architecture had us implement an ABI for an 8-bit RISC machine in microcode.
Ah, you beat me to the punch. I know a couple Erlang developers and they've only had great things to say about the language and about OTP. I've read through the first five or so chapters from the Erlang book (it's almost impossible to find in the States, but Amazon.co.uk will print it for you on-demand) but haven't done much work with it other than a few toy programs.
In addition to the two items you mentioned, I'm always hearing about the following things:
Process supervisor: will monitor and automatically restart failed processes.
Write-once variables: once a variable has been assigned a value, it's immutable. This is supposed to reduce programmer error.
Mnesia database: An in-memory (and on-disk), network replicated database. You application database can span the entire Erlang cloud if you so choose.
Load new code on the fly: you can change code while the system's still running.
You did mention the process mailbox and message passing; it would probably shock most C programmers at how easy it is to perform IPC in Erlang. If "X" is a PID and you want to send the tuple { 1, 2, 3} it's as easy as writing "X ! {1, 2, 3}". Where the actual processes reside is irrelevant, they could be on the same system or half-way around the World. There no need to worry about basic Berkeley-style socket programming, it's handled for you.
Also, Erlang supports many, many more concurrent processes than any other language I've heard of. I seem to recall hearing of people running simulations with hundreds of thousands of processes. Erlang processes are much lighter weight than O.S. processes, since it's handled internally by the interpreter performing a context switch isn't very expensive.
Finally, Erlang code is very programmer (and hardware, from what I'm told) efficient. You'll write orders of magnitude less code in Erlang than you would in a traditional language. Less code means less bugs.
Have you seen the Erlang video yet? It's hilarious.
By the way, do you happen to know of shops running Erlang? I've heard that Amazon is using it, but I don't know of anyone in the Chicago area using Erlang other than Orbitz.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people like to see films before they're released in theaters. These same people may or may not then go see the movie in a theater.
I know that sniping can be used to defend against shill bidding, but I don't see the value in using the technique against people who don't understand that eBay auctions are designed for proxy bidding.
Whether a legitimate bidder places one or one hundred bids is irrelevent; they will ultimately reach their final price. I don't see how the number of bids that it takes them to reach their final price affects your bid.
I tend to believe that people will recycle if you make it convenient for them to do so.
As an example of what not to do, take a look at Chicago's Blue Bag program. Rather than deploying special vehicles to collect recyclables, the City decided to simply use their existing garbage trucks. Instead of giving residents bins for glass, paper and plastic, the City requires them to buy special blue bags. Residents are supposed to throw all of their recyclable materials into these bags which are then disposed of in the trash bins and are picked up by garbage trucks. The result is that many residents balk at paying extra to recycle their waste and some see that the bags are going in garbage trucks and assume it's just getting tossed anyway. The City has been in denial for _years_ about why their recycling program doesn't work, although I seem to recall reading some Chicago Tribune articles about dedicated recycling trucks being deployed in some neighborhoods.
Regarding the sorting of garbage intended for landfills, I though the garbage _was_ sorted? The last time I was in Sarasota, Florida I saw a newspaper article (Herald Tribune?) about a new landfill the was being constructed. I believe the diagram of the site included areas where the garbage was separated. If you're so inclined, I believe the article below is the one I read:
You can order a reprint on the Sarasota Herald Tribune's website for $2.95.
Ouch!
I'm old enough to have used some of SGI's systems. I'd imagine that knowing that you're on SGI's old property would freak some of the Google employees out, but it sounds like a lot of them are too young to remember SGI.
That sounds like the job I just left. My question to you is are you stagnating or are you growing?
I've found that it gets to be pretty depressing showing up for a job that's no real challenge. Sure the pay might be nice, but each day that you're doing the same thing as yesterday is another day spent falling behind those that are learning something new each day.
Some people actually do like being seat warmers, but I'm not one of them. If I'm not doing or learning something new at work I'm wondering why I'm wasting my time at the place. I expect to be paid, yes, but more importantly I expect to grow.
Back in the day, I attended the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Daniel Bernstein is a member of their MSCS department.
In 1995 (IIRC), Bernstein taught a course on cryptography in which a friend of mine had enrolled. Naturally the government (I forget which agency specifically) flipped out and tried to shut him down. I believe this led to Bernstein's lawsuit against the Federal Government. Anyway, students in his class were forbidden from speaking to others about material covered in the course, were forbidden from showing their notebooks to others and also had their notebooks confiscated (okay, turned in) at the end of the semester. I believe the students also underwent background checks prior to their enrollment in the class, but I could be mistaken about that.
I was more than a little surprised about all of the commotion. I mean, this is the United States; aren't we supposed to have academic freedom? I suppose the big concern was that foreign nationals would be taught cryptography, but again, the Constitution guarantees those freedoms.
More information about all of this is available at Berstein's website, linked to above.
We had very similar technology, although it didn't allow you to reposition text and, depending on the particular model, didn't allow easy creation of PDF files. The technology was an overhead_projector!
The old models had two spools, one that held a roll of transparent film and a second one that accepted the used (written on) film. When the professor got to the bottom of the project screen, he just rolled out some more film to write on. If he need to go back to something, he rolled the film the other way.
The modern models were basically a platform with an arm and an optical head. You placed a sheet of paper on the platform and the optical head converted the image into an electric signal that's passed out via a VGA or S-video connection. To create a PDF you just ran your pieces of paper through a scanner which created a PDF file and emailed the output to you.
I had no issues using whiteboards, projectors, pens and sheets of paper on a clipboard for my classes; I suppose computer demonstrations could be useful in certain situations. I've never used a clicker and frankly don't understand the point. What's wrong with a show of hands, or calling someone out individually?
But didn't Nintendo lose that lawsuit relating to their lockout chips for the NES? Isn't this the same situation all over again?
and get a Postscript laser printer.
I _highly_ recommend the HP LaserJet models, those things are tanks! I used the black and white models (4si/mx) for years in high school and college, and finally picked up a Color LaserJet 4550N for home use. It's awesome. You can buy them used for about $600 and the toner cartridges (CMYK) are less than $100 each. They last a _long_ time and the ink doesn't fade like it does with crappy inkjet printers.
Just say NO to inkjet printers!
Who yearns for the days of old when the ESRB did not exist?
Back in the day, I got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. I was five. When the Nintendo NES came out I bought that, then the Sega Genesis, etc. There was no ESRB and we liked it!
Why do we need an ESRB now? To prevent the government from stepping in and censoring games? If the government did it, we'd at least be able to sue them for violating citizens' civil rights. What's the problem with a retailer carrying Adult Only rated titles? If that's what the people want to buy, then sell it to them!
Also, what's with this crap about the console makers dictating which games they will and will not allow console owners to play? The VCR and DVD manufacturers don't get to tell you which videos you can and cannot view on their devices. Why should Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have the privilege?
I imagine it's unlikely, but I really wish Take2 would simply sell the game directly to consumers. With all of the controversy surrounding it, I'm sure it would sell like mad. Hell, I own the first Manhunt and found the gameplay boring, but would buy two copies of this game out of protest.
The sections talking about a la carte service are there to distract people from the real meat of the legislation, allowing the FCC to censor cable channels. Currently the FCC's able to censor over the air broadcasters quite well, restricting the information that they are allowed to push to their viewers. They do not have this ability with cable channels and I suspect that they desperately want it.
Just think about it, over the air broadcasters are unable to show or talk about certain things (eg. horrors of war, human sexuality). As a result, it becomes much easier to control what people believe about certain things. Cable channels do not have this sort of restriction, so they're able to get this information out to their subscribers/viewers/listeners.
If the FCC is allowed to censor cable and satellite (and Internet?) content along with traditional television and radio broadcasts, then they will become the information gatekeepers for the majority of Americans.
What I don't understand is how one would plant the virus in the first place. Assuming you're running a locked down UNIX system, what's the attack vector? Maybe I'm just naive in thinking that people would _never_ run Windows based systems in sensitive environments?
Dude, you are seriously deluded. I suggest you stop using labels like "liberal", "right-wingers" and "conservatives" and start following current events.
Based on the article, it sounds like identity theft is quite lucractive. 40 days in jail for $9,000 sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and that's assuming you're going to be caught.
That's probably because the PSP actually does a better job at being a portable media center than a portable gaming system.
I own both a PSP and DS; I use the DS to play games while the PSP is mostly used for watching movies, listening to music and browsing the web. While the DS has a large library of exclusives, a lot of the PSP games are simply portable versions of the game I already own for the PS2.
Zeno Colaço mentions this in the article,
Playboy is hardly a softcore porn magazine; it's just a bunch of articles about fashion, food and drink, electronics, humor, etc. with three pictorials consisting of nude and semi-nude photographs of women. No big deal.
Softcore porn implies depictions of simulated sexual contact and cheesy light jazz music. It's an abomination and should be eliminated at all costs!
Perhaps she should close her blinds then?
LOL. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to have people over, but my friends typically live about 30 minutes away and I'm extremely time poor during the week. Some of them have finally been able to pick up a Wii so we have started getting together to play some tennis, etc.
During the week I've only got about two hours of "free" time per night. It's much quicker for me to simply go online and find a game than to kill half of my time driving to and from someone's house.
Does anyone here actually use online banking? If you do, aren't you worried about your account being compromised? What measures do you take to address the numerous security issues?
Personally, there's no way I'd sign up for online banking, there's just too much risk. I prefer to either visit my bank in person or (rarely) speak to someone at the bank over the phone. I understand that the phone is also risky, but I figure that there's much more risk for an attacker since there will be a record of from where the call was placed.
I do place quite a few orders online using my credit card, but that's because it offers some legal protections, like only being responsible for the first $50 of a fraudulent charge.
Get a Wavebird! I've got two or three and batteries last forever in the controllers.
I hear you regarding online play. I'm starting to get extremely frustrated with Nintendo and the lack of network support.
The GameCube did have network support, but only two or three games actually used it.
The Wii has built-in wireless, a web-browser, newsreader, etc. but no support for actual games. WTF? What's the point of purchasing a sports or racing game if I can't play against other people over the network? I'm in my thirties and almost never have people over to play games. If I want to game with others I have to do it online; Nintendo's basically telling me to turn off the Wii and fire up the PS2.
The cynic in me is saying that the lack of online gaming is simply due to Nintendo's focus on kiddie gamers and "family friendly" titles. Nintendo has always denied it, but everyone knows that it's true. If Nintendo allowed Wii owners to play with and meet new people online, some parents would be absolutely freaked out about someone reaching through the television and molesting their little Timmy. So, rather than having to deal with these sorts of people, Nintendo ruins it for everyone by refusing to allow online gaming with the Wii.
I really wish Nintendo would allow developers to include their own network support like was done on the PS2 with Tonyhawk Pro-Skater 3. Sony hadn't yet developed an online portal for the PS2, so they simply allowed the game developer to include support for certain network adapters. I'm guessing that we're going to be forced to play Flash games via the Opera browser on the Wii if we want to play online with others.
LOL, I used to work for a couple of companies (Learning Curve International and RC2) that manufactured Thomas toys. We did the wood and diecast trains, track and destinations. When I left, the Thomas brand was doing something like 60M in annual sales.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought a mutator (as in accessors and mutators) was something that changed the state of the object? Typically a method called something like setProperty() in Java. Also doesn't the synchronized keyword simply mark the entire method as a critical region? The JVM obtains a lock on the object, executes the method and then releases the lock.
See also:
Microcode? It's not too tough assuming you understand the architecture you're working with. It's also extremely simple. You're basically messing with the data and control lines on the underlying digital logic devices.
My first course in computer architecture had us implement an ABI for an 8-bit RISC machine in microcode.
Ah, you beat me to the punch. I know a couple Erlang developers and they've only had great things to say about the language and about OTP. I've read through the first five or so chapters from the Erlang book (it's almost impossible to find in the States, but Amazon.co.uk will print it for you on-demand) but haven't done much work with it other than a few toy programs.
In addition to the two items you mentioned, I'm always hearing about the following things:
You did mention the process mailbox and message passing; it would probably shock most C programmers at how easy it is to perform IPC in Erlang. If "X" is a PID and you want to send the tuple { 1, 2, 3} it's as easy as writing "X ! {1, 2, 3}". Where the actual processes reside is irrelevant, they could be on the same system or half-way around the World. There no need to worry about basic Berkeley-style socket programming, it's handled for you.
Also, Erlang supports many, many more concurrent processes than any other language I've heard of. I seem to recall hearing of people running simulations with hundreds of thousands of processes. Erlang processes are much lighter weight than O.S. processes, since it's handled internally by the interpreter performing a context switch isn't very expensive.
Finally, Erlang code is very programmer (and hardware, from what I'm told) efficient. You'll write orders of magnitude less code in Erlang than you would in a traditional language. Less code means less bugs.
Have you seen the Erlang video yet? It's hilarious.
By the way, do you happen to know of shops running Erlang? I've heard that Amazon is using it, but I don't know of anyone in the Chicago area using Erlang other than Orbitz.