This is an easy one. Sell your house (at a good price) to the shadiest possible bidder.
Bidders with ties to the mob or the drug world are especially suited.
Take the money, and buy in a better place.
Either the new owners will take care of the problem in their own way,
or the old man will stop the annoying buzz, and maybe even decamp from the
neighbourhood.
Just be sure you mention the buzz problem to the buyers... _you_ don't want any problem from them!
Defining what counts as a click is a very interesting and difficult problem.
The main trouble is that you have to get a definition such that, even if
the click-spammers know it, they cannot take advantage from the knowledge.
I have the impression that right now, click fraud is fought using statistical criteria to identify real and fake clicks. If you publish a definition of what is a real click, the definition has to be very good and clever, so that fraudsters cannot simply write code that generates fake clicks that satisfy the definition.
I dunno, sometimes I wish _my_ inbox was erased.
Being able to forget all those details, deadlines, stuff...
Being able to have a bit of time to think long-term rather than rushing for the next deadline...
And in any case, I am sure that I would get reminded of the truly important issues/deadlines, but I would be able to forget all the rest of the small fry.
Maybe what I need is an inbox in which each email, if I don't look at it for more than say a week, sinks automatically in the "Archived Mail" folder.
I disagree. Spam is light. Spam emails are typically small.
I get a few every day past the spam filter - let's overestimate, and say 10. They are usually small, let's overapproximate again, and say that they are 40k. That makes 400k/day, even if I didn't delete them.
Send and receive 2 pdf attachments per day = (2 + 2) * 300k = 1200k.
So if you send/receive attachments, as I do all the time, the size of the spam is going to be a small fraction of the size of your good email.
Also, I personally have no sympathy for sysadmins/companies who think that a 1 GB mailbox is sufficient. Even a 2GB doesn't cut it. Google is right, why should I ever delete email? Even without Gmail's search abilities, I can simply file it into folder named after the year.
Companies would often not complain about the cost of file cabinets; why they seem to be so stingy with disk space (2 GB = $20, less than 1/5 the price of a really small file cabinet) is beyond me, especially considering that email nowadays is essentially the repository of just about all the documents one deals with.
This is similar to how you fix scratches or defects on telescope or camera lenses.
The problem in even a large scratch or defect is not the 1% of lens area that will be unable to gather light. Rather, it is the fact that light is scattered all around by the defect, lowering overall contrast. So what you do is paint the defect black. This way, you lose an insignificant amount of light, but the contrast of the image is unaffected.
Perhaps for CDs there is a similar phenomenon. I am not sure how the error correction in a CD works, I am not sure whether it has the problem of "identifying" errors - I thought it simply applied to the data stream a standard decoding transform based on distance to a correct codeword.
So perhaps part of the benefit of painting the defect black is that it cuts down on reflections, so that you can read neighbouring areas of the CD better?
Funny - the reason I am NOT using iPhoto is because there seems to be no darn way of seeing the file name of the photos you are looking at!
We have several PCs (linux and OSX) and I need to have quick access to the photos to, say, scp them to my wife's computer, if she decides to edit them there. How can I do that if I don't know the filename??
So for me, it's navigating folders, thank you very much!
When Noga and others came up with LegOS,
an operating system for the Lego Mindstroms that enabled the writing of sophisticated programs, they were forced to change name, to BrickOS, I guess under legal thread from the Lego company due to misuse of trademark. So much for supporting the community! And the sad irony is that they must have sold lots of Mindstorms due to LegOS - pardon, BrickOS.
So this is a real direction change! I have a lot invested in LegOS code, and I am waiting to see if anyone will port BrickOS to that, or whether there will be any half-decent RTOS that runs on them... I am not holding my breath though.
As a developer, I notice that the applications I write in Python are often FASTER on large jobs than my C applications.
Why? Because Python makes it easy to use the right data structures for the job. It is trivial to use hash tables, trees, and all that in Python. Not only are such data structures easy to use (a = {} is all it takes to create a hash table), but crucially, they are easy to print, and easy to input on the command line, making debugging a breeze. Yes, C++ has STL, but you cannot match the easyness of creating and printing data structures on the fly in Python (I assume Ruby, etc, are similar).
Thus, in Python I tend to think carefully which is the best data structure and algorithm for the job. In C, I tend instead to be lazy, and use the data structures that are easy to use (what's that, arrays?). As a result, on small data sets, my C code is typically 4-5 times faster than my Python code, but on large datasets, I often get O(n log n) algorithms in Python where my lazyness in C yields O(n^2), and this shows.
As a result, I am now a convert to Python (and I want to try Ruby). The programs I write are faster when it matters, easier to write, no memory leaks, no segmentation faults, no memory management, no worries... there is NO way back.
Latex + cvs is a very good combination. The text format of latex makes it possible also to
merge changes to different portions of the same document in a painless way.
Another great feature of latex is that you can split a document in sections, keep every section as a separate file, and include all the files from the main file. This makes it possible for people working on different sections to work on different files.
I note that cvs for documents is even better than svn: as it versions files, rather than whole projects, people can work in parallel on different files and check them in at their leisure,
without the need for updating everything every time somebody checks in a file.
I have been using latex + cvs to write papers with co-authors for many years,
and I can attest that it works really well.
It will mostly benefit the military.
Everyone else will have to live with internet communications being
monitored by a mix of FBI/NSA/Dept of Homeland Security.
Nobody even cares to encrypt email... I believe the main obstacle to
more secure communications is human, not technical.
It's quite silly of somethinghorrible.com to show that page as proof of
what goes on in Apple's manucacturing process.
Most likely (surely), Apple wanted a photo for the manual, and a
product photographer, to ensure that the grease was well visible
in the photo, put a lot of grease. Product photographers, after
all, are not experts at assembling PCs.
The only shoddiness on Apple's part is to have approved that photo
for the manual. On the other hand, if the termal grease was not evident,
someone would surely have forgotten to put it.
So the photo does not prove anything. If the laptops overheat,
that's bad, and THAT is a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Either the new owners will take care of the problem in their own way, or the old man will stop the annoying buzz, and maybe even decamp from the neighbourhood.
Just be sure you mention the buzz problem to the buyers... _you_ don't want any problem from them!
I have the impression that right now, click fraud is fought using statistical criteria to identify real and fake clicks. If you publish a definition of what is a real click, the definition has to be very good and clever, so that fraudsters cannot simply write code that generates fake clicks that satisfy the definition.
And in any case, I am sure that I would get reminded of the truly important issues/deadlines, but I would be able to forget all the rest of the small fry.
Maybe what I need is an inbox in which each email, if I don't look at it for more than say a week, sinks automatically in the "Archived Mail" folder.
Send and receive 2 pdf attachments per day = (2 + 2) * 300k = 1200k.
So if you send/receive attachments, as I do all the time, the size of the spam is going to be a small fraction of the size of your good email.
Also, I personally have no sympathy for sysadmins/companies who think that a 1 GB mailbox is sufficient. Even a 2GB doesn't cut it. Google is right, why should I ever delete email? Even without Gmail's search abilities, I can simply file it into folder named after the year. Companies would often not complain about the cost of file cabinets; why they seem to be so stingy with disk space (2 GB = $20, less than 1/5 the price of a really small file cabinet) is beyond me, especially considering that email nowadays is essentially the repository of just about all the documents one deals with.
Perhaps for CDs there is a similar phenomenon. I am not sure how the error correction in a CD works, I am not sure whether it has the problem of "identifying" errors - I thought it simply applied to the data stream a standard decoding transform based on distance to a correct codeword. So perhaps part of the benefit of painting the defect black is that it cuts down on reflections, so that you can read neighbouring areas of the CD better?
So for me, it's navigating folders, thank you very much!
When Noga and others came up with LegOS, an operating system for the Lego Mindstroms that enabled the writing of sophisticated programs, they were forced to change name, to BrickOS, I guess under legal thread from the Lego company due to misuse of trademark. So much for supporting the community! And the sad irony is that they must have sold lots of Mindstorms due to LegOS - pardon, BrickOS.
So this is a real direction change! I have a lot invested in LegOS code, and I am waiting to see if anyone will port BrickOS to that, or whether there will be any half-decent RTOS that runs on them... I am not holding my breath though.
Why? Because Python makes it easy to use the right data structures for the job. It is trivial to use hash tables, trees, and all that in Python. Not only are such data structures easy to use (a = {} is all it takes to create a hash table), but crucially, they are easy to print, and easy to input on the command line, making debugging a breeze. Yes, C++ has STL, but you cannot match the easyness of creating and printing data structures on the fly in Python (I assume Ruby, etc, are similar).
Thus, in Python I tend to think carefully which is the best data structure and algorithm for the job. In C, I tend instead to be lazy, and use the data structures that are easy to use (what's that, arrays?). As a result, on small data sets, my C code is typically 4-5 times faster than my Python code, but on large datasets, I often get O(n log n) algorithms in Python where my lazyness in C yields O(n^2), and this shows.
As a result, I am now a convert to Python (and I want to try Ruby). The programs I write are faster when it matters, easier to write, no memory leaks, no segmentation faults, no memory management, no worries... there is NO way back.
I have been using latex + cvs to write papers with co-authors for many years, and I can attest that it works really well.
Nobody even cares to encrypt email... I believe the main obstacle to more secure communications is human, not technical.
The only shoddiness on Apple's part is to have approved that photo for the manual. On the other hand, if the termal grease was not evident, someone would surely have forgotten to put it.
So the photo does not prove anything. If the laptops overheat, that's bad, and THAT is a problem.