"If your only tool is a hammer all your problems begin to look like nails."
Look at what development is going on today. VB and Java represent a huge and growning number of large business data driven apps. Why? Ease of use, rapid prototyping, simple(r) debugging.
But these languages are limited by their design. VB is platform dependant, and is a good arms length from the OS. Also, it isn't very fast. Java is slow too, and its platform independance separates it from the OS as well..Net is another framework of 'Glue' languages.
Any of these, require occasional tweaking with something more low level, and that usually meanse C++, Delphi, ANSI C, whatever.
Yeah, I dropped my dsl line back in October. My carrier got bought out by RealConnect and at the end of my one year contract I was notified that my 49.95 128K IDSL line would be *slightly* going up to $169.95!
What really annoyed me was the letter itself. Okay, I can understand if costs go up. But (a) there was no apology in the letter and (b)I was given 7 days to make up my mind on continuing the contract.
So I call up RealConnect and mildly explain my position, which is that you are trying to gouge me with an insanely high price. They in turn blamed Network Access Solutions for ratcheting up the residential rates to match business class. NAS is the only provider to the local switch, so after some research, I figured I was pretty much hosed.
Needless to say I do my big downloads from work and at home I say, "Welcome to NetZero!"
Postscript: After one month plus at 28.8K (my phone lines are &@#'d up buts thats another story) I don't knotice it that much. When I'm online my phone calls are forwarded to my cell, and I can't download ISO's, MP3's, or mulimedia, but who cares? I can easily do without that junk. Email, ebay, online shopping, messaging, you can do 90% of your stuff with a dog slow connection.
...achieving prompt,
effective and certain relief for consumers and businesses.
(from the press release)
Prompt? After five years? Is that really prompt?
Effective? about the only thing the justice department has proven itself to be effective at is in lawyering. Short of actually whimpering and running out of the courtroom they have all but thrown in the towel.
Certain? Oh please, the certainty of this settlement can be easily seen reflected in the stock market. If the market had faith that microsoft was being forced to behave fairly, then the competitors to and middleware providers of software to microsoft would be jumping up. Borland, Symantec, Roxio, Corel. But it is not happening, because nodoby is buying the bull. I feel, as the market does, that microsoft will pay no attention to this directive, as it has not paid attention to any other court orders in the past.
I used to work in this computer lab, that was actually was the first level of a parking garage that was converted into office space. It was okay, except for the lack of visible light and the strange gurgling noises that would come from the plumbing that ran floor to ceiling throughout the lab. One saturday night I was working late, this was a few years back, I think it was in October, but I'm not sure.
Around 7pm my Kastle card stopped working at the keydoors around the lab. For some reason, they had built a wall around an area that had been an exit to the stairwell at one point. The stair well had been walled over, and the emergency exit open INWARD. I know this now, because around 8pm, I was rooting around for a network card I needed to put in an IVR server. I thought there was a spare parts bin in this large closet, instead I was trapped, with no way out but my Kastle card.
I was stuck.
Well, I figured I was in there for the night, so I managed to find some foam packing material, and stretched out in the corner between a few odd sized piles of pc components. I guess when I enterd the room I must have tripped a silent alarm, because sometime later a large swedish looking guy in a security uniform opened the door about an hour later. He must have been 6 foor 5 and weighed about 300 pounds, he was a healthy boy to sya the least.
He opened the door with and slowly entered with his flashlight shining all over the place. Then he proceeds to do the exact same thing as me! He shuts the door behind him, and eventually, as he is trying to leave, realizes that he is stuck too.
So the security dude is banging on the door, when I finally wake up enough to figure out what's going on. I get up, and walk over to him in the dark room. I say, "don't even bother, there's no way to get out of here."
Son of a bitch if the guy didn't break down the door on his first try getting out of there! Funniest god damn thing I ever saw!
Dude, I am most excited with your purchasing experience, but perhaps it would be helpful to explain why you wished this whispery machine.
Are you frequently coding in a zen like state of consciousness? Do you trade high quality sho files and play them on your wharfdale? Are you seeking the ultimate immersive gaming experience?
Also, why not just put the pc in the other room and run cables? Wouldn't that be much quieter? I am sorry, but this just seems to me to be episode 12,037 of how I built a very chi-chi pc to bring to lan parties. Thats okay, but its a different horse than "how I found silence in computing"
You're initial premise is that this war will not make the US a safer place. I disagree. You make the assumption that if we do nothing the "bad people" who did this to us will go away, and that if we behave differently then they will not terrorize us.
This is not the case.
The butchers who flew 4 airplanes full of innocent men, women, and children to their death, on september 11th, did not present demands to us. There was no ransom. They are not going to go away on their own. Bin Laden has made it perfectly clear that he is the enemy, and nothing we do will make him go away.
This enemy will not leave us. He will not give up or rest. He has made that very clear to us. He believes that he can fight the coward's war of terror, and that by hiding in belly of a cave he can remain safe from us.
If we decide to start backpedaling, and do what you say, hoping to appease these terrorists, then we will only encourage them to terrorize us more in order to gain further concessions from us. We can not sacrifice our morals or values in order to appease a coward and a terrorist.
The unfortunate and misguided souls who thought that by giving their lives to kill thousands of innocents they would secure a place in heaven are wrong. They have not gained a place in heaven. And they will gain concessions. What these poor stupid foolish people, these tools, have accomplished is to raise the anger and attention of the most intelligent, enlightened, and advanced peoples in the world. I don't mean just the US either, I mean the US, Britain, europe, russia, and others.
September 11th will mark the end of their way of life and not ours.
Okay, I know I am straying from the "how tech will help us" so let me try and tie this all together. Technology will allow us to rid ourselves of these vermins at less of a cost in human life than would be otherwise possible. This has already been shown with the unmanned spy plane that was shot down. Here in the US money is cheap and lives our precious. I say our current strategy is a good one. Freeze Bin Laden out, freeze his money and resource, blast his infrasturcture, the collect info and make use of it, using all this technology we have. All the while tightening the noose around him.
I think that one of the reasons Linux continues to march onward so relentlessly despite the best efforts of commercial competitors is the creation of a competitive environment.
Don't like your distro? Write a new one. Is it a piece of crap? It will go away. Is it worthwhile? Well, it still might go away. But over time, a process similar to natural selection allows the best software to rise to the top.
The downside of all this prolific spread is that standards become rare. This is why the Linux Standard Base is such an important idea.
I remember reading sometime back about 'engodelization' as a compression algorithm. This theoretically could be used on a stream of random numbers.
Take a block of data. ("Four score and twenty...")
Convert it into bits. (1010001001001...)
Arrange the bits so that they form a decimal number. (564273274687632....)
Factor the decimal number as compactly as possible, by using brute force to encode the number as a series of prime powers. So the number becomes
(2^A)+(3^B)+(5^C)+(7^D)+... - Delta
So the original message becomes (an example, I have no ideas what the actual values are, this is a thought experiment)
(2^71)+(3^151)+(5^0)+(7^12)-18763
Which could be compactly encoded as
(71,151,0,12,-18763).
Presto! Godel originally proposed this I believe, and I read about this in aa novel 'Starburst' by Robert Silverberg. I can't recall anymore. Any thoughts? Would this work?
Well, I have heard a lot about OS X and it sounds impressive. And while I would be the envy of my neighbors with one of those cool looking cubes, I just can't get around the hardware cost.
I mean, even if this OS produces everything it claims to, is it really worth an intel user to switch over when you can get a duron/celeron box for 500, and the cheapest way to get a mac is an iMac for about 8 or 9 hundred and then you have to suffer through a 15" monitor?
I am sympathetic to Apple's plight. They probably rightly feel that by adanoning a unique hardware platform they destroy the gravy train.
Apple has a superior product. No question.
But until I can buy OS X for my cheap and available hardware platform, my interest is going to be limited to reading these interesting threads on/..
Sorry if this is not directly germane to the topic at hand. But its the everpresent problem, right?
Wrong-o.
By generating a larger volume of mail in total, per unit costs are smaller. If private first class mail made up say 30% of total volume instead of 10% you can bet the postage on 1st class would go up by more than a penny.
--Pete
There is an important difference between junk mail and spam, and that it that is that junk mail costs the sender real physical dollars. The stuff you recieve in the mail are mostly legitimate. Its easy to filter out. It only takes time if you let it. Finally, the costs of junk mail is used by the USPS to subsidize acutual postage.
Would nay of you be willing to pay 75 cents for a stamp in order to get no junk mail? This is a real dollar issue, and I have no problem with junk mail at all. I find that the best credit card offers are junk mailed to me. I get menus to my local chinese restaurants. Its a good thing.
Contrast this with SPAM, or Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE). This costs the sender nothing. It is frequently fraudulent, illegal, or 'scammy'. Some garbage about buying a stock or checking out a web page. The problem with the SPAM is that it doesn't cost anything! I wish to god that there was someway I could stuff a brick in a return envelope to every SPAMMER out there, but I can't so I make due with filters.
I am not aware of the technology required, but it seems to me the only real way to eliminated SPAM is to develop some sort of universal validated return address. Like caller-id, it would be optional, and like caller-id, you could block messages from those who don't disclose a valid return address.
But please don't terrorize those junk mailers, they are an annoyance that causes more good than harm.
--Pete
'he felt himself splitting into two halfs, one part soft, one part hard, one part warm, and one part cold, one part trembling, and one part not trembling, each half grinding against the other."--Ray Bradbury
The answer IMHO, is to give your employees something they can't get anywhere else, without spending a lot. Things that work.
1.)Foosball tables, poool tables, video games, etc..
2.)Send everyone on a cruise! (My employer is oing this right now. Its a cheapo 4-day deal in Miami, but what a great morale booster.
3.)Buy lunch once a week.
4.)Offer 3 or 4 weeks of vacation. A little bit more than average.
5.)Open a satelite office in the 'burbs, or do work at home two days a weel.
6.)Free soda,coffee, bottled water.
7.)Stock options.
8.)Better than average healthcare.
9.)Ask your employees what they want most.
Okay, I'm out of ideas. Here's the scoop. I know right now that I could increase my income as a direct bill contractor by 50-60%. Why don't I?
Two reasons. First I have a family and two small children, and I want to spend time with them and not work myself nutty chasing down leads, so I guess thats less time. Two, I have great health care which helps with the kids.
So I'm giving myself a break for a few years. (I have been an IC for the last 7 years.)
It absolutely kills me to here management talk about high costs of free soda and vacation. The cost of replacing one employee is at least 25% of the annual salary of the position. Happy people don't leave. You can be cheaper onthe salary if you don't scrimp on the benefits.
One last thing to all you HR people. As an IC I would take 4-6 weeks off a year. I routinely make up for all those lost weeks and more in overtime. Every time I look for a job I mention desiring 4 weeks of vacation. I get looks like I am from mars. Its not a negotiable benefit, and no one seems to think its a reasonable request. If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
Pros:
1.)Portability. A user can keep all there email on the exchange server, and access this common mailbox from multiple locations.
2.)Scheduler/Task Manager. The scheduler can be neat for setting aside conference rooms, and scheduling meetings.
And a bunch of other neat features which I have never in my life seen anyone use.
Cons:
1.)High server maintenance workload. An exhange server for 1000 people will need 1 or 2 full time people for care and feeeding of the beast.
2.)No cross platform dependence. You only have windows clients, and a really clunky webmail interface.
3.)Cost. Microsoft charges for exchange server on a per-seat basis. (I think, not sure on this). This can be a decisive factor.
4.)Poor Reliability. Exchange does not have a high uptime track record. Your welcome to throw facts aat me, but based on my own anecdotal evidence, MS-exchange crashes fairly frequently.
5.)Security. Migrating to MS-Exchange invites you to the join the Exchange e-mail virus of the month club. The nature of the way MS-Outlook handles e-mail makes it vulnerable to virus attacks.
As a postscript, I would address the MS-Outlook faction with a functional equivalent to the scheduling and portability issues, maybe with web based email and an online scheduling app.
Maybe only 500 songs if you exclude all of the freely permitted live bootleg mp3 files that are permitted by The Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, Phish, Dave Mathews Band, Metallica (yes, even Lars doesn't mind the bootlegs being traded), Widespread Panic, etc.. There is lots of great music out there that CAN be traded. So even with MD5s's napster might have some real legitimate use.
1.)corporations represent stockholders who as a rule value money more than principles.
2.)Honesty only has value if it can generate goodwill or some percieved value.
3.)Take away the incentive to remain honest and the corps revert to there scummy do-anything-for-a-buck selfs.
4.)#3 especially applies to a corp that enters reorganization. A corporate mission statement looses much meaning when all your assets are getting repo'd.
But honestly, I know in principle this sucks, but, I can't help but thinking. Who cares? So they tracked all of my toy purchasing habits for the last 12 months. They have illegally sold my lego purchasing fetish information to everyone with a buck who wants to purchase it.
I just am not swept up with outrage here. Sorry! --Pete he felt himself being split into two haves, one part hot, one cold, one part hard, one soft, one part trembling, and one part not trembling, each half grinding against the other. -- ray bradbury
It seems that every point made in the case against PETA.ORG could be made against whitehouse.com, that oh so naughty purveyor of porn with the Pennsylvania Avenue Address.
Why then hasn't the government made any steps to prosecute whitehouse.com? Perhaps a case such as that would be more likely to test boundaries in a more decisive way, for better or worse.
Wow. Well, I *thought* I had a good point, but it seems instead that I was merely filling in white spaces with characters. I should be more aware of the facts when I post. My apologies. --Peteman
Well, let me start by saying that Borland still has more recognition than Inprise. Change the name back guys! Borland rocks! Go turbo pascal!
Ahem. From a logical and business point of view, the merger made sense on many levels. The goal was too have a company with an operating system product, a suite of applications, and development tools. $ound familiar? Unfortunately, I think Corel was like some sleazy guy looking at some well endowed lass and telling her how much he likes her brain. Inprise/Borland was sitting on 250 million in cash, which is a lot for a company recently valued at less than 300 million. Corel may have wanted the company for kylix and its other excellent products, but they wanted the cash to go and buy some more linux comanies, and see if any of this stuff stuck together.
Inprise really screwed up by not putting a collar on the merger agreement, which would have made it easy for them to bail out of the merger agreement if stock prices plummetted like they did in the months following the announencement. Without the collar, the choices were to either pay a 30 million fine or wait until the shareholder vote. Fortunately, it must have been obvious that everyone who owned borland stock was not going to vote to exchange there stock 3 for 4 for a company who's stock price was below there own! That is why IMHO, Corel basically allowed Inprise to back out of the deal with no fine.
In fact, as soon as as the price of inprise tracked off.76 the price of Corel, it became clear that "the street" was not expecting the merger to take place.
I believe this puts Inprise back in the personal columns under "looking for mergers" column.
I should note that I have owned corel stock in the past and currently own Inprise. Not that any of this whould impact the prise of Inprise. Its value will ultimately depend on the quality of its products and its success at generating revenue with them.
"curing dandruff with decapitation" Is what Mr. Frank Zappa called what the PMRC was trying to do when they were attacking the "problem" of profanity in music with legislation and beaurocracy. I think the same situation applies here.
I am still 100% unconvinced that Metallica, or Dr. Dre, or anybody else has lost a dime. I have yet to see any evidence. Have sales dropped? Not on your life. What then is the problem? Got some dandruff Lars? More likely Metallica is being a stooge for some music industry wank, but that's just a theory of mine and I really don't know one way or the other.
Now, lets try and put this in a historical context, even though the anologies don't match up, you can interpolate the results a little bit.
Everyone knew that VCR's would destroy the motion picture industry. Why would anyone go out to a movie when they could just buy a tape. For that matter, why not just copy a tape from your friend? Why not just tape a free movie on TV rather than paying to go to a motion picture. Why indeed?
The answer is complicated, but basically, the act of going out and seeing a picture pleases many senses, and is worth hard currency. Owning the actual movie is more satisfying than looking at your hand scrawled markings on an old TDK blank. So despite piracy, and availability, and ease of duplication, the motion picture industry is thriving, and to top everything off they haven't learned there lesson and they are trying to do the same with the DVD thing. Okay, fine whatever.
I have another great idea for Metallica. Sue tape deck manufacturers! When cassette tape decks first came out the recording industry (does anyone else remember this) wanted to tax every tape deck sold because it would obviously be used for piracy and would steal income from artists like Metallica who so obviously are in it just for there fans. I wonder how many Metallica fans got turned on by having a friedn make a tape for them back in the 80's. The anology now is that your friend would burn some MP3's onto a CD for you, or you'd download them from the Napster.
But why would you ever buy an album? Why go to the movies? No one wants to have some crappy blank cd with hand written setlist on it when you can have the real deal. Not if your a FAN. And how do you get to be a FAN if you've never heard any Metallica? They're not on the radio that much. Droop 20$ bucks on some band you've never heard before? Not likely.
I am not a fan of Metallica. I haven't even heard one album in entirety. But I am a fan of the grateful dead. I can download about a bazillion MP3's for free with no problem. Its allowed and in fact encouraged by the band's organization. (only bootlegs, not studio recordings) Interestingly enough, I also own about twenty of their CD's, along with a bunch of crappy sounding bootleg tapes with handwritten scrawled labels. That's because I am a FAN.
Re: Humans have not been beaten at Chess!
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 1
God I hate it when people say this!
Gary Kasparov lost a 6 game series under strict conditions that are not comparable to tournament play. In this one match, under these specific conditions, Deep Blue manage to best Kasparov. But a rematch, or any furthur games, were refused, and here is why.
Computers tend to play predictable styles; it is the nature of programming an AI into a game. Human's, being adaptive, can change their own play to take advantage of this. This is why the match was so short, and this is why there has never been a rematch.
Until a computer can beat grandmasters consistently, at tournament style conditions, it ain't fair to say computers are better at chess than humans. Now, it is certainly fair to say that computers are better than 99.9% of humans, and that 99.9% of all chess playing computers are better than me!
But to 'solve' chess you would need to construct a tree of a forced game from start to end, accounting for all possible moves by your opponent. The problem is that even now I don't think computers can go farther than 10-12 ply (1 players move) even with huge amounts of power and time. You'd probably need 45 ply or more top solve chess, so who knows, maybe? I'll leave that question to those more knowledgable.
Cheers --Pete
He felt himself break into two halves, one part warm and one part cold, one part hard and one part soft, one part trembling and one part not trembling, each half grinding against the other. --Ray Bradbury
This gentleman argues against technology by making an argue of emotions or romanticism.
That's fine. Its great to listen to everyone go on about how wrong he is, but even at a very high level I think it ieasy to see that when they are through digitizing the non-book material, they are going to go through the books.
Eventually this material will become available online. Its just a matter of how long progress will take to arrive.
BTW, did anyone else remeber the LOC on a laptop in Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather"? I'm pretty sure this book predates "Snow Crash". Its set in 2010 or so I think. --Pete
Yeah! I for one would give anything just to see that annoying Holodeck go away. Its like, who would use this thing if it was so buggy it would crash every couple of weeks, and put the users in mortal danger, or spit out some sentient hostile being?
I think the holodeck should be renamed the "lazy-writers couldn't think of anything lets send the crew to 14th century mongolia-deck".
If the holo-deck goes away, and the once-cool borg stop getting dilluted into absurdity, then maybe this could be a cool series.
If they had good writers and ignored the conventional wisdom (Hint- ST is not a soap opera!) this could be good. And honestly, even if its crap, I'll probably watch it and just complain more.
First of all, it is indeed an honor to pester a bigname scientist with my puny little questions! Hopefully I will not arouse angst with the simplicity of my perceptions. Aha! I toss my wheaties on Mount Olympus and hope to see golden flakes drift down from the sky!
I have always thought that distributed computing naturally lends itself to large scale AI problems, specifically your Neural Networks and Dynamical Systems work. I am thinking specifically of the SETI@home project, and the distributed.net projects. Have you thought about, or to your knowledge has anyone thought about harnessing the power of colective geekdom for sort of a brute force approach to neural networks. I don't know how NN normally work, but it seems that you could write a very small, lightweight client, and embed it into a screen saver a'la SETI@home. This SS would really be really a simple client 'node'. You could then add some cute graphics like a picture of a human brain and some brightly colored synapseds or what have you.
Once the/.ers got their hands on such a geek toy I have no doubt you'd have the equivalent of several hundred thousand hours or more of free computer time, and who knows, maybe we could all make a brain together! I would love to think of my computer as a small cog in some vast nueral network, or at least I would until Arnold Scwartzenegger got sent back in time to kill my mom. Whaddayathink, Jordan? Is this a good idea, or am I an idiot?
First of all, this is listed as Netscape 6 PR1, so its not gold or anything. Its just a prerelease version of there normal buggy.0 releae.
It looks just like mozilla m14. This should not come as a surprise to me, but I didn't know what to expect.
Does it leak memory? After an hour or so, three windows were using 45K of free memory, slowing my meager 64K laptop to lots of grinding.
Otherwise, despite the ugly N logo replacing the cute Mozillasoar, it looks pretty solid.
A final word about the integration. I have a netscape webmail account that uses the name "peteshaw". I stopped using it some time back when I accidentally posted it once on the usenet and found I was getting inunspamdated.
When I started up N6, it went through this whole routine told me that I would have to change my easy to remember name to something abstract and bizarre to satisfy its corporate renaming requirements. I think Netscape is merging the webmail name lists with AOL IM Service, which is integrated with Netscape IM. So now instead of "peteshaw" I need to come up with PeteShawSpankMyMonkey or something long and stupid.
So far its just annoying, but after trying 3 or 4 times to come up with a reasonable username, it gives me this error "Too many logins from this IP address, please wait 24 hours before logging on." On top of that, the only button I have to choose is marked "retry". What's a guy to do? Sit here staring at the retry button for 24 hours? It wasn't that hard to eventually work around, but its like ??????
So, needless to say I am skipping the netscape bundle of features for now, or at least for the next 24 hours. I might just stick with M14.
Bands such as Phish and the Grateful Dead have always made a substantial amount of their income from touring and live performance, rather than selling studio material. Instead, they encouraged the free exchange of live recorded concert material, and in response fans flocked to see them perform. This may just change the profit model of running a band. The big dollars may shift from expensive cd's and a wide range of concert prices to cheap cd/mp3's and expensive live performances. Whether or not this is a bad thing is anyone's guess. I for one, will shed no tears at the demise of an industry that still charges 18$ for a cd that costs maybe 50 cents to make. How much does an artist get from that 18$ anyway?
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I am reminded of the expression
.Net is another framework of 'Glue' languages.
"If your only tool is a hammer all your problems begin to look like nails."
Look at what development is going on today. VB and Java represent a huge and growning number of large business data driven apps. Why? Ease of use, rapid prototyping, simple(r) debugging.
But these languages are limited by their design. VB is platform dependant, and is a good arms length from the OS. Also, it isn't very fast. Java is slow too, and its platform independance separates it from the OS as well.
Any of these, require occasional tweaking with something more low level, and that usually meanse C++, Delphi, ANSI C, whatever.
Yeah, I dropped my dsl line back in October. My carrier got bought out by RealConnect and at the end of my one year contract I was notified that my 49.95 128K IDSL line would be *slightly* going up to $169.95!
What really annoyed me was the letter itself. Okay, I can understand if costs go up. But (a) there was no apology in the letter and (b)I was given 7 days to make up my mind on continuing the contract.
So I call up RealConnect and mildly explain my position, which is that you are trying to gouge me with an insanely high price. They in turn blamed Network Access Solutions for ratcheting up the residential rates to match business class. NAS is the only provider to the local switch, so after some research, I figured I was pretty much hosed.
Needless to say I do my big downloads from work and at home I say, "Welcome to NetZero!"
Postscript: After one month plus at 28.8K (my phone lines are &@#'d up buts thats another story) I don't knotice it that much. When I'm online my phone calls are forwarded to my cell, and I can't download ISO's, MP3's, or mulimedia, but who cares? I can easily do without that junk. Email, ebay, online shopping, messaging, you can do 90% of your stuff with a dog slow connection.
...achieving prompt,
effective and certain relief for consumers and businesses.
(from the press release)
Prompt? After five years? Is that really prompt?
Effective? about the only thing the justice department has proven itself to be effective at is in lawyering. Short of actually whimpering and running out of the courtroom they have all but thrown in the towel.
Certain? Oh please, the certainty of this settlement can be easily seen reflected in the stock market. If the market had faith that microsoft was being forced to behave fairly, then the competitors to and middleware providers of software to microsoft would be jumping up. Borland, Symantec, Roxio, Corel. But it is not happening, because nodoby is buying the bull. I feel, as the market does, that microsoft will pay no attention to this directive, as it has not paid attention to any other court orders in the past.
I used to work in this computer lab, that was actually was the first level of a parking garage that was converted into office space. It was okay, except for the lack of visible light and the strange gurgling noises that would come from the plumbing that ran floor to ceiling throughout the lab. One saturday night I was working late, this was a few years back, I think it was in October, but I'm not sure.
Around 7pm my Kastle card stopped working at the keydoors around the lab. For some reason, they had built a wall around an area that had been an exit to the stairwell at one point. The stair well had been walled over, and the emergency exit open INWARD. I know this now, because around 8pm, I was rooting around for a network card I needed to put in an IVR server. I thought there was a spare parts bin in this large closet, instead I was trapped, with no way out but my Kastle card.
I was stuck.
Well, I figured I was in there for the night, so I managed to find some foam packing material, and stretched out in the corner between a few odd sized piles of pc components. I guess when I enterd the room I must have tripped a silent alarm, because sometime later a large swedish looking guy in a security uniform opened the door about an hour later. He must have been 6 foor 5 and weighed about 300 pounds, he was a healthy boy to sya the least.
He opened the door with and slowly entered with his flashlight shining all over the place. Then he proceeds to do the exact same thing as me! He shuts the door behind him, and eventually, as he is trying to leave, realizes that he is stuck too.
So the security dude is banging on the door, when I finally wake up enough to figure out what's going on. I get up, and walk over to him in the dark room. I say, "don't even bother, there's no way to get out of here."
Son of a bitch if the guy didn't break down the door on his first try getting out of there! Funniest god damn thing I ever saw!
Dude, I am most excited with your purchasing experience, but perhaps it would be helpful to explain why you wished this whispery machine.
Are you frequently coding in a zen like state of consciousness? Do you trade high quality sho files and play them on your wharfdale? Are you seeking the ultimate immersive gaming experience?
Also, why not just put the pc in the other room and run cables? Wouldn't that be much quieter? I am sorry, but this just seems to me to be episode 12,037 of how I built a very chi-chi pc to bring to lan parties. Thats okay, but its a different horse than "how I found silence in computing"
You're initial premise is that this war will not make the US a safer place. I disagree. You make the assumption that if we do nothing the "bad people" who did this to us will go away, and that if we behave differently then they will not terrorize us.
This is not the case.
The butchers who flew 4 airplanes full of innocent men, women, and children to their death, on september 11th, did not present demands to us. There was no ransom. They are not going to go away on their own. Bin Laden has made it perfectly clear that he is the enemy, and nothing we do will make him go away.
This enemy will not leave us. He will not give up or rest. He has made that very clear to us. He believes that he can fight the coward's war of terror, and that by hiding in belly of a cave he can remain safe from us.
If we decide to start backpedaling, and do what you say, hoping to appease these terrorists, then we will only encourage them to terrorize us more in order to gain further concessions from us. We can not sacrifice our morals or values in order to appease a coward and a terrorist.
The unfortunate and misguided souls who thought that by giving their lives to kill thousands of innocents they would secure a place in heaven are wrong. They have not gained a place in heaven. And they will gain concessions. What these poor stupid foolish people, these tools, have accomplished is to raise the anger and attention of the most intelligent, enlightened, and advanced peoples in the world. I don't mean just the US either, I mean the US, Britain, europe, russia, and others.
September 11th will mark the end of their way of life and not ours.
Okay, I know I am straying from the "how tech will help us" so let me try and tie this all together. Technology will allow us to rid ourselves of these vermins at less of a cost in human life than would be otherwise possible. This has already been shown with the unmanned spy plane that was shot down. Here in the US money is cheap and lives our precious. I say our current strategy is a good one. Freeze Bin Laden out, freeze his money and resource, blast his infrasturcture, the collect info and make use of it, using all this technology we have. All the while tightening the noose around him.
Don't like your distro? Write a new one. Is it a piece of crap? It will go away. Is it worthwhile? Well, it still might go away. But over time, a process similar to natural selection allows the best software to rise to the top.
The downside of all this prolific spread is that standards become rare. This is why the Linux Standard Base is such an important idea.
Take a block of data. ("Four score and twenty...")
Convert it into bits. (1010001001001...)
Arrange the bits so that they form a decimal number. (564273274687632....)
Factor the decimal number as compactly as possible, by using brute force to encode the number as a series of prime powers. So the number becomes
(2^A)+(3^B)+(5^C)+(7^D)+... - Delta
So the original message becomes (an example, I have no ideas what the actual values are, this is a thought experiment) (2^71)+(3^151)+(5^0)+(7^12)-18763
Which could be compactly encoded as (71,151,0,12,-18763).
Presto! Godel originally proposed this I believe, and I read about this in aa novel 'Starburst' by Robert Silverberg. I can't recall anymore. Any thoughts? Would this work?
I mean, even if this OS produces everything it claims to, is it really worth an intel user to switch over when you can get a duron/celeron box for 500, and the cheapest way to get a mac is an iMac for about 8 or 9 hundred and then you have to suffer through a 15" monitor?
I am sympathetic to Apple's plight. They probably rightly feel that by adanoning a unique hardware platform they destroy the gravy train.
Apple has a superior product. No question.
But until I can buy OS X for my cheap and available hardware platform, my interest is going to be limited to reading these interesting threads on /..
Sorry if this is not directly germane to the topic at hand. But its the everpresent problem, right?
Wrong-o. By generating a larger volume of mail in total, per unit costs are smaller. If private first class mail made up say 30% of total volume instead of 10% you can bet the postage on 1st class would go up by more than a penny. --Pete
There is an important difference between junk mail and spam, and that it that is that junk mail costs the sender real physical dollars. The stuff you recieve in the mail are mostly legitimate. Its easy to filter out. It only takes time if you let it. Finally, the costs of junk mail is used by the USPS to subsidize acutual postage.
Would nay of you be willing to pay 75 cents for a stamp in order to get no junk mail? This is a real dollar issue, and I have no problem with junk mail at all. I find that the best credit card offers are junk mailed to me. I get menus to my local chinese restaurants. Its a good thing.
Contrast this with SPAM, or Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE). This costs the sender nothing. It is frequently fraudulent, illegal, or 'scammy'. Some garbage about buying a stock or checking out a web page. The problem with the SPAM is that it doesn't cost anything! I wish to god that there was someway I could stuff a brick in a return envelope to every SPAMMER out there, but I can't so I make due with filters.
I am not aware of the technology required, but it seems to me the only real way to eliminated SPAM is to develop some sort of universal validated return address. Like caller-id, it would be optional, and like caller-id, you could block messages from those who don't disclose a valid return address.
But please don't terrorize those junk mailers, they are an annoyance that causes more good than harm.
--Pete
'he felt himself splitting into two halfs, one part soft, one part hard, one part warm, and one part cold, one part trembling, and one part not trembling, each half grinding against the other."--Ray Bradbury
1.)Foosball tables, poool tables, video games, etc..
2.)Send everyone on a cruise! (My employer is oing this right now. Its a cheapo 4-day deal in Miami, but what a great morale booster.
3.)Buy lunch once a week.
4.)Offer 3 or 4 weeks of vacation. A little bit more than average.
5.)Open a satelite office in the 'burbs, or do work at home two days a weel.
6.)Free soda,coffee, bottled water.
7.)Stock options.
8.)Better than average healthcare.
9.)Ask your employees what they want most.
Okay, I'm out of ideas. Here's the scoop. I know right now that I could increase my income as a direct bill contractor by 50-60%. Why don't I?
Two reasons. First I have a family and two small children, and I want to spend time with them and not work myself nutty chasing down leads, so I guess thats less time. Two, I have great health care which helps with the kids. So I'm giving myself a break for a few years. (I have been an IC for the last 7 years.) It absolutely kills me to here management talk about high costs of free soda and vacation. The cost of replacing one employee is at least 25% of the annual salary of the position. Happy people don't leave. You can be cheaper onthe salary if you don't scrimp on the benefits.
One last thing to all you HR people. As an IC I would take 4-6 weeks off a year. I routinely make up for all those lost weeks and more in overtime. Every time I look for a job I mention desiring 4 weeks of vacation. I get looks like I am from mars. Its not a negotiable benefit, and no one seems to think its a reasonable request. If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
Right off the top of my small, pointy, head.
Pros:
1.)Portability. A user can keep all there email on the exchange server, and access this common mailbox from multiple locations.
2.)Scheduler/Task Manager. The scheduler can be neat for setting aside conference rooms, and scheduling meetings.
And a bunch of other neat features which I have never in my life seen anyone use.
Cons:
1.)High server maintenance workload. An exhange server for 1000 people will need 1 or 2 full time people for care and feeeding of the beast.
2.)No cross platform dependence. You only have windows clients, and a really clunky webmail interface.
3.)Cost. Microsoft charges for exchange server on a per-seat basis. (I think, not sure on this). This can be a decisive factor.
4.)Poor Reliability. Exchange does not have a high uptime track record. Your welcome to throw facts aat me, but based on my own anecdotal evidence, MS-exchange crashes fairly frequently.
5.)Security. Migrating to MS-Exchange invites you to the join the Exchange e-mail virus of the month club. The nature of the way MS-Outlook handles e-mail makes it vulnerable to virus attacks.
As a postscript, I would address the MS-Outlook faction with a functional equivalent to the scheduling and portability issues, maybe with web based email and an online scheduling app.
Maybe only 500 songs if you exclude all of the freely permitted live bootleg mp3 files that are permitted by The Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, Phish, Dave Mathews Band, Metallica (yes, even Lars doesn't mind the bootlegs being traded), Widespread Panic, etc.. There is lots of great music out there that CAN be traded. So even with MD5s's napster might have some real legitimate use.
What can we learn from this whole debacle?
1.)corporations represent stockholders who as a rule value money more than principles.
2.)Honesty only has value if it can generate goodwill or some percieved value.
3.)Take away the incentive to remain honest and the corps revert to there scummy do-anything-for-a-buck selfs.
4.)#3 especially applies to a corp that enters reorganization. A corporate mission statement looses much meaning when all your assets are getting repo'd.
But honestly, I know in principle this sucks, but, I can't help but thinking. Who cares? So they tracked all of my toy purchasing habits for the last 12 months. They have illegally sold my lego purchasing fetish information to everyone with a buck who wants to purchase it.
I just am not swept up with outrage here. Sorry!
--Pete
he felt himself being split into two haves, one part hot, one cold, one part hard, one soft, one part trembling, and one part not trembling, each half grinding against the other. -- ray bradbury
It seems that every point made in the case against PETA.ORG could be made against whitehouse.com, that oh so naughty purveyor of porn with the Pennsylvania Avenue Address.
Why then hasn't the government made any steps to prosecute whitehouse.com? Perhaps a case such as that would be more likely to test boundaries in a more decisive way, for better or worse.
Wow. Well, I *thought* I had a good point, but it seems instead that I was merely filling in white spaces with characters. I should be more aware of the facts when I post. My apologies. --Peteman
Well, let me start by saying that Borland still has more recognition than Inprise. Change the name back guys! Borland rocks! Go turbo pascal!
.76 the price of Corel, it became clear that "the street" was not expecting the merger to take place.
Ahem. From a logical and business point of view, the merger made sense on many levels. The goal was too have a company with an operating system product, a suite of applications, and development tools. $ound familiar? Unfortunately, I think Corel was like some sleazy guy looking at some well endowed lass and telling her how much he likes her brain. Inprise/Borland was sitting on 250 million in cash, which is a lot for a company recently valued at less than 300 million. Corel may have wanted the company for kylix and its other excellent products, but they wanted the cash to go and buy some more linux comanies, and see if any of this stuff stuck together.
Inprise really screwed up by not putting a collar on the merger agreement, which would have made it easy for them to bail out of the merger agreement if stock prices plummetted like they did in the months following the announencement. Without the collar, the choices were to either pay a 30 million fine or wait until the shareholder vote. Fortunately, it must have been obvious that everyone who owned borland stock was not going to vote to exchange there stock 3 for 4 for a company who's stock price was below there own! That is why IMHO, Corel basically allowed Inprise to back out of the deal with no fine.
In fact, as soon as as the price of inprise tracked off
I believe this puts Inprise back in the personal columns under "looking for mergers" column.
I should note that I have owned corel stock in the past and currently own Inprise. Not that any of this whould impact the prise of Inprise. Its value will ultimately depend on the quality of its products and its success at generating revenue with them.
--Pete
"curing dandruff with decapitation" Is what Mr. Frank Zappa called what the PMRC was trying to do when they were attacking the "problem" of profanity in music with legislation and beaurocracy. I think the same situation applies here.
I am still 100% unconvinced that Metallica, or Dr. Dre, or anybody else has lost a dime. I have yet to see any evidence. Have sales dropped? Not on your life. What then is the problem? Got some dandruff Lars? More likely Metallica is being a stooge for some music industry wank, but that's just a theory of mine and I really don't know one way or the other.
Now, lets try and put this in a historical context, even though the anologies don't match up, you can interpolate the results a little bit.
Everyone knew that VCR's would destroy the motion picture industry. Why would anyone go out to a movie when they could just buy a tape. For that matter, why not just copy a tape from your friend? Why not just tape a free movie on TV rather than paying to go to a motion picture. Why indeed?
The answer is complicated, but basically, the act of going out and seeing a picture pleases many senses, and is worth hard currency. Owning the actual movie is more satisfying than looking at your hand scrawled markings on an old TDK blank. So despite piracy, and availability, and ease of duplication, the motion picture industry is thriving, and to top everything off they haven't learned there lesson and they are trying to do the same with the DVD thing. Okay, fine whatever.
I have another great idea for Metallica. Sue tape deck manufacturers! When cassette tape decks first came out the recording industry (does anyone else remember this) wanted to tax every tape deck sold because it would obviously be used for piracy and would steal income from artists like Metallica who so obviously are in it just for there fans. I wonder how many Metallica fans got turned on by having a friedn make a tape for them back in the 80's. The anology now is that your friend would burn some MP3's onto a CD for you, or you'd download them from the Napster.
But why would you ever buy an album? Why go to the movies? No one wants to have some crappy blank cd with hand written setlist on it when you can have the real deal. Not if your a FAN. And how do you get to be a FAN if you've never heard any Metallica? They're not on the radio that much. Droop 20$ bucks on some band you've never heard before? Not likely.
I am not a fan of Metallica. I haven't even heard one album in entirety. But I am a fan of the grateful dead. I can download about a bazillion MP3's for free with no problem. Its allowed and in fact encouraged by the band's organization. (only bootlegs, not studio recordings) Interestingly enough, I also own about twenty of their CD's, along with a bunch of crappy sounding bootleg tapes with handwritten scrawled labels. That's because I am a FAN.
God I hate it when people say this!
Gary Kasparov lost a 6 game series under strict conditions that are not comparable to tournament play. In this one match, under these specific conditions, Deep Blue manage to best Kasparov. But a rematch, or any furthur games, were refused, and here is why.
Computers tend to play predictable styles; it is the nature of programming an AI into a game. Human's, being adaptive, can change their own play to take advantage of this. This is why the match was so short, and this is why there has never been a rematch.
Until a computer can beat grandmasters consistently, at tournament style conditions, it ain't fair to say computers are better at chess than humans. Now, it is certainly fair to say that computers are better than 99.9% of humans, and that 99.9% of all chess playing computers are better than me!
But to 'solve' chess you would need to construct a tree of a forced game from start to end, accounting for all possible moves by your opponent. The problem is that even now I don't think computers can go farther than 10-12 ply (1 players move) even with huge amounts of power and time. You'd probably need 45 ply or more top solve chess, so who knows, maybe? I'll leave that question to those more knowledgable.
Cheers
--Pete
He felt himself break into two halves, one part warm and one part cold, one part hard and one part soft, one part trembling and one part not trembling, each half grinding against the other.
--Ray Bradbury
This gentleman argues against technology by making an argue of emotions or romanticism.
That's fine. Its great to listen to everyone go on about how wrong he is, but even at a very high level I think it ieasy to see that when they are through digitizing the non-book material, they are going to go through the books.
Eventually this material will become available online. Its just a matter of how long progress will take to arrive.
BTW, did anyone else remeber the LOC on a laptop in Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather"? I'm pretty sure this book predates "Snow Crash". Its set in 2010 or so I think.
--Pete
Yeah! I for one would give anything just to see that annoying Holodeck go away. Its like, who would use this thing if it was so buggy it would crash every couple of weeks, and put the users in mortal danger, or spit out some sentient hostile being?
I think the holodeck should be renamed the "lazy-writers couldn't think of anything lets send the crew to 14th century mongolia-deck".
If the holo-deck goes away, and the once-cool borg stop getting dilluted into absurdity, then maybe this could be a cool series.
If they had good writers and ignored the conventional wisdom (Hint- ST is not a soap opera!) this could be good. And honestly, even if its crap, I'll probably watch it and just complain more.
First of all, it is indeed an honor to pester a bigname scientist with my puny little questions! Hopefully I will not arouse angst with the simplicity of my perceptions. Aha! I toss my wheaties on Mount Olympus and hope to see golden flakes drift down from the sky!
/.ers got their hands on such a geek toy I have no doubt you'd have the equivalent of several hundred thousand hours or more of free computer time, and who knows, maybe we could all make a brain together! I would love to think of my computer as a small cog in some vast nueral network, or at least I would until Arnold Scwartzenegger got sent back in time to kill my mom. Whaddayathink, Jordan? Is this a good idea, or am I an idiot?
I have always thought that distributed computing naturally lends itself to large scale AI problems, specifically your Neural Networks and Dynamical Systems work. I am thinking specifically of the SETI@home project, and the distributed.net projects. Have you thought about, or to your knowledge has anyone thought about harnessing the power of colective geekdom for sort of a brute force approach to neural networks. I don't know how NN normally work, but it seems that you could write a
very small, lightweight client, and embed it into a screen saver a'la SETI@home. This SS would really be really a simple client 'node'. You could then add some cute graphics like a picture of a human brain and some brightly colored synapseds or what have you.
Once the
Pete Shaw
First of all, this is listed as Netscape 6 PR1, so its not gold or anything. Its just a prerelease version of there normal buggy .0 releae.
It looks just like mozilla m14. This should not come as a surprise to me, but I didn't know what to expect.
Does it leak memory? After an hour or so, three windows were using 45K of free memory, slowing my meager 64K laptop to lots of grinding.
Otherwise, despite the ugly N logo replacing the cute Mozillasoar, it looks pretty solid.
A final word about the integration. I have a netscape webmail account that uses the name "peteshaw". I stopped using it some time back when I accidentally posted it once on the usenet and found I was getting inunspamdated.
When I started up N6, it went through this whole routine told me that I would have to change my easy to remember name to something abstract and bizarre to satisfy its corporate renaming requirements. I think Netscape is merging the webmail name lists with AOL IM Service, which is integrated with Netscape IM. So now instead of "peteshaw" I need to come up with PeteShawSpankMyMonkey or something long and stupid.
So far its just annoying, but after trying 3 or 4 times to come up with a reasonable username, it gives me this error "Too many logins from this IP address, please wait 24 hours before logging on." On top of that, the only button I have to choose is marked "retry". What's a guy to do? Sit here staring at the retry button for 24 hours? It wasn't that hard to eventually work around, but its like ??????
So, needless to say I am skipping the netscape bundle of features for now, or at least for the next 24 hours. I might just stick with M14.
Bands such as Phish and the Grateful Dead have always made a substantial amount of their income from touring and live performance, rather than selling studio material. Instead, they encouraged the free exchange of live recorded concert material, and in response fans flocked to see them perform. This may just change the profit model of running a band. The big dollars may shift from expensive cd's and a wide range of concert prices to cheap cd/mp3's and expensive live performances. Whether or not this is a bad thing is anyone's guess. I for one, will shed no tears at the demise of an industry that still charges 18$ for a cd that costs maybe 50 cents to make. How much does an artist get from that 18$ anyway?