3dFlatLander

I'm a wannabe chef, and I use it for all recipes I've created, or adapted from others. Ratios for baked goods are much easier to work with in metric than imperial. Same goes for woodworking, and anything else with smaller distances. Try as I might, I'm still too used to 'miles' to switch to kilometers.

When I first started to become computer savvy, Stallman had already moved into the activist stage, and further away from programming. I had always heard that he was a great programmer. But, I've never actually seen any code he's written. The earliest software versions I can find on gnu.org's FTP are from 1994--I'm guessing most of the projects had multiple contributors by this time.

Anyone happen to know where some pure Stallman code can be found?

Small business health insurance that doesn't cost a small fortune would be fantastic. I know this was a goal of the health care bill passed earlier, but I haven't seen anything to indicate something has actually changed.

I believe so. They referenced TAOCP Vol 3 in the patent. But, they just cited the entire hashing chapter (p. 506-549).

I followed the link to the patent, and just want to make sure I understand things correctly. I'm not very knowledgeable about legal jargon, or formal CS terminology.

>> Performing storage and retrieval that uses the hashing technique with the external chaining method for collision resolution.

Isnt this just describing a hash table?

>> In order to prevent performance deterioration due to the presence of automatically expiring data items, a garbage collection technique is used that removes all expired records stored in the system in the external chain targeted by a probe into the data storage system.

So the software doesn't run slowly, we're going to do something special to get rid of those pesky expired records.

I believe, "removes all expired records stored in the system in the external chain targeted by a probe into the data storage system." is just preparing you for the description of what they're going to do, without actually saying anything.

>> Each insertion, retrieval, or deletion of a record is an occasion to search an entire linked-list chain of records for expired items and then remove them.

Whenever an action is taken on a record, remove expired records near the record targeted by the action.

>> Because an expired data item will not remain in the system long term if the system is frequently probed, it is useful for large information storage systems that are heavily used, require the fast access provided by hashing, and cannot be taken off-line for removal of expired data.

Expired items don't stay long. System doesn't have to be taken offline to remove expired items... Because they remove expired items after CRUD of a record takes place, I guess.

Surely I'm missing something here. Or is it just that silly that you can get a patent on something like this?

> Boosting learning velocity/capacity/efficieny should help. Why must we replay histroy when teaching? But maybe we are not doing such a good job at consolidating/compressing knowledge as we used to since there is so much.

I think we are boosting our learning capacity and efficiency by better understanding how our minds work, and how this giant web of knowledge that we have created can be simplified. I'm absolutely dumbstruck that we still teach the majority of children using the same methods used for at least a hundred years, despite the (information) world being a completely different place than it was even a decade ago.

I'm always biased against my code as well. But man.. Software with a million downloads is something to be proud of. That's a lot of people getting use out of something you created.

In regards to working from home: Keep a schedule. I know a lot of people say the best part of the freelance life (or any work from home) is the flexible schedule. Speaking from experience, I'm easily twice as productive when I keep a schedule. I treat it like a real job and clock myself in and out of work at specific hours.

My fear (hope?) would be VirtualBox. Aside from Java, I use that the most.

A good number of the domains I search for are godaddy parked pages. There's a link to a service godaddy operates that can buy the domain. Is this the service you're talking about?

> 3) Your market may be parents who want their kids to know how to program, especially homeschoolers. I don't know how large that market is, but it's definitely worth exploring.

I hadn't even considered that. Kinda puts a new spin on how I can market this.

Thank you all for the feedback, it's very much appreciated.

The product is an ebook and software bundle aimed at technology / computer teachers. The goal of it is to assist in teaching students programming and computer science concepts, whilst subtly mixing in a lot of math and physics (making games). So it is indeed something to be used in the classroom. I meant to write this in my text, sorry I didn't include it that.

You can play with the numbers and goals all you want, but until you actually start something and generate revenue, it will all be meaningless. If your project goes like many of the others here, it will generate close to nothing for a while, and then slowly rise (or shoot up if you're lucky). Moreover, if you want to be successful you'll need to pick something you're knowledgeable about and have the skillset to create. Everybody here can pitch ideas, but do you really think we'd be better at coming up with an idea for a project than you would, especially given this limited amount of information?

There was an article recently that talked about the problem of people asking what programming projects they should work on, and how that was really the wrong question to ask in the first place. I wish I could find it again, as there are some parallels to these kids of questions.

Yeah, but I don't think many people check the comments for what can be read from the story. It's mostly a way of seeing what other people think about the article before going to read it. The more sensationalist the headline, the more important the comments are to checking for bullshit before investing the time to read it.

Would it really help with spam though? The rewards for a spammer to make it to the first, second, or even third page are probably worth the risk of negative karma.

As for duplicate articles, I'm not even really sure what the problem is. Is it duplicate articles (same url, slightly different) that clog up the system? Or is it the same subject being covered from many different sources? There have also been a few times within the last month where two stories about the same topic will be right next to each other on the front page--amazon/apple/other big industry announcements like to do this.

I like to think of the startup world as a distributed version of PARC. Not sure how accurate it is--but still a neat thought.

PBS did a good Frontline episode on for profit colleges and the federal student loan situation for their students. Available online here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm...

> I know the following sentiment will not be popular here, but here I go anyway(bye bye karma).

Eesh.. please don't do that. It's not really 'baiting people to downvote you' per the comment guidelines, but baiting the contrarians to upvote you.

If you liked it, you may also be interested in the companion reader http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743273982/ -- a collection of the primary source material used for the book.

I'm creating an ebook and software combo for computer/technology educators. Hoping to market it to school districts, but individual teachers as well.

I signed up for gmail and have a simple account name in the form of {common firstname}{first letter of last name}@gmail.com. The amount of crap that has started to show up in my inbox over the last year is completely ludicrous--and I believe it's all from people who, like you say, just don't know how email works.

As of today, my account is associated with seven addresses--that is, seven people said my email address was their alternative email address. 2,000 messages in the spam folder over ~1 month. Sometimes a dozen can hit my inbox per day; But, I'm guessing these are legit newsletters that people use my address for. And someone in South America used it to sign up for a facebook account. I was getting slammed with his friend requests and lost password requests until I just filtered them out.

sigh ... Rant over, and I feel better.

In general. I've got zero experience doing distributed computing, hence my fanboy label. Just felt like sharing a thought. :) However, any starting points you could provide on being able to accomplish such things would be awesome. I'm especially interested in being able to use cloud services like EC2 for it.

I think I'm a distributed computing fanboy. I'd like to pull a few EC2 (or GPU) instances and see how quick brute forcing different encryption/hashing would take, how big of a prime number one could compute in a few hours, do the same pi/e/eulers, or let some genetic algorithms generate a huge wad of data. No idea why or to what ends, just seems like a cool thing to do with spare time.

I'd worry about being lean and frugal there, due to the cost of living. I bet there's some ways to save money (aside from cramming five guys into a studio apartment).

Related question: Did NYC ever get any of those miracle residential fiber connections covering the whole city? It's surprisingly hard to get broadband info w/o going through forms.

Exactly. This is more for technical writing, not sales copy. That being said, a sales copy equivalent would be nice.

All of the suggestions listed involve changing some mechanic of the site. Some of them are quite good though (I think voting based on karma is neat).

My theory: Internet marketers descend on online communities that are popular. Possible solution: No follow on frontpage stories with less than X upvotes or no follow all frontpage stories.

Astronomy Cast -- They have a pretty big show archive that has aged very well.

In Our Time, a BBC radio podcast focusing on history.

PBS Frontline (a tv show, not a podcast) streams all their shows online. Great for current events.

The Economist Audio Edition requires subscription to magazine, but if you want to catch up on the entire world in a couple of hours, this is the way to go.

The reddit blog linked to in the TC article says the recently hired a new sys admin, which "doubles the size of our systems administration team."

I really like that, but Roy Disney died after Disney World opened. You may be referring to his brother Walter Disney (the 'Walt' in Disney), who died prior to the parks completion.

Their music recommendation database has more songs and attributes. But theres no service that streams all the music they have indexed like Pandora does.