I actually had to turn off adblock to see the complaint, and indeed it is terrible
We really need to start thinking about the post advertising economy dont we
1,405 karma · joined May 18, 2009
We really need to start thinking about the post advertising economy dont we
(Not that I dislike bpython, just never had the desire to use it)
Sure ruby could, but it would have to play catchup adding things like sage, cython, numpy, scikits etc etc
Oddly people started to complain that the application was _too fast_, after much arguments (many of these being management thinking that, because it was too fast it was not working properly) they came upon a solution.
The solution in all its glory was a loop at the end of the sort, with a sleep in it.
The best thing was, that when they were feeling lazy they would put out a release that was, for example 33% faster - by reducing the sleep time.
---- ME:
It just dumbfounds me that, with card in hand they cant make this shit work. I had the same problem with microsoft and fallout3 extensions, after I went through microsofts increadibly evil market place for games thing, bought myself some credits (why can't I just use money guys) and downloaded the extensions, I had to jerry rig them to work with fallout3 because that version I downloaded with steam, and MS has a clause in their terms about versions of fallout downloaded from competing software devlivery systems.
In fact steam is the only on of these fucking things I have ever used that just works (in fact it works a bit too well its nearly as dangerous to my wallet as amazons one click)
Hint guys, If you cant make it like steam, or amazons one click, just pack up shop and go home, the more hoops I jump through, just to appease your circle jacking business people and "Information architects" the more likly I am to just pirate the software.
My Friend:
> > It just dumbfounds me that, with card in hand they cant make this shit work. I feel your pain.
But you're expecting it to work because you see it as a transaction, you buy it, they give it to you. They on the other hand are living in crazy bugfuck dying-media-company world (it's Sony), where it's actually an opportunity for you to STEAL FROM THEM. And so people who a) don't know how software works and b) aren't operating with a full deck to start with dictate how the process gets built. They add this and demand that in this big committee (all the more efficient because it's actually a tree of committees), and some poor schmoe programmer implements it the way he's told.
The real surprise is that they manage to sell /anything/.
FWIW I tend to think of common-lisp when people say lisp in general, the schemers and clojurites tend to self identify better.
Many of the comments below discuss how people experience HDTV "lag", I was wondering if you could shed any light on what causes this. Initially I was thinking that, if its a commodity processor then of course there is the potential for lag, but then you mentioned the FPGA's.
Now I am no fool, I know that its going to take time to process things even with an FPGA, but you got me thinking, in the HDTV application surely an FPGA will be coupled with a commercial DSP chip, heck for high volume I am sure the manufacturers will go the whole hog and get the FPGA netlist converted out into an ASIC or even full blown foundry chip.
Wouldn't the FPGA coupled with a DSP kill most of the lag outright ?
So where in your experience is the lag ?
Heck NSS supports it so Firefox and Chrome must be good for SEED (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839)
Now if only the vim plugin could be made a little less buggy (not jetbrains fault)
Mistakenly, my impression of how to learn maths was based around the ideas of learning how to calculate new idea X and then spending hour upon hour of rote exercises.
One day I had an epiphany, being a computer programmer it dawned on me that I should not be doing all these calculations by hand, only enough to get the basic idea.
Since then I have only bought undergraduate or graduate text books, and used sage for learning math, its just thousands of times better as I now get to learn the real concepts and not just rules (or put another way where axioms do appear I now understand _why_ they are formulated).
Also the other thing that has long lacked in my early math teaching was that in no way were we taught anything about the art of creating and reading proofs, I think this is a shame as it deprives people from the interesting mental rigour that is required to accomplish this.
I think the average high school mathematics syllabus is being devised by the criminally insane. Personally I am a great believer in the work of these folk http://www.computerbasedmath.org/
its really rare to be asked for ID, it happens but only on the really big stuff (loans, getting a car, buying a _house_).
You would not need to provide a driving license to buy an iPhone.
I have just moved to the US for work and I am amazed at how often you guys get asked for driving license / SSN etc.
Like most people a long time ago I also held the belief that robots were just dumb scripts, however I learnt that this is not the case when I had to trap said robots for a previous employer.
See at the time I was working for one of the many online travel sites; now most people probably are not aware that there is quite a bit of money that can be made in knowing airline costs. The thing is that to get this information is not actually cheap, see most of the GDS (Global Distribution System) providers are big mainframe shops that require all sorts of cunning to happen to emulate a green-screen session for the purposes of booking a flight.
The availability search (I forget the exact codenames for this) is done first, this search gives you the potential flights (after working through the byzantine rules of travel) and a costing or fare quote for your trip. This information is reliable about ~95% of the time. Each search costs a small amount against a pre-determined budget, and the slightly more over the limit (kinda like how commercial bandwidth is sold), if my memory serves it was 0.001 euro cents for each search.
During the booking phase (known as the GDS code FXP) the price is actually settled, the booking is a weird form of two-phase commit where first you get a concrete fair quote. This quote ‟ringfences” the fare - essentially ensuring that the seat cannot be booked for roughly 15 minutes. In practise there are a load more technicalities around this part of the system and as such it is possible for double bookings and over bookings to happen, but lets keep it simple for the sake of this story. These prebookings are roughly 99.5% accurate on price but cost something like 0.75 cents (there is a _lot_ that happens when you start booking a flight).
So with that in mind if you are in the business of trying to resell flights it can be to your advantage to avoid the GDS costs and scrape one of the online travel companies. You also want the prebook version of the fare as its more likely to be accurate, the travel sites mind less about people scrapping the lookup search.
Thus begins the saga of our bot elimination projects, first we banned all IP's that smash the site thousands of times, this is easy and kills 45% of the bots dead. Next up we start proper robots.txt and ways to discourage googlebot and the more "honest" robots, that gets us up to dealing with 80% of the bots. Next we take out china, russia etc as ip-addresses, we find that these often have the most fraudulent bookings anyhow so no big loss, that takes us up to 90% of the bots.
Killing the last 10% was never done, every time we tried something new (captua's, JS nonce values, weird redirect patterns, bot traps and pixels, user agent sniffs etc etc) the bots seemed to immediately work around it. I remember watching the access logs where we had one IP that never, ever bought products, just looked for really expensive flights. I distinctly remember seeing it hit a bottrap, notice the page was bad, and then out of nowhere the same user session appears on a brand new IP address with a new user agent, one that essentially said "netscape navigator 4.0 on X11" (this was firefox 1-2 days so seeing unix netscape navigator was a rare sight), it was clear the bot went and executed the javascript nonce with a full browser, and then went back to fast scraping.
A few years later, at the same company but for very different reasons I wrote a tool to replace a product known as gomez with an in house system. The idea of gomez and similar products like site-confidence is to run your website as the user sees it, from random ip's across the world and then report on it. I wrote this tool with XulRunner which is a stripped down version of firefox. Now admittedly I had the insider knowledge of where the bot traps were, but I was amazed at how easy it was to side-step all of our bot-detection in only a few days, I also had unit tests for the system that ran it on sites like Amazon and Google and even there is was shocking how easily I was able to side step bot traps (I am sure since they have got better, but it surprised me how easy it was).
I am not saying all the bots are smart, but my mantra since then has been that "if there is value for the bots to be smart, they can get very smart". I guess its all about the cost payoff for those writing the bots, is it a good idea to run JS all the time as a spider - probably not, does it make sense to save you from 0.75 cents of cost per search - very much so !
Not sure if perl6 has the same properties mind.
That would make building a training set hard ....
I can only imagine those responsible for developing such systems would require serious therapy as well.