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Learning programming was so frequent back in the day because the primitive nature of early PCs required people to be able to do so low-level work to use them well. Heck, the Altair didn't even have a monitor, you had to flip switches to process commands. Freiburger & Swaine's Fire in the Valley shows you some of these early computers and their users. Everyone was programming back then because these simple machines attract a crowd of people willing to think analytically.

What most people fail to realize when they see Wal-Mart as the big, bad, evil juggernaut, is that the employees of Wal-Mart often end up better off with less benefits from Wal-Mart supercenters than they do with better benefits from unionized, benefits-bearing labor at other supermarkets. Why? Because when the supercenter moves into town, those low-paid workers end up paying so much less for their basic needs.

I suggest you read the following: Nickel and Dimed

I'll email you later if I don't hear from you, but the Cracker album is called "Greatest Hits Redux" and it's available on Amazon. Cracker's webpage links to "pitchatent.com" for orders.

The Virgin album is called "Get on With It: The Best of Cracker" and the Amazon page is flooded with one star reviews.

There's also "Garage d'Or" which is a two CD retrospective.

I don't have any opinion on any of this music, since I only ever heard Low, which was great.

I'll email you later if I don't hear from you, but the Cracker album is called "Greatest Hits Redux" and it's available on Amazon. Cracker's webpage links to "pitchatent.com" for orders.

The Virgin album is called "Get on With It: The Best of Cracker" and the Amazon page is flooded with one star reviews.

There's also "Garage d'Or" which is a two CD retrospective.

I don't have any opinion on any of this music, since I only ever heard Low, which was great.

Just in case someone doesn't get it, the OP is a reference to Robert Hamburger's Real Ultimate Power meme.

The reason a recording artist can't just re-record an album with a different record company is because the recording company has secured the mechanical rights, i.e., the recording rights.

The reason a recording artist can't just re-record an album with a different record company is because the recording company has secured the mechanical rights, i.e., the recording rights.

TFA: Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0
Anybody know where I can get a copy of this textbook?

here

Whatever you do, please store everything in UTF-8 encoding, since most of the lyrics of the world's music are not in English. I was outraged the day I discovered that the old CDDB system required everything to be in ISO-8859-1. What is someone to do with music in foreign scripts? ISO-8859-1 doesn't even have the necessary characters from standard Latin transliterations (such the characters with carons for Cyrillic transliteration).

If you don't have any experience with Unicode issues, a problem shared by a regrettable number of developers, try Gilliam's Unicode Demystified .

Business / Internet video

Clip culture
Apr 27th 2006 | SAN MATEO
From The Economist print edition

A start-up shows big media and mighty Google how to do web video

CHAD HURLEY and Steve Chen, two modest twenty-something software geeks in Silicon Valley, were at a dinner party last year where several people brought their camcorders and then complained how difficult it was to share home videos online. So they did what one does in their circles. They founded a company, called YouTube; got a few million dollars from Sequoia Capital, an eminent venture-capital firm; wrote some code in Mr Hurley’s garage; and then moved into a San Mateo loft that resembles an office. Their simple idea was to make uploading home videos to the internet easy.

It turns out that millions of people already had such videos and were just waiting for a way to share them. Even before YouTube’s official launch last December, the site contained more than a million short video clips. In December people were uploading 8,000 clips a day, and watching 3m a day. This month they were uploading 35,000 a day and watching 40m a day. With such amazing growth—almost all by word of mouth, e-mail and hyperlink—YouTube already has four times the traffic of Google Video, the online video market of the world’s largest search-engine firm, and the nearest thing to a rival.

YouTube’s success is therefore of great interest to many older and larger companies. Web video has over the past year become the next “next big thing” on the internet. A survey by the Online Publishers Association in February found that 69% of American internet users have watched video on the web, 24% do so at least once a week, and 5% every day. Almost every big internet company, from portals such as Yahoo! to retailers like Amazon, now has plans to offer video search and feeds. The traditional media companies—owners of video libraries—are interested too. Walt Disney is about to make several shows from its ABC television network available without charge (ie, with advertising) on a new web cinema. CBS already offers some of its shows online for 99 cents.

This may appeal to younger audiences, since it allows “time-shifting”, so that viewers can watch when it suits them, as opposed to when the show is on air. Apple Computer was the first to understand this—it struck a deal with Walt Disney last autumn to provide some television shows on iTunes, its online music store, so that people can put them onto their iPods.

But the success of YouTube points to another development. People are spending an average of 15 minutes on the site during each visit, enough to view several short, funny clips. This is because they are using YouTube for little breaks during a dull workday. And it is a “lean-forward” experience, as people sit in front of computer screens. This “clip culture”, as Mr Hurley calls it, is quite different from the “lean-back” experience of enjoying a half-hour show while reclining on the sofa. So different that YouTube sees Hollywood as a potential ally, rather than as a threat. For instance, the producers of “Lucky Number Slevin”, a new film with Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu and Bruce Willis, are marketing it by making the first eight minutes exclusively available as a clip on YouTube.

This emerging clip culture is also a supply-side phenomenon. Only 10% of the clips on YouTube are from film-industry “professionals”, says Mr Chen. About 80% come from rank amateurs, and another 10% from “dedicated amateurs”, such as young comedians hoping to use internet celebrity as a way into a career. Unlike the big media companies looking to recycle their film libraries, Goog

What have we learned?

Walmart is nothing but a free company in a capitalist society. Those complaining about Walmart are really complaining about capitalism itself.

Yes, walmart prices some American manufacturers out of business. But that is allowing a switch from manufacturing to service based economy. And, thanks to low prices at places like Walmart, more Americans than ever are able to own a house, and stock that house with Tvs, DVDs, Mp3 players and Cell Phones - even at the salary paid by Walmart!

Yes, Walmart buys Chinese. In fact, it is China's leading trading partner and is giving China a real capitalist change from within - a growing middle class in China is coming up. Millions have benefitted there, and I fail to see how this is a bad thing for anyone.

Yes, Walmart doesn't give the very best health benefits. But it beats having unemployment and medicaid. And if Walmart wasn't providing "low paying" jobs, we'd be paying for them in taxes, instead of collecting tax revenue from them.

I checked the Walmart page and Walmart was called "The great satan" in the first line. Why? Because they decided to sell inexpensive, yet usable goods to a mass market?

I rarely shop there, don't work there, don't own stock - but I'm glad they exist. Because they show, better than anything, the hypocracy of anti-capitalist whiners. You know the type - those who complain that they are entitled to everything the world has to offer, for free from the government.

Walmart has shown that the goverment need not provide every citizen with a DVD player. Instead, Walmart has shown the real way for every American who wants a DVD player to get one - is to make it cheaply and sell it cheap enough.

And that's really why people hate Walmart - it shows that capitalism does what utopian socialism never could.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451191145/103-48 86274-2659010?v=glance&n=283155

-Ben

When will they be getting around to the rest of the artificial insect?

In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines , futurist Ray Kurzweil ventures that the transformation of humans from flesh-and-blood to total machine bodies will start with small augmentations like this, proceeding step by step until everything original is replaced.

That in fact used to be the case.

Of the two books cited at the end of that section of the linked article, I've only read Bakan's book. Which is entertaining and informative, but is regarded by some as being a one-sided criticism of the modern corporation. As one might have guessed, it was a form of state greed that allowed the development of the limited liability deregulated company, and in this form is no older than many 120 years or so.

First we had slashvertisements, and now we have commentvertisements! Amazing, truly amazing.

This post brought to you by jrockway widgets inc. The finest supplier of imagniary objects this side of http://amazon.com/. :)

There's as fairly informative essay on work patterns I read recently.

"On the other hand, the "market" for free time hardly even exists in America. With few exceptions, employers (the sellers) don't offer the chance to trade off income gains for a shorter work day or the occasional sabbatical. They just pass on income, in the form of annual pay raises or bonuses, or, if granting increased vacation or personal days, usually do so unilaterally. Employees rarely have the chance to exercise an actual choice about how they will spend their productivity dividend. The closest substitute for a "market in leisure" is the travel and other leisure industries that advertise products to occupy, our free time. But this indirect effect has been weak, as consumers crowd increasingly expensive leisure spending into smaller periods of time."

It's taken from a book by a Harvard sociology professor, Juliet B. Schor.

I think it summarizes the weird dichotomy I see here. Some yanks just can't get enough of that 9 to 5, like it's their way of buying a stairway to heaven or something. I'd rather enjoy my time off, but if I were to live in the US, I'd have no real way of enforcing this since employers discourage less pay for more time off.

This reminds of me a book Vectors by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell where a scientist uses something like this to determine a fingerprint for every human being. His research wound up finding a link between the soul and the mind. I wonder if such a device will cause problems for any religions? At least it doesn't draw blood.

Many BrainPal(TM) users find it useful to give their BrainPal(TM) a name other than BrainPal(TM). Would you like to name your BrainPal(TM) at this time?

"Yes," I said.

Please speak the name you would like to give your BrainPal(TM).

"'Asshole,'" I said.

You have selected "Asshole,"the BrainPal wrote, and to its credit it spelled the word correctly. Be aware that many recruits have selected this name for their BrainPal(TM)...

It is kind of hard to tell, but they suggest the list price is always closer to $30. But if you look at those that aren't, then go look up the regular dvd price, they seem to be about $10 higher.

I grabbed "last samurai" because it has the biggest mark-off on the page you showed me (34%), so should be a really fair test subject.

recommended retail: $28.99
amazon price: $18.99
regular dvd price: $9.99

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E5KJDO/ref=am b_link_1119432_/102-0089251-1421717?n=130

I'm willing to bet your average retailer will be closer to that recommended retail price too. They could not give those high-def audio formats away and still they kept the prices much higher than regular cd's, what would lead you to believe this is going to be different?

I'm also very concerned to see whether or not the Aboriginal peoples [hreoc.gov.au] of Australia will be forced to carry this card.

A few points:

1) Aboriginal means "Original inhabitant." If you're going to use that term, please prefix it with "Australian" (lest we think you're talking about the Orang Asli, Samis or other aboriginal cultures.

2) Noone is being forced to carry the card (at least noone is suggesting that yet - you will just need to possess this card to access certain government provided services.

Try not to rely on slashdot summaries - they're frequently extremely misleading.

Primal Therapy is a cure for depression. However, it's a lot of work, and most people are looking for an externally administered way out.

It's possible to read the book and do what it says. But that is very scary and only someone with a strong sense of logic is able to guide himself or herself.

I managed to get a copy of the book finally, and discovered wonderful passages such as the following on page 115:

ESB [electrical stimulation of the brain -- JAB] may evoke more elaborate responses. For example, in one of our patients, electrical stimulation of the rostral part of the internal capsule produced head turning and slow displacement of the body to either side with a well-oriented and apparently normal sequence, as if the patient were looking for something. This stimulation was repeated six times on two different days with comparable results. The interesting fact was that the patient considered the evoked activity spontaneous and always offered a reasonable explanation for it. When asked, "What are you doing?" the answers were, "I am looking for my slippers," "I heard a noise," "I am restless," and "I was looking under the bed." In this case it was difficult to ascertain whether the stimulation had evoked a movement which the patient tried to justify, or if an hallucination had been elicited which subsequently induced the patient to move and to explore the surroundings.

This passage is eerily reminiscent of a passage from Richard Dawkins' "The Extended Phenotype" chapter titled "Host Phenotypes of Parasite Genes":

"Many fascinating examples of parasites manipulating the behavior of their hosts can be given. For nematomorph larvae, who need to break out of their insect hosts and get into water where they live as adults, '...a major difficulty in the parasite's life is the return to water. It is, therefore, of particular interest that the parasite appears to affect the behavior of its host, and "encourages" it to return to water. The mechanism by which this is achieved is obscure, but there are sufficient isolated reports to certify that the parasite does influence its host, and often suicidally for the host... One of the more dramatic reports describes an infected bee flying over a pool and, when about six feet over it, diving straight into the water. Immediately on impact the gordian worm burst out and swam into the water, the maimed bee being left to die' (Croll 1966)."

I managed to get a copy of the book finally, and discovered wonderful passages such as the following on page 115:

ESB [electrical stimulation of the brain -- JAB] may evoke more elaborate responses. For example, in one of our patients, electrical stimulation of the rostral part of the internal capsule produced head turning and slow displacement of the body to either side with a well-oriented and apparently normal sequence, as if the patient were looking for something. This stimulation was repeated six times on two different days with comparable results. The interesting fact was that the patient considered the evoked activity spontaneous and always offered a reasonable explanation for it. When asked, "What are you doing?" the answers were, "I am looking for my slippers," "I heard a noise," "I am restless," and "I was looking under the bed." In this case it was difficult to ascertain whether the stimulation had evoked a movement which the patient tried to justify, or if an hallucination had been elicited which subsequently induced the patient to move and to explore the surroundings.

This passage is eerily reminiscent of a passage from Richard Dawkins' "The Extended Phenotype" chapter titled "Host Phenotypes of Parasite Genes":

"Many fascinating examples of parasites manipulating the behavior of their hosts can be given. For nematomorph larvae, who need to break out of their insect hosts and get into water where they live as adults, '...a major difficulty in the parasite's life is the return to water. It is, therefore, of particular interest that the parasite appears to affect the behavior of its host, and "encourages" it to return to water. The mechanism by which this is achieved is obscure, but there are sufficient isolated reports to certify that the parasite does influence its host, and often suicidally for the host... One of the more dramatic reports describes an infected bee flying over a pool and, when about six feet over it, diving straight into the water. Immediately on impact the gordian worm burst out and swam into the water, the maimed bee being left to die' (Croll 1966)."

Time to trade in that crystal ball.

Because Amazon's prices on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks are $20-$25 High Definition DVDs

I totally agree.

I have suffered with RSI for years. I have tried just about everything, Kinesis keyboard, very good chair, good workstation...nothing was working.

The RSI was starting to get really bad, so I picked up the book "It's not carpal tunnel syndrome...". I highly recommend it, a very good read.

The book encouraged me to see a specialist so I finally went to see one; a physiotherapist and it has made a huge difference.

My problem had nothing to do with carpal tunnel. I used to bike race (bicycle) and had been in several pretty bad crashes: the problems with my wrists originate from neck injuries. So after a number of intramuscular stimulation sessions (western acupuncture) and months of core-strength training, my problem has pretty much disappeared. Improved posture has also made a big difference.

I also changed my sleeping habits, and I believe that has also made a difference. I use a pretty thick pillow, and sleep mostly on my back, sometimes on my side. It was difficult to adjust, but I feel much better in the mornings, and seem to have a deeper sleep.

I will need to do the core strength training for the remainder of my career, but it is well worth it.

Moral of the story: see a professional!.

You can buy the game here: Kingdom Hearts 2. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

You can buy the game here: Kingdom Hearts 2. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Because the rest of the world isn't South Korea, and as a result the rest of the world can't support an industry dedicated to watching people play video games? I mean, even The Wizard isn't available on DVD in the USA (though it was released on DVD in Germany)

Save yourself $10.18 by buying the book here: Retro Gaming Hacks : Tips & Tools for Playing the Classics. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $10.18 by buying the book here: Retro Gaming Hacks : Tips & Tools for Playing the Classics. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Yep, I can agree to this. I'm 30 and in my mid-20's I started getting fatigued and sore forearms (and the top too) after long hours at the keyboard.

After reading around, I decided to change the setup of my desk and chair, and now have my arms comfortably at 90 degrees, instead of having my arms rest against the edge of the desk.

I also bought a wireless
notebook mouse, the only Microsoft product I've ever bought. Perfect for my small hands and lets me place the mouse where my arms are. Previously, I made the mistake of moving my hand to where the mouse was...nooo..the mouse should be where your hand is naturally.

Now I have no more problems. Bottom line - RSI and carpal tunnel are not a problem, no matter how long you code for...IF you are in a natural position.

Excellent exercises for RSI suffers organized by where it hurts. Logical, no? Also contains preventative exercises. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Other Repetitive Stress Injuries http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572240393/sr=8-1 /qid=1146067332/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-5383978-0991125?_ encoding=UTF8/

Internet2.

Why?

Why not?

"Dude where is the convention?"

This year it's in Vegas.

Seriously, it's a convention, not a standard, as practiced by the majority of web browsers and probably the majority of web sites. Of late it's been deconstructed to be just colored text within plain text, or underlined text, but blue/underlined is still a convention. Just like making your web site's logo also a link back to the home page is a convention.

Want a list of conventions and stats? See: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073571102X

Perhaps I'm getting too old|bitter, but this seems like a dumb joke. Essentially 3 grad students in a relevent field submit a bogus, although somewhat cleverly* generated paper. Frankly, they got accepted because their paper said MIT EECS, not because their program was so great. Sure, I suppose it says a lot about academia. Frankly, if anything, it should be an eye-opening look at the 'Publish or Perish' mania that these kids are walking into. *I'm impressed in the same way I impressed when a 12 year old script kiddie writes some malicious VBA code and passes it off as a virus. Incidentally, Claude Shannon published a series of papers on such work over 50 years ago. You can find a description of his work, and more, John Pierce's great pop-sci book "An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise". Plus, it's a Dover book -- so it's cheap!

My source is this book. As for Wikipedia, it isn't any more authoritative than a random article on Slashdot. In neither case should you assume that the material has been fact-checked or comes from a reliable source. I'll leave updates of Wikipedia to somebody who doesn't think that the idea of a "open encylopedia" is laughable.

The latter notion reminds me of the book Bait and Switch: (The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream) by Barbara Ehrenreich. In it, she fluffs up her resume and goes searching for work that pays a minimum of $50,000 with benefits. She attends workshops, seminars, coaching clinics, and other things to improve her likelihood of finding work. Months later, she fails to reach this goal and in turns calls the American Dream a pointless pursuit. I realized this is not true, but that she was just too damn picky. Nobody can realistically expect a job paying $50,000 annually without qualified skills and plenty of experience.

Is this a reality of American developers? Perhaps indicative of why fewer students graduate with CS because they are not as qualified as they could be if they graduated in other disciplines?

-Eric

Just wait until they discover the historical documents!

Well, I was never all that into IF originally; though I enjoyed it, I was never obsessively interested in it. Aside from Hitchhikers, obviously ;-)

But I do find books about computer industry history particularly interesting; one I bought and read at about the same time as the Montfort book was "The Soul Of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. Very interesting, though a little depressing given that the company he wrote and enthused about (Data General) is one I'd barely even heard of. To bring this vaguely back on topic, there's a great description in there of the author's first encounter with Adventure. Very well written and I commend it to you.

and an all new system architecture that delivers up to five
times the performance of the PowerBook(R) G4

Up to 5 times faster for many operations, but substatially slower for legacy software & software that relies on altivec.

features a MagSafe(TM) Power Adapter, invented by Apple especially for mobile users.

For safer operation, the magnetic cord easily detaches from the fryer if accidentally pulled.

features a MagSafe(TM) Power Adapter, adapted from others inventions by Apple especially for mobile users.

I recently read "Twisty Little Passages" ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134365/ ) by Nick Montfort which despite its horribly self-consciously academic approach (it's all about developing a "theory" of IF for lit. crit. purposes) still has some interesting sections about the history of IF and comparing the various approaches to the field against each other.

It also introduced me to my favourite work of IF, "For a change" by Dan Schmidt, which is really proof that the genre has more to offer than you might have expected. He's a genius, and it's beautiful.

Give it a go online here: http://paperstack.com/for_a_change/ (requires Java) or download the ZCode files from Dan's site: http://www.dfan.org/IF/

Yeah, remember what I said. "I voted for a third party". I'm sorry, but Kerry rubbed me the wrong way. 'Everything I object to about Bush, Kerry's worse'. I automatically assume that politicians lie, but the question is how much?

Okay, name me some of Kerry's flaws that aren't shared by Bush to a greater degree.

I think that it's they know how to campaign for democrat votes, but not for moderate/republican votes. Thus, they say and take positions that tend to turn off the moderates.

Except that the Democratic party today is a very conservative party. The Dems today are more conservative than the GOP was 30 years ago, before the God-gun nut-uber capitalist jihad was assembled. Which should tell you something about where the GOP is these days. So not only do the Dems stances match up much better with moderates, they also match up better with most Republican voters as well. See What's the matter with Kansas for examples.

And before you think that I'm a tool of the republican party, I'll give a quick rundown on my positions:
1: Anti-gun control

Ah yes. This reminds me of a single issue voter I knew of around the time of the election, who delcared he would not vote for Kerry because he would support gun control. I pointed out that Bush also supported gun control, when he said he would resign the assualt weapons ban. He went ahead and voted for Bush anyway, as opposed to the Libertarian candidate, for example. It's awsome when principles turn out to be an excuse.

And for teaching a course on Compilers, I used the now-classic http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201100886/sr=8-1 /qid=1145828128/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6472017-6203054?_ encoding=UTF8dragon book. The advertisement said that the new edition was revised, but not in the print copy; the new chapters were available online as an electronic book for anyone who purchases the book. The additional cost for this e-book was about $40 (not optional). To my horrid disappointment, when I went online (much later, after I started teaching the class), I found that the digital copy could only be viewed with some Macromedia-Flash like software on the browser, which would only allow you to view it page by page, no search, and no printing or saving the entire file either locally. There were no options to increase the font sizes for viewing the document comfortably either. I felt sorry for my students and apologized to them, and after the semester gets over, am planning to write to the authors of the text book to look into the matter.

One of my profs was writing his own book. We got to beta test the book, so we got early copies from the photocopy centre. I think for the semester it ended up around $CDN 30. Which is pretty good considering the price that the book is selling for now. He even gave prizes at the end of the semester for students who found the most mistakes.

First I have to plug the Hofstadter books Godel, Escher, Bach, and to a lesser extent, Metamagical Themas. These books are as close to hard science as you're going to get talking about conciousness. Anyone with any interest in these topics really owes it to themselves to read these (sometimes challenging) books.

Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly. And as a creative emotional person I didn't want that to be true. But after digging as far as I could, in I've come to peace with the idea that reductionism will not reveal the man behind the curtain, so to speak. Maybe I'll be proved wrong someday, but to me, loosely speaking, the combinations of uncertainty, incompleteness, chaos, and feedback effects result in the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. I'm not saying that there's some magical soul that exists outside our physical selfs, but rather that there is some higher level network effect in complex systems such as our brain where something exists on top of the physical parts, is wholly made from them, but is only loosely determined by them. That is the "I" to me.

Cheers.

First I have to plug the Hofstadter books Godel, Escher, Bach, and to a lesser extent, Metamagical Themas. These books are as close to hard science as you're going to get talking about conciousness. Anyone with any interest in these topics really owes it to themselves to read these (sometimes challenging) books.

Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly. And as a creative emotional person I didn't want that to be true. But after digging as far as I could, in I've come to peace with the idea that reductionism will not reveal the man behind the curtain, so to speak. Maybe I'll be proved wrong someday, but to me, loosely speaking, the combinations of uncertainty, incompleteness, chaos, and feedback effects result in the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. I'm not saying that there's some magical soul that exists outside our physical selfs, but rather that there is some higher level network effect in complex systems such as our brain where something exists on top of the physical parts, is wholly made from them, but is only loosely determined by them. That is the "I" to me.

Cheers.

A very interesting book I read about the ability of people to choose -- and shape -- their behaviors is discussed in the book "The Mind and the Brain : Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force" by Jeffrey Schwartz. Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060393556/002-24 45071-9680866?v=glance&n=283155

A very very interesting read, based on Schwartz's own research on OCD patients. Normally one would argue these people have malfucntioning brain areas, and need medication, but Dr. Schwartz's studies have shown that the patients were able to change their behaviors consciously, and strikingly, re-wire their brains to reflect this new behavior. The other interesting part was Schwartz's explanation of how the patients came to rewire their brain with their conscious effort. It turns out (if he and his friends are correct) that quantum mechanics plays a role: consciousness acting as observers, we are able to collapse waveforms of quantum states of particles in our brains into single states. Parts of it were over my head, but inspiring nevertheless. If he is right, the implications are awesome.

Here's what a monitor should look like.

"The challenge in IT is that you need to be nimble with your skills independent of your employer."

Just to elaborate, you need to be nimble with your skills independent of your employer, no matter what job or industry you're in. See: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0977100200

Second, you need to realize that in all likelyhood, you don't have just an IT job. What you have is an IT job in telcom, or manufacturing, on insurance, or service. You need to keep a weather eye open for problems and opportunities in your sector and react accordingly. Too many at a company see people laid off, see their industry and stock pricde decline, see more people laid off, hear rumors, and then are suprised when THEY are laid off. Duh.

Third, find a job you're skilled at and enjoy doing. I know lots of developers who treat it as a job, don't enjoy it, run home when the clock hits five, and as such fail to keep up with trends and skills. And again, are suprised when they are the ones in the unemployment line.

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