Absolutely. At some point in my very early education, my reading level was not where it should have been. My mom made me realize that the answers to all of my questions about the world were right there in the encyclopedia (at least the kid-size questions!) - all I had to do was pick it up and read. I consequently spent an entire summer devouring those books, and skipped about three grades ahead in reading ability, learning a ton in the process.
It became frustrating, however, when my understanding and need for more detailed knowledge outstripped what the encyclopedia offered me. I wanted the gory details! The technical bits! I then discovered the central library. Oh, the joys! And especially the published patents. I had a major ah-ha moment when I discovered I could look on the back of any gizmo I had, write down the patent numbers cited there, and go look up *exact directions on how to build it* in the patent filings. For a young hacker and tinkerer, this was a freeking gold mine!
I think, even though electronic references can offer faster and wider resources, having physical books in the house would still today be good for the kids. They can discover new things with more depth, and less distractions. The old editions of any reference books are fascinating as well, for discovering lost technical details and techniques, getting perspective on older ways of thinking, and seeing just how far our understanding has changed over time.
I've also recently acquired a copy of Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, including a copy of the Syntopicon. Why they don't publish this today is beyond me - it's an incredible achievement (especially for the time it was done) and there's nothing else quite like it that I've found. If you don't know what it is, go look it up and snag a copy. You'll be happy you did, if you do any kind of research or writing or even thinking on the grand topics of life.
We used DocBook to write over 500 pages of process documentation for people to follow. After an initial learning curve with it, it was very easy to code up tagged text. Then it was convenient for it to translate into whatever format we needed, HTML, PDF, etc. That was the easy part. And I agree with other people here - keep it simple.
The hard part is getting anyone to actually read it and use it. Practically nobody did, and less so the further down the skill chain you went. What did work for us was holding regular in-service training sessions with everyone, covering one topic per week, and eventually getting everyone up to speed. We used the documentation as handouts, printing the relevant sections for them.
Popularity of a site and value of its content are not the same thing. While those sites may very well be popular, due to having plenty of mind-share, their content is by no means exclusive or essential. It's a rare day that I access any of the sites you mentioned, and yet I get the same or equivalent information eslewhere every day. If one of the sites I use becomes unavailable, for whatever reason, I'll simply find another, and that is why ESPN's strategy will fail them in the long run.
As you say, many electrical devices that don't draw a lot of power while in use can draw a lot of power at startup (cranking is I think the technical name)
Microsoft sure missed the boat on this one - a chipped xbox with Xbox Media Center blows away any HTPC setup I've ever seen. Plays every format, runs happily on your network, simple to use, great interface....
We use over 64 Nforce2 boards at CyberJocks, and have NEVER had a SINGLE problem with them after one year of nearly continuous operation. W2k.
However, on a particular revision of the board we used (asus), linux with ACPI support got really screwy. Turned it off and bing it worked like a champ again. FYI.
The only effective hardware tests I've used in the ten years I've been supporting all kinds of hardware and software have been SpinRite and Memtest86. Between these two, I can check for the most insidious and hard-to-detect hardware problems; i.e. flakey hard drives and RAM. A cheap $20 POST card is highly useful for dead machines. You don't need all the extra features the Microscope card gives you unless you are designing motherboards or doing some other such serious work. No software will replace your own experience and ability to know where a problem is forming based on the specific failure of the machine. All the rest of the so-called diagnostic software is more or less useless from a practical perspective, aside from testing serial ports with loopback plugs and printing cute certification reports for anal customers.
This is detective work. You have to suss out the exact problem based on clues left by the failure of the system. Learn how the hardware works, and it's easier than you think.
Technically though, wouldn't the nutrients have to be certified kosher for some people? How do people define what is food and what is not, and how then do they apply religious principles to that?
I would think that a good measure for success in a free software development project would be moreso how well the team was coordinated and what was actually completed. Free software isn't usually created for financial reasons, so using money as a metric seems irrelevant.
Well, the artificial flavoring industry has a basic palette of flavors that you could use, and I would assume that as the technology got more complex you could have more nozzles connected to more flavor components.
When they make artificial orange flavor for example, they take oranges and break them down into their constituent molecules, then smell-test (smell is the larger part of flavor sensing) them until they find the single one that is the most orange-like. That becomes artificial orange flavor, and can be synthesized by the chemists.
So, you have some nozzles that spray out your container material, and others that fill it with "orange juice". Trouble is, it would take quite a while, and probably not be the healthiest thing for ya. Still cool.
If people would educate themselves about and follow ESD safety procedures for handling components, things would be a lot better than they currently are. Don't blame the manufacturers.
Ok, I know the mirror thing won't work for defense against lasers, but how about the thermal tiles they use on the space shuttle? Those little buggers are so very not thermally conductive, wouldn't they make an effective shield against a laser weapon?
Granted, several inches of thermal tiles may not be practical on an artillery warhead, but certainly would be on tanks and the like.
Exactly! That was some of the information we went over in the training class for it. Most of the damage only _weakens_ components, and causes them to fail in, say, six months instead of six years.
Same thing is true with hard drives, which people don't realize are super-delicate. If you drop a drive more than an inch or two, the heads slap the platters and cause tiny scratches and dust to be relased. The drive will test fine and work fine for a while, but will fail with dead sectors far sooner than a properly handled drive.
I really wish the rest of our employees could have gone to this training class. They all think of me as the ESD Nazi because I'm always on their backs about using their wristbands and component handling. To them, it's the rumored unseen threat of the ESD monster; to me, it's the real threat of something I've *seen*.
A demonstration by an ESD trainer is a great way to show people. When they see on a meter that they generate seven hundred volts of charge on their body by simply lifting their foot, it hits home. Our training was by a 3M guy, hosted by Contact East. I'd recommend it to anyone; he was a fantastic presenter.
This is a really important consideration. Most people don't even know how sensitive modern electronics are to ESD. Heck, you don't even have to TOUCH something to fry it these days, the electric field itself can be strong enough to zap cmos devices.
Taking a training class on ESD control was a real eye-opener; seeing it demonstrated before my eyes drove home the point that ESD safety precautions are CRITICAL when working on stuff.
Since taking that class, we have implemented an ANSI 20.20 compliant service bay for PC hardware, and requested that all our distributors ship us parts manufacturer-sealed (they used to 'test' motherboards before they sent them to us). We have reduced our number of returns from customers immensely since then.
Interesting idea, having "pre-transformed" power in a house. A low-voltage power infrastructure. It makes sooo much more sense since there are so many low-power devices in use in the home these days. 120vac at 60hz was originally designed to easily run big motors and heating elements, not cmos chips.
I think he means the plug that goes into the AC power outlet itself. They are pretty big and chunky. Personally, I've always thought the plugs used in the US (edison plugs) are pretty crummy in design. Until the fortuitous addition of a bigass ground pin, they always fall out of the damn outlet, or pop out halfway to let things short out. There are sooooo many better designs, but shit, the installed base is big big big.
Reply to the "stalker" comment in article
on
Meet the Spammers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I find slackware to be a refreshing distro. Personally, I will sacrifice speed and features any day for reliability and flexibility, which slack provides quite well. It is straightforward, clean, and stable. Seems very well thought out overall.
There seems to be this big push to make linux the new desktop of choice for novice users. That's a good goal, but realize that by making something easy, you give up a lot of flexibility and simplicity. Remember, it's taking something that is astronomically complex like a computer, and making it 'one-click easy' for the non-techies out there. It will have to bloat, and it will have to become unwieldy. It's just the nature of the beast. There will always be a need for small, stable, and flexible distros like slack, for those that need a reliable tool to get a job done. Much praise to slack!
"But now with SO MANY shared libs and other dependencies, it gets to be a major pain in the ass to get one package then have to go get 15 other libs to get it to work. RPM solves all that, and I've come to accept binary distributions as making sense"
I've had the opposite experience, where the RPMs wouldn't install because the installer bitched about the wrong versions of a gajillion different libraries, but the./make version would compile and run without problems on the old crusty libraries that came with slack. I'm sure that there are plenty of apps out there that won't work well this way, but on a 56k dialup, I don't want to download fifty megs of libraries and spend three days integrating them into the system just to run a simple app.
So personally, I've sworn off RPMs and I go straight to the tarballs. I also like having the source around anyhow, because I like to tinker with it now and then.
They use the same technology in the latest atomic clocks at NIST. Pretty cool stuff, they have a video there to check out that shows how the lasers make a ball of supercooled cesium and fling it up in the air to make a clock. Check it out.
Where I work we employ about 16 people, most of whom are under 21 years old. They are all computer techs of some kind. While we have no problem listening to what they have to say, and their work is fine, the one issue that we have observed is a distinct lack maturity, a sense of responsibility (to one's self as well as the business), and the wisdom that comes with real business experience. While the youthful energy is a great thing to have in our office, it gets frustrating at times having to deal with so many people who in so many ways haven't grown up yet (hell, they haven't even moved out of their parents' houses yet) and just don't know what the 'real world' is like, or how to operate in it effectively.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think it sucks big time when the old folks don't listen to the young for no reason other than a prejudgement on the youth. But there may be good reasons sometimes to take what is said and analyze it without simply accepting it. I feel this should be done in a constructive way with constructive feedback given to the young individual, so growth and learning can be facilitated. I think that there are a lot of people though who would rather ignore or blow off the young opinions and thoughts instead of work with them and glean value from them. Unfortunate.
I think the only way around it, for the young people, is to demonstrate that which is being said. Actions speak way louder than words, especially in business, where words are disposable and not trusted.
good and bad (and just plain ugly)
on
Juno And Privacy
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· Score: 1
Well, on one hand, I don't like the idea of Juno sortof 'sneaking' this up on users. Yeah yeah, they put it in the EULA, but who the fuck reads those anyhow? (if you haven't read one, I suggest you do, just any one, it's wacked)
But on the other hand, it's nice to see all this unused CPU time going to do SOMETHING. I don't like, on principle, idling computer hardware of any kind. It's a massively wasted resource, and things like what Juno is doing that will 'sneak' it onto the computers of the uninitiated masses who don't know that distributed.net exists will help to exploit that resource.
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
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· Score: 1
The process described in the article sounds a LOT like conventional hologram creation, with the two interfering beams. It makes me wonder if they aren't just making a holographic impression on the storage gas, perhaps on the quantum level or something... I don't know. But it doesn't sound like the original light/energy that was put in is actually coming out. I look forward to the full report when it is published. This is fascinating shit!
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. At some point in my very early education, my reading level was not where it should have been. My mom made me realize that the answers to all of my questions about the world were right there in the encyclopedia (at least the kid-size questions!) - all I had to do was pick it up and read. I consequently spent an entire summer devouring those books, and skipped about three grades ahead in reading ability, learning a ton in the process.
It became frustrating, however, when my understanding and need for more detailed knowledge outstripped what the encyclopedia offered me. I wanted the gory details! The technical bits! I then discovered the central library. Oh, the joys! And especially the published patents. I had a major ah-ha moment when I discovered I could look on the back of any gizmo I had, write down the patent numbers cited there, and go look up *exact directions on how to build it* in the patent filings. For a young hacker and tinkerer, this was a freeking gold mine!
I think, even though electronic references can offer faster and wider resources, having physical books in the house would still today be good for the kids. They can discover new things with more depth, and less distractions. The old editions of any reference books are fascinating as well, for discovering lost technical details and techniques, getting perspective on older ways of thinking, and seeing just how far our understanding has changed over time.
I've also recently acquired a copy of Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, including a copy of the Syntopicon. Why they don't publish this today is beyond me - it's an incredible achievement (especially for the time it was done) and there's nothing else quite like it that I've found. If you don't know what it is, go look it up and snag a copy. You'll be happy you did, if you do any kind of research or writing or even thinking on the grand topics of life.
We used DocBook to write over 500 pages of process documentation for people to follow. After an initial learning curve with it, it was very easy to code up tagged text. Then it was convenient for it to translate into whatever format we needed, HTML, PDF, etc. That was the easy part. And I agree with other people here - keep it simple.
The hard part is getting anyone to actually read it and use it. Practically nobody did, and less so the further down the skill chain you went. What did work for us was holding regular in-service training sessions with everyone, covering one topic per week, and eventually getting everyone up to speed. We used the documentation as handouts, printing the relevant sections for them.
Popularity of a site and value of its content are not the same thing. While those sites may very well be popular, due to having plenty of mind-share, their content is by no means exclusive or essential. It's a rare day that I access any of the sites you mentioned, and yet I get the same or equivalent information eslewhere every day. If one of the sites I use becomes unavailable, for whatever reason, I'll simply find another, and that is why ESPN's strategy will fail them in the long run.
As you say, many electrical devices that don't draw a lot of power while in use can draw a lot of power at startup (cranking is I think the technical name)
I've seen it called "Inrush Current"
Microsoft sure missed the boat on this one - a chipped xbox with Xbox Media Center blows away any HTPC setup I've ever seen. Plays every format, runs happily on your network, simple to use, great interface....
We use over 64 Nforce2 boards at CyberJocks, and have NEVER had a SINGLE problem with them after one year of nearly continuous operation. W2k.
However, on a particular revision of the board we used (asus), linux with ACPI support got really screwy. Turned it off and bing it worked like a champ again. FYI.
The only effective hardware tests I've used in the ten years I've been supporting all kinds of hardware and software have been SpinRite and Memtest86. Between these two, I can check for the most insidious and hard-to-detect hardware problems; i.e. flakey hard drives and RAM. A cheap $20 POST card is highly useful for dead machines. You don't need all the extra features the Microscope card gives you unless you are designing motherboards or doing some other such serious work. No software will replace your own experience and ability to know where a problem is forming based on the specific failure of the machine. All the rest of the so-called diagnostic software is more or less useless from a practical perspective, aside from testing serial ports with loopback plugs and printing cute certification reports for anal customers. This is detective work. You have to suss out the exact problem based on clues left by the failure of the system. Learn how the hardware works, and it's easier than you think.
we always considered ourselves Digital Jizz Moppers when we had to interact with end users...
Technically though, wouldn't the nutrients have to be certified kosher for some people? How do people define what is food and what is not, and how then do they apply religious principles to that?
Anyone out there have an idea?
I would think that a good measure for success in a free software development project would be moreso how well the team was coordinated and what was actually completed. Free software isn't usually created for financial reasons, so using money as a metric seems irrelevant.
Well, the artificial flavoring industry has a basic palette of flavors that you could use, and I would assume that as the technology got more complex you could have more nozzles connected to more flavor components.
When they make artificial orange flavor for example, they take oranges and break them down into their constituent molecules, then smell-test (smell is the larger part of flavor sensing) them until they find the single one that is the most orange-like. That becomes artificial orange flavor, and can be synthesized by the chemists.
So, you have some nozzles that spray out your container material, and others that fill it with "orange juice". Trouble is, it would take quite a while, and probably not be the healthiest thing for ya. Still cool.
If people would educate themselves about and follow ESD safety procedures for handling components, things would be a lot better than they currently are. Don't blame the manufacturers.
Ok, I know the mirror thing won't work for defense against lasers, but how about the thermal tiles they use on the space shuttle? Those little buggers are so very not thermally conductive, wouldn't they make an effective shield against a laser weapon?
Granted, several inches of thermal tiles may not be practical on an artillery warhead, but certainly would be on tanks and the like.
Exactly! That was some of the information we went over in the training class for it. Most of the damage only _weakens_ components, and causes them to fail in, say, six months instead of six years.
Same thing is true with hard drives, which people don't realize are super-delicate. If you drop a drive more than an inch or two, the heads slap the platters and cause tiny scratches and dust to be relased. The drive will test fine and work fine for a while, but will fail with dead sectors far sooner than a properly handled drive.
I really wish the rest of our employees could have gone to this training class. They all think of me as the ESD Nazi because I'm always on their backs about using their wristbands and component handling. To them, it's the rumored unseen threat of the ESD monster; to me, it's the real threat of something I've *seen*.
A demonstration by an ESD trainer is a great way to show people. When they see on a meter that they generate seven hundred volts of charge on their body by simply lifting their foot, it hits home. Our training was by a 3M guy, hosted by Contact East. I'd recommend it to anyone; he was a fantastic presenter.
This is a really important consideration. Most people don't even know how sensitive modern electronics are to ESD. Heck, you don't even have to TOUCH something to fry it these days, the electric field itself can be strong enough to zap cmos devices.
Taking a training class on ESD control was a real eye-opener; seeing it demonstrated before my eyes drove home the point that ESD safety precautions are CRITICAL when working on stuff.
Since taking that class, we have implemented an ANSI 20.20 compliant service bay for PC hardware, and requested that all our distributors ship us parts manufacturer-sealed (they used to 'test' motherboards before they sent them to us). We have reduced our number of returns from customers immensely since then.
Why are they little *green* men? Why not blue? Where did that start?
Interesting idea, having "pre-transformed" power in a house. A low-voltage power infrastructure. It makes sooo much more sense since there are so many low-power devices in use in the home these days. 120vac at 60hz was originally designed to easily run big motors and heating elements, not cmos chips.
I think he means the plug that goes into the AC power outlet itself. They are pretty big and chunky. Personally, I've always thought the plugs used in the US (edison plugs) are pretty crummy in design. Until the fortuitous addition of a bigass ground pin, they always fall out of the damn outlet, or pop out halfway to let things short out. There are sooooo many better designs, but shit, the installed base is big big big.
can be found at http://www.toledocybercafe.com/ivtg/ Check yer facts, reporters!
I find slackware to be a refreshing distro. Personally, I will sacrifice speed and features any day for reliability and flexibility, which slack provides quite well. It is straightforward, clean, and stable. Seems very well thought out overall.
There seems to be this big push to make linux the new desktop of choice for novice users. That's a good goal, but realize that by making something easy, you give up a lot of flexibility and simplicity. Remember, it's taking something that is astronomically complex like a computer, and making it 'one-click easy' for the non-techies out there. It will have to bloat, and it will have to become unwieldy. It's just the nature of the beast. There will always be a need for small, stable, and flexible distros like slack, for those that need a reliable tool to get a job done. Much praise to slack!
"But now with SO MANY shared libs and other dependencies, it gets to be a major pain in the ass to get one package then have to go get 15 other libs to get it to work. RPM solves all that, and I've come to accept binary distributions as making sense"
./make version would compile and run without problems on the old crusty libraries that came with slack. I'm sure that there are plenty of apps out there that won't work well this way, but on a 56k dialup, I don't want to download fifty megs of libraries and spend three days integrating them into the system just to run a simple app.
I've had the opposite experience, where the RPMs wouldn't install because the installer bitched about the wrong versions of a gajillion different libraries, but the
So personally, I've sworn off RPMs and I go straight to the tarballs. I also like having the source around anyhow, because I like to tinker with it now and then.
They use the same technology in the latest atomic clocks at NIST. Pretty cool stuff, they have a video there to check out that shows how the lasers make a ball of supercooled cesium and fling it up in the air to make a clock. Check it out.
Where I work we employ about 16 people, most of whom are under 21 years old. They are all computer techs of some kind. While we have no problem listening to what they have to say, and their work is fine, the one issue that we have observed is a distinct lack maturity, a sense of responsibility (to one's self as well as the business), and the wisdom that comes with real business experience. While the youthful energy is a great thing to have in our office, it gets frustrating at times having to deal with so many people who in so many ways haven't grown up yet (hell, they haven't even moved out of their parents' houses yet) and just don't know what the 'real world' is like, or how to operate in it effectively.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think it sucks big time when the old folks don't listen to the young for no reason other than a prejudgement on the youth. But there may be good reasons sometimes to take what is said and analyze it without simply accepting it. I feel this should be done in a constructive way with constructive feedback given to the young individual, so growth and learning can be facilitated. I think that there are a lot of people though who would rather ignore or blow off the young opinions and thoughts instead of work with them and glean value from them. Unfortunate.
I think the only way around it, for the young people, is to demonstrate that which is being said. Actions speak way louder than words, especially in business, where words are disposable and not trusted.
Well, on one hand, I don't like the idea of Juno sortof 'sneaking' this up on users. Yeah yeah, they put it in the EULA, but who the fuck reads those anyhow? (if you haven't read one, I suggest you do, just any one, it's wacked) But on the other hand, it's nice to see all this unused CPU time going to do SOMETHING. I don't like, on principle, idling computer hardware of any kind. It's a massively wasted resource, and things like what Juno is doing that will 'sneak' it onto the computers of the uninitiated masses who don't know that distributed.net exists will help to exploit that resource.
The process described in the article sounds a LOT like conventional hologram creation, with the two interfering beams. It makes me wonder if they aren't just making a holographic impression on the storage gas, perhaps on the quantum level or something... I don't know. But it doesn't sound like the original light/energy that was put in is actually coming out. I look forward to the full report when it is published. This is fascinating shit!