My advisor has a 24" cinema display set to 1024x768 resolution. It makes me cry each time I see it.
I'm going to be disposing of a 21" CRT as soon as I get around to lugging it down the stairs (assuming that I don't trip and break my neck doing it). Giving it to a customer with a 60+ year old user with vision issues. She wants a bigger picture, so 1024x768 is what she uses since it's the minimum for an application; it looks like crap on the LCD she's using now. I suspect that she'll be very pleased with the improvement in picture quality. When I offered it to these folks the response was "What do you want for it?"
Just as a side note, while it's sometimes not possible to kill suspicious processes with Process Explorer (or they get automatically relaunched by another piece of software - especially if they were installed as a Windows service) you can also "Suspend" processes allowing you time to deal with other parts of the cleanup.
Open Source software (including Linux) is kind of like those free tomatoes. Your neighbor grows them for his own use, but ends up with more than he can use so he offers them to other people. With open source software, your neighbor (and many other people around the world) work on it for their own reasons, and rather than hoarding what they've done they offer it to other people.
The reasons for people to work on open source software are many:
some are students working to learn programming;
some work for companies that sell support and services - they give away the software, but if you want their staff to answer your questions on the phone then you have to pay them for their time;
many are using the software already but found that it doesn't do something they want so they add that feature;
many work on open source software because they truly love to work on software - both as a job and as a hobby.
Apparently they got in a bit of trouble over this - not for instituting the checklists, but for having the gall to track results to see how effective they were. Because of that, it basically becomes an experiment and you have to get all sorts of permissions.
And some commentary from the University of Houston Law Center: here
Note that all of this is actually a bit dated - the original New Yorker article was from December, 2007 and the followups that I saw were from January, 2008. I don't know what's happened with it since then; I suspect that checklists have been implemented in some hospitals but that nobody is sharing results.
More expensive I'm sure, but Digiboard has some nice stuff. Generally very solid drivers (from what I've experienced), real documentation in English, etc.
A PortServer TS/16 runs approximately $1000 new and provides 16 serial ports that can be configured in any of a variety of ways.
A requirement for on-disk encryption could actually be a real problem for many medical practices, because an astonishing number are still using slightly-updated versions of practice management software from the early- to mid-90's on systems like SCO's OpenServer 5.0.x. I support a fair number of those practices.
We also have one practice running a dedicated system for ophthalmologists that is so old it doesn't understand networks. Users are connected via serial port expansion units. Makes it a pain when they have multiple sites and the telco says "We're dropping support for those 56k dedicated lines you've been using for 15 years."
Don't trust your inputs. Sanity-check what you get, particularly if you're getting it from users but even from your database. Don't assume that your users will make stupid mistakes, assume that your users will make stupid malicious mistakes.
Trim whitespace. If you don't, something else will and someday your program will be comparing "This " and "This" and giving unexpected results.
When you test for errors, do something significant.
The best reason to write good (documented, understandable) code is so you don't have to look at it again. This doesn't mean that looking at it is bad, but you don't want to be pulled off projects in the future because "You wrote it and none of us understand it, so we need you to make these few little changes."
Sneak in a "Credits" Easter Egg. If you find yourself wanting to be sure your name doesn't appear on that egg, it's a good indication that you should've picked up major problems long ago. See also "Cordwainer Bird" and "Alan Smithee"
I've not used it cross-platform (the creator does) but you might want to take a look at Stani's Python Editor. Releases aren't that frequent, but the repository is updated more often and generally seems stable.
There's an out of date project on Sourceforge; development moved to SPE Project Page here.
Sure someday it might be used for something significant, but I just registered it as an amusing pun when.us became available (and no, it was not del.icio.us, but it was an English word ending in us).
I'd been paying the registration fees on it for a few years but had never used it as more than a testing page. Someone else was interested and asked politely, I sat on it for a while but when the registration was coming due I decided it wasn't worth the $8 bucks to me to hang on to it so I transferred it over to him.
If the law requires that the location be inspected and certified, demand that they do so. If they refuse to inspect, document everything. If they inspect but refuse to certify, demand that they document what the failures are, etc.
Give the local board/council/whatever an opportunity to rectify the situation by showing up with all of your materials. Point out that the law makes coffeemakers, household solvents, etc. require inspections, and suggest that they'd better be budgeting to hire additional inspectors to handle every home in the town starting, oh, next week.
If they refuse to do anything about the situation, get your friends and neighbors into the act.
I got ticketed in a podunk little speed trap of a town in Arkansas, with a GPS sitting on the dash at the time. I'm pretty sure that when the officer saw the GPS he lowered what he was going to be ticketing me for. I thought about trying to fight it, but it just wasn't worth it - it would've been 16+ hours in the car to get there & back, a motel in the area, etc. all to fight a $75 or so ticket using a GPS tracklog as evidence. Throw in the local judge, local cops, etc. and it would've been a waste.
Note that the WRT54G-TM (T-Mobile branded) routers are basically the same thing as the GL, though I don't believe you'll be able to reflash with other firmware (yet) without some hardware hacking.
Switching to a Blackberry stopped it. For simple messages, even as a low-volume text message user I could type on the keypad with one hand and without looking at it - predictive text was usually correct, and when it wasn't I could make corrections at a stoplight before actually sending. Of course, the fact that I can spell helped with the predictive text bit.
Doing the same thing on the "full" keyboard on the Blackberry? No thanks. It can be faster to enter things on, but would be very hazardous to use while actually driving.
Any languages being used could easily have used sounds that are not a part of most languages currently in use. I believe the key sounds differ between most western languages and many Asian languages, and then you get the more exotic sounds like click consonants.
A more limited vocal range does not necessarily imply more limited communication abilities. If it did, dolphins might be justified in deciding that we bipeds are clearly incapable of intelligent communication.
I find it amusing that he starts out with differences in menu/toolbar placement and comparisons to Windows; I long ago moved my Windows taskbar to the top of the screen - I'm remoted into other systems many times a day, and it's convenient to not have to worry about overlapping on my laptop.
For a related reason, I prefer KDE on my desktop system because of its bottom bar - I have a dual stacked monitor setup, and I'd rather not have to go 2000 pixels up just to get to menus. I tend to throw more stuff like "tail -f whatever" onto that upper monitor.
A significant amount of the phishing email that I get seems to have IP addresses rather than domain names. I use OpenDNS, but it's not going to do squat about that.
For quite a while AT&T has offered access to their network to their DSL customers for $2.99/month, but recently they announced that they were dropping that to "free for our DSL customers." So, in addition to McD's, Barnes & Noble and some other locations, you can now get effectively free access at Starbucks as well.
Handy, that.
If I was still paying $20/month to T-Mobile this'd sure be the end of it. What's left in their network besides Borders bookstores?
I'm not actually using it yet, but two quotes from the "System Encryption" page of the manual: <blockquote>TrueCrypt can on-the-fly encrypt a system partition or entire system drive, i.e. a partition or drive where Windows is installed and from which it boots (a TrueCrypt-encrypted system drive may also contain non-system partitions, which are encrypted as well).</blockquote>
<blockquote>Note that TrueCrypt can encrypt an existing unencrypted system partition/drive in-place while the operating system is running (while the system is being encrypted, you can use your computer as usual without any restrictions). Likewise, a TrueCrypt-encrypted system partition/drive can be decrypted in-place while the operating system is running. You can interrupt the process of encryption or decryption anytime, leave the partition/drive partially unencrypted, restart or shut down the computer, and then resume the process, which will continue from the point it was stopped.</blockquote>
The thing that I don't see addressed by this is situations where you have separate boot and data drives where information on the data drives is required during system boot but the drive has not been decrypted yet. Not sure if there is (or can be) support for that.
This is probably one of those areas where it's never been worth anyone's time to go back and change how the drivers work.
If you think of your print job going to an inkjet as a stream instead of as a collection of page objects it may make more sense - that's what they originally were and probably still are, which is why you can print high-resolution graphics without having any significant amount of RAM in the printer. Sure you can add the equivalent of full-page buffering in the driver, and some of them probably build the image of what's being printed in just that way (Windows GDI printing, anyone?) but what's the incentive for the manufacturer to do so?
Blocking if any ink tank is empty is much simpler than generating the print data, determining which colors are needed (hopefully while the print job is being generated) then going back and prompting only if necessary.
I do support and consulting as part of a small group focused on a specific set of small businesses. We do work for that category of business, plus serving a few others that also support that industry, and as a result we get referrals because we know what we're doing and get results.
From what you're describing you were trying to be all things to all people, and I suspect that that's what killed you in the end.
In the northwest suburbs of Chicago a gas station (independent? small chain?) had their sign out front with 'hp' in a sans-serif font combined with a flower logo that looked remarkably like some other company's but in yellow and orange instead.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to be disposing of a 21" CRT as soon as I get around to lugging it down the stairs (assuming that I don't trip and break my neck doing it). Giving it to a customer with a 60+ year old user with vision issues. She wants a bigger picture, so 1024x768 is what she uses since it's the minimum for an application; it looks like crap on the LCD she's using now. I suspect that she'll be very pleased with the improvement in picture quality. When I offered it to these folks the response was "What do you want for it?"
"My floor space back."
Just as a side note, while it's sometimes not possible to kill suspicious processes with Process Explorer (or they get automatically relaunched by another piece of software - especially if they were installed as a Windows service) you can also "Suspend" processes allowing you time to deal with other parts of the cleanup.
Open Source software (including Linux) is kind of like those free tomatoes. Your neighbor grows them for his own use, but ends up with more than he can use so he offers them to other people. With open source software, your neighbor (and many other people around the world) work on it for their own reasons, and rather than hoarding what they've done they offer it to other people.
The reasons for people to work on open source software are many:
Apparently they got in a bit of trouble over this - not for instituting the checklists, but for having the gall to track results to see how effective they were. Because of that, it basically becomes an experiment and you have to get all sorts of permissions.
A bit more detail in this NYTimes editorial
And some commentary from the University of Houston Law Center: here
Note that all of this is actually a bit dated - the original New Yorker article was from December, 2007 and the followups that I saw were from January, 2008. I don't know what's happened with it since then; I suspect that checklists have been implemented in some hospitals but that nobody is sharing results.
More expensive I'm sure, but Digiboard has some nice stuff. Generally very solid drivers (from what I've experienced), real documentation in English, etc.
A PortServer TS/16 runs approximately $1000 new and provides 16 serial ports that can be configured in any of a variety of ways.
A requirement for on-disk encryption could actually be a real problem for many medical practices, because an astonishing number are still using slightly-updated versions of practice management software from the early- to mid-90's on systems like SCO's OpenServer 5.0.x. I support a fair number of those practices.
We also have one practice running a dedicated system for ophthalmologists that is so old it doesn't understand networks. Users are connected via serial port expansion units. Makes it a pain when they have multiple sites and the telco says "We're dropping support for those 56k dedicated lines you've been using for 15 years."
A few more:
I've not used it cross-platform (the creator does) but you might want to take a look at Stani's Python Editor. Releases aren't that frequent, but the repository is updated more often and generally seems stable.
There's an out of date project on Sourceforge; development moved to SPE Project Page here.
Sure someday it might be used for something significant, but I just registered it as an amusing pun when .us became available (and no, it was not del.icio.us, but it was an English word ending in us).
I'd been paying the registration fees on it for a few years but had never used it as more than a testing page. Someone else was interested and asked politely, I sat on it for a while but when the registration was coming due I decided it wasn't worth the $8 bucks to me to hang on to it so I transferred it over to him.
If the law requires that the location be inspected and certified, demand that they do so. If they refuse to inspect, document everything. If they inspect but refuse to certify, demand that they document what the failures are, etc.
Give the local board/council/whatever an opportunity to rectify the situation by showing up with all of your materials. Point out that the law makes coffeemakers, household solvents, etc. require inspections, and suggest that they'd better be budgeting to hire additional inspectors to handle every home in the town starting, oh, next week.
If they refuse to do anything about the situation, get your friends and neighbors into the act.
Now how do I get the prosecutor to return those backups to me?
I got ticketed in a podunk little speed trap of a town in Arkansas, with a GPS sitting on the dash at the time. I'm pretty sure that when the officer saw the GPS he lowered what he was going to be ticketing me for. I thought about trying to fight it, but it just wasn't worth it - it would've been 16+ hours in the car to get there & back, a motel in the area, etc. all to fight a $75 or so ticket using a GPS tracklog as evidence. Throw in the local judge, local cops, etc. and it would've been a waste.
Note that the WRT54G-TM (T-Mobile branded) routers are basically the same thing as the GL, though I don't believe you'll be able to reflash with other firmware (yet) without some hardware hacking.
Switching to a Blackberry stopped it. For simple messages, even as a low-volume text message user I could type on the keypad with one hand and without looking at it - predictive text was usually correct, and when it wasn't I could make corrections at a stoplight before actually sending. Of course, the fact that I can spell helped with the predictive text bit.
Doing the same thing on the "full" keyboard on the Blackberry? No thanks. It can be faster to enter things on, but would be very hazardous to use while actually driving.
A more limited vocal range does not necessarily imply more limited communication abilities. If it did, dolphins might be justified in deciding that we bipeds are clearly incapable of intelligent communication.
I find it amusing that he starts out with differences in menu/toolbar placement and comparisons to Windows; I long ago moved my Windows taskbar to the top of the screen - I'm remoted into other systems many times a day, and it's convenient to not have to worry about overlapping on my laptop.
For a related reason, I prefer KDE on my desktop system because of its bottom bar - I have a dual stacked monitor setup, and I'd rather not have to go 2000 pixels up just to get to menus. I tend to throw more stuff like "tail -f whatever" onto that upper monitor.
A significant amount of the phishing email that I get seems to have IP addresses rather than domain names. I use OpenDNS, but it's not going to do squat about that.
For quite a while AT&T has offered access to their network to their DSL customers for $2.99/month, but recently they announced that they were dropping that to "free for our DSL customers." So, in addition to McD's, Barnes & Noble and some other locations, you can now get effectively free access at Starbucks as well.
Handy, that.
If I was still paying $20/month to T-Mobile this'd sure be the end of it. What's left in their network besides Borders bookstores?
I'm not actually using it yet, but two quotes from the "System Encryption" page of the manual:
<blockquote>TrueCrypt can on-the-fly encrypt a system partition or entire system drive, i.e. a partition or drive where Windows is installed and from which it boots (a TrueCrypt-encrypted system drive may also contain non-system partitions, which are encrypted as well).</blockquote>
<blockquote>Note that TrueCrypt can encrypt an existing unencrypted system partition/drive in-place while the operating system is running (while the system is being encrypted, you can use your computer as usual without any restrictions). Likewise, a TrueCrypt-encrypted system partition/drive can be decrypted in-place while the operating system is running. You can interrupt the process of encryption or decryption anytime, leave the partition/drive partially unencrypted, restart or shut down the computer, and then resume the process, which will continue from the point it was stopped.</blockquote>
The thing that I don't see addressed by this is situations where you have separate boot and data drives where information on the data drives is required during system boot but the drive has not been decrypted yet. Not sure if there is (or can be) support for that.
Sounds like range() is being replaced by xrange().
(xrange() doesn't actually allocate the list)
It's not the destination that matters, it's the journey.
This is probably one of those areas where it's never been worth anyone's time to go back and change how the drivers work.
If you think of your print job going to an inkjet as a stream instead of as a collection of page objects it may make more sense - that's what they originally were and probably still are, which is why you can print high-resolution graphics without having any significant amount of RAM in the printer. Sure you can add the equivalent of full-page buffering in the driver, and some of them probably build the image of what's being printed in just that way (Windows GDI printing, anyone?) but what's the incentive for the manufacturer to do so?
Blocking if any ink tank is empty is much simpler than generating the print data, determining which colors are needed (hopefully while the print job is being generated) then going back and prompting only if necessary.
I do support and consulting as part of a small group focused on a specific set of small businesses. We do work for that category of business, plus serving a few others that also support that industry, and as a result we get referrals because we know what we're doing and get results.
From what you're describing you were trying to be all things to all people, and I suspect that that's what killed you in the end.
I think the expectation is that since they're extensively firewalled they don't worry about whether the addresses are routable.
It didn't last like that for long.