At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious: why not put anything you care about through an anonymous proxy service? There are zillions of these, ranging from totally-free-but-overloaded to expensive-luxury-model. Just search for "anonymous proxy service".
At the risk of stating something else obvious: an anonymous proxy will not help if you use a service that requires you to log in. It is only good for search queries and general surfing.
Assuming that all of the programmers are in agreement, here is what you should do:
Choose a time when you know that your boss has no appointments. Do not make an appointment yourselves - just walk in and say that you need to talk.
It is essential that you go as a group - all of you physically present. This shows that it is a real problem, and not just one or two disgrunted individuals.
Choose your spokesperson in advance - best is a senior developer who carries a lot of responsibility.
Do not make this an issue about listening to music - that is entirely irrelevant. The problem is the office chatter and the ability to concentrate. The real solution is to isolate the programmers from the chatter.
Let me emphasize that last point: the problem is not the lack of music. The problem is the noise. The solution you want is a separate room, or else a sound-proof partition in the current room. As you point out, the music is mainly to drown out the chatter. Get rid of the chatter, and the music is a non-issue.
Floating point numbers are a mess if you want to deal with currencies - rounding errors are guaranteed.
That said, look at IBM's 754r standard: unpacking a 128-bit number in chunks of 10-bits? That's got to be the ugliest thing I've seen in a long, long time. A triple-bagger. Implementing that in software will be painfully slow - implementing it in hardware will be a gigantic kludge of dedicated circuitry.
This is an area where ECMAscript pays the price for not being a strongly typed language. The only solution in the ECMAscript framework is to use a decimal library. Awkward, but that's life.
This is the proof that "hard cases make bad law". Based on the behavior of one slimeball, the court now seeks to criminalize an entire category of behavior. This now includes any conversation that (TFA) "could be interpreted to mean anything that would make it easier or more probable for a young person to be taken advantage of." Note that "to be taken advantage of" can be by anyone - it is no longer necessary for the person holding the conversation to have any ill intent.
The goal of Skiff (from the press release): "connect publishers and marketers with consumers". Translation: getting advertising to the consumer is just as important as getting content to the consumer. The isn't anything the consumer wants; we see where their priorities are.
Eliminate the middleman: Who the heck said this? It isn't in TFA or even in TFS. Skiff wants to be the middleman.
Kindle; no control over your content: Lots of comments complain about the Kindle, the lack of control over the content you have purchased, and being tied to a particular company. Why has no one stated the obvious solution?
Buy eReaders that support the ePub format (Kindle does not, guess why).
Buy ePub books and keep your library on your own computer.
Most important of all: support publishers like Baen Books, whose eBooks are DRM-free.
Much as I am a fan of small government, the government does have a duty to regulate the market. How about a general regulation that prohibits a standard sales price that is less than the manufacturing cost of the product? I.e., no loss-leaders. It's pretty clear that the printer manufacturers are selling the printers at a loss, planning to make it up in ink sales. If they sold the printers at a fair price, the markets both for printers and for ink would be less distorted.
For what it's worth, I second the earlier vote for HP lasers. However, be careful: HP has a mid-line of devices (such as the CM2320) that they have gutted. Although marketed as network printers, they are intimitely tied to a PC - they cannot process anything themselves. They rely entirely on the processor in the PC for everything - even scanning a picture! There are dirty tricks even in the laser printer market...
There is a strong argument for saying that only people who pay taxes should be allowed to vote. Anyone who receives more in benefits that they pay in should be ineligible - it ain't their money, they don't get to say how it's spent. This includes not only those who do not pay taxes, but also essentially all government employees.
I often use games in courses. As another commenter said: the idea is not to teach people to program game, but rather to allow a bit of fun while doing homework. I would not suggest that one of my students tell an employer: "I wrote this great multiplayer game", but rather "I implemented an interactive network application". Both are true.
Some students dislike games, or perhaps find them somehow undignified. Hence, I usually offer a choice, with the other option being something "serious".
I have much the same problem. Here is my solution:
First: Unison is a good, cross-platform solution. There are two important things to be aware of with Unison: first, use a star-configuration. Something should be the master, and this master is then synchronized with each client. In my case, the master is a USB stick that I always have with me. The second thing is: set Unison to filter out unnecessary stuff. For example, configuration files that apply to specific platforms.
I don't recommend it, but you can also use Unison to synchronize source code - if you do this, you will need to set more filters. For example, Eclipse stores lots and lots of files that you never want to see - and certainly don't want to synchronize.
A much better solution is to put your source code in a subversion repository and synchronize the clients with this repository as necessary.
So two parts: SVN (or CVS) for code, and Unison for everything else.
There is no reason to suppose that democracies are self-correcting. Look at the path the USA is taking:
The USA is almost at the point where majority of voters either pay no taxes or receive a net payout from the government. Once the majority can vote themselves largesse from the minority, why should they stop? Correction is no longer possible.
The constitutional freedoms of the USA are being eliminated: Habeus corpus has been suspended numerous times, the government no longer requires probable cause for searches (Patriot Act), no longer must publish the laws and regulations by which you must abide (numerous TSA cases), freedom of speech is increasingly limited ("hate speech" laws), and on and on. While this could be corrected, there are no signs of it happening.
Government debt is out of control. Although Congress recognizes the danger and says all the right words, there is no sign that they are capable of ending deficit spending. Doing so would mean putting a stop to (1) above, which the electorate would not tolerate.
The government has become fundamentally an oligarchy. The only candidates with a chance at election are put up by the two major parties, and generally come from the same Ivy League inner circle. Behind the scenes, the two parties decide who should win which election, and guide the electorate to the right decision. Any non-approved candidate has essentially no chance.
Do you really believe in correction? The only correction that I could imagine would be individual states saving themselves by seceding. The USA as a whole is almost certainly past the point of no return.
Thank you for a very thoughtful comment. Democracy is not the only form of government in the world, and certainly has its share of problems. China's current government also has its problems, but one cannot deny that China has made huge progress the past few decades. The best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship - the trick is keeping a dictatorship benevolent. China has surprisingly well in that regard.
I hope/. readers will think about what you said, rather than mindlessly jumping on the "democracy is best" bandwagon.
Sorry, but you are being really naive. There are two reasons free books are a silly idea:
1. Anyone with any motivation at all can already learn whatever they want on the Internet. The information is not neatly in order, with careful examples and consistent explanations, but it's all fundamentally there.
2. Putting information neatly in order, with careful examples and consistent explanations (i.e., writing a textbook) is a lot of work. Writing a textbook from scratch, in a field where you are an expert, takes around a year. Maybe with OSS software, you can earn your living by selling support, but just how do you propose that people earn a living by writing free books? It's not even a one-time investment: books, especially in technical fields, must be continuously updated or they quickly become useless.
Collaborative projects like Wikpedia and Wikibooks help collect some information in the same place. However, they will never achieve the quality of a good textbook (in whatever media) written by someone who needs to pay the mortgage with the royalties. Capitalism: it works, you know...
Good heavens, don't feed the BSA. Sure, this business has a slimeball for a boss. Feeding him to even bigger slimeballs is not the answer. Finding another job is.
Several posters have proposed using a simple-but-obscure algorithm to generate passwords. I like this idea, for its sheer portability: no need for a USB key, or a special password management program. Other posters have also proposed interesting ideas - like starting from a meaningless fixed text and constructing a password from it.
There is just one problem: <rant>What is it with those sites that "know better"? Your password must contains at least one capital letter, 2 digits, 3 special characters and four donkeys. Or else: your password may not contain any of the characters./*,:;_ etc.? The fact that every such idiotic website has a different set of rules makes any sort of 100% consistent password management impossible.</rant>
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest - having just yesterday been forced to create a password outside my system, because of some nitwit's idea of security. To add to the "amusement": it was a credit-card company. You know, the guys who invented that ultra-secure secret number printed on the back of your credit card.
As a prof, I get to see the lovely material that comes with books. It generally sucks. The publisher takes the illustrations out of the book, has someone who clearly doesn't understand the material copy in a few bullet points, and that's it.
Anyway, the students don't need the book to be read to them. The prof needs to present a different explanation with different examples - to give a different viewpoint. Any prof who uses the slides provided with the book is not doing the job.
Damn, I wish my school administration would read this. Every time a building is remodeled, the projector screens get larger and the boards get smaller. In the newest rooms, the whiteboard is about 70cm high and 140cm wide (30" by 60") - nearly useless. Meanwhile, the projection screen is huge, six or eight times that size. I am forced to put most of my material in the presentation. There ain't no other way to do it!
While I'm venting: there are no blackboards anymore, only whiteboards. Why anyone think these abominations are progress is beyond me: the pens can't deliver ink fast enough - the first few words are nice, then they get faint and the pens don't recover until they sit for a good, long while. I suppose the suits didn't like chalk dust on their pinstripes, but give me a good quality blackboard any day.
We're getting a new school building in two years. I will probably need a magnifying glass to find the whiteboards. Assuming they haven't been eliminated entirely...
I'm just as much for gadgets as anyone, but this one is somehow kind of pointless. It's not even as handy as having a hand-held torch: mounted on your palm, it makes your hand entirely useless. And you better be damn careful not to close your fingers after using it.
This clearly violates common-carrier protection, and would require complete monitoring of web-traffic. The idea is, of course, well-intentioned (stop financial scams) - but the actual effects of such a poorly thought-out law would be horrendous. Sort of like the DMCA, Patriot Act and all the other well-intentioned idiocy that has become law.
The goal is to encode international characters as the characters currently accepted by the standard (a-z, 0-9, etc.) UTF does not do this. Also, the number of characters you can have in a domain name is limited to 26 (and it is the encoded length that counts), so the coding has to be efficient. This is precisely what Punycode is designed to do. Software can recognize an encoded name by the fact that it begins with the special sequence of letters "xn--"
For what it's worth as an anecdote: I recently took a deep breath and upgraded an 8.04 machine. The 8.10 update ran a very long time and then reported that it had failed and would try to run a recovery script. The machine was pretty hosed afterwards. Nothing to lose - I told it to try to update to 9.04.
Guess what: afterwards, everything worked! One of those very rare positive surprises in the IT world!
That is, unfortunately, absolutely right: you do not save money with CFLs. For that matter, any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production, not to mention disposal.
We have CFLs for various reasons. For example, the big CFL lamps mentioned in the post above are in rooms that are often used by 20-40 people. With that many bodies, they already get too warm. Without CFLs, we would need some 2000 watts of lighting - that would be intolerable.
In the end, forcing CFLs is yet another political scam. So is just about anything touted for its energy conservation potential. Energy is the lifeblood of civilization - we ought to see how cheaply we can generate more of it, not shave pennies like misers.
...you just have to buy quality stuff. About 10 years ago, we bought five standing lamps, each with 3x32watt dimmable bulbs. The electronics in the lamp are specifically designed to dim CFLs, and the CFLs are designed to be dimmed. The total price for each lamp (they are nice lamps) was several hundred dollars. However, in 10 years, we have replaced only one bulb. The warm-up time is negligible and the light quality is excellent.
Hot-wire bulbs are a throw-away product. You just can't look at CFLs the same way: you are buying an electronic appliance that ought to last for years. Either spend for quality, or use some other kind of lighting.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps of interest: how many Firefox users currently use AdBlock Plus? According to this reference (search for "AdBlock" to find the spot), the number is around 12%.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious: why not put anything you care about through an anonymous proxy service? There are zillions of these, ranging from totally-free-but-overloaded to expensive-luxury-model. Just search for "anonymous proxy service".
At the risk of stating something else obvious: an anonymous proxy will not help if you use a service that requires you to log in. It is only good for search queries and general surfing.
Assuming that all of the programmers are in agreement, here is what you should do:
Let me emphasize that last point: the problem is not the lack of music. The problem is the noise. The solution you want is a separate room, or else a sound-proof partition in the current room. As you point out, the music is mainly to drown out the chatter. Get rid of the chatter, and the music is a non-issue.
Darwin award!!!
Floating point numbers are a mess if you want to deal with currencies - rounding errors are guaranteed.
That said, look at IBM's 754r standard: unpacking a 128-bit number in chunks of 10-bits? That's got to be the ugliest thing I've seen in a long, long time. A triple-bagger. Implementing that in software will be painfully slow - implementing it in hardware will be a gigantic kludge of dedicated circuitry.
This is an area where ECMAscript pays the price for not being a strongly typed language. The only solution in the ECMAscript framework is to use a decimal library. Awkward, but that's life.
This is the proof that "hard cases make bad law". Based on the behavior of one slimeball, the court now seeks to criminalize an entire category of behavior. This now includes any conversation that (TFA) "could be interpreted to mean anything that would make it easier or more probable for a young person to be taken advantage of." Note that "to be taken advantage of" can be by anyone - it is no longer necessary for the person holding the conversation to have any ill intent.
Much as I am a fan of small government, the government does have a duty to regulate the market. How about a general regulation that prohibits a standard sales price that is less than the manufacturing cost of the product? I.e., no loss-leaders. It's pretty clear that the printer manufacturers are selling the printers at a loss, planning to make it up in ink sales. If they sold the printers at a fair price, the markets both for printers and for ink would be less distorted.
For what it's worth, I second the earlier vote for HP lasers. However, be careful: HP has a mid-line of devices (such as the CM2320) that they have gutted. Although marketed as network printers, they are intimitely tied to a PC - they cannot process anything themselves. They rely entirely on the processor in the PC for everything - even scanning a picture! There are dirty tricks even in the laser printer market...
This didn't last long, but the idea was that voters ought to have a stake in the system. There's an argument for that. The USA is very nearly to the point that more than half of the voters either pay no taxes, or receive a net payout from the federal government. Once the majority can vote themselves largess at the expense of the minority, the game is over. It's only a matter of time till the corpse stops twitching.
There is a strong argument for saying that only people who pay taxes should be allowed to vote. Anyone who receives more in benefits that they pay in should be ineligible - it ain't their money, they don't get to say how it's spent. This includes not only those who do not pay taxes, but also essentially all government employees.
I often use games in courses. As another commenter said: the idea is not to teach people to program game, but rather to allow a bit of fun while doing homework. I would not suggest that one of my students tell an employer: "I wrote this great multiplayer game", but rather "I implemented an interactive network application". Both are true. Some students dislike games, or perhaps find them somehow undignified. Hence, I usually offer a choice, with the other option being something "serious".
I have much the same problem. Here is my solution:
First: Unison is a good, cross-platform solution. There are two important things to be aware of with Unison: first, use a star-configuration. Something should be the master, and this master is then synchronized with each client. In my case, the master is a USB stick that I always have with me. The second thing is: set Unison to filter out unnecessary stuff. For example, configuration files that apply to specific platforms.
I don't recommend it, but you can also use Unison to synchronize source code - if you do this, you will need to set more filters. For example, Eclipse stores lots and lots of files that you never want to see - and certainly don't want to synchronize.
A much better solution is to put your source code in a subversion repository and synchronize the clients with this repository as necessary. So two parts: SVN (or CVS) for code, and Unison for everything else.
There is no reason to suppose that democracies are self-correcting. Look at the path the USA is taking:
Do you really believe in correction? The only correction that I could imagine would be individual states saving themselves by seceding. The USA as a whole is almost certainly past the point of no return.
Thank you for a very thoughtful comment. Democracy is not the only form of government in the world, and certainly has its share of problems. China's current government also has its problems, but one cannot deny that China has made huge progress the past few decades. The best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship - the trick is keeping a dictatorship benevolent. China has surprisingly well in that regard. I hope /. readers will think about what you said, rather than mindlessly jumping on the "democracy is best" bandwagon.
Sorry, but you are being really naive. There are two reasons free books are a silly idea:
1. Anyone with any motivation at all can already learn whatever they want on the Internet. The information is not neatly in order, with careful examples and consistent explanations, but it's all fundamentally there.
2. Putting information neatly in order, with careful examples and consistent explanations (i.e., writing a textbook) is a lot of work. Writing a textbook from scratch, in a field where you are an expert, takes around a year. Maybe with OSS software, you can earn your living by selling support, but just how do you propose that people earn a living by writing free books? It's not even a one-time investment: books, especially in technical fields, must be continuously updated or they quickly become useless.
Collaborative projects like Wikpedia and Wikibooks help collect some information in the same place. However, they will never achieve the quality of a good textbook (in whatever media) written by someone who needs to pay the mortgage with the royalties. Capitalism: it works, you know...
Good heavens, don't feed the BSA. Sure, this business has a slimeball for a boss. Feeding him to even bigger slimeballs is not the answer. Finding another job is.
Several posters have proposed using a simple-but-obscure algorithm to generate passwords. I like this idea, for its sheer portability: no need for a USB key, or a special password management program. Other posters have also proposed interesting ideas - like starting from a meaningless fixed text and constructing a password from it.
There is just one problem: <rant>What is it with those sites that "know better"? Your password must contains at least one capital letter, 2 digits, 3 special characters and four donkeys. Or else: your password may not contain any of the characters ./*,:;_ etc.? The fact that every such idiotic website has a different set of rules makes any sort of 100% consistent password management impossible.</rant>
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest - having just yesterday been forced to create a password outside my system, because of some nitwit's idea of security. To add to the "amusement": it was a credit-card company. You know, the guys who invented that ultra-secure secret number printed on the back of your credit card.
As a prof, I get to see the lovely material that comes with books. It generally sucks. The publisher takes the illustrations out of the book, has someone who clearly doesn't understand the material copy in a few bullet points, and that's it.
Anyway, the students don't need the book to be read to them. The prof needs to present a different explanation with different examples - to give a different viewpoint. Any prof who uses the slides provided with the book is not doing the job.
Damn, I wish my school administration would read this. Every time a building is remodeled, the projector screens get larger and the boards get smaller. In the newest rooms, the whiteboard is about 70cm high and 140cm wide (30" by 60") - nearly useless. Meanwhile, the projection screen is huge, six or eight times that size. I am forced to put most of my material in the presentation. There ain't no other way to do it!
While I'm venting: there are no blackboards anymore, only whiteboards. Why anyone think these abominations are progress is beyond me: the pens can't deliver ink fast enough - the first few words are nice, then they get faint and the pens don't recover until they sit for a good, long while. I suppose the suits didn't like chalk dust on their pinstripes, but give me a good quality blackboard any day.
We're getting a new school building in two years. I will probably need a magnifying glass to find the whiteboards. Assuming they haven't been eliminated entirely...
I'm just as much for gadgets as anyone, but this one is somehow kind of pointless. It's not even as handy as having a hand-held torch: mounted on your palm, it makes your hand entirely useless. And you better be damn careful not to close your fingers after using it.
This clearly violates common-carrier protection, and would require complete monitoring of web-traffic. The idea is, of course, well-intentioned (stop financial scams) - but the actual effects of such a poorly thought-out law would be horrendous. Sort of like the DMCA, Patriot Act and all the other well-intentioned idiocy that has become law.
The goal is to encode international characters as the characters currently accepted by the standard (a-z, 0-9, etc.) UTF does not do this. Also, the number of characters you can have in a domain name is limited to 26 (and it is the encoded length that counts), so the coding has to be efficient. This is precisely what Punycode is designed to do. Software can recognize an encoded name by the fact that it begins with the special sequence of letters "xn--"
For what it's worth as an anecdote: I recently took a deep breath and upgraded an 8.04 machine. The 8.10 update ran a very long time and then reported that it had failed and would try to run a recovery script. The machine was pretty hosed afterwards. Nothing to lose - I told it to try to update to 9.04.
Guess what: afterwards, everything worked! One of those very rare positive surprises in the IT world!
That is, unfortunately, absolutely right: you do not save money with CFLs. For that matter, any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production, not to mention disposal.
We have CFLs for various reasons. For example, the big CFL lamps mentioned in the post above are in rooms that are often used by 20-40 people. With that many bodies, they already get too warm. Without CFLs, we would need some 2000 watts of lighting - that would be intolerable.
In the end, forcing CFLs is yet another political scam. So is just about anything touted for its energy conservation potential. Energy is the lifeblood of civilization - we ought to see how cheaply we can generate more of it, not shave pennies like misers.
Absolutely: we have good experience with both Phillips and Osram!
...you just have to buy quality stuff. About 10 years ago, we bought five standing lamps, each with 3x32watt dimmable bulbs. The electronics in the lamp are specifically designed to dim CFLs, and the CFLs are designed to be dimmed. The total price for each lamp (they are nice lamps) was several hundred dollars. However, in 10 years, we have replaced only one bulb. The warm-up time is negligible and the light quality is excellent.
Hot-wire bulbs are a throw-away product. You just can't look at CFLs the same way: you are buying an electronic appliance that ought to last for years. Either spend for quality, or use some other kind of lighting.
You get what you pay for.