Well, I'm by no means an uber-coding guru, but I used to prgram in C, and I just finised a three-year job writing many little programs in Fortran 90. I liked it, for what it is. The modern variants of Fortran are, in general, much nicer to look at, and if you know C and/or other languages, you could probably pick it up pretty easily.
I think I found basic i/o to be much easier in Fortran than C, but then that might be because my C is so rusty I have to keep re-looking everything up. Oh well.
For a (mostly Fortran-like) language that has a free compiler, you might also take a look at F as well. (http://www.fortran.com/F/).
I have to second this recommendation. My wife uses Reliance to call her family, and it is always very clear for her, and we always get through on the first try. Something I cannot say for a lot of services.
Strangely enough, I always thought quality/connectivity issues were due to the fragile Indian phone system. (Perhaps that's my western bias showing through; I'm a native US citizen.) However, when we visited India this year (or last year, depending on when you read this post!;-) I had crystal-clear connections when I direct-dialed my family from India on their land line. And I mean crystal. Other than the inevitable delay due to the travel distance of the signal, which was easy to adjust to, it sounded ***great***.
That reminds me of what I do when I get a new box that has a "Designed for Windows..." sticker on it. I always take that little sticker off and put it on a trash can...
Let me reply to my own post, just to show what a complete farking hypocrite I am. If, on the other hand, someone were to use this to turn off the Sox Yankees game on me, they would be in a world of pain.
I would definitely buy one of these. The TVs I would target are the ones you run across in random public spaces spewing adverts. Yeah, I should just ignore it, other people want to watch it, blah blah blah. Well fark em, they can always turn it back on if they really want to watch it that bad.
BTW I do folks that pirate windows, but they usually build thier own boxes.
Wow, you must really like people that pirate windows. Does it matter if they're male or female?
;-)
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist commenting on your Freudian slip!)
OnTopic: It's been said already in this thread, but I have to repeat: "What about those of us who bought Windows boxes and wiped them to install Linux?" Actually, it's been a while since I've had to do this. Last time was a Dell laptop we ordered at work. I didn't even boot into the pre-installed Windows XP that it came with. As for home machines, I now "roll my own," so this isn't an issue for me anymore.
Heh, I've always been very interested in this kind of stuff. I even got my hands on a couple of lockpicks back in my late high-school/early college days. I never managed to open door locks, but I could get into a file cabinet (and more usefully, the parent's liquor cabinet!) handily enough. Actually, I already had a workaround for the liquor cabinet, but developing this skill meant that I no longer had to unscrew/reattach the door! =-)
Anyway, I bought a cheap CVS combo lock (For those not in the know, CVS is a pharmacy/chemist that in addition sells other health products, such as cigarettes, in addition to other miscellaneous crap) to put on my locker at the health club. I was just playing with it right now, to see if the "Master Lock Cracking Widget" would apply to it. Well, I'm reading the article and playing with it and the fucking thing comes open in my hand! What a fluke, I figure. Not so. To open it, I merely have to pull on the lock while I turn the dial clockwise a few turns (hearing numerous clicks along the way). I then reverse direction and turn the dial CCW for a bit. You'll feel the U bar release a tiny bit as you do this, and if you keep turning, the fucking thing will spread open like a two-dollar whore!
Oh well, I suppose I'll have to get another lock when I get the chance. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, based on the quality of other CVS branded crap I've had to deal with.
Not completely on topic, but I was just in London on holiday, and we visited Greenwich. Greenwich is quite a nice place, with a large park surrounding the Royal Observatory. It was cool to stand on the prime meridian, but I read someplace (one of my travel guides, I believe) that if you use GPS, it will indicate that the Prime Meridian is about 400/450 feet or so to the east or west (I don't remember the exact number or direction), due to the way GPS operates. Can anyone confirm this?
I think a lot of these problems you've all been talking about will just go away if we just travel in *4D* instead. Imagine disappearing from your home at 10:00 and showing up at work at 08:00 on the same day. Of course, it might be confusing if you try to call home to check the messages before 10, but even that might have some uses...
You: "Hello, Dave speaking."
You: "Hi, it's you. Ummm, don't eat that two-week old yogurt in the fridge, or you'll regret it later. Oh god, I've gotta go..."
Hmmm, what a strange post, and I haven't even been drinking.
One question for the pilots out there: Is stereo vision necessary in this new class? I have vision in both eyes, but unfortunately, I don't have true stereo vision I have lazy-eye and was cross-eyed as a baby, but surgery fixed that part of it. Unfortunately, no surgery would be able to fix the lack of stereo vision.
I seem to be able to judge distance fine, at least in a car, since much distance judging actually involves using relative sizes, but maybe the same isn't true for flying?
I'm not exactly sure about an unbiased source, but you might check out samachar.com, which collects headlines from various Indian news sources, plus CNN and BBC. Hope that helps.
Next the middle class over there starts to take off, and they make a national effort to help make sure that the benefit of the boom is extended to the less fortunate, so they can make more of the country self-sufficient.
Actually, this point (or the lack of it) is a primary reason that the BJP were pounded in the last elections. A lot of the rural people (which is about 70% of India's population) HAVEN'T see the benefits of the tech boom. As for infrastructure, some cities have done a pretty good job, from what I've heard (Hyderbad comes to mind), but Bangalore really needs to improve things. They have some really nice tech parks, but they have really been suffering from a mass influx of people from rural areas, looking for jobs. They need some controlled growth in a bad way (and programs to help the rural areas), but unfortunately, this is in practice very difficult to achieve.
Would owning a smaller car to drive during the week, and renting a larger vehicle work for you? It wouldn't make sense if you have to load it up every weekend, but just a thought.
Also, you might check out the Ford Escape (a hybrid SUV) that will be coming out next year. 40MPG ain't bad for an SUV! Check out
this article, for example.
They must not realize that jpg is a compressed format. They didn't gain much by zipping them, of course.
Pretty pics. I had the idea a while ago to make a full panorama digital camera. Actually, I imagined a sphere that would take a full-view pic with only a blind spot where the electronics enter the sphere. You could then view the resulting pics with a helmet/goggles/whatever and look around and it would be like you are there. Oh well, maybe some day.
Wow, I haven't even bothered to read any of the other comments, and I'm sure I'm going to add nothing new here, but the reasons keep growing by the day.
I started my computing career on an Apple//c, an incredibly open archetecture, and I just got used to being able to twiddle with things any way I wanted. I still remember a few of the hex codes for assembly lang. instructions (Ex: 0x20 = JSR, 0x60 = RTS,...)
My Apple broke and for a few years, I didn't have a home computer (gasp!) Of course, at the time I was working as a programmer, so I got plenty of computer time. I quit my job and went back to grad school and decided I wanted a computer. By this point I had heard about the *BSDs and this thing called Linux, and since I decided I loved Unix so much, I thought that I would give Linux a spin.
Of course, I had a dual boot machine at this point. I liked playing with Photoshop (this was in the days before GIMP) and a few other Windows apps, but I couldn't help the feeling of being... restrained. W95 was fun to play with at first, but I was frustrated by the fact that there was only so much you could tinker with. I was a math grad student, and so the fact that TeX was installed by default helped me to stay in the Linux environment most of the time. I played a few games in Windows, but for the most part, Linux was my choice. Viri were around at that point, but they were a relatively minor nuisance, compared to today. And spam? Hadn't really been invented yet. Ahhh, to be able to go back to those days....
Well, to cut a long, rambling post shor.... well, never mind, way too late for that. (Note: Quantity of single malt scotch is directly proportional to length of posts/e-mails.) At this point, it works like this: Every time I turn around, I find another reason not to use Windows. At the end of the day, as much as I love Linux, I'm still not one to slobber over it and denounce Windows; it just seems so childish to do so. On the other hand, I love Unix/Linux so much, and administering said systems, that I've decided to make a career switch to system administration, despite all the outsourcing/bad economy/whatever.
Linux is great technology, and it isn't just the technical part that is great. It's the people. The people I know who are into Linux and Unix are , by and large, enthusiastic about what they do, and that just makes it so much more fun for me. There are of course Windows admins/users like this, but I've met so many pissed off/frustrated ones that it just brings me down.
Oh well, that's my 2 cents (ok, more like four bucks) worth.
Give the guy a break. Learning their history is a good start, but I'm honestly not sure what you'll immediately learn from their literature/music (i.e. how day-to-day life is lived now), besides how they express themselves artistically. It may give you some insight into their mindset, but it will most likely tell you nothing about the fact that they don't live in the desert, and there isn't sand everywhere, as one questioner implies.
Really, direct contacts like this are one of the BEST ways to learn about a culture. I'm from the US, but my wife is Indian. Were I to judge India from her literature/music, I might get the impression that people ride around on elephants and dance around trees! (Note: I actually have heard other USians ask my wife such ignorant questions!)
Slashdot Mirror
Glanced the headline briefly, and thought that university administrator were getting desperate for methods to keep college students on campus.
Well, I'm by no means an uber-coding guru, but I used to prgram in C, and I just finised a three-year job writing many little programs in Fortran 90. I liked it, for what it is. The modern variants of Fortran are, in general, much nicer to look at, and if you know C and/or other languages, you could probably pick it up pretty easily.
I think I found basic i/o to be much easier in Fortran than C, but then that might be because my C is so rusty I have to keep re-looking everything up. Oh well.
For a (mostly Fortran-like) language that has a free compiler, you might also take a look at F as well. (http://www.fortran.com/F/).
I found a press release on another site, which actually lists a real person:
e r- interface-system-dt20041125ptan20040233624.php
Alain Aisenberg / Tel: (305) 865-1400
Email: alain.aisenberg@batmax.com
Our boy also seems to be a bit of an inventor:
http://www.freshpatents.com/Modular-computer-us
I have to second this recommendation. My wife uses Reliance to call her family, and it is always very clear for her, and we always get through on the first try. Something I cannot say for a lot of services.
;-) I had crystal-clear connections when I direct-dialed my family from India on their land line. And I mean crystal. Other than the inevitable delay due to the travel distance of the signal, which was easy to adjust to, it sounded ***great***.
Strangely enough, I always thought quality/connectivity issues were due to the fragile Indian phone system. (Perhaps that's my western bias showing through; I'm a native US citizen.) However, when we visited India this year (or last year, depending on when you read this post!
That reminds me of what I do when I get a new box that has a "Designed for Windows..." sticker on it. I always take that little sticker off and put it on a trash can...
backslashdot??? Where is that, I've never surfed there before.
Hmmm, I can think of a good cure for that. Actually, many video game players already self-treat this condition.
Let me reply to my own post, just to show what a complete farking hypocrite I am. If, on the other hand, someone were to use this to turn off the Sox Yankees game on me, they would be in a world of pain.
Go Sox!
I would definitely buy one of these. The TVs I would target are the ones you run across in random public spaces spewing adverts. Yeah, I should just ignore it, other people want to watch it, blah blah blah. Well fark em, they can always turn it back on if they really want to watch it that bad.
Wow, you must really like people that pirate windows. Does it matter if they're male or female?
OnTopic: It's been said already in this thread, but I have to repeat: "What about those of us who bought Windows boxes and wiped them to install Linux?" Actually, it's been a while since I've had to do this. Last time was a Dell laptop we ordered at work. I didn't even boot into the pre-installed Windows XP that it came with. As for home machines, I now "roll my own," so this isn't an issue for me anymore.
The site is dead. The guy got some complaints and ended up taking it down. Too bad, too. It was quite funny, if a bit creepy.
That's great, but it doesn't seem very useful. All the text is garbled! Either that or someone cannot spell. nieuws? televisie? I don't get it!
(Yes, for the humo(u)r impaired, I am joking!)
Heh, I've always been very interested in this kind of stuff. I even got my hands on a couple of lockpicks back in my late high-school/early college days. I never managed to open door locks, but I could get into a file cabinet (and more usefully, the parent's liquor cabinet!) handily enough. Actually, I already had a workaround for the liquor cabinet, but developing this skill meant that I no longer had to unscrew/reattach the door! =-)
Anyway, I bought a cheap CVS combo lock (For those not in the know, CVS is a pharmacy/chemist that in addition sells other health products, such as cigarettes, in addition to other miscellaneous crap) to put on my locker at the health club. I was just playing with it right now, to see if the "Master Lock Cracking Widget" would apply to it. Well, I'm reading the article and playing with it and the fucking thing comes open in my hand! What a fluke, I figure. Not so. To open it, I merely have to pull on the lock while I turn the dial clockwise a few turns (hearing numerous clicks along the way). I then reverse direction and turn the dial CCW for a bit. You'll feel the U bar release a tiny bit as you do this, and if you keep turning, the fucking thing will spread open like a two-dollar whore!
Oh well, I suppose I'll have to get another lock when I get the chance. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, based on the quality of other CVS branded crap I've had to deal with.
Not completely on topic, but I was just in London on holiday, and we visited Greenwich. Greenwich is quite a nice place, with a large park surrounding the Royal Observatory. It was cool to stand on the prime meridian, but I read someplace (one of my travel guides, I believe) that if you use GPS, it will indicate that the Prime Meridian is about 400/450 feet or so to the east or west (I don't remember the exact number or direction), due to the way GPS operates. Can anyone confirm this?
I think a lot of these problems you've all been talking about will just go away if we just travel in *4D* instead. Imagine disappearing from your home at 10:00 and showing up at work at 08:00 on the same day. Of course, it might be confusing if you try to call home to check the messages before 10, but even that might have some uses...
You: "Hello, Dave speaking."
You: "Hi, it's you. Ummm, don't eat that two-week old yogurt in the fridge, or you'll regret it later. Oh god, I've gotta go..."
Hmmm, what a strange post, and I haven't even been drinking.
Two words: IBM.
IBM what!?!?!?!?! C'mon, you said two words, so where's the second one? Don't keep us in suspense! ;-)
One question for the pilots out there: Is stereo vision necessary in this new class? I have vision in both eyes, but unfortunately, I don't have true stereo vision I have lazy-eye and was cross-eyed as a baby, but surgery fixed that part of it. Unfortunately, no surgery would be able to fix the lack of stereo vision.
I seem to be able to judge distance fine, at least in a car, since much distance judging actually involves using relative sizes, but maybe the same isn't true for flying?
I'm not exactly sure about an unbiased source, but you might check out samachar.com, which collects headlines from various Indian news sources, plus CNN and BBC. Hope that helps.
Next the middle class over there starts to take off, and they make a national effort to help make sure that the benefit of the boom is extended to the less fortunate, so they can make more of the country self-sufficient.
Actually, this point (or the lack of it) is a primary reason that the BJP were pounded in the last elections. A lot of the rural people (which is about 70% of India's population) HAVEN'T see the benefits of the tech boom. As for infrastructure, some cities have done a pretty good job, from what I've heard (Hyderbad comes to mind), but Bangalore really needs to improve things. They have some really nice tech parks, but they have really been suffering from a mass influx of people from rural areas, looking for jobs. They need some controlled growth in a bad way (and programs to help the rural areas), but unfortunately, this is in practice very difficult to achieve.
Also, you might check out the Ford Escape (a hybrid SUV) that will be coming out next year. 40MPG ain't bad for an SUV! Check out this article, for example.
They must not realize that jpg is a compressed format. They didn't gain much by zipping them, of course.
Pretty pics. I had the idea a while ago to make a full panorama digital camera. Actually, I imagined a sphere that would take a full-view pic with only a blind spot where the electronics enter the sphere. You could then view the resulting pics with a helmet/goggles/whatever and look around and it would be like you are there. Oh well, maybe some day.
Wow, I haven't even bothered to read any of the other comments, and I'm sure I'm going to add nothing new here, but the reasons keep growing by the day.
//c, an incredibly open archetecture, and I just got used to being able to twiddle with things any way I wanted. I still remember a few of the hex codes for assembly lang. instructions (Ex: 0x20 = JSR, 0x60 = RTS,...)
I started my computing career on an Apple
My Apple broke and for a few years, I didn't have a home computer (gasp!) Of course, at the time I was working as a programmer, so I got plenty of computer time. I quit my job and went back to grad school and decided I wanted a computer. By this point I had heard about the *BSDs and this thing called Linux, and since I decided I loved Unix so much, I thought that I would give Linux a spin.
Of course, I had a dual boot machine at this point. I liked playing with Photoshop (this was in the days before GIMP) and a few other Windows apps, but I couldn't help the feeling of being... restrained. W95 was fun to play with at first, but I was frustrated by the fact that there was only so much you could tinker with. I was a math grad student, and so the fact that TeX was installed by default helped me to stay in the Linux environment most of the time. I played a few games in Windows, but for the most part, Linux was my choice. Viri were around at that point, but they were a relatively minor nuisance, compared to today. And spam? Hadn't really been invented yet. Ahhh, to be able to go back to those days....
Well, to cut a long, rambling post shor.... well, never mind, way too late for that. (Note: Quantity of single malt scotch is directly proportional to length of posts/e-mails.) At this point, it works like this: Every time I turn around, I find another reason not to use Windows. At the end of the day, as much as I love Linux, I'm still not one to slobber over it and denounce Windows; it just seems so childish to do so. On the other hand, I love Unix/Linux so much, and administering said systems, that I've decided to make a career switch to system administration, despite all the outsourcing/bad economy/whatever.
Linux is great technology, and it isn't just the technical part that is great. It's the people. The people I know who are into Linux and Unix are , by and large, enthusiastic about what they do, and that just makes it so much more fun for me. There are of course Windows admins/users like this, but I've met so many pissed off/frustrated ones that it just brings me down.
Oh well, that's my 2 cents (ok, more like four bucks) worth.
Wow, sure enough it does. Thanks, I never knew this! I've always done the afforementioned ctrl-t to open a new tab in Mozilla...
But I'm a liberal, you insensitive clod!
Give the guy a break. Learning their history is a good start, but I'm honestly not sure what you'll immediately learn from their literature/music (i.e. how day-to-day life is lived now), besides how they express themselves artistically. It may give you some insight into their mindset, but it will most likely tell you nothing about the fact that they don't live in the desert, and there isn't sand everywhere, as one questioner implies.
Really, direct contacts like this are one of the BEST ways to learn about a culture. I'm from the US, but my wife is Indian. Were I to judge India from her literature/music, I might get the impression that people ride around on elephants and dance around trees! (Note: I actually have heard other USians ask my wife such ignorant questions!)
Think about it.