Bear with me for this imperfect analogy:
A have a few of friends who have written tech books. One of them kept doing it over the years. If the question is wether the money he has made from advances and royalties paid well, the answer is flatly "NO." The pay is quite small compared to the amount of time that has to be sunk into the project. But he keeps doing them. Why? The *real* benefit is that now he's an authority on the subject. This drastically increases his (and his consultancy's) value and has brought him many clients over the years.
Being able to point to a working, published iPhone app is probably a lot more valuable to your career and/or business than whatever paltry sum you derive from direct revenue. Assuming there continues to be general demand for iPhone apps, at least.
At least, that's one theory.
It's frankly made worse by the fact that (at least when I used complied languages, which was ages ago), it was hard to find a good reference. The old O'Reilly book was terrible. It was actually the K&P "The UNIX Programming Environment" that had the best intro to make.
For home machines sure. If you need to build a server and the application is I/O bound (and, indeed, most people find that CPU is as big a bottleneck as I/O) and want to stay in the x86 world, doing I/O on your PCI-e independent busses is a big help.
We used three PCI-e slots: one for GigE, one each for SCSI so each of the two disks got their own controller and bus. The ethernet alone can swamp an old, shared PCI bus, and SATA was not nearly fast enough.
The USAF had planned to redesignate the A-12 aircraft as the B-71 as the successor to the B-70 Valkyrie. The B-71 would have a nuclear capability of 3 first-generation SRAM's (Short-Range Attack Missiles). The next designation was RS-71 (Reconnaissance-Strike) when the strike capability became an option. However, then USAF Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay preferred the SR (Strategic Reconnaisance) designation and wanted the RS-71 to be named SR-71. Before the Blackbird was to be announced by President Johnson on 29 February 1964, LeMay lobbied to modify Johnson's speech to read SR-71 instead of RS-71. The media transcript given to the press at the time still had the earlier RS-71 designation in places, creating the myth that the president had misread the plane's designation.[1][2]
California has a three strikes law. According the TFA, "she pleaded guilty to one felony count of using another person's identification fraudulently." So, at minimum, that's one strike. Her prior conviction may or may not be a strike, but sounds serious enough that it probably is. If it is, then the fact that she "was delivered to the Yolo County sheriff on another outstanding fraud-related warrant after she was sentenced in San Francisco" may very well be strike three, which results in a long, mandatory sentence. Of course, I may be wrong about the applicability of three strikes here.
Then you can have a debate about putting another non-violent offender into the already *absurdly* overcrowded California prison system, versus allowing her the freedom to, most likely, do a lot of damage to peoples lives -- neither is a very attractive outcome.
An open letter to Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc. regarding the official Sun Microsystems Mac OS X participation announcement of May, 2007.
attn: Jonathan Schwartz c/o Sun Microsystems, Inc. 4150 Network Circle Santa Clara, CA 95054 Return Receipt Requested
Mr. Schwartz:
Send beer.
Sincerely, Edward Peterlin Chief Visionary, NeoOffice.org and The Undersigned
Actually, AFAIK, the issue is if the candidate filed. A lot of places will count the write-in votes for those candidates who actually filed to run as a write-in, because those are valid votes and must be included in final reports (whatever those are called in a given state). Note however that a lot of people vote for joke write-ins. Those are not counted because they are not valid votes -- you still have to file (at lease most places), even if you are running as a write-in. It is not a "I can vote for anybody" space.
Actually in my case, and in that of my friends, it was one of:
- When it was announced that George Lucas was doing a new Star Wars(tm) series - When it was announced that the first of these would be called Phantom Menace
And don't forget that if these cities mirror most American large and medium sized cities, then many, if not most, users will be people who don't live in the WiFi zone or even in the city. Most users will be people who work or are doing business downtown.
I'm all for "free" WiFi for areas like this, but charging only those who live in that zone is not the way to go. It indirectly benefits the whole metro area. Widen the tax base and then you only charge pennies a month. Obviously, if there are only geogrphic centers of commerce besides downtown, it then behooves the city to provide "free" WiFi to those areas too as resources allow.
Also, bear in mind that European carriers were required to adhere to one standard (GSM) and that their networks interoperate. As a result, ever since SMS became available everywhere, European customers never had to work about what network the recipient of the SMS was on -- it would work regardless of that.
In the US, when SMS was introduced (under a zillion different brand names, I might add) it usually only worked between phones on the same network. That has changed -- most (all?) US networks will now receive each others SMS's. But it's another reason the feature was basically ignored for years. This was certainly the case five years ago -- many payphones in Switzerland even had keyboards for sending SMS's, while in the States it was effectively crippled.
On another note, some commenters have pointed out that SMS is no longer cheaper than a minute of airtime in Europe, and that airtime minutes are cheaper in the US. This is true.
However, there are still times when SMS may be as/more effective than voice. One can unobtusively use SMS in places (meetings, loud bars, for example) where a voice call would have to be ignored. "One minute" of voice can easily stretch on if the receiver must leave a room to talk, or if you have 30 seconds of "can you hear me now" (common in the US). Also, if you have addresses, numbers, directions, etc in your messages, it may be easier to receive an SMS than to transcribe notes (for example, in the car).
Does anyone know of anyone making add-ons (I'm mainly thinking of an external 3.5" hard drive enclosure) that are the same form factor as the mini? This seems like a no brainer to me. You could stack 'em then. It's just the right size for an external enclosure...
I've just spent the past year going from zero to local Veritas NetBackup Enterprise Server guru. The reason it's SO convoluted is that it is actually a very complex problem. You could can a solution -- indeed, many such products are available -- but it wouldn't be flexible enough for "enterprise level" installations. Even Backup Exec only comes close, and it's certainly a non-trivial product.
I'm a little fuzzy on the relationship between Ericsson and SonyEricsson.
Ericsson is primarily a telecom network infrastructure company. They make, for example, the base stations for wireless networks. They used to make handsets but haven't for a long time. It's not part of their core business.
They long ago entered into a 50/50 joint venture with Sony, called SonyEricsson, to make handsets -- what with Sony being a consumer electronics giant and all.
Absolutely. Let me add that often simply having to explain the problem to someone else will make you realize something you'd been overlooking (more often than not, a bogus assumption).
I TiVo the University of Washington Computer Science Department's colloquia each week on the Research Channel. There are a number of geekly, raw academic programs like this that might be of interest to Slashdotters on there. I see from the schedule that there's a program on computers from George Mason University and they rebroadcasted stuff from the ACM 2003 International Conference and Trade Show, Tampa, Florida.
Might be worth a look if you get the channel. I have it on Dish Network. It appears that it may be broadcast live on the web as well (sadly, in Windows Media).
At AUUG '99, Qualcomm's Greg Rose pointed out in a presentation some key things to keep in mind out the encryption features various wireless protocols:
1) They are seldom enabled by network operators. And good luck finding out which ones are and aren't...
2) When they are enabled, most implementations are so poor that you don't get anything by turning them on. (IIRC, one of the most common schemes revolves around the psuedo-random number sequence used to encrypt the data stream (new number for each chuck (or set of chunks) of data. Fine, but apparently virtually all the implementations restart the sequence with the seed of 0 for each new call. So the sequence is completely known in advance.)
Point (2) is an illustration of a point I think is key to computer and network security: Security is hard, even on paper. Implementing something is just as hard again. The security systems are remarkably brittle: virtually *any* little mistake can completely break the system (more so than most software).
Your ISP is paying real amounts of money for bandwidth. Not dial-up or DSL connections, but really big pipes that they share amongst their subscribers. They're also paying for disk space to store their customers' mail.
Yes. Furthermore: Just because the incremental cost of bandwidth is nearly (or actually) nil for many of us doesn't mean it's so cheap for everybody. Go out to sea or to the desert and use your $6-a-minute, ass-slow satellite phone to check your email. Some people must pay dearly for each byte. Every spam costs them some real dough.
OO techniques are seldom fully understood
on
Head First Java
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The majority of developers do NOT fully understand OO principles. There is a difference between learning the syntax and the basic features and understanding how to leverage them. Most OO developers can write and use simple classes, use inheritance and basic polymorphism. This is generally all that is taught in courses and language books. This is also sufficient to get most things done.:)
However, most people this level of knowledge do not understand just how much more can be done. A good example of more powerful OO programming is in the Gang of Four book. The conceptual leap from procedural to basic OO programming is but the first step.
I guess what I'm getting at is that once you're at this point where you're using basic OO techniques, then there's still a lot more you can learn (even if you know each and every language feature and its syntax). Just be aware of that and look into it someday.
The
Prisoner's Dilemma is a useful device for understanding how rational decisions for the individual can lead to irrational decisions for the group. In addition to being used by game theorists and in AI (where readers of Slashdot may have seen it), it is a very basic illustrative tool used in political science to explain behavior.
Similar to what Australia did a few years back, I would rather see a digit prepended to the area code. Live in 212? Now you live in, say, 0212.
Then, when you need more numbers, go ahead and split the area code, but do it several ways (2212, 3212, etc.) -- and do the split all at once, so you're not dealing with a new set every year. Also, it would keep "212" as a distinct geographical area.
Furthermore, mobiles get their own area codes (say, 9212, 8212, however many are required for growth) -- then you can move to allowing caller-pays for mobile phones...
Slashdot Mirror
Bear with me for this imperfect analogy: A have a few of friends who have written tech books. One of them kept doing it over the years. If the question is wether the money he has made from advances and royalties paid well, the answer is flatly "NO." The pay is quite small compared to the amount of time that has to be sunk into the project. But he keeps doing them. Why? The *real* benefit is that now he's an authority on the subject. This drastically increases his (and his consultancy's) value and has brought him many clients over the years. Being able to point to a working, published iPhone app is probably a lot more valuable to your career and/or business than whatever paltry sum you derive from direct revenue. Assuming there continues to be general demand for iPhone apps, at least. At least, that's one theory.
It's frankly made worse by the fact that (at least when I used complied languages, which was ages ago), it was hard to find a good reference. The old O'Reilly book was terrible. It was actually the K&P "The UNIX Programming Environment" that had the best intro to make.
In A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge posited Programmer Archaeologists would replace all new development. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=760521
... It's a series of frauds!
For home machines sure. If you need to build a server and the application is I/O bound (and, indeed, most people find that CPU is as big a bottleneck as I/O) and want to stay in the x86 world, doing I/O on your PCI-e independent busses is a big help. We used three PCI-e slots: one for GigE, one each for SCSI so each of the two disks got their own controller and bus. The ethernet alone can swamp an old, shared PCI bus, and SATA was not nearly fast enough.
California has a three strikes law. According the TFA, "she pleaded guilty to one felony count of using another person's identification fraudulently." So, at minimum, that's one strike. Her prior conviction may or may not be a strike, but sounds serious enough that it probably is. If it is, then the fact that she "was delivered to the Yolo County sheriff on another outstanding fraud-related warrant after she was sentenced in San Francisco" may very well be strike three, which results in a long, mandatory sentence. Of course, I may be wrong about the applicability of three strikes here. Then you can have a debate about putting another non-violent offender into the already *absurdly* overcrowded California prison system, versus allowing her the freedom to, most likely, do a lot of damage to peoples lives -- neither is a very attractive outcome.
Actually, AFAIK, the issue is if the candidate filed. A lot of places will count the write-in votes for those candidates who actually filed to run as a write-in, because those are valid votes and must be included in final reports (whatever those are called in a given state). Note however that a lot of people vote for joke write-ins. Those are not counted because they are not valid votes -- you still have to file (at lease most places), even if you are running as a write-in. It is not a "I can vote for anybody" space.
Actually in my case, and in that of my friends, it was one of:
- When it was announced that George Lucas was doing a new Star Wars(tm) series
- When it was announced that the first of these would be called Phantom Menace
Thanks for making my month! Seriously ... I needed oxygen and Jolt.
I'm all for "free" WiFi for areas like this, but charging only those who live in that zone is not the way to go. It indirectly benefits the whole metro area. Widen the tax base and then you only charge pennies a month. Obviously, if there are only geogrphic centers of commerce besides downtown, it then behooves the city to provide "free" WiFi to those areas too as resources allow.
Also, bear in mind that European carriers were required to adhere to one standard (GSM) and that their networks interoperate. As a result, ever since SMS became available everywhere, European customers never had to work about what network the recipient of the SMS was on -- it would work regardless of that. In the US, when SMS was introduced (under a zillion different brand names, I might add) it usually only worked between phones on the same network. That has changed -- most (all?) US networks will now receive each others SMS's. But it's another reason the feature was basically ignored for years. This was certainly the case five years ago -- many payphones in Switzerland even had keyboards for sending SMS's, while in the States it was effectively crippled. On another note, some commenters have pointed out that SMS is no longer cheaper than a minute of airtime in Europe, and that airtime minutes are cheaper in the US. This is true. However, there are still times when SMS may be as/more effective than voice. One can unobtusively use SMS in places (meetings, loud bars, for example) where a voice call would have to be ignored. "One minute" of voice can easily stretch on if the receiver must leave a room to talk, or if you have 30 seconds of "can you hear me now" (common in the US). Also, if you have addresses, numbers, directions, etc in your messages, it may be easier to receive an SMS than to transcribe notes (for example, in the car).
Does anyone know of anyone making add-ons (I'm mainly thinking of an external 3.5" hard drive enclosure) that are the same form factor as the mini? This seems like a no brainer to me. You could stack 'em then. It's just the right size for an external enclosure...
I've just spent the past year going from zero to local Veritas NetBackup Enterprise Server guru. The reason it's SO convoluted is that it is actually a very complex problem. You could can a solution -- indeed, many such products are available -- but it wouldn't be flexible enough for "enterprise level" installations. Even Backup Exec only comes close, and it's certainly a non-trivial product.
Ericsson is primarily a telecom network infrastructure company. They make, for example, the base stations for wireless networks. They used to make handsets but haven't for a long time. It's not part of their core business.
They long ago entered into a 50/50 joint venture with Sony, called SonyEricsson, to make handsets -- what with Sony being a consumer electronics giant and all.
Absolutely. Let me add that often simply having to explain the problem to someone else will make you realize something you'd been overlooking (more often than not, a bogus assumption).
Might be worth a look if you get the channel. I have it on Dish Network. It appears that it may be broadcast live on the web as well (sadly, in Windows Media).
Take heed:
That pretty much says it all. Maybe someone should post some good link about Post-Traumatic Strees Syndrome for those of use who have seen it.
Must get lunch now...
1) They are seldom enabled by network operators. And good luck finding out which ones are and aren't...
2) When they are enabled, most implementations are so poor that you don't get anything by turning them on. (IIRC, one of the most common schemes revolves around the psuedo-random number sequence used to encrypt the data stream (new number for each chuck (or set of chunks) of data. Fine, but apparently virtually all the implementations restart the sequence with the seed of 0 for each new call. So the sequence is completely known in advance.)
Point (2) is an illustration of a point I think is key to computer and network security: Security is hard, even on paper. Implementing something is just as hard again. The security systems are remarkably brittle: virtually *any* little mistake can completely break the system (more so than most software).
- Your ISP is paying real amounts of money for bandwidth. Not dial-up or DSL connections, but really big pipes that they share amongst their subscribers. They're also paying for disk space to store their customers' mail.
Yes. Furthermore: Just because the incremental cost of bandwidth is nearly (or actually) nil for many of us doesn't mean it's so cheap for everybody. Go out to sea or to the desert and use your $6-a-minute, ass-slow satellite phone to check your email. Some people must pay dearly for each byte. Every spam costs them some real dough.The majority of developers do NOT fully understand OO principles. There is a difference between learning the syntax and the basic features and understanding how to leverage them. Most OO developers can write and use simple classes, use inheritance and basic polymorphism. This is generally all that is taught in courses and language books. This is also sufficient to get most things done. :)
However, most people this level of knowledge do not understand just how much more can be done. A good example of more powerful OO programming is in the Gang of Four book. The conceptual leap from procedural to basic OO programming is but the first step.
I guess what I'm getting at is that once you're at this point where you're using basic OO techniques, then there's still a lot more you can learn (even if you know each and every language feature and its syntax). Just be aware of that and look into it someday.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a useful device for understanding how rational decisions for the individual can lead to irrational decisions for the group. In addition to being used by game theorists and in AI (where readers of Slashdot may have seen it), it is a very basic illustrative tool used in political science to explain behavior.
Then, when you need more numbers, go ahead and split the area code, but do it several ways (2212, 3212, etc.) -- and do the split all at once, so you're not dealing with a new set every year. Also, it would keep "212" as a distinct geographical area.
Furthermore, mobiles get their own area codes (say, 9212, 8212, however many are required for growth) -- then you can move to allowing caller-pays for mobile phones...