Basically, you ssh into it from an actual computer. For the price/performance ratio, xboxes could be handily turned into nice headless render farms, parallel computing platforms, webservers... whatever you can think of that would benefit from a more-than-one use.
If I had some spare $$$s I might pick up a 6 pack and see what kind of fun I could have with em.:D
For all his relative ineffectiveness in actually stopping such ugly legislation, it's a good thing that we have a privacy advocate watching out for this sort of chicanery.
It's given me the heads up, and I plan on spreading the word to interested parties around town (universities and the like). Maybe I'll drop in on my MP/MLA and have a brief chat with why this bill would be A Bad Thing For Canadians(tm).
I think the primary cause of failures that I could see was people just not lubricating (ie: spraying on enough water to keep the thing moving smooth). If you grind on a dry or under-lubricated disk, you might as well be using #60 wet-dry sandpaper, and start saving up for your next CD/DVD.
Hell, it even works on DVDs for me... my kids managed to completely mangle my old Matrix dvd, to the point where my player would completely barf on it about the point where neo took the pills... a little Dr. on it and it doesn't even skip any more.
Maybe I got a good one, I dunno.;) Hasn't failed me yet, tho!
I found a little device in Electronics Boutique called the 'Game Doctor'. There's a manual and electronic motorized version. Requires no special parts aside from purified water to lubricate the process, and the results are nothing short of astounding. There's some CDs I had with gouges so deep I thought for sure I'd have to replace them and the Game Dr. ressurected them.
Definately worth an investment to check out, at the very least. I haven't come across a disk it hasn't been able to save yet.
Heh... wayyyy back in the day I made a terminal program for the atari 8 bit and the MPP-1000e modem. 80x24 screen (using a 4-pixel wide font... quite a feat, lemme tell you)... made pretty heavy use of De Re Atari, the holy bible of all things atari 8-bittish. It was actually kind of fun, if you consider that sort of thing 'fun'.;)
That was about the last time I did anything serious with asm. I tried to get into 8086 stuff and got some dos-based things hammered out, but compared to the 6502 it was a faustian nightmare.
People cheat on in-person work anyways. Online would just make it (slightly) easier.
I'd be okay with requiring tests and so forth be done under in-person supervision, so long as the in-person testing was done locally. I think they do that for grade 12 distance education anyways and it seems to work fine.
Hmmm... this implies that you've already completed a graduate program at some 'in person' university already.
It's getting closer though, maybe the goal of getting an accredited full undergrad->grad->doctorate program in CS isn't that far off after all.
I thought we were all spoda be in paperless classrooms and everything by now, anyways. And driving levitating bubble cars that got 700 miles to the gallon of seawater...;)
I'm still waiting for the REALLY cool stuff, 100% full online non-classroomed university.
Yes, I'm aware of U. of Phoenix, but the courses they offer are pretty minimal, and definately don't seem like they're going to get you much of a job anywhere (except perhaps the MBA).
Why can't a good university (Dalhousie? UBC? UCLA-Berkeley?) put out a fully virtualized, 100% online computer science degree? You'd think with the computing luminaries these universities churn out there'd be enough brainpower to overcome whatever technical problems are left to tackle. All the elements are there... streaming video for lectures, standards to deliver homework assignments... what else is needed but professors willing to get with the program, and administration willing to shell out a few bucks with the possibility of getting back much, much more?
Hmmm... I've seen some of those legal nightmares of which you speak, and while plain jane RTF might not handle it well, plain jane HTML would easily be able to... or if HTML was found lacking, a commonly accepted SMGL DTD would be in order.
Mind you, the vast vast vast majority of documents generated in any office (government, law, or otherwise) are simple memos, notes, and casual correspondance. Standardizing on a DTD for official documents isn't too insane, and standardizing on.rtf for 'unofficial' things would be fine.
That's all blue sky though. Most offices don't have enough techno savvy to understand what rtf or SGML is, let alone implement it in a uniform fashion.
When I was in Jr. High, myself and at least another half dozen of my classmates all knew more than our teacher... that is, any of the kids who'd had ANY experience with computers.
Of course, it'd probably have been better if our teacher wasn't chosen from the pool as being the person showing the most aptitude at getting the flashing '12:00' off the school's VCR...
Grade 12 in high school was different. We had a former MIT grad teaching. Got us all manner of cool things to play with. First time I'd not known more in computers than the person allegedly teaching me.:D
Guy I know was walking on 41st street in brooklyn a little while ago... apparently some big ass building beam fell off the building and pancaked a worker not more than 20 feet from him.
Life has stuff like that. If you think too deeply about these things all the time, you'll end up depressed, paranoid, and indoors all the time.
The video game DDR, though, provides ample opportunity to sit back and alternately laugh your ass off (when 280 lbs geekfreaks attempt dancing the first time) or smile appreciatively (when tasty looking wimminz attempt the same).
er... to prove that they're NOT making use of a patent, that is.
Bah. I even previewed before I posted. Damn rented fingers.:D
"Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment." [sigh... wait... twiddle fingers...]
Yeah, but try to add in provisions to review that, and it'd make things even worse. The fat companies that have mad bank will be taking little-guy patent holders to court to 'prove' they're making use of a patent EVERYWHERE.
Reducing the term of patent issuance (or removing them outright for software development) and getting patent office workers with a clue would be money far better spent, I'd say...
The possibility of a latex sphincter dance notwithstanding, I'd still rather run a private mail server with an https: based web frontend in that situation.
Of course, I'm an administrator type. Most people who perch themselves in front of a box at work are just your standard data entry plebe with no clue about how email works aside from "I puts the name of the person I wants to mail here, and hits send after I babble for a while."
"I can't see a difference... can you see a difference?"
Still seems like business is thrashing about trying to find a long term viable money generating plan for OSS, and that's where the majority of the conflict comes in. Governments are just other types of businesses (often very poorly run ones, but still businesses) which just seem to have different budgetary and regulatory constraints than 'normal' businesses.
I dunno if which side of the shill fence I'd fall on, but I think forcing anyone to accept either an all-microsoft or all-OSS solution is inane. Pragmatism with a little forward thinking should be the rule, with a heavy emphasis on interoperability.
Is that so hard? Perhaps not if you're an individual or small business without lobbyists or other special interest groups fucking with your policy, but when you get bigger...
While I have no desire to see SnoSoft get... uh, "Snowed", this would have been a landmark DMCA case. It would have been nice to see SnoSoft win, and set a precident to other companies who'd like to wield this myopic peice of litterbox-lining legislation as a flaw shield.
Perhaps they think they can cover the blemishes of their software with the blood of the people who point them out.
Yeah, but you need the rest of the book to help cushion the blow before you come to the inevitable conclusion that you're an indentured servant of a mealy mouthed schmuck who'd rather twin 6000+km of perfectly good highway than fix the problems with health care, schools, the military or any of the other actually important things in the country.
If you didn't have the book to brainwa^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcarefull explain why things are the way they are, you might feel like you were being treated unfairly, and noone wants to feel THAT way.;)
Seriously though, it's a good book. If you're not a suit-and-tie geek with your feet nailed to the floor under your desk at the office, it can be a useful reference.
Specifically Unix Network Programming (vols 1 + 2) and Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment. Basically the holy bibles of all things unix-programish.
Aside from that, same as what others have mentioned... Applied Cryptography, Unix System Administration, Practical Unix & Internet security...
Oh yeah, "The Complete Canadian Small Business Guide" has come in handy in many instances indirectly related to programming...;)
Slashdot Mirror
If I had some spare $$$s I might pick up a 6 pack and see what kind of fun I could have with em. :D
Thanks, typhoid Lilserf. :-P
For all his relative ineffectiveness in actually stopping such ugly legislation, it's a good thing that we have a privacy advocate watching out for this sort of chicanery.
It's given me the heads up, and I plan on spreading the word to interested parties around town (universities and the like). Maybe I'll drop in on my MP/MLA and have a brief chat with why this bill would be A Bad Thing For Canadians(tm).
Reading the instructions helped ;)
;) Hasn't failed me yet, tho!
I think the primary cause of failures that I could see was people just not lubricating (ie: spraying on enough water to keep the thing moving smooth). If you grind on a dry or under-lubricated disk, you might as well be using #60 wet-dry sandpaper, and start saving up for your next CD/DVD.
Hell, it even works on DVDs for me... my kids managed to completely mangle my old Matrix dvd, to the point where my player would completely barf on it about the point where neo took the pills... a little Dr. on it and it doesn't even skip any more.
Maybe I got a good one, I dunno.
Found the link to the manufacturer...
http://www.digitalinnovations.com
Mail: sales@digitalinnovations.com
Phone: 1-888-SMART-58
HTH. HAND.
I found a little device in Electronics Boutique called the 'Game Doctor'. There's a manual and electronic motorized version. Requires no special parts aside from purified water to lubricate the process, and the results are nothing short of astounding. There's some CDs I had with gouges so deep I thought for sure I'd have to replace them and the Game Dr. ressurected them.
Definately worth an investment to check out, at the very least. I haven't come across a disk it hasn't been able to save yet.
IANAL, but I think he meant to say 'device driver'. ;)
It's:
:D
"Build a man a fire and you'll warm him for a night.
Set a man on fire and you'll warm him for the rest of his life."
Heh... wayyyy back in the day I made a terminal program for the atari 8 bit and the MPP-1000e modem. 80x24 screen (using a 4-pixel wide font... quite a feat, lemme tell you)... made pretty heavy use of De Re Atari, the holy bible of all things atari 8-bittish. It was actually kind of fun, if you consider that sort of thing 'fun'. ;)
That was about the last time I did anything serious with asm. I tried to get into 8086 stuff and got some dos-based things hammered out, but compared to the 6502 it was a faustian nightmare.
People cheat on in-person work anyways. Online would just make it (slightly) easier.
I'd be okay with requiring tests and so forth be done under in-person supervision, so long as the in-person testing was done locally. I think they do that for grade 12 distance education anyways and it seems to work fine.
Hmmm... this implies that you've already completed a graduate program at some 'in person' university already.
;)
It's getting closer though, maybe the goal of getting an accredited full undergrad->grad->doctorate program in CS isn't that far off after all.
I thought we were all spoda be in paperless classrooms and everything by now, anyways. And driving levitating bubble cars that got 700 miles to the gallon of seawater...
I'm still waiting for the REALLY cool stuff, 100% full online non-classroomed university.
Yes, I'm aware of U. of Phoenix, but the courses they offer are pretty minimal, and definately don't seem like they're going to get you much of a job anywhere (except perhaps the MBA).
Why can't a good university (Dalhousie? UBC? UCLA-Berkeley?) put out a fully virtualized, 100% online computer science degree? You'd think with the computing luminaries these universities churn out there'd be enough brainpower to overcome whatever technical problems are left to tackle. All the elements are there... streaming video for lectures, standards to deliver homework assignments... what else is needed but professors willing to get with the program, and administration willing to shell out a few bucks with the possibility of getting back much, much more?
Hmmm... I've seen some of those legal nightmares of which you speak, and while plain jane RTF might not handle it well, plain jane HTML would easily be able to... or if HTML was found lacking, a commonly accepted SMGL DTD would be in order.
.rtf for 'unofficial' things would be fine.
Mind you, the vast vast vast majority of documents generated in any office (government, law, or otherwise) are simple memos, notes, and casual correspondance. Standardizing on a DTD for official documents isn't too insane, and standardizing on
That's all blue sky though. Most offices don't have enough techno savvy to understand what rtf or SGML is, let alone implement it in a uniform fashion.
When I was in Jr. High, myself and at least another half dozen of my classmates all knew more than our teacher... that is, any of the kids who'd had ANY experience with computers.
:D
Of course, it'd probably have been better if our teacher wasn't chosen from the pool as being the person showing the most aptitude at getting the flashing '12:00' off the school's VCR...
Grade 12 in high school was different. We had a former MIT grad teaching. Got us all manner of cool things to play with. First time I'd not known more in computers than the person allegedly teaching me.
Guy I know was walking on 41st street in brooklyn a little while ago... apparently some big ass building beam fell off the building and pancaked a worker not more than 20 feet from him.
Life has stuff like that. If you think too deeply about these things all the time, you'll end up depressed, paranoid, and indoors all the time.
Kinda like most slashdot posters. Hmmmm...
The video game DDR, though, provides ample opportunity to sit back and alternately laugh your ass off (when 280 lbs geekfreaks attempt dancing the first time) or smile appreciatively (when tasty looking wimminz attempt the same).
:D
I think the choice is pretty clear.
er... to prove that they're NOT making use of a patent, that is.
:D
Bah. I even previewed before I posted. Damn rented fingers.
"Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment." [sigh... wait... twiddle fingers...]
Yeah, but try to add in provisions to review that, and it'd make things even worse. The fat companies that have mad bank will be taking little-guy patent holders to court to 'prove' they're making use of a patent EVERYWHERE.
Reducing the term of patent issuance (or removing them outright for software development) and getting patent office workers with a clue would be money far better spent, I'd say...
The possibility of a latex sphincter dance notwithstanding, I'd still rather run a private mail server with an https: based web frontend in that situation.
:D
Of course, I'm an administrator type. Most people who perch themselves in front of a box at work are just your standard data entry plebe with no clue about how email works aside from "I puts the name of the person I wants to mail here, and hits send after I babble for a while."
Hm. Not unlike slashdot, if you think about it.
... actually use hotmail for anything other than a spam folder when you need to sign up for a website that requires an e-mail address?
I wouldn't trust MS to hold on to any information I considered important.
For most people's word processing, .rtf would be more than sufficient. It'd make wading through those annoying word-generated emails a lot easier.
"I can't see a difference... can you see a difference?"
Still seems like business is thrashing about trying to find a long term viable money generating plan for OSS, and that's where the majority of the conflict comes in. Governments are just other types of businesses (often very poorly run ones, but still businesses) which just seem to have different budgetary and regulatory constraints than 'normal' businesses.
I dunno if which side of the shill fence I'd fall on, but I think forcing anyone to accept either an all-microsoft or all-OSS solution is inane. Pragmatism with a little forward thinking should be the rule, with a heavy emphasis on interoperability.
Is that so hard? Perhaps not if you're an individual or small business without lobbyists or other special interest groups fucking with your policy, but when you get bigger...
While I have no desire to see SnoSoft get... uh, "Snowed", this would have been a landmark DMCA case. It would have been nice to see SnoSoft win, and set a precident to other companies who'd like to wield this myopic peice of litterbox-lining legislation as a flaw shield.
Perhaps they think they can cover the blemishes of their software with the blood of the people who point them out.
Yeah, but you need the rest of the book to help cushion the blow before you come to the inevitable conclusion that you're an indentured servant of a mealy mouthed schmuck who'd rather twin 6000+km of perfectly good highway than fix the problems with health care, schools, the military or any of the other actually important things in the country.
;)
If you didn't have the book to brainwa^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcarefull explain why things are the way they are, you might feel like you were being treated unfairly, and noone wants to feel THAT way.
Seriously though, it's a good book. If you're not a suit-and-tie geek with your feet nailed to the floor under your desk at the office, it can be a useful reference.
Specifically Unix Network Programming (vols 1 + 2) and Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment. Basically the holy bibles of all things unix-programish.
;)
Aside from that, same as what others have mentioned... Applied Cryptography, Unix System Administration, Practical Unix & Internet security...
Oh yeah, "The Complete Canadian Small Business Guide" has come in handy in many instances indirectly related to programming...