I'm surprised to see the Lego building block on Slashdot. Has Lego sued you yet?
The LEGO Corporation seems to have lightened up on this. Their site now has this fair play page that describes how an enthusiast site can reference LEGO bricks without stepping on trademark and copyright issues. They even allow "scanning of limited extracts" of their copyrighted materials as long as you're not trying to suggest that the LEGO Corporation is in any way connected with your site. The guidelines seem quite reasonable, allowing use of the LEGO trademarks and material while still protecting the corporation's intellectual property.
Oh boy! Just what I've been waiting for! Another game with textures that get blurry when close-up, making me feel like I need glasses for farsightedness!
Duke Nukem 3D (no, not Forever, but the one that was out long before Quake I) will still blow Doom III away, just 'cause it has attitude.
By the way, did anyone else think the Doom III screenshots looked more realistic than the actual booth photos? The booth looked like something out of Dr. Who...
Precisely. We need to change our NT passwords every 45 days or so. Everyone I know just rotates "password1", "password2", etc. In fact, the system here is set up to only remember your last four passwords, not all your passwords within the past 90 days or something. So, in the course of about 30 seconds you can rotate all the way back to "password1" again. Effectively, the password is never changed.
To add to this, the password format isn't checked. I can set mine to "password", "hello", or even my userid. Tell me again why changing them periodically is more secure?
Some people are on-call 24x7x52. And others (like me) would prefer that the babysitter can get ahold of us if something dire should happen. Of course, my phone is left on vibrate and I'd leave the theater before answering. Anyone not considerate to do likewise deserves exile to the Saturday Matinee.
I agree that laptops, PDAs, and the like should be turned off during the movie. They may not be loud, but the light is surely going to bother everyone behind you.
That's an interesting bit of speculation-- what exactly would we have to do to make the next Privacy Chernobyl? Something legitimate, that pissed off millions of people and made them feel totally violated. And of course, make sure they knew we got all of their information from, say, yahoo.
Oh, you mean like declaring a "war" against an intangible enemy with an undefined victory condition? (When will we think we've won the "war on terrorism", anyway?) Then using this so-called "war" as justification for just about any privacy-invading action the government wants to take?
Been there, done that. And the annoying part is, most people are in favor of it. No, not the Slashdot readers, but go outside and ask the other 99% of the population.
Privacy is dead. The genie's out of the bottle and can't be stuffed back in. The technology exists, so somebody will use it. It's inevitable. Your homework, class -- Learn to deal with it.
Re:Do what you can to protect yourself.
on
Headhunting Laws?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
First off is the spam you start getting, the others are the annoying phone calls and other crap you have to do, like "we expect your resumes in this format, our clients expect this level of quality, blah blah blah..."
I'll post the dissenting view. The two times I've worked with a headhunter (the same guy in both cases) it was wonderful. Maybe I just got lucky and found a good guy/agency. I had intended to use my time between jobs to brush up on new technologies and so forth, but he kept my schedule too full of interviews. In both cases I got a new job in under a week.
Mind you, this was 4-6 years ago, when the job market was really good. I also had nearly a decade of embedded systems experience under my belt, so he actually had something to sell to people.
I've never gotten spam from him or any other agency. I do get a phone call now and then asking if I'm looking for a new job again, but it's nowhere near enough to be considered a nuisance. I have way more trouble with vendors I met once at a trade show hounding me over and over trying to sell me their product.
I'd never post my resume to an online service again, though. I did once, and found that not a single company calling me had actually read the damn thing. They just did a keyword scan and called everyone who matched. Blech.
As for the original poster's problem... There's the possibility that 'X Solutions, Inc.' is another name for an agency that you did work through. Agencies sometimes go by more than one name, or get bought out by another agency, etc. There's also the possibility that someone else with the same name you have applied through 'X Solutions, Inc.'. If you're lucky you might be able to talk the HR department into giving you enough info to show them that the prior resume wasn't yours.
Or, if the case is simply that they don't want to be accused of stealing X Solutions' finder's fee, tell them to go ahead and pay it. A hiring manager can often find ways to work our difficulties with HR if he really wants to hire someone.
On the other hand, the company may have changed its mind and this is simply an easy excuse to reneg on their offer...
The reflective LCD used in the Sony Clie is marvelous. Perfectly readable in high-light conditions, and has a frontlight that makes it readable under just about any condition.
Now, if only I could read it while wearing polarized sunglasses...
Look, guys... It's a computer. It's a tool, not an objet d'art. Shove it under your desk and forget about it already! Who cares what flippin' color it is? In a couple months it'll have that "accumulated dust" veneer anyway.
Now, quit messing with those case mods and get back to something important. Like desktop themes.
I've been using the Baen Free Library for a year now, and actually (*gasp*) buying ebooks from them on their "Webscription" program. It's fantastic. I prefer ebooks, and their use of an open, unencrypted format (HTML) really gives them an edge over other publishers. I can read it on my PC, download it to my Palm, whatever. I don't have to worry about losing the book because the particular viewer went out of vogue or I lost some silly registration key.
The price is right, too. The Baen titles are priced a little below a paperback, on average. Contrast this to some of the other ebooks you see on Amazon or other online vendors. Often the ebook costs more than the hardcover! What the heck are they thinking?
I bought a title from Peanut Press last week. I have the hardcover, but I'll be going on a trip soon and don't want to lug the thing around with me. Fortunately the Palm version was relatively inexpensive (about $4). Unfortunately, it's encrypted and I can only read it using their viewer, which I don't particularly like. I'll put up with it for this title, but they're not going to get a lot of repeat business from me.
Baen's gotten some sales from me that they wouldn't have otherwise, just because I can easily sample new authors from the free library. Other publishers have benefitted too, indirectly. I wanted to read a particular non-fiction title that was offered in ebook form for more than the price of the hardcover. I already had the paperback, but after it had been sitting on my shelf for a year I finally decided that I'd never get around to reading it if I wasn't carrying it around in my Palm with all my other current reading material. Fortunately I know the author, and he was kind enough to send me the manuscript in HTML. After reading it I went out and bought two more copies of the printed book as gifts for people. Those sales wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been able to get the ebook at a reasonable price. (Essentially, "free with the purchase of the paperback".)
I'd really like to see the DVD laid out so you can pick and choose which edition you want to see. This would be perfect for something like Star Wars. Wanna see the original? Great. Press "Play Original Version" and you get just that, no Special Edition footage. Wanna see the special edition? Great, press that button instead. And if you let me program the scene order myself, I can keep in the cool scene where the Millenium Falcon takes off out of Mos Eisle but take out the lame Jabba scene just before it.
This was one of the promises of DVD that I haven't seen used in any title yet. I remember hearing it touted that you'd be able to switch between, say, an R-rated original or the PG-rated cut-for-TV release. Or maybe I'd like to see the deleted scenes in the context of the movie rather than as snippets to be viewed separately. *sigh*
BTW, if anyone needs a volunteer to study the effects of impact with Téa Leoni, well, I'd be willing to sacrifice myself. For the good of humanity, you know...
[...] they also don't want their three year old to take such an expensive little piece of equipment off and toss it in the street.
Precisely! Actually, an abductor wouldn't care about the value of the device and would probably cut the band immediately and toss the thing out the window. A small kid, on the other hand, may remove it simply because he/she can. You'd want to prevent that. (Although, it'd be easy to find if it did get lost!)
This device is not a bad thing. I wouldn't force it on an older child who didn't want it, but it sounds like a great thing for small children. Case in point -- We spend about a week each summer camping in the north woods. My wife is terrified that our 4yo will wander off. (Not that he's really prone to doing this, but moms are good at irrational fear.:-) Getting lost at a shopping mall is one thing -- The kid will eventually be seen wandering without parents and be taken to the mall office or some-such. Getting lost in the woods literally miles from the nearest houses is quite different.
Those Garmin FRS radios with the GPS features are also wonderfully attractive, for the same reasons. They're all a bit too pricey, but once something like this hits the $100 price-point we'll probably get a few.
These things shouldn't be used to check up on a kid you don't trust. I wouldn't want to use one to keep them honest. But don't discount them as "evil tools of Da Man". Like any tool, they can be used for good or bad.
Let's make the water turn black
on
Black Water
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· Score: 2
Someone built an Amazing Lego DAT Tape Changer out of Mindstorms. I imagine the same could be done for a CDR changer. Here's your excuse to go buy yourself a cool toy!
Cygwin's bash runs passably well. However, I can't really recommend cygwin due to the basic conflicts between Unix and Windows conventions. Most Unixes have case-sensitive filenames, for instance, but Windows doesn't. And there's no clean mapping of Unix permissions to NTFS ACLs. Cygwin's nice, and I keep it around for a few things, but personally I get frustrated when I run up against things that are almost but not quite like they should be.
On the other hand, if you're just looking for a decent command shell for Windows, you can't do much better than 4NT from JP Software. 4NT is compatible with 'cmd.exe', yet adds a whole bunch of features reminiscent of a good Unix shell. I've been a big fan of 4DOS/4NT for quite a few years.
Oh, and don't forget to download Perl, Python and/or Tcl from ActiveState.
I was working at Capcom Coin-Op around the time SF Alpha came out. We had one in the showroom on free play, so I played it a bit. Never could understand the popularity of it. Or any others in the fighting genre, for that matter... The whole thing seemed to come down to memorizing arbitrary joystick/button sequences that had little or no connection to what was happening on the screen. Wanna do your super-mega-knockout move? LLLDU-sweepCCW-punch-kick. I never really saw the game aspect of it.
Now, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, on the other hand... There was a great game! It was so cool to see half the company lined up to play it; everyone from the assembly-line workers through the highest levels of management. Time to fire up MAME, I think...
[...] but come on, a single-user license for iSilo is $17.50! Pay for it, already.
Seconded! iSilo is an excellent DOC reader, and if you need text markup you can run plain ol' HTML through the iSiloX converter. It even does images and nested tables. Plus, it supports the hi-res screens of the Clie and Handera 330.
I use iSilo every day, and I have no regrets about giving them my cash. They've earned it.
My wife is almost ready to drop huge amounts of money on a set of these for the family. "Popular Science" had a "What's New" blurb on them this month. That write-up made it sound like the units could be set to spontaneously transmit their positions periodically, and that they could draw a map of the other units' current positions relative to each other and to any other waypoints that have been set.
The appealing part of this is that we go camping once in a while, and have had the kids get "lost" (ie., out of sight) more than once. Nothing's worse than your wife going nuts because the 3yo has wandered off... If the kid's position can be plotted without the kid having to do anything, we're there! (ESPECIALLY if the radios come in a ruggedized version, maybe without the screen for the kids' units.)
While the integrated GPS may have been done before by HAMs, this is the first "for the masses" product that has done this. I still wonder how they're going to get around the data-over-FRS restrictions, though.
[...] Microsoft is granting the world a royalty-free, non-exclusive license [...]
Boy, talk about a 180-degree policy change! First Microsoft keeps the extensions proprietary, then they reverse that and make it so open that license is even extended to other worlds. I guess that's a good thing. I'd hate to see a Mars mission that couldn't login to the on-board network simply because the authentication algorithm wasn't licensed for use off of Earth...
Slashdot Mirror
The LEGO Corporation seems to have lightened up on this. Their site now has this fair play page that describes how an enthusiast site can reference LEGO bricks without stepping on trademark and copyright issues. They even allow "scanning of limited extracts" of their copyrighted materials as long as you're not trying to suggest that the LEGO Corporation is in any way connected with your site. The guidelines seem quite reasonable, allowing use of the LEGO trademarks and material while still protecting the corporation's intellectual property.
Oh boy! Just what I've been waiting for! Another game with textures that get blurry when close-up, making me feel like I need glasses for farsightedness!
Duke Nukem 3D (no, not Forever, but the one that was out long before Quake I) will still blow Doom III away, just 'cause it has attitude.
By the way, did anyone else think the Doom III screenshots looked more realistic than the actual booth photos? The booth looked like something out of Dr. Who...
Precisely. We need to change our NT passwords every 45 days or so. Everyone I know just rotates "password1", "password2", etc. In fact, the system here is set up to only remember your last four passwords, not all your passwords within the past 90 days or something. So, in the course of about 30 seconds you can rotate all the way back to "password1" again. Effectively, the password is never changed.
To add to this, the password format isn't checked. I can set mine to "password", "hello", or even my userid. Tell me again why changing them periodically is more secure?
I'm sorry, you can't legally do that unless you also burn the computers with which the OS was bundled.
Some people are on-call 24x7x52. And others (like me) would prefer that the babysitter can get ahold of us if something dire should happen. Of course, my phone is left on vibrate and I'd leave the theater before answering. Anyone not considerate to do likewise deserves exile to the Saturday Matinee.
I agree that laptops, PDAs, and the like should be turned off during the movie. They may not be loud, but the light is surely going to bother everyone behind you.
Oh, you mean like declaring a "war" against an intangible enemy with an undefined victory condition? (When will we think we've won the "war on terrorism", anyway?) Then using this so-called "war" as justification for just about any privacy-invading action the government wants to take?
Been there, done that. And the annoying part is, most people are in favor of it. No, not the Slashdot readers, but go outside and ask the other 99% of the population.
Privacy is dead. The genie's out of the bottle and can't be stuffed back in. The technology exists, so somebody will use it. It's inevitable. Your homework, class -- Learn to deal with it.
I'll post the dissenting view. The two times I've worked with a headhunter (the same guy in both cases) it was wonderful. Maybe I just got lucky and found a good guy/agency. I had intended to use my time between jobs to brush up on new technologies and so forth, but he kept my schedule too full of interviews. In both cases I got a new job in under a week.
Mind you, this was 4-6 years ago, when the job market was really good. I also had nearly a decade of embedded systems experience under my belt, so he actually had something to sell to people.
I've never gotten spam from him or any other agency. I do get a phone call now and then asking if I'm looking for a new job again, but it's nowhere near enough to be considered a nuisance. I have way more trouble with vendors I met once at a trade show hounding me over and over trying to sell me their product.
I'd never post my resume to an online service again, though. I did once, and found that not a single company calling me had actually read the damn thing. They just did a keyword scan and called everyone who matched. Blech.
As for the original poster's problem... There's the possibility that 'X Solutions, Inc.' is another name for an agency that you did work through. Agencies sometimes go by more than one name, or get bought out by another agency, etc. There's also the possibility that someone else with the same name you have applied through 'X Solutions, Inc.'. If you're lucky you might be able to talk the HR department into giving you enough info to show them that the prior resume wasn't yours.
Or, if the case is simply that they don't want to be accused of stealing X Solutions' finder's fee, tell them to go ahead and pay it. A hiring manager can often find ways to work our difficulties with HR if he really wants to hire someone.
On the other hand, the company may have changed its mind and this is simply an easy excuse to reneg on their offer...
The reflective LCD used in the Sony Clie is marvelous. Perfectly readable in high-light conditions, and has a frontlight that makes it readable under just about any condition.
Now, if only I could read it while wearing polarized sunglasses...
Look, guys... It's a computer. It's a tool, not an objet d'art. Shove it under your desk and forget about it already! Who cares what flippin' color it is? In a couple months it'll have that "accumulated dust" veneer anyway.
Now, quit messing with those case mods and get back to something important. Like desktop themes.
I've been using the Baen Free Library for a year now, and actually (*gasp*) buying ebooks from them on their "Webscription" program. It's fantastic. I prefer ebooks, and their use of an open, unencrypted format (HTML) really gives them an edge over other publishers. I can read it on my PC, download it to my Palm, whatever. I don't have to worry about losing the book because the particular viewer went out of vogue or I lost some silly registration key.
The price is right, too. The Baen titles are priced a little below a paperback, on average. Contrast this to some of the other ebooks you see on Amazon or other online vendors. Often the ebook costs more than the hardcover! What the heck are they thinking?
I bought a title from Peanut Press last week. I have the hardcover, but I'll be going on a trip soon and don't want to lug the thing around with me. Fortunately the Palm version was relatively inexpensive (about $4). Unfortunately, it's encrypted and I can only read it using their viewer, which I don't particularly like. I'll put up with it for this title, but they're not going to get a lot of repeat business from me.
Baen's gotten some sales from me that they wouldn't have otherwise, just because I can easily sample new authors from the free library. Other publishers have benefitted too, indirectly. I wanted to read a particular non-fiction title that was offered in ebook form for more than the price of the hardcover. I already had the paperback, but after it had been sitting on my shelf for a year I finally decided that I'd never get around to reading it if I wasn't carrying it around in my Palm with all my other current reading material. Fortunately I know the author, and he was kind enough to send me the manuscript in HTML. After reading it I went out and bought two more copies of the printed book as gifts for people. Those sales wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been able to get the ebook at a reasonable price. (Essentially, "free with the purchase of the paperback".)
I'd really like to see the DVD laid out so you can pick and choose which edition you want to see. This would be perfect for something like Star Wars. Wanna see the original? Great. Press "Play Original Version" and you get just that, no Special Edition footage. Wanna see the special edition? Great, press that button instead. And if you let me program the scene order myself, I can keep in the cool scene where the Millenium Falcon takes off out of Mos Eisle but take out the lame Jabba scene just before it.
This was one of the promises of DVD that I haven't seen used in any title yet. I remember hearing it touted that you'd be able to switch between, say, an R-rated original or the PG-rated cut-for-TV release. Or maybe I'd like to see the deleted scenes in the context of the movie rather than as snippets to be viewed separately. *sigh*
Immortality is a solved problem. You just need some magnetic pinky rings.
BTW, if anyone needs a volunteer to study the effects of impact with Téa Leoni, well, I'd be willing to sacrifice myself. For the good of humanity, you know...
I don't know, kinda depends on the dimensions of the user, doesn't it? Maybe the memory stick slot is big enough for the article's submitter.
Quick, Robin! The Bat-Shark-Repellent!
Precisely! Actually, an abductor wouldn't care about the value of the device and would probably cut the band immediately and toss the thing out the window. A small kid, on the other hand, may remove it simply because he/she can. You'd want to prevent that. (Although, it'd be easy to find if it did get lost!)
This device is not a bad thing. I wouldn't force it on an older child who didn't want it, but it sounds like a great thing for small children. Case in point -- We spend about a week each summer camping in the north woods. My wife is terrified that our 4yo will wander off. (Not that he's really prone to doing this, but moms are good at irrational fear. :-) Getting lost at a shopping mall is one thing -- The kid will eventually be seen wandering without parents and be taken to the mall office or some-such. Getting lost in the woods literally miles from the nearest houses is quite different.
Those Garmin FRS radios with the GPS features are also wonderfully attractive, for the same reasons. They're all a bit too pricey, but once something like this hits the $100 price-point we'll probably get a few.
These things shouldn't be used to check up on a kid you don't trust. I wouldn't want to use one to keep them honest. But don't discount them as "evil tools of Da Man". Like any tool, they can be used for good or bad.
It's the ghost of Frank Zappa!
Someone built an Amazing Lego DAT Tape Changer out of Mindstorms. I imagine the same could be done for a CDR changer. Here's your excuse to go buy yourself a cool toy!
Peeps in chocolate fondue. Mmmmm...
Cygwin's bash runs passably well. However, I can't really recommend cygwin due to the basic conflicts between Unix and Windows conventions. Most Unixes have case-sensitive filenames, for instance, but Windows doesn't. And there's no clean mapping of Unix permissions to NTFS ACLs. Cygwin's nice, and I keep it around for a few things, but personally I get frustrated when I run up against things that are almost but not quite like they should be.
On the other hand, if you're just looking for a decent command shell for Windows, you can't do much better than 4NT from JP Software. 4NT is compatible with 'cmd.exe', yet adds a whole bunch of features reminiscent of a good Unix shell. I've been a big fan of 4DOS/4NT for quite a few years.
Oh, and don't forget to download Perl, Python and/or Tcl from ActiveState.
Odd. I have a working SPF2X dump for MAME. Got it off the net somewhere. My kids love it.
I was working at Capcom Coin-Op around the time SF Alpha came out. We had one in the showroom on free play, so I played it a bit. Never could understand the popularity of it. Or any others in the fighting genre, for that matter... The whole thing seemed to come down to memorizing arbitrary joystick/button sequences that had little or no connection to what was happening on the screen. Wanna do your super-mega-knockout move? LLLDU-sweepCCW-punch-kick. I never really saw the game aspect of it.
Now, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo , on the other hand... There was a great game! It was so cool to see half the company lined up to play it; everyone from the assembly-line workers through the highest levels of management. Time to fire up MAME, I think...
Seconded! iSilo is an excellent DOC reader, and if you need text markup you can run plain ol' HTML through the iSiloX converter. It even does images and nested tables. Plus, it supports the hi-res screens of the Clie and Handera 330.
I use iSilo every day, and I have no regrets about giving them my cash. They've earned it.
My wife is almost ready to drop huge amounts of money on a set of these for the family. "Popular Science" had a "What's New" blurb on them this month. That write-up made it sound like the units could be set to spontaneously transmit their positions periodically, and that they could draw a map of the other units' current positions relative to each other and to any other waypoints that have been set.
The appealing part of this is that we go camping once in a while, and have had the kids get "lost" (ie., out of sight) more than once. Nothing's worse than your wife going nuts because the 3yo has wandered off... If the kid's position can be plotted without the kid having to do anything, we're there! (ESPECIALLY if the radios come in a ruggedized version, maybe without the screen for the kids' units.)
While the integrated GPS may have been done before by HAMs, this is the first "for the masses" product that has done this. I still wonder how they're going to get around the data-over-FRS restrictions, though.
Now there's a way to make your first million. Market a line of affordable RC Nerf Attack Helicopters.
Even better if they were programmable and could be used autonomously. "Nerf Mindstorms". Oooh, I could rule this office!
Boy, talk about a 180-degree policy change! First Microsoft keeps the extensions proprietary, then they reverse that and make it so open that license is even extended to other worlds. I guess that's a good thing. I'd hate to see a Mars mission that couldn't login to the on-board network simply because the authentication algorithm wasn't licensed for use off of Earth...