Draconian Measures are fine, too. The problem is that it's pretty difficult to enforce such things, as MySpace and its ilk have no ID-verification service. And MySpace is so big, it really behooves the sexual predator or paedophile to join up -- there's an excellent chance they can find some dumb schmoe they're interested in attacking or exploiting.
Children shouldn't expect too much privacy since they're still kind of "in training", and especially shouldn't expect things they share with anonymous strangers to be private from their parents and legal guardians. There should be an API for social networking sites that allows parents to moderate and censor (but not edit) their children's MySpace and Email accounts, et al. Even a chance to put in a wordlist to keep their hometown, school name, last name, etc. private. Maybe all the 'tweenies would flock to some other, less secure service, but if the community is smaller, there's less low-hanging fruit for the predators.
I wonder about this, and worry a little bit. These companies certainly need people with those skills, so... would society benefit from a return to some form of indentured servitude? Perhaps if companies had protected their image over the past 30 years instead of letting hotshot MBA's slit their cash cows' throats and ride it into the ground, screwing all their customers in the process, then the stable companies could be trusted to provide a lifelong career for someone who chooses to learn these skills. I think that in the current environment, there aren't enough jobs to entice someone to get the necessary training. Turnover in skilled disciplines -- from both the employer's and employee's sides -- is way too high to justify the kind of dedication it takes to learn to do these things well.
It would be nice to have enough faith in the long-term plans of a company that, eg, when IBM or Ford Motor Group needs someone who can do this, an employee could be sent to school for 2-4 years with a reasonable expectation of some long-term benefits.
Lately, it seems like you need 10-15 years of experience just to be an asset rather than a liability in some fields. So why would an employer hire a college graduate for a reasonable salary, when the chances are next-to-nothing that this person will work for them long enough to contribute to the company? And who will guarantee that some new MBA won't fire him for some stupid reason? I once lost a job because some middle-manager decided that being "late" to work was defined as punching in more than 3 minutes after your scheduled time, and if you were late more than 8 times a year, you should be fired.
Back to the core of the topic: It's the question of Freddy Fastfingers, the coder who can churn out functional code super-fast, but for every hour of his work, the company invests 2-3 hours of manpower fixing, explaining, or otherwise ameliorating the effects of solveable flaws in his code. Does he even deserve to have a job? Probably not. The question is, is it reasonable for the company to nurse his career for 10 years until he's learned his way around in his field, or should they find a way to do his job with less-skilled labor, using tools that (while overpriced and underperforming) aren't filled with amateurish, glaring bugs?
Employers can't trust Employees to stick with their company, and Employees can't trust Employers not to fire them. It's a vicious cycle, and it's destroyed much of what made this country a leader in high technology in the first place.
Exactly. When I need to do a mass-mailing from my PHP apps, I use a custom class that emulates some of the sendmail interface by opening a socket to a SMTP host. See 'fsockopen' in the PHP docs -- SMTP is super-simple, and if you want, I'll share my class source with you.
You just have to make sure that your production server has a trusted connection to the MTA, or write a few lines of code to authenticate against the server. Also remember that one thing that really pisses SPAM filters off is when you try to forge headers to make it look like your mail came from a desktop mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If your message says "I came from Outlook", and then doesn't put the headers in the same order as Outlook, or uses encodings or MIME organization that Outlook wouldn't, expect it to get dumped pretty quickly by Bayesian algorithms.
It is indeed a Flash 8 issue. Here is the page in Camino (Gecko/20060427) with Flash 7 and Flash 8.
Neither is great -- notice the 'undefined' text at the bottom of the Flash 8 version -- but at least it's legible with Flash 8. The page is just not Linux friendly, since there's no Flash 8 client for Linux.
OK, I'll bite. Upgrading an iMac G5 1.9GHz with 1.5GB of RAM from a WD1600, a 160GB 5400RPM drive with an 8MB buffer, to a WD740 Raptor, a 74GB 10kRPM drive with a 16MB buffer, dropped my boot time from 85 seconds to 30 seconds. Application icons that used to bounce 5-10 times in my dock before becoming active, now bounce once or twice. ANY benchmark can be refuted: Objective or otherwise.
I assume you're referring to Seagate's new 750GB behemoth with parallel recording, as an example of 7200RPM performance. It performs very well -- not so well for many heavier applications because of its seek times, but very well. If you like it, you should definitely buy it instead of a 5400RPM laptop drive. There are a lot bigger sources of heat, noise, and power draw in a PC than its hard disk, and there really isn't anything that is as much of a bottleneck. In this case, the performance is more important, at least for a boot or swap drive. Saying that you can get a 7200RPM disk that performs nearly as well as a 10kRPM one doesn't change the fact that your priorities have to be pretty skewed for a 5400RPM laptop drive to be your disk of choice.
Average seek of 3.6ms, sustained data rate of 93.3MB/sec... All in a nice little 2.5" package.
Umm... Maybe you misread that. It's over an inch tall, and 4"x5.7", according to its spec sheet. That would make it, by necessity, a 3.5" form-factor hard disk. It is nice, though. Now I just have to get a machine that can use SAS drives well, and save up a lot of money. I've got a 15kRPM Fujitsu hard disk around here somewhere that a customer gave me, but I never got around to shelling out the money for a Ultra320 controller so I could use it. C'est la vie.
The next generation of laptop hard disks have performance characteristics that are competitive with three generations old desktop hard disk drives. I fail to see a story. I'd be much more interested to see them compare these new 'hybrid' laptop hard drives with genuine top-of-the-line desktop drives.
And the newest hard disks aren't that loud. I just upgraded my iMac G5 with a WD Raptor (10kRPM SATA). You can definitely hear it more clearly when large files are being written or under swap conditions, but most of the time the difference in noise levels is indistinguishable -- meaning silent. And my subjective benchmarks reveal an almost 4x increase in the speed of common tasks.
You might not like making left turns, but when your passenger grabs the wheel and yanks it to the right, you've got to do some corrective steering, or crash. There's a line to be crossed before you're on the wrong side of the road, and right now I'd be happy if we could just get back on the damn road. Commuter lane, commercial lane, whatever.
If a Chinese kid blows it on the big day, his mother will never, ever, ever shut up about it. Until the very day she dies.
Totally true, and thus the rash of suicides that inevitably follows each Black Thursday. Many people would like to attribute it to simple shame or despair, but really it's still about cheating. See, if you score poorly, you can 'cheat' by committing suicide, and thereby avoid a lifetime of nagging and degradation.
Nice USB disk. Not to diminish your post, but let's do the math so people can see EXACTLY how much info would be there. 4 bytes (SSN) + 14 bytes (avg) for a name + null byte = 19 bytes each. 262 million US citizens * 19 bytes is 4.64GiB. If you keep the optimal binary format, and want to add DOB, add another 4 bytes per record for a total of 5.6GiB. First and last names are seldom unique in the US, so assume it could be compressed by 50% for a backup.
If it was someone's goal to walk away with the data, they might actually be able to fit it all on a flash drive or DVD. If they want addresses, school records, credit history, any genealogical information (to link children to parents), maiden names, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, etc., these would all add to the total.
We're not quite to the point of worrying about a flash drive yet, or really even a laptop, because laptops don't tend to have that much free space. But if someone were to buy an iPod or similar player for the purpose, they could put a few albums on it and use the rest of the disk to walk away from a data center with all the information. Hell, they could be on the next flight to a country with no extradition, still listening to their favorite band, before anyone knows what happened.
What I worry about is smaller databases, like you said. Whilst the Fed's complete database might be around 40-50GiB in compressed form, State Agencies' complete files could be 1-3GiB after gzipping. Considering the payout involved, the collusion of 50-100 people isn't out of the picture.
The ocean cannot be above the geode in one part of the world and below it in another _by definition_. At least not on average over a year.
But, the geode is measured relatively to something, because there's no instrument I know of that is capable of measuring the specific gravity for every latitude/longitude on earth. The geode is an equipotential model, and the mass below the point of measurement affects it as well as the mass above. We have seen evidence recently that our magnetic poles are shifting around, so what's to say that some change in densities under the Earth's crust hasn't caused this effect? If the points of focus for the magnetic poles demonstrate some type of organization of materials below the surface, this should be expected.
And this point brings up something really scary. What happens when you use your rights to privacy, and choose not to post anything about your private life on the Internet? Do employers start interviewing MySpace users first (because they are at least a known quantity), or even dropping your resume completely?
IMO, this is just a question of references. If you are able to provide suitable character and work references on your resume, then your employers shouldn't be considering additional references that you did not provide. Maybe it will be decided that listing MySpace as a reference is acceptable, but there is no guarantee as to accuracy. Prospective employers don't have the right (as far as I know) to call random co-workers from your past, your drinking buddies, or your old high school friends to dig for dirt. I can't imagine that they would examine the transcript of an argument you got in at a bar, which is what a lot of online flames degenerate to. If employees want their online lives evaluated, it should be optional, with no reasonable expectation of consequence if they refuse.
That's a catch? I'm finding more and more every day that the Mac is my ideal development platform. I can run X11 apps if I want; With the new Intel Macs I can run XP in a *window* (I downloaded but haven't tried Vista B2 yet). XCode isn't bad for compiled code, but the best editor for scripts like PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc. on any platform (TextMate) is Mac-only. I have all the command-line tools I need like ssh, rsync, cvs, etc. And Fugu is a great SFTP client, where hitting Command-J will open a file in your editor of choice and automagically apply any changes back to the server in real-time when you hit 'save' -- great for fixing live websites.
The only thing I've needed in the past that I couldn't do on a Mac is writing J2ME apps for a mobile phone. But see above paragraph about running Windows in Parallels. Parallels Desktop is saving me money on my electric bill and wear & tear on my office carpet (not having to scoot between Mac & PC a hundred times a day).
Part of my problem is that my cellphone's charger is on my bedside outlet, connected to a switch which my wife often turns off when she comes to bed. I don't find out until the next morning that it sat there most of the night not charging, but if I leave it in another room I will sometimes miss customer calls in the mornings. The real point I wanted to make is that I'll be glad to charge it more often, as long as it spends less time suckling at the wallbound teat.
... And thus the comments about the mfg. process 'catching up'. I think we already don't use Li-Ion AA's and AAA's because they're cost-prohibitive, and the packaging is wasteful of space. I already wince at paying about US$2.50 per individual AAA for NiMH. But this technology promises features I think are worth paying for, just like having Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries in your cellphone, mp3 player, and PDA right now. Imagine when the battery for your cellphone or iPod is long-lived enough to be printed onto the circuit board and never replaced, and it can receive a charge in only a few seconds. If this is done properly, it'll eventually be the end of removable cells altogether.
This even opens up a lot of integration possibilities that just weren't there before, like peripherals that bring their own capacitor bank in to boost the system's capacity. Everything with a PCB can now cache its power, without all the bulk of a traditional battery. Imagine expansion cards that can carry the power needed for I/O (Wireless, Flash Memory, whatever) and charge with the system. You could even use the memory expansion slot as an auxiliary battery, like on some laptops how the optical drive can be replaced with another battery.
Take this with System-On-Package designs like were just recently discussed here, and we may get some really small electronics in our lifetime. You could even reduce capacity to save space -- I wouldn't mind charging my cellphone almost every night if it only took a few seconds.
Wrong. Google is not supposed to be a "trusted source of information". Google is a trusted index of legally available information. If information isn't available to Chinese citizens, then there is no reasonable or moral expectation of inclusion. You can't pin the blame on Google. Google is actually going a step further and telling the user about information that isn't available.
It really seems like a lot of users here have this fallacious impression of Google as a source, a creator, protector and defender of information, when their only function is to help you find information you have legal access to. I suppose Google, therefore, is amoral for honoring a robots.txt file, too! After all, to allow a site owner to censor himself would clash similarly with the "don't be evil" motto. This isn't about Google censoring its users. This is about Google allowing the citizens of a sovereign nation to censor themselves. People forget that Google censors results in the US as well, but since this is in line with your social conscience, or your respect for US law, or whatever, somehow it's better.
but wouldn't you rather have a really really tiny phone which you can add those things through equally tiny modular attachments if you so desire?
Not really. It's hard enough to carry around all the chotchkies that go with my current gadgets. Each one needs a slew of accessories if I want it to be fully functional, like memory card readers, USB charging cables or AC adapters, etc. You'd be replacing the problem of carrying several gadgets with the problem of carrying a small purse-sized case of attachments, their battery chargers, and any special dongles they need to work properly.
I'd love a phone that is configurable from the store, like a phone that is basically two super-thin plates between which peripherals can be assembled-in. It can then have a 1" hard drive, bigger battery, card reader with IR, TV Tuner, various cameras, different keypads/keyboards, etc. installed by a technician with a T6 driver and some training. But I really doubt I would go goofballs over having to carry around a bunch of peripherals, only one of which can be installed at a given time.
Maybe it's OT, but I agree completely. I take it a step further, though, and try to only buy from stores with a return policy of some sort. We have a local video game store that accepts returns on new games up to 7 days from original purchase, for a full refund. If you can't return a game, it's a bit ridiculous to talk about 'feedback' to the developers. That is, unless you're willing to wait until you've played a game on someone else's system and read a slew of reviews about it online before you buy anything. If I spent the time to fully research each game before I buy, and/or tried to wait until a friend had a copy, I'd spend more time deciding what games to get than playing them. And there are a lot of games I've really enjoyed that I never would have gotten, just because they didn't match the tastes of the hardcore gaming community.
The problem is, prohibitions are never a "do-it-once" kind of thing. Don't do something stupid is a command that users have to obey every time, in every situation. It takes control, it takes perserverence, and it takes focus. You can't trust every user of a computer to follow this rule every time.
Computers, however, are phenomenally better at consistently repeating tasks than humans. Computers don't come up with ad-hoc justifications to break the rules, or ignore the rules from carelessness. Once you give a computer a decent set of rules to follow, it can do it much better than the user.
Think of it like this: If your car was designed so that opening the doors while the car is in gear destroys the gearbox (resulting in costly repair), would you buy that car and trust all the members of your family to adhere to the prohibition, or would you buy a car that was designed differently? I doubt you'd be on an online forum complaining that it's soo simple not to open the doors, and everyone is getting all worked up over nothing.
I don't remember who said, "Change is the only thing that really stays the same", but it's appropriate. There are advantages and disadvantages to working at home, and HP has decided that this week they want to reap the benefits of team-based collaboration. Maybe it's as simple as a new manager wanting to have whatever managers are n levels below him directly indoctrinate these telecommuters to his way of thinking.
I hope they let the employees keep their VPN equipment and computers at home, and give them comp time for clever ideas they implement from home. Otherwise, HP will certainly lose its most dedicated workers. And, if they have built up a slacker culture that exploits telecommuting and rips off the company, one can only hope they will lose that too, but I think it's a little less certain.
So called 'rich media' could still be easilly sent via email but it would all have to be inlined via the magic of MIME.
I think that email is fundamentally broken in this regard because MUA's don't handle MIME envelopes consistently. Recently, I tried to send a message with: (1) a plain text for backwards compatibility, (2) an HTML-formatted message to look really nice, (3) an inline header graphic (.png) for #2, and (4) a PDF attachment.
For this setup, even though the design spec was very simple, there was NO way to organize the various multipart wrappers for even a majority of compatibility. You need all three of: mime/multipart-alternative, mime/multipart-related, and mime/multipart-mixed to get it to display properly in any MUA, and there was no reliable way to make it work in more than (full-version) Outlook and Thunderbird. If you want an attachment, you have to give up inline images and vice-versa.
BTW, if someone knows why my statements above are wrong, please tell me. I'd like to make that work.
I don't think it will be the Democrats. They feed off of the current system as stronly as the Republican Party.
Most/. posters seem to me to be Libertarian (disclaimer: I am), but they don't know it. Here's a brief statement of the party's agenda:
Minimal Government Control of Markets
Minimal Government Control of Personal Rights
Jefferson said "That government is best, which governs least." The moral complement to this is: If you desire a freedom for yourself, you cannot prevent anyone else from having that same freedom.
No-one ever believes anything without evidence. Even if the only evidence is the popular opinion of other people, it is evidence nonetheless. The original idea on which that faith is based can be traced to some observation of reality -- a hypothesis that can be accepted or rejected based on physical evidence.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith. Most people, however, fail to do either. And as the issues become more important, and people have developed derivative faiths and dogma that rely on earlier assumptions, scrutiny of the underlying evidence becomes anathema to them, even to the point of sacrilege.
Since they're talking about a glass encasement, and palladium is an element (not a compound), one would assume zero breakdown. The palladium (or the glass shell, actually) could be laced with iron to make strong-magnetic collection possible.
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Draconian Measures are fine, too. The problem is that it's pretty difficult to enforce such things, as MySpace and its ilk have no ID-verification service. And MySpace is so big, it really behooves the sexual predator or paedophile to join up -- there's an excellent chance they can find some dumb schmoe they're interested in attacking or exploiting.
Children shouldn't expect too much privacy since they're still kind of "in training", and especially shouldn't expect things they share with anonymous strangers to be private from their parents and legal guardians. There should be an API for social networking sites that allows parents to moderate and censor (but not edit) their children's MySpace and Email accounts, et al. Even a chance to put in a wordlist to keep their hometown, school name, last name, etc. private. Maybe all the 'tweenies would flock to some other, less secure service, but if the community is smaller, there's less low-hanging fruit for the predators.
I wonder about this, and worry a little bit. These companies certainly need people with those skills, so ... would society benefit from a return to some form of indentured servitude? Perhaps if companies had protected their image over the past 30 years instead of letting hotshot MBA's slit their cash cows' throats and ride it into the ground, screwing all their customers in the process, then the stable companies could be trusted to provide a lifelong career for someone who chooses to learn these skills. I think that in the current environment, there aren't enough jobs to entice someone to get the necessary training. Turnover in skilled disciplines -- from both the employer's and employee's sides -- is way too high to justify the kind of dedication it takes to learn to do these things well.
It would be nice to have enough faith in the long-term plans of a company that, eg, when IBM or Ford Motor Group needs someone who can do this, an employee could be sent to school for 2-4 years with a reasonable expectation of some long-term benefits.
Lately, it seems like you need 10-15 years of experience just to be an asset rather than a liability in some fields. So why would an employer hire a college graduate for a reasonable salary, when the chances are next-to-nothing that this person will work for them long enough to contribute to the company? And who will guarantee that some new MBA won't fire him for some stupid reason? I once lost a job because some middle-manager decided that being "late" to work was defined as punching in more than 3 minutes after your scheduled time, and if you were late more than 8 times a year, you should be fired.
Back to the core of the topic: It's the question of Freddy Fastfingers, the coder who can churn out functional code super-fast, but for every hour of his work, the company invests 2-3 hours of manpower fixing, explaining, or otherwise ameliorating the effects of solveable flaws in his code. Does he even deserve to have a job? Probably not. The question is, is it reasonable for the company to nurse his career for 10 years until he's learned his way around in his field, or should they find a way to do his job with less-skilled labor, using tools that (while overpriced and underperforming) aren't filled with amateurish, glaring bugs?
Employers can't trust Employees to stick with their company, and Employees can't trust Employers not to fire them. It's a vicious cycle, and it's destroyed much of what made this country a leader in high technology in the first place.
Exactly. When I need to do a mass-mailing from my PHP apps, I use a custom class that emulates some of the sendmail interface by opening a socket to a SMTP host. See 'fsockopen' in the PHP docs -- SMTP is super-simple, and if you want, I'll share my class source with you.
You just have to make sure that your production server has a trusted connection to the MTA, or write a few lines of code to authenticate against the server. Also remember that one thing that really pisses SPAM filters off is when you try to forge headers to make it look like your mail came from a desktop mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If your message says "I came from Outlook", and then doesn't put the headers in the same order as Outlook, or uses encodings or MIME organization that Outlook wouldn't, expect it to get dumped pretty quickly by Bayesian algorithms.
It is indeed a Flash 8 issue. Here is the page in Camino (Gecko/20060427) with Flash 7 and Flash 8.
Neither is great -- notice the 'undefined' text at the bottom of the Flash 8 version -- but at least it's legible with Flash 8. The page is just not Linux friendly, since there's no Flash 8 client for Linux.
OK, I'll bite. Upgrading an iMac G5 1.9GHz with 1.5GB of RAM from a WD1600, a 160GB 5400RPM drive with an 8MB buffer, to a WD740 Raptor, a 74GB 10kRPM drive with a 16MB buffer, dropped my boot time from 85 seconds to 30 seconds. Application icons that used to bounce 5-10 times in my dock before becoming active, now bounce once or twice. ANY benchmark can be refuted: Objective or otherwise.
I assume you're referring to Seagate's new 750GB behemoth with parallel recording, as an example of 7200RPM performance. It performs very well -- not so well for many heavier applications because of its seek times, but very well. If you like it, you should definitely buy it instead of a 5400RPM laptop drive. There are a lot bigger sources of heat, noise, and power draw in a PC than its hard disk, and there really isn't anything that is as much of a bottleneck. In this case, the performance is more important, at least for a boot or swap drive. Saying that you can get a 7200RPM disk that performs nearly as well as a 10kRPM one doesn't change the fact that your priorities have to be pretty skewed for a 5400RPM laptop drive to be your disk of choice.
Umm... Maybe you misread that. It's over an inch tall, and 4"x5.7", according to its spec sheet. That would make it, by necessity, a 3.5" form-factor hard disk. It is nice, though. Now I just have to get a machine that can use SAS drives well, and save up a lot of money. I've got a 15kRPM Fujitsu hard disk around here somewhere that a customer gave me, but I never got around to shelling out the money for a Ultra320 controller so I could use it. C'est la vie.
The next generation of laptop hard disks have performance characteristics that are competitive with three generations old desktop hard disk drives. I fail to see a story. I'd be much more interested to see them compare these new 'hybrid' laptop hard drives with genuine top-of-the-line desktop drives.
And the newest hard disks aren't that loud. I just upgraded my iMac G5 with a WD Raptor (10kRPM SATA). You can definitely hear it more clearly when large files are being written or under swap conditions, but most of the time the difference in noise levels is indistinguishable -- meaning silent. And my subjective benchmarks reveal an almost 4x increase in the speed of common tasks.
You might not like making left turns, but when your passenger grabs the wheel and yanks it to the right, you've got to do some corrective steering, or crash. There's a line to be crossed before you're on the wrong side of the road, and right now I'd be happy if we could just get back on the damn road. Commuter lane, commercial lane, whatever.
Totally true, and thus the rash of suicides that inevitably follows each Black Thursday. Many people would like to attribute it to simple shame or despair, but really it's still about cheating. See, if you score poorly, you can 'cheat' by committing suicide, and thereby avoid a lifetime of nagging and degradation.
Nice USB disk. Not to diminish your post, but let's do the math so people can see EXACTLY how much info would be there. 4 bytes (SSN) + 14 bytes (avg) for a name + null byte = 19 bytes each. 262 million US citizens * 19 bytes is 4.64GiB. If you keep the optimal binary format, and want to add DOB, add another 4 bytes per record for a total of 5.6GiB. First and last names are seldom unique in the US, so assume it could be compressed by 50% for a backup.
If it was someone's goal to walk away with the data, they might actually be able to fit it all on a flash drive or DVD. If they want addresses, school records, credit history, any genealogical information (to link children to parents), maiden names, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, etc., these would all add to the total.
We're not quite to the point of worrying about a flash drive yet, or really even a laptop, because laptops don't tend to have that much free space. But if someone were to buy an iPod or similar player for the purpose, they could put a few albums on it and use the rest of the disk to walk away from a data center with all the information. Hell, they could be on the next flight to a country with no extradition, still listening to their favorite band, before anyone knows what happened.
What I worry about is smaller databases, like you said. Whilst the Fed's complete database might be around 40-50GiB in compressed form, State Agencies' complete files could be 1-3GiB after gzipping. Considering the payout involved, the collusion of 50-100 people isn't out of the picture.
But, the geode is measured relatively to something, because there's no instrument I know of that is capable of measuring the specific gravity for every latitude/longitude on earth. The geode is an equipotential model, and the mass below the point of measurement affects it as well as the mass above. We have seen evidence recently that our magnetic poles are shifting around, so what's to say that some change in densities under the Earth's crust hasn't caused this effect? If the points of focus for the magnetic poles demonstrate some type of organization of materials below the surface, this should be expected.
And this point brings up something really scary. What happens when you use your rights to privacy, and choose not to post anything about your private life on the Internet? Do employers start interviewing MySpace users first (because they are at least a known quantity), or even dropping your resume completely?
IMO, this is just a question of references. If you are able to provide suitable character and work references on your resume, then your employers shouldn't be considering additional references that you did not provide. Maybe it will be decided that listing MySpace as a reference is acceptable, but there is no guarantee as to accuracy. Prospective employers don't have the right (as far as I know) to call random co-workers from your past, your drinking buddies, or your old high school friends to dig for dirt. I can't imagine that they would examine the transcript of an argument you got in at a bar, which is what a lot of online flames degenerate to. If employees want their online lives evaluated, it should be optional, with no reasonable expectation of consequence if they refuse.
That's a catch? I'm finding more and more every day that the Mac is my ideal development platform. I can run X11 apps if I want; With the new Intel Macs I can run XP in a *window* (I downloaded but haven't tried Vista B2 yet). XCode isn't bad for compiled code, but the best editor for scripts like PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc. on any platform (TextMate) is Mac-only. I have all the command-line tools I need like ssh, rsync, cvs, etc. And Fugu is a great SFTP client, where hitting Command-J will open a file in your editor of choice and automagically apply any changes back to the server in real-time when you hit 'save' -- great for fixing live websites.
The only thing I've needed in the past that I couldn't do on a Mac is writing J2ME apps for a mobile phone. But see above paragraph about running Windows in Parallels. Parallels Desktop is saving me money on my electric bill and wear & tear on my office carpet (not having to scoot between Mac & PC a hundred times a day).
Agreed. :-P
Part of my problem is that my cellphone's charger is on my bedside outlet, connected to a switch which my wife often turns off when she comes to bed. I don't find out until the next morning that it sat there most of the night not charging, but if I leave it in another room I will sometimes miss customer calls in the mornings. The real point I wanted to make is that I'll be glad to charge it more often, as long as it spends less time suckling at the wallbound teat.
... And thus the comments about the mfg. process 'catching up'. I think we already don't use Li-Ion AA's and AAA's because they're cost-prohibitive, and the packaging is wasteful of space. I already wince at paying about US$2.50 per individual AAA for NiMH. But this technology promises features I think are worth paying for, just like having Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries in your cellphone, mp3 player, and PDA right now. Imagine when the battery for your cellphone or iPod is long-lived enough to be printed onto the circuit board and never replaced, and it can receive a charge in only a few seconds. If this is done properly, it'll eventually be the end of removable cells altogether.
This even opens up a lot of integration possibilities that just weren't there before, like peripherals that bring their own capacitor bank in to boost the system's capacity. Everything with a PCB can now cache its power, without all the bulk of a traditional battery. Imagine expansion cards that can carry the power needed for I/O (Wireless, Flash Memory, whatever) and charge with the system. You could even use the memory expansion slot as an auxiliary battery, like on some laptops how the optical drive can be replaced with another battery.
Take this with System-On-Package designs like were just recently discussed here, and we may get some really small electronics in our lifetime. You could even reduce capacity to save space -- I wouldn't mind charging my cellphone almost every night if it only took a few seconds.
Wrong. Google is not supposed to be a "trusted source of information". Google is a trusted index of legally available information. If information isn't available to Chinese citizens, then there is no reasonable or moral expectation of inclusion. You can't pin the blame on Google. Google is actually going a step further and telling the user about information that isn't available.
It really seems like a lot of users here have this fallacious impression of Google as a source, a creator, protector and defender of information, when their only function is to help you find information you have legal access to. I suppose Google, therefore, is amoral for honoring a robots.txt file, too! After all, to allow a site owner to censor himself would clash similarly with the "don't be evil" motto. This isn't about Google censoring its users. This is about Google allowing the citizens of a sovereign nation to censor themselves. People forget that Google censors results in the US as well, but since this is in line with your social conscience, or your respect for US law, or whatever, somehow it's better.
Not really. It's hard enough to carry around all the chotchkies that go with my current gadgets. Each one needs a slew of accessories if I want it to be fully functional, like memory card readers, USB charging cables or AC adapters, etc. You'd be replacing the problem of carrying several gadgets with the problem of carrying a small purse-sized case of attachments, their battery chargers, and any special dongles they need to work properly.
I'd love a phone that is configurable from the store, like a phone that is basically two super-thin plates between which peripherals can be assembled-in. It can then have a 1" hard drive, bigger battery, card reader with IR, TV Tuner, various cameras, different keypads/keyboards, etc. installed by a technician with a T6 driver and some training. But I really doubt I would go goofballs over having to carry around a bunch of peripherals, only one of which can be installed at a given time.
Maybe it's OT, but I agree completely. I take it a step further, though, and try to only buy from stores with a return policy of some sort. We have a local video game store that accepts returns on new games up to 7 days from original purchase, for a full refund. If you can't return a game, it's a bit ridiculous to talk about 'feedback' to the developers. That is, unless you're willing to wait until you've played a game on someone else's system and read a slew of reviews about it online before you buy anything. If I spent the time to fully research each game before I buy, and/or tried to wait until a friend had a copy, I'd spend more time deciding what games to get than playing them. And there are a lot of games I've really enjoyed that I never would have gotten, just because they didn't match the tastes of the hardcore gaming community.
The problem is, prohibitions are never a "do-it-once" kind of thing. Don't do something stupid is a command that users have to obey every time, in every situation. It takes control, it takes perserverence, and it takes focus. You can't trust every user of a computer to follow this rule every time.
Computers, however, are phenomenally better at consistently repeating tasks than humans. Computers don't come up with ad-hoc justifications to break the rules, or ignore the rules from carelessness. Once you give a computer a decent set of rules to follow, it can do it much better than the user.
Think of it like this: If your car was designed so that opening the doors while the car is in gear destroys the gearbox (resulting in costly repair), would you buy that car and trust all the members of your family to adhere to the prohibition, or would you buy a car that was designed differently? I doubt you'd be on an online forum complaining that it's soo simple not to open the doors, and everyone is getting all worked up over nothing.
I don't remember who said, "Change is the only thing that really stays the same", but it's appropriate. There are advantages and disadvantages to working at home, and HP has decided that this week they want to reap the benefits of team-based collaboration. Maybe it's as simple as a new manager wanting to have whatever managers are n levels below him directly indoctrinate these telecommuters to his way of thinking.
I hope they let the employees keep their VPN equipment and computers at home, and give them comp time for clever ideas they implement from home. Otherwise, HP will certainly lose its most dedicated workers. And, if they have built up a slacker culture that exploits telecommuting and rips off the company, one can only hope they will lose that too, but I think it's a little less certain.
I think that email is fundamentally broken in this regard because MUA's don't handle MIME envelopes consistently. Recently, I tried to send a message with: (1) a plain text for backwards compatibility, (2) an HTML-formatted message to look really nice, (3) an inline header graphic (.png) for #2, and (4) a PDF attachment.
For this setup, even though the design spec was very simple, there was NO way to organize the various multipart wrappers for even a majority of compatibility. You need all three of: mime/multipart-alternative, mime/multipart-related, and mime/multipart-mixed to get it to display properly in any MUA, and there was no reliable way to make it work in more than (full-version) Outlook and Thunderbird. If you want an attachment, you have to give up inline images and vice-versa.
BTW, if someone knows why my statements above are wrong, please tell me. I'd like to make that work.
I don't think it will be the Democrats. They feed off of the current system as stronly as the Republican Party.
Most /. posters seem to me to be Libertarian (disclaimer: I am), but they don't know it. Here's a brief statement of the party's agenda:
Jefferson said "That government is best, which governs least." The moral complement to this is: If you desire a freedom for yourself, you cannot prevent anyone else from having that same freedom.
Check it out at their website.
Well met. I hadn't realized that in all these years, all my sigs have been humorous.
Thank You.
No-one ever believes anything without evidence. Even if the only evidence is the popular opinion of other people, it is evidence nonetheless. The original idea on which that faith is based can be traced to some observation of reality -- a hypothesis that can be accepted or rejected based on physical evidence.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith. Most people, however, fail to do either. And as the issues become more important, and people have developed derivative faiths and dogma that rely on earlier assumptions, scrutiny of the underlying evidence becomes anathema to them, even to the point of sacrilege.
Since they're talking about a glass encasement, and palladium is an element (not a compound), one would assume zero breakdown. The palladium (or the glass shell, actually) could be laced with iron to make strong-magnetic collection possible.