Yes! I see all of this stuff about monster technology and all the rest, and I'm realizing that even though I'm a nerd who has 5 computers in my living room, I've spent a lot of time getting as much of that stuff out of my house, or at least as unobtrusive, as possible. And those five computers are as hidden as I can make them (three are laptops, one is a small server in my stereo cabinet, the display for the desktop is an LCD in a bookshelf with a pull-out drawer for the keyboard and mouse). I want much of my furniture, especially anything holding computers or whatnot, to be fold away and to have blank faces when it's closed (I've already built myself such a workbench, it's just a large cabinet in my livingroom when I'm not working on stuff).
Lots of shelves/cabinets and lots of storage, I've got gobs of projects and parts for projects, and I want to keep them organized and close to my life, but I don't want to have to have separate spaces for entertaining and for living, 'cause that's just spending money on half-used space. I haven't actually lived in or used a house with these amenities, but since a lot of projects seem to happen on the floor anyway, I think I'd like hatches or similar floor storage.
However, no unnecessary nooks or hallways or connectors, I want my rooms rectangular, easy to clean, with simple openings between spaces. If the climate demands it (and most do), I like to compartmentalize the house for heating and cooling (and maybe here's your application for technology, a centralized place that I can say "heat the living room, let the dining room and bedroom sit at 50 degrees"), but I don't buy into this crap that some architects push about hallways to provide transition areas in between parts of the house. Make it a door or an opening with a curtain and be done with it.
I don't need a large kitchen, but I want prep room on both sides of the stove, and a veggie sink as well as a clean-up sink. Whatever the entrance to the house, I want a little space, maybe just a few feet of hall, with shelves for shoes by the front door.
Technology-wise, the only really geeky thing I want is a smarter cat door (Yes, I know about Flo Control, but I'd settle for "after dark, opens from the inside only"). I want room to run cables under the floor and through walls, as I'm sick of slap-dash phone/cable installations run under the siding around the outside of the house, and I want lots of power outlets, but I'm less concerned with built-in lights or any fancy technology to switch them; I'm fine with having desk lamps and similar per-application lamps. Don't build crap into the house, as it'll only be made obsolete (and this especially applies to lighting technologies right now). If you do have built in lights, they should be able to make that room like daylight; my alarm clock is currently a big bank of daylight balanced flourescents, and when that lights up the room I'm happy, even in the doldrums of the rainy season.
I want good fitting doors, double-paned glass, good insulation (for conventional construction types, I'm interested in the folks doing 2x6 studs at 19.whatever centers, more room for insulation, cheaper materials costs). Yes, I know that a house needs to breathe, but let's make that a specific function of the design, not a byproduct of skimping on materials.
And, if I go specific to my particular needs, parking for a bunch of bicycles out of the elements, including long ones (tandem/recumbent).
At the recent Emergening Telephony conference, I've also also seen cell phones that understood calendaring software and information about your contact list, so that if you were in a meeting only close coworkers could ring you, everyone else would get voice mail immediately. Other phones equipped with the same software get a menu suggesting that they IM or email the contact.
So, yeah, the opening scenario of that article? It'll take a little hunting, but you can have one of those today.
My girlfriend, a very non-technical person (massage therapist and special ed instructional assistant), was recently given a laptop, with the provision that she'd ask me to try to get the data off of the drive that was in there. It looks like the laptop had been rendered unusable by viruses, but I didn't dig very hard, I popped the drive into an SDA adapter and copied everything over to a secure place on my network for later retrieval.
Data point #1: It was easier for the original user to give away a relatively recent laptop and buy a new one rather than properly admin Windows.
My girlfriend, previously a Windows user, said "the only Windows-only apps I use are QuickBooks and TurboTax, can I run Linux for everything else?" (Everything else being email and web browsing (Opera), spreadsheets and text documents (OpenOffice.org), digital photography and image management, and solitaire.)
Data point #2: Migrating people running Windows over to cross-platform apps is laying groundwork.
She continued "...and I want to do the install, so I can fix things when stuff goes wrong." Gulp. Okay, but I downloaded an Ubuntu install ISO, gave it to her, and off she went. She asked for a little help in partitioning, because this was going to be a dual boot system, but it took her an hour or so. Then she got the XP CD out. That took another hour of her time, and then about 4 hours of my time running Windows Update, finding network drivers, and so forth.
Data point #3: On decent hardware, Windows and Linux have equal hardware support, except that the continuous update model of Linux means that you'll have that support on installation, and that, for the most part you won't have to go chasing down drivers from manufacturer's web sites.
Data point #4: Windows Update sucks, especially if you're used to something that runs the Debian package manager.
And then we had to go back and fix the fact that Windows is either completely freakin' incompetent or deliberately malicious when it comes to running dual-boot with Windows installed second, but it was possible using an Ubuntu Live CD.
Now, to be fair, I'm having a bitch of a time getting the 2.6 kernel to handle power management on my older laptop, but on the relatively recent machine she was given, Ubuntu just worked, where Windows XP took a substantial amount of time from a guy who's been doing computer stuff for over two decades to get working.
And, in the few weeks we've had this running I've been interrupted with questions about how things work or why wacky stuff is happening far less often than when she was running Windows.
Next week, when she does the end of the month accounting stuff, we're going to see about migrating QuickBooks over to CodeWeavers, because having spent some time in a world where the Epson printer drivers actually work for photo quality printing, where the WiFi card stack doesn't crap itself several times an evening, and where the photo browsing snaps quickly, she's now firmly convinced she made the right choice, and never wants to see Windows again.
Yeah, there have been a few complaints: Why, the first time she drilled down on the Windows shares on our network she had to enter her password so many times, but now that it's saved in her keyring she doesn't have to do it again. Not all of the printer management stuff works the way she expects. But relatively? Even though it's only been a week or three, on Ubuntu, most things have just worked, and when they haven't she's had a clear path to what's gone wrong and how to fix it.
But, to tie this back to the subject at hand: Thank you, Microsoft and Mike Nash, for creating the current state of security in Windows. Because of that, my girlfriend just got a sweeeet laptop in exchange for the time it took me to flop out the drive, plug it into a Linux box, and copy the data off. I want more people running laptops to specify Windows, and I want to encourage the notion that replacing your computer every year and a half or so is a totally reasonable way to deal with the fact that a Windows install just doesn't last that long.
The list itself is pretty good, but I can't believe that 441 comments later nobody's mentioned "Headcrash" by Bruce Bethke. Not necessarily high literature, but a must-read if you've ever tried to recover from sysadminery.
Maybe it's your overly permissive SPF record? I don't pretend to understand such things, but I've locked mine down to IP addresses which I actually send mail from and have no problems.
You have "-mx all", I think what you want is a "-a a:chrisbartle.com" and then make sure that all of your mail goes outbound through 216.17.137.189.
Citizen, these enemies are everywhere. They could be in your town. They could be in your neighborhood. They could live on your block. They may, in fact, reside in your home.
Comra... err... Citizen, it is important to be vigilant in protecting our way of life from these would-be evildoers, and it is up to you to ferret them out and report them to the proper authorities.
Sheesh. I'm as much of a Linux zealot as anyone, but that's either a reporter who took quotes out of context and twisted them to make the story sound bizarre, or a spokesperson who might want to rethink their use of language.
I haven't seen anyone mention the main thing I regret in not having a degree: The social advantages.
Look at your classmates. Are any of them people who are likely to get all fired up with you and want to start a company come middle of your junior year? Are any of your professors people you'd want on the board of directors on that company?
Flashing forward a decade, how many of those people do you expect to see at the cutting edge conference you're attending? Are you going to be introducing yourself to people you haven't met before, or are you going to be saying "haven't seen you since..."
I think it's fairly well established at this point that as an educational system, college mostly functions as a low-pass filter. The advantage of grinding in a better school is that you'll be doing so with peers who you're going to have contact with for professional reasons for the rest of your career.
My regrets about degree aren't a bit about what I would or wouldn't have learned, frankly most of what matters you'll learn out in the real world anyway. The regrets are all about the social connections I've had to make later in life.
I stopped calling "on your left" because too many pedestrians took that as "look over your left shoulder" which generally meant they took a step to their left.
Eventually I stopped warning them: much better I should have a slightly frightened but unhit pedestrian than one who stepped into my path.
For quite a while now when friends and I are out late we've sometimes asked a bartender to put a shot of espresso in a glass of porter or stout. Way tasty, and it lets us old farts stay out later.
Highly recommended. I've had a couple of sweet beers, mostly homebrews, and I can see that option being good too. I'm dubious that these guys would pull off one that I'd like, though...
Not quite so impressive performance from my P2110, but 11 hours is as long as I've cared about so far, so I haven't bothered to seriously tune.
And lest the original questioner comment about the "additional battery", it slides into the CD drive bay, so if you leave the CD drive at home it's not like it adds anything to the already super-portable little device.
Granted, it ain't something you'll be playing Doom 3 on, but I love mine!
Start with real offices. Relative to the costs of the employee, what does real estate cost you? For the most part, programmers need flow, and flow can't happen if there are the sounds of other activities going on around you (from phone calls to loud typing).
I currently share an office, which beats cubes, but it also means we both have to agree to needing the flow to have our door closed, which means that if one person needs outside suggestions the other person gets less work done that day.
Run the cables in the walls. Make the place look finished. Computer folks in general have a tendency to drop cables from the ceiling or tape 'em to the floor, and while we think it's no big deal that little bit of clutter does have an effect over time.
The offices can be small if you have an extra conference room. Because unless you have an extra one will always be booked, and you need a place for people to go for impromptu meetings and brainstorming sessions. So build one more conference room than you think is necessary (and certainly one more than your architect/interior designer thinks is necessary).
Lots of big white boards, and a shelf to hold markers and erasers (you'd be amazed at how many times the eraser is perched on a narrow shelf and falls off regularly). Use a digital camera to take pictures of the whiteboard.
Don't overlight the offices, and don't underlight the common areas. In one building I worked in, someone complained (while it was being built) that the offices weren't going to be bright enough. So the builder halved the number of lights in the halls and doubled the ones in the offices. Made the halls feel like a dark alley, and nobody ever turned on all of the lights in their office.
Don't put a coffee pot on every corner. The act of getting coffee isn't just about drugs, it's about the social interaction that happens when people from different groups meet over the coffee pot. So do one, and make it centralized. And as everyone else says: Make sure the coffee is good, strongly consider a commercial service.
Make sure that the cooling system allows you to close the door on the machine room. The office should look finished, and open machine room doors make it feel more like a garage workshop than a comfortable place to get work done and not be distracted by loose wires and tasks to do.
I've ridden one (a Segway), and I don't see the appeal.
Don't get me wrong, it's a very cool toy, but unless you're going to build your own for the geek points spend a tenth of the dollars on a conventional electric scooter: Same range, same maneuverability at reasonable speeds, and when the battery runs out it's still a useful conventional scooter or something you can carry in one hand, not 70 lbs of dead weight you have to find somewhere to park.
And really, at least San Francisco and New York, the major U.S. cities I've been to recently, have sidewalks which are congested enough that they can't handle any higher speed traffic. And I say this as someone who consistently tries to run to catch the ferry, it's just not possible to dodge and weave through that mass of pedestrians at any real speed.
Back on the topic of the Megway, I have met Meg, and I think she's been over her "Megway" fame for several years.
Just to be completely pedantic, I know that A Bug's Life had some raytraced shots. Larry Gritz kludged together something that let BMRT handle the pixels in the glass bits in, I think that giant jar that had all of the grain in it in Hopper's hideout.
It's been a while and I don't remember all of the details, and I'm not sure what else has been done ray-tracing wise since I left there.
But yeah, in general smart use of reflection maps is more reasonable than ray tracing for that sort of application.
It happens that I just configured a mixed network at my house, a Linux box with a printer, and Linux and Windows machines (98 and XP) talking to it.
I've also debugged Windows printing at the office recently.
I realize that ESR likes to hear himself rant, but I'm sorry, anyone who thinks that configuring printers under Windows is easier than setting up CUPS is severely deluded. After running the nth install program on a Windows machine because the printer manufacturers refused to just distribute the drivers, and after reinstalling the printer for the gazillionth time because Windows horks up printer permissions, and all of those other Windows issues we've just learned to deal with, the "plug it in, make a few obvious selections, and print" of the assorted apps talking to CUPS kicked the whole Windows thing to the curb.
ESR has been slowly sliding into irrelevance and meaningless ranting for a while, this little screed puts him solidly in the Jon Katz camp in my book.
Metallic grey case. Small and sleek enough that Apple laptop owners inquire because it looks so good. Only three "multimedia" buttons, labeled "A", "B", and with a little envelope icon.
And, oh yeah, runs Linux really nicely and with the second battery swapped in instead of the drive blows Enderle's aspired to 7 hours out of the water.
If you had penis compensation issues, I'm sure you could make it play screeching tire sounds on startup too...
Okay, going way off topic here and I'll take my karma lumps if I have to, but: If you have Spanish then with a little practice you can probably get the gist of French, at least enough to figure out where Babelfish is falling down.
Heck, neither my french or german is good enough that I'd consider translating for anyone, but I was able to make it through that page getting the gist of what was being said.
And I'm not saying everyone who reads/. has to understand all of those languages, but I'll bet enough do that making a requirement that links be to english only would remove the utility for a lot of us.
And it may be the universal language, but there's a lot more to being a geek than talking with other programmers. I'm communicating with manufacturing facilities, with customers, with other people in the field, and while all of them know English to some extent or another, every little bit I learn about them helps me to understand their communication better. Even though we allegedly share a language.
Besides which, if you can order off the menu without a translator, that shows a willingness to comprehend that generally draws out those who'd otherwise be shy about their knowledge of English.
Moderate me off-topic or flamebait if you must, but if you're a computer professional or want to be one it seems to me that the ability to read a little bit of French or German comes with the territory, and a little written Chinese and Japanese probably wouldn't keep you down either. Perhaps asking for some icon which denotes language after a link would be reasonable, but this "hayull, billybob, if English was good enough for jaysus..." attitude is just childish.
Of course you could have also just looked at the link, seen it was in Germany, and not clicked on it. Or would that have been too much work?
Because that's a heck of a lot of energy, and energy costs fuel. If you can use atmospheric drag (which you're going to have to deal with to some extent anyway) rather than drag up all of that extra fuel, that's mass that can be used for payload.
I'm working today, and not much of a physics geek, so it'd take too long for me to prove this to myself, but off the top of my head I think it'd take roughly half the fuel it took to get the vehicle into orbit to stop it.
So you come home one evening, and find your neighbors with whom you've been feuding over your barking dog rooting through your underwear drawer. Is it your fault that you forgot to lock the door?
Slashdot Mirror
If the cats go out after dark they can bloody well stay out. But if they can get out on their own, then they won't be trying to wake me up at 2AM.
Yes! I see all of this stuff about monster technology and all the rest, and I'm realizing that even though I'm a nerd who has 5 computers in my living room, I've spent a lot of time getting as much of that stuff out of my house, or at least as unobtrusive, as possible. And those five computers are as hidden as I can make them (three are laptops, one is a small server in my stereo cabinet, the display for the desktop is an LCD in a bookshelf with a pull-out drawer for the keyboard and mouse). I want much of my furniture, especially anything holding computers or whatnot, to be fold away and to have blank faces when it's closed (I've already built myself such a workbench, it's just a large cabinet in my livingroom when I'm not working on stuff).
Lots of shelves/cabinets and lots of storage, I've got gobs of projects and parts for projects, and I want to keep them organized and close to my life, but I don't want to have to have separate spaces for entertaining and for living, 'cause that's just spending money on half-used space. I haven't actually lived in or used a house with these amenities, but since a lot of projects seem to happen on the floor anyway, I think I'd like hatches or similar floor storage.
However, no unnecessary nooks or hallways or connectors, I want my rooms rectangular, easy to clean, with simple openings between spaces. If the climate demands it (and most do), I like to compartmentalize the house for heating and cooling (and maybe here's your application for technology, a centralized place that I can say "heat the living room, let the dining room and bedroom sit at 50 degrees"), but I don't buy into this crap that some architects push about hallways to provide transition areas in between parts of the house. Make it a door or an opening with a curtain and be done with it.
I don't need a large kitchen, but I want prep room on both sides of the stove, and a veggie sink as well as a clean-up sink. Whatever the entrance to the house, I want a little space, maybe just a few feet of hall, with shelves for shoes by the front door.
Technology-wise, the only really geeky thing I want is a smarter cat door (Yes, I know about Flo Control, but I'd settle for "after dark, opens from the inside only"). I want room to run cables under the floor and through walls, as I'm sick of slap-dash phone/cable installations run under the siding around the outside of the house, and I want lots of power outlets, but I'm less concerned with built-in lights or any fancy technology to switch them; I'm fine with having desk lamps and similar per-application lamps. Don't build crap into the house, as it'll only be made obsolete (and this especially applies to lighting technologies right now). If you do have built in lights, they should be able to make that room like daylight; my alarm clock is currently a big bank of daylight balanced flourescents, and when that lights up the room I'm happy, even in the doldrums of the rainy season.
I want good fitting doors, double-paned glass, good insulation (for conventional construction types, I'm interested in the folks doing 2x6 studs at 19.whatever centers, more room for insulation, cheaper materials costs). Yes, I know that a house needs to breathe, but let's make that a specific function of the design, not a byproduct of skimping on materials.
And, if I go specific to my particular needs, parking for a bunch of bicycles out of the elements, including long ones (tandem/recumbent).
At the recent Emergening Telephony conference, I've also also seen cell phones that understood calendaring software and information about your contact list, so that if you were in a meeting only close coworkers could ring you, everyone else would get voice mail immediately. Other phones equipped with the same software get a menu suggesting that they IM or email the contact.
So, yeah, the opening scenario of that article? It'll take a little hunting, but you can have one of those today.
We're straying a little off-topic here, but...
My girlfriend, a very non-technical person (massage therapist and special ed instructional assistant), was recently given a laptop, with the provision that she'd ask me to try to get the data off of the drive that was in there. It looks like the laptop had been rendered unusable by viruses, but I didn't dig very hard, I popped the drive into an SDA adapter and copied everything over to a secure place on my network for later retrieval.
Data point #1: It was easier for the original user to give away a relatively recent laptop and buy a new one rather than properly admin Windows.
My girlfriend, previously a Windows user, said "the only Windows-only apps I use are QuickBooks and TurboTax, can I run Linux for everything else?" (Everything else being email and web browsing (Opera), spreadsheets and text documents (OpenOffice.org), digital photography and image management, and solitaire.)
Data point #2: Migrating people running Windows over to cross-platform apps is laying groundwork.
She continued "...and I want to do the install, so I can fix things when stuff goes wrong." Gulp. Okay, but I downloaded an Ubuntu install ISO, gave it to her, and off she went. She asked for a little help in partitioning, because this was going to be a dual boot system, but it took her an hour or so. Then she got the XP CD out. That took another hour of her time, and then about 4 hours of my time running Windows Update, finding network drivers, and so forth.
Data point #3: On decent hardware, Windows and Linux have equal hardware support, except that the continuous update model of Linux means that you'll have that support on installation, and that, for the most part you won't have to go chasing down drivers from manufacturer's web sites.
Data point #4: Windows Update sucks, especially if you're used to something that runs the Debian package manager.
And then we had to go back and fix the fact that Windows is either completely freakin' incompetent or deliberately malicious when it comes to running dual-boot with Windows installed second, but it was possible using an Ubuntu Live CD.
Now, to be fair, I'm having a bitch of a time getting the 2.6 kernel to handle power management on my older laptop, but on the relatively recent machine she was given, Ubuntu just worked, where Windows XP took a substantial amount of time from a guy who's been doing computer stuff for over two decades to get working.
And, in the few weeks we've had this running I've been interrupted with questions about how things work or why wacky stuff is happening far less often than when she was running Windows.
Next week, when she does the end of the month accounting stuff, we're going to see about migrating QuickBooks over to CodeWeavers, because having spent some time in a world where the Epson printer drivers actually work for photo quality printing, where the WiFi card stack doesn't crap itself several times an evening, and where the photo browsing snaps quickly, she's now firmly convinced she made the right choice, and never wants to see Windows again.
Yeah, there have been a few complaints: Why, the first time she drilled down on the Windows shares on our network she had to enter her password so many times, but now that it's saved in her keyring she doesn't have to do it again. Not all of the printer management stuff works the way she expects. But relatively? Even though it's only been a week or three, on Ubuntu, most things have just worked, and when they haven't she's had a clear path to what's gone wrong and how to fix it.
But, to tie this back to the subject at hand: Thank you, Microsoft and Mike Nash, for creating the current state of security in Windows. Because of that, my girlfriend just got a sweeeet laptop in exchange for the time it took me to flop out the drive, plug it into a Linux box, and copy the data off. I want more people running laptops to specify Windows, and I want to encourage the notion that replacing your computer every year and a half or so is a totally reasonable way to deal with the fact that a Windows install just doesn't last that long.
The list itself is pretty good, but I can't believe that 441 comments later nobody's mentioned "Headcrash" by Bruce Bethke. Not necessarily high literature, but a must-read if you've ever tried to recover from sysadminery.
Maybe it's your overly permissive SPF record? I don't pretend to understand such things, but I've locked mine down to IP addresses which I actually send mail from and have no problems.
You have "-mx all", I think what you want is a "-a a:chrisbartle.com" and then make sure that all of your mail goes outbound through 216.17.137.189.
Citizen, these enemies are everywhere. They could be in your town. They could be in your neighborhood. They could live on your block. They may, in fact, reside in your home.
Comra... err... Citizen, it is important to be vigilant in protecting our way of life from these would-be evildoers, and it is up to you to ferret them out and report them to the proper authorities.
Sheesh. I'm as much of a Linux zealot as anyone, but that's either a reporter who took quotes out of context and twisted them to make the story sound bizarre, or a spokesperson who might want to rethink their use of language.
I haven't seen anyone mention the main thing I regret in not having a degree: The social advantages.
Look at your classmates. Are any of them people who are likely to get all fired up with you and want to start a company come middle of your junior year? Are any of your professors people you'd want on the board of directors on that company?
Flashing forward a decade, how many of those people do you expect to see at the cutting edge conference you're attending? Are you going to be introducing yourself to people you haven't met before, or are you going to be saying "haven't seen you since..."
I think it's fairly well established at this point that as an educational system, college mostly functions as a low-pass filter. The advantage of grinding in a better school is that you'll be doing so with peers who you're going to have contact with for professional reasons for the rest of your career.
My regrets about degree aren't a bit about what I would or wouldn't have learned, frankly most of what matters you'll learn out in the real world anyway. The regrets are all about the social connections I've had to make later in life.
I stopped calling "on your left" because too many pedestrians took that as "look over your left shoulder" which generally meant they took a step to their left.
Eventually I stopped warning them: much better I should have a slightly frightened but unhit pedestrian than one who stepped into my path.
For quite a while now when friends and I are out late we've sometimes asked a bartender to put a shot of espresso in a glass of porter or stout. Way tasty, and it lets us old farts stay out later.
Highly recommended. I've had a couple of sweet beers, mostly homebrews, and I can see that option being good too. I'm dubious that these guys would pull off one that I'd like, though...
Not quite so impressive performance from my P2110, but 11 hours is as long as I've cared about so far, so I haven't bothered to seriously tune.
And lest the original questioner comment about the "additional battery", it slides into the CD drive bay, so if you leave the CD drive at home it's not like it adds anything to the already super-portable little device.
Granted, it ain't something you'll be playing Doom 3 on, but I love mine!
This is exactly why I provide an NNTP version of my blog and have made an open offer of NNTP syndication for anyone else who wants to do their 'blog that way. I believe there are also a couple of people doing RSS to NNTP feeds, but none of us have ever gotten enough traction to make doing this as more than a novelty worth our while.
Start with real offices. Relative to the costs of the employee, what does real estate cost you? For the most part, programmers need flow, and flow can't happen if there are the sounds of other activities going on around you (from phone calls to loud typing).
I currently share an office, which beats cubes, but it also means we both have to agree to needing the flow to have our door closed, which means that if one person needs outside suggestions the other person gets less work done that day.
Run the cables in the walls. Make the place look finished. Computer folks in general have a tendency to drop cables from the ceiling or tape 'em to the floor, and while we think it's no big deal that little bit of clutter does have an effect over time.
The offices can be small if you have an extra conference room. Because unless you have an extra one will always be booked, and you need a place for people to go for impromptu meetings and brainstorming sessions. So build one more conference room than you think is necessary (and certainly one more than your architect/interior designer thinks is necessary).
Lots of big white boards, and a shelf to hold markers and erasers (you'd be amazed at how many times the eraser is perched on a narrow shelf and falls off regularly). Use a digital camera to take pictures of the whiteboard.
Don't overlight the offices, and don't underlight the common areas. In one building I worked in, someone complained (while it was being built) that the offices weren't going to be bright enough. So the builder halved the number of lights in the halls and doubled the ones in the offices. Made the halls feel like a dark alley, and nobody ever turned on all of the lights in their office.
Don't put a coffee pot on every corner. The act of getting coffee isn't just about drugs, it's about the social interaction that happens when people from different groups meet over the coffee pot. So do one, and make it centralized. And as everyone else says: Make sure the coffee is good, strongly consider a commercial service.
Make sure that the cooling system allows you to close the door on the machine room. The office should look finished, and open machine room doors make it feel more like a garage workshop than a comfortable place to get work done and not be distracted by loose wires and tasks to do.
I've ridden one (a Segway), and I don't see the appeal.
Don't get me wrong, it's a very cool toy, but unless you're going to build your own for the geek points spend a tenth of the dollars on a conventional electric scooter: Same range, same maneuverability at reasonable speeds, and when the battery runs out it's still a useful conventional scooter or something you can carry in one hand, not 70 lbs of dead weight you have to find somewhere to park.
And really, at least San Francisco and New York, the major U.S. cities I've been to recently, have sidewalks which are congested enough that they can't handle any higher speed traffic. And I say this as someone who consistently tries to run to catch the ferry, it's just not possible to dodge and weave through that mass of pedestrians at any real speed.
Back on the topic of the Megway, I have met Meg, and I think she's been over her "Megway" fame for several years.
Just to be completely pedantic, I know that A Bug's Life had some raytraced shots. Larry Gritz kludged together something that let BMRT handle the pixels in the glass bits in, I think that giant jar that had all of the grain in it in Hopper's hideout.
It's been a while and I don't remember all of the details, and I'm not sure what else has been done ray-tracing wise since I left there.
But yeah, in general smart use of reflection maps is more reasonable than ray tracing for that sort of application.
Yeah, but if my boss catches me camping behind the crates with the AWP, I'm unhappy.
(And yes, two jobs ago everyone in the office used "scouted" and "deagled" as verbs...)
So in your country, are the criminals and the law enforcement often one and the same?
Yep. Thought so.
It happens that I just configured a mixed network at my house, a Linux box with a printer, and Linux and Windows machines (98 and XP) talking to it.
I've also debugged Windows printing at the office recently.
I realize that ESR likes to hear himself rant, but I'm sorry, anyone who thinks that configuring printers under Windows is easier than setting up CUPS is severely deluded. After running the nth install program on a Windows machine because the printer manufacturers refused to just distribute the drivers, and after reinstalling the printer for the gazillionth time because Windows horks up printer permissions, and all of those other Windows issues we've just learned to deal with, the "plug it in, make a few obvious selections, and print" of the assorted apps talking to CUPS kicked the whole Windows thing to the curb.
ESR has been slowly sliding into irrelevance and meaningless ranting for a while, this little screed puts him solidly in the Jon Katz camp in my book.
Metallic grey case. Small and sleek enough that Apple laptop owners inquire because it looks so good. Only three "multimedia" buttons, labeled "A", "B", and with a little envelope icon.
And, oh yeah, runs Linux really nicely and with the second battery swapped in instead of the drive blows Enderle's aspired to 7 hours out of the water.
If you had penis compensation issues, I'm sure you could make it play screeching tire sounds on startup too...
Okay, going way off topic here and I'll take my karma lumps if I have to, but: If you have Spanish then with a little practice you can probably get the gist of French, at least enough to figure out where Babelfish is falling down.
/. has to understand all of those languages, but I'll bet enough do that making a requirement that links be to english only would remove the utility for a lot of us.
Heck, neither my french or german is good enough that I'd consider translating for anyone, but I was able to make it through that page getting the gist of what was being said.
And I'm not saying everyone who reads
And it may be the universal language, but there's a lot more to being a geek than talking with other programmers. I'm communicating with manufacturing facilities, with customers, with other people in the field, and while all of them know English to some extent or another, every little bit I learn about them helps me to understand their communication better. Even though we allegedly share a language.
Besides which, if you can order off the menu without a translator, that shows a willingness to comprehend that generally draws out those who'd otherwise be shy about their knowledge of English.
Moderate me off-topic or flamebait if you must, but if you're a computer professional or want to be one it seems to me that the ability to read a little bit of French or German comes with the territory, and a little written Chinese and Japanese probably wouldn't keep you down either. Perhaps asking for some icon which denotes language after a link would be reasonable, but this "hayull, billybob, if English was good enough for jaysus..." attitude is just childish.
Of course you could have also just looked at the link, seen it was in Germany, and not clicked on it. Or would that have been too much work?
RTFA. Both suggestions are covered in the article.
Because that's a heck of a lot of energy, and energy costs fuel. If you can use atmospheric drag (which you're going to have to deal with to some extent anyway) rather than drag up all of that extra fuel, that's mass that can be used for payload.
I'm working today, and not much of a physics geek, so it'd take too long for me to prove this to myself, but off the top of my head I think it'd take roughly half the fuel it took to get the vehicle into orbit to stop it.
So you come home one evening, and find your neighbors with whom you've been feuding over your barking dog rooting through your underwear drawer. Is it your fault that you forgot to lock the door?