From a site design perspective it shouldn't be hard to do both. When the user first hits the site then give them a javascript link tracker as well as the ping one, then once you receive a ping from them then you can disable the javascript for the rest of their session and keep the experience snappy.
It seems like there's a lot of overhead in having a powerstation have the equipment to create biodiesel, and then setting up a distribution network to deal with a relatively small amount of it.
Why not have the power station burn the biodiesel and use it to create electricity, it already has a distribution network for getting the electricity out.
My cousin is an architect and the guys in his office have already started putting buildings into landscapes. Sounds like a neat idea, although until they have better background 3d models of cities it has fairly limited use (in my mind).
I've made red/green stereoscopic images with a webcam before and they come out pretty well. You just need two images of the same scene, each about 3 in apart. Colorize them appropriately so that they each show up as white through the appropriate glasses lens. Then you overlay them and you're done.
It might be a little tricky to get two DSLRs that close, and of course they'd need to have the same lens, but i might give it a shot sometime soon.
The #1 reason that people don't continue to donate to a charity is that they dont feel their donations are appreciated.
Knowing where to draw the line is a different matter. It's probably wasteful to send an airmail letter to someone who donated $5, when an email would suffice. However if someone donates $100 then it's worth sending them xmas cards for the rest of their life to solicit a second $100 donation.
Some charities spend more than 50% of their income on soliciting further donations, others spend far less. Make sure you know how that breaks down before giving anything.
landscape measuring: It could be done more accurately using a measuring wheel, but most landscape guys i've met struggle to work out the area of a triangle, let alone a more complex curved shape.
pile volume: my GPS doesn't, but i know someone who does use GPS to estimate the volume of very large piles of material. There's no reason why a GPS couldn't calculate the area enclosed by a path.
buoy altitude: the water level in lakes seems to change quite frequently with the season. GPS seems to be as good a way as any to monitor it.
search/rescue: The new system will provide a means for my wife to call up S&R and say that her husband, carrying GPS serial 1234567 has gone missing. The S&R party can then give that number to the positioning system, which will in turn broadcast it to all units. That way my GPS will be able to tell ME that people are looking for me. As a result, I can avoid wasting a flare before anyone knows i'm missing. Similarly i can (presumably) know when the search is called off for the night and take shelter without having to worry about staying exposed where i can be seen.
IMHO smaller accuracies tend to be better for relative measurements, rather than world-scale ones.
With a 50cm accuracy it'd be practical for landscape contractors to use GPS to measure out how much grass they need to plant.
From a pile of raw material, say coal, if you walk round the outside and roughly know the height then you could take a pretty good guess at the volume of the pile.
You could leave a buoy floating in a lake and measure the water level from the GPS altitude
Also the ability to signal to a particular unit that help has been dispatched could be a life saver. I presume it's just a unidirectional signal, but that'd mean if i go missing hiking then i'll know if my wife has alerted authorities to my disappearance, which might well change my plans.
Testing on people in third world countries is potentially unethical since it skirts the tougher legislation found in Western countries and people who are more desperate and less educated will be more likely to consent to riskier tests. I'm not sure the indian test subjects stand to gain much from the drugs they test
OTOH, brain damaged children have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain that it would be likely to could find test subjects who wouldn't even expect compensation. This is much like drugs for late stage aids pateients - they know they have little to lose so are much more likely to consent.
I'd like to see internet service providers be just that... providing just bandwidth and pipe. Let customers shop elsewhere for things like email and webhosting, much like we can choose our longdistance provider.
Regulations against predatory pricing, filtered connections and the like would be good.
Where does this notion that countries with low value currency units are cheap places to live?
The cost of living seems to have very little to do with the currency exchange rate, if it did then i'd be moving to Japan as i'd get 116 yen for my dollar or perhaps turkey where i'd get over a million lira to my $.
It's not like federal authorities can't get permission to run wire-taps without the patriot act. Having to make their case to a judge surely puts some checks and balances into the system.
Certainly from what I've seen, Ruby looks very promising and i'm not qualified to comment on Python.
My current work involves lots of GUI stuff and from developing Java Servlets I was able to jump right into Swing. The other big benefit I see to Java is that Eclipse and NetBeans are both excellent, and when I last looked, there wasn't anything close for Ruby.
Nice looks very cool. I'll be checking that out asap.
In my mind LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (I've spent most of the past 5 years working in perl) and i'd argue that Java has a far more complete OM than perl does.
I'll give you the introspection is needlessly complex and that autoboxing is something of a hack, but I feel interfaces are very useful and perhaps more-so than multiple inheritance. Of course Java was my first real-world experience of OO programming, so i may view it differently just because i'm not very used to working with C++.
I'd never make the claim that Java is a concise langauge. On the contrary it is often quite verbose, but as long as you can type fast then in isn't a great hinderance and makes the code a lot easier to follow than perl. Ruby does look very interesting, but i haven't had the time to really learn it yet.
However, to get back to the original point, I felt that java was very flexible in terms of end result. I can think of loads of things i can't do in visual basic without resorting to some nasty hack. OTOH the only thing, that springs to mind, that i've had trouble with in Java was getting a servlet to accept a large (8GB) file encoded in an HTTPS post. Perl had no qualms about it.
Java not flexible?!
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I feel java is one of the more flexible languages that i've worked in.
Swing components are plenty flexible. It's not hard to add checkboxes to trees, have spanning columns in tables etc...
Where do you feel java lacks flexibility?
The only thing i feel is that it's not ideal for quick and dirty tasks. I write little perl scripts all the time to accomplish one of tasks that would take 5x the time in java. But for real software development that's more or less a non-issue.
I resigned from a developer/pretend-sys-admin position with a fairly paranoid large company, and ended up working through my two weeks.
I had root access to dozens of machines including a few high visibility web properties and didn't have to hand that in until my exit interview. This was after another, now-former, employee had accidentally (hmm) deleted over a million files from said production environment.
However in many places it's just policy that you dont work after they know you are leaving, and that's just the way it is.
A field programmable gate array is a little (fairly) inexpensive chip with hundreds of thousands of gates that can be programmed into lots of different types of hardware, and reprogrammed at your convience.
I've worked with stuff from Xilinx and it's pretty impressive.
The other bonus to this is that you can take the Verilog or VHDL langauge (used to write hardware) and simulate it with great accuracy.
Do circuit city really hand over the tax the the state, or do they cunningly assume you'll file the rebate and refrain from paying that portion of the tax.
There are a few (very few) commercials that i like.
Usually whenever i see the Geico logo i pause my tivo, rewind and watch the commercial since they are usually quite entertaining.
If tivo were to let users rate ads (volutarily of course) then they could pull out the best ones and demonstrate to advertisers that good ads really do work and crappy ones just piss off your potential customers.
I used to have your mindset. I stopped using windows as my primary OS around 2001, and worked exclusively with Linux and Solaris.
I now do some Windows development again, and have an XP Laptop and I have to admit i'm very impressed. It's stable, fast, easy to use and with a few GPL tools installed I'm pretty happy. Visual Studio.NET is a pretty decent tool and is catching up to eclipse and netbeans.
OTOH I can't stand windows servers. SQL Server is a nightmare, they aren't easy to administer remotely and scriptability is pretty lacking. They have a place in small companies without a full time IT guy, but that's about it.
Windows has it's place, and for now that place is bigger than the place that linux has. I'm certain in time Linux will take over, but it wont happen this year or next.
One of my brothers friends had some real solid gold and silver lego bricks. His father was a goldsmith and seemingly just made them for fun.
I think most of ours were inherited or from garage sales. Though i do remember when i first got one of the knights and castles models that had custom pieces - even back then i wasn't too happy about it.
That was the best part. We had something like 3 of those large plastic totes filled with lego and another couple with technic and played with that shit for hours making huge contraptions.
If i were a kid now i'm not sure i'd want to be able to build some crappy version of harry potter or some star wars model.
Slashdot Mirror
From a site design perspective it shouldn't be hard to do both. When the user first hits the site then give them a javascript link tracker as well as the ping one, then once you receive a ping from them then you can disable the javascript for the rest of their session and keep the experience snappy.
It seems like there's a lot of overhead in having a powerstation have the equipment to create biodiesel, and then setting up a distribution network to deal with a relatively small amount of it.
Why not have the power station burn the biodiesel and use it to create electricity, it already has a distribution network for getting the electricity out.
My cousin is an architect and the guys in his office have already started putting buildings into landscapes. Sounds like a neat idea, although until they have better background 3d models of cities it has fairly limited use (in my mind).
I've made red/green stereoscopic images with a webcam before and they come out pretty well. You just need two images of the same scene, each about 3 in apart. Colorize them appropriately so that they each show up as white through the appropriate glasses lens. Then you overlay them and you're done.
It might be a little tricky to get two DSLRs that close, and of course they'd need to have the same lens, but i might give it a shot sometime soon.
The #1 reason that people don't continue to donate to a charity is that they dont feel their donations are appreciated.
Knowing where to draw the line is a different matter. It's probably wasteful to send an airmail letter to someone who donated $5, when an email would suffice. However if someone donates $100 then it's worth sending them xmas cards for the rest of their life to solicit a second $100 donation.
Some charities spend more than 50% of their income on soliciting further donations, others spend far less. Make sure you know how that breaks down before giving anything.
Some counter-points...
landscape measuring: It could be done more accurately using a measuring wheel, but most landscape guys i've met struggle to work out the area of a triangle, let alone a more complex curved shape.
pile volume: my GPS doesn't, but i know someone who does use GPS to estimate the volume of very large piles of material. There's no reason why a GPS couldn't calculate the area enclosed by a path.
buoy altitude: the water level in lakes seems to change quite frequently with the season. GPS seems to be as good a way as any to monitor it.
search/rescue: The new system will provide a means for my wife to call up S&R and say that her husband, carrying GPS serial 1234567 has gone missing. The S&R party can then give that number to the positioning system, which will in turn broadcast it to all units. That way my GPS will be able to tell ME that people are looking for me. As a result, I can avoid wasting a flare before anyone knows i'm missing. Similarly i can (presumably) know when the search is called off for the night and take shelter without having to worry about staying exposed where i can be seen.
IMHO smaller accuracies tend to be better for relative measurements, rather than world-scale ones.
With a 50cm accuracy it'd be practical for landscape contractors to use GPS to measure out how much grass they need to plant.
From a pile of raw material, say coal, if you walk round the outside and roughly know the height then you could take a pretty good guess at the volume of the pile.
You could leave a buoy floating in a lake and measure the water level from the GPS altitude
Also the ability to signal to a particular unit that help has been dispatched could be a life saver. I presume it's just a unidirectional signal, but that'd mean if i go missing hiking then i'll know if my wife has alerted authorities to my disappearance, which might well change my plans.
Testing on people in third world countries is potentially unethical since it skirts the tougher legislation found in Western countries and people who are more desperate and less educated will be more likely to consent to riskier tests. I'm not sure the indian test subjects stand to gain much from the drugs they test
OTOH, brain damaged children have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain that it would be likely to could find test subjects who wouldn't even expect compensation. This is much like drugs for late stage aids pateients - they know they have little to lose so are much more likely to consent.
Opera Mini is a cut down Java MIDP based browser.
However real opera mobile only has a 14 day trial
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/
I'd like to see internet service providers be just that... providing just bandwidth and pipe. Let customers shop elsewhere for things like email and webhosting, much like we can choose our longdistance provider.
Regulations against predatory pricing, filtered connections and the like would be good.
Where does this notion that countries with low value currency units are cheap places to live?
The cost of living seems to have very little to do with the currency exchange rate, if it did then i'd be moving to Japan as i'd get 116 yen for my dollar or perhaps turkey where i'd get over a million lira to my $.
It's not like federal authorities can't get permission to run wire-taps without the patriot act. Having to make their case to a judge surely puts some checks and balances into the system.
Iirc it's the only Opera browser that you have to pay for.
It's worth it though.
Where they let you choose a short password or sometimes even just a pin code.
Furthermore they often use your Social Security Number as the user id.
Online banking security in the USA is disgraceful, but no-one seems to hold the banks to task for it.
Certainly from what I've seen, Ruby looks very promising and i'm not qualified to comment on Python.
My current work involves lots of GUI stuff and from developing Java Servlets I was able to jump right into Swing. The other big benefit I see to Java is that Eclipse and NetBeans are both excellent, and when I last looked, there wasn't anything close for Ruby.
Nice looks very cool. I'll be checking that out asap.
In my mind LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (I've spent most of the past 5 years working in perl)
and i'd argue that Java has a far more complete OM than perl does.
I'll give you the introspection is needlessly complex and that autoboxing is something of a hack, but I feel interfaces are very useful and perhaps more-so than multiple inheritance. Of course Java was my first real-world experience of OO programming, so i may view it differently just because i'm not very used to working with C++.
I'd never make the claim that Java is a concise langauge. On the contrary it is often quite verbose, but as long as you can type fast then in isn't a great hinderance and makes the code a lot easier to follow than perl. Ruby does look very interesting, but i haven't had the time to really learn it yet.
However, to get back to the original point, I felt that java was very flexible in terms of end result. I can think of loads of things i can't do in visual basic without resorting to some nasty hack. OTOH the only thing, that springs to mind, that i've had trouble with in Java was getting a servlet to accept a large (8GB) file encoded in an HTTPS post. Perl had no qualms about it.
I feel java is one of the more flexible languages that i've worked in.
Swing components are plenty flexible. It's not hard to add checkboxes to trees, have spanning columns in tables etc...
Where do you feel java lacks flexibility?
The only thing i feel is that it's not ideal for quick and dirty tasks. I write little perl scripts all the time to accomplish one of tasks that would take 5x the time in java. But for real software development that's more or less a non-issue.
I resigned from a developer/pretend-sys-admin position with a fairly paranoid large company, and ended up working through my two weeks.
I had root access to dozens of machines including a few high visibility web properties and didn't have to hand that in until my exit interview. This was after another, now-former, employee had accidentally (hmm) deleted over a million files from said production environment.
However in many places it's just policy that you dont work after they know you are leaving, and that's just the way it is.
A field programmable gate array is a little (fairly) inexpensive chip with hundreds of thousands of gates that can be programmed into lots of different types of hardware, and reprogrammed at your convience.
I've worked with stuff from Xilinx and it's pretty impressive.
The other bonus to this is that you can take the Verilog or VHDL langauge (used to write hardware) and simulate it with great accuracy.
I had a set of rebates that were set up something like as follows
Rebate Department 4913
City, State, 12345-4931
Rebate Department 4931
City, State,12345-4913
Those rebate departments and zip codes MUST have been chosen to make it complicated for the consumer filling in both rebates.
Do circuit city really hand over the tax the the state, or do they cunningly assume you'll file the rebate and refrain from paying that portion of the tax.
There are a few (very few) commercials that i like.
Usually whenever i see the Geico logo i pause my tivo, rewind and watch the commercial since they are usually quite entertaining.
If tivo were to let users rate ads (volutarily of course) then they could pull out the best ones and demonstrate to advertisers that good ads really do work and crappy ones just piss off your potential customers.
I used to have your mindset. I stopped using windows as my primary OS around 2001, and worked exclusively with Linux and Solaris.
I now do some Windows development again, and have an XP Laptop and I have to admit i'm very impressed. It's stable, fast, easy to use and with a few GPL tools installed I'm pretty happy. Visual Studio.NET is a pretty decent tool and is catching up to eclipse and netbeans.
OTOH I can't stand windows servers. SQL Server is a nightmare, they aren't easy to administer remotely and scriptability is pretty lacking. They have a place in small companies without a full time IT guy, but that's about it.
Windows has it's place, and for now that place is bigger than the place that linux has. I'm certain in time Linux will take over, but it wont happen this year or next.
One of my brothers friends had some real solid gold and silver lego bricks. His father was a goldsmith and seemingly just made them for fun.
I think most of ours were inherited or from garage sales. Though i do remember when i first got one of the knights and castles models that had custom pieces - even back then i wasn't too happy about it.
That was the best part. We had something like 3 of those large plastic totes filled with lego and another couple with technic and played with that shit for hours making huge contraptions.
If i were a kid now i'm not sure i'd want to be able to build some crappy version of harry potter or some star wars model.