I agree that there is a lack of good titles for young children.
I started playing video games with my oldest son when he was about your daughter's age - about 2.5.
Time limits, "lives", complicated puzzles and strict boundaries kill most games for young kids.
I found the best games for young kids are those that offer free play with no time limits, lives, damage and simple controls. I try to avoid violence too.
I've found the controls in these devices/games to be simple enough that the young kids can "get it" pretty early on. They see cause/effect of button-pushing and action on the TV. After that they can grow into the more advanced controllers.
On our PSX/PS2 the best young kids games I've found are: - the Spyro series has areas of decent free play for exploring and low violence - the ATV racing games in free ride with no time limits
As my son has grown older (6 now) he likes the go carts games and Star Wars Lego series.
I just introduced Pole Position to my 3 year old last week.
I use the games to encourage exploring, hand-eye coordination, number/letter/color recognition on menus and "keep trying, you'll get it"
My systems are Ultra10s and a Netra T1 100. I've installed Debian sarge and etch on them. I mostly use them as server systems really so Flash and other desktop features are not so useful to me. Kaffe does have compatibility limitations but you can get it to work for a lot of applications. I was impressed that Tomcat and my webapps mostly work. I keep my needs modest at Java 1.4.x code and it largely works.
The most annoying feature is I found Kaffe on sparc linux to be much slower than my sun jdk on intel linux. I just installed Solaris Express on another Ultra10 the other day. It comes with jdk 1.6 so I'm planning to run some speed comparisons one of these days so I can see how much slower on like hardware.
I use Kaffe (http://kaffe.org) on my Debian Sparc Linux system(s) with OK results. I use the version packaged for etch.
Sure it has limitations: - it's not up to JDK 1.5+ levels for compatibility - performance *seems* slow but I haven't compared with Solaris+Sun-JDK on same hardware yet
I don't condone jammers in anyway. I was stating that there should be backup measures in such critical devices. Backup measures should preferably use different communication paths than the primary method of communication.
Do pacemakers use the cell network to call a doctor directly?
Maybe a suitable 'backup' in your pacemaker would be a local wireless to hard-line relay station *not* relying on the jammed cell network. I don't know.
Remember, a lot (not most, but not insignificant) of cellular traffic comes from telemetry systems. So, the next call you might jam could be some heart paitent's ECG telling his cardiologist that he's having a heart attack...
Maybe so, but I place some blame on the ECG system designer (or implementor) that puts life-critical communications over a jammable channel without backup. If there is a backup plan (hard-line whatever) then, well, that's what it's for.
If the 911 call doesn't go through, how will anyone know that it was blocked?
Even the 911 caller would likely not distinguish a blocked/jammed call from a normal "no service" area. My assumption is that a jammed call appears as "no service" to the handset. After all, it can't communicate with the tower.
My idea of a good anti-spam bill would just extend the current anti-junk-fax laws to include any form of electronic communication, but that doesn't look like it's going to happen.
While I would generally agree with this sentiment, I think it would be heavily lobbied against by phone soliciting companies. After all, isn't phone communication electronic communications?
I've had 2 or 3 shoulder type bags from various vendors. My last was an IBM bag.
While I liked the bags, the IBM was nice, I always felt lopsided with the bags. I also broke each bag's shoulder strap.
Due to a car accident a couple years ago, I was seeing a chiropractor. I asked him if he knew of any good laptop backpacks. He recommended the Targus Rakgear. I've been very happy with it. It has ample pockets and padding for my Thinkpad. My back/shoulders no longer complain about carrying my equipment with me.
I definitely recommend a backpack. The only downside is people look at me funny coming into a business meeting with a large backpack. I'll keep my back, and my laptop bag.
I did RTFA. As CrackHappy pointed out and it's well documented that with sufficient traffic WEP can be easily broken.
Further, I'm sure a spammer stands to make much more than $34.95/mo so the economics are such that the network would be tempting to abuse, particularly if they offer NAT or some other anonymizing features (likely.)
Finally, the article doesn't mention security features at all. Just because they mention a monthly price doesn't mean there is any sort of authentication being employed. Maybe the city will simply pay $35/resident and allow open access. It's unlikely and I hope it won't happen that way but the article doesn't say.
My original comment was meant to raise the question of how are they planning to secure these networks and protect against abuse? I never really hear about that.
Blocking port 25 would help but wouldn't stop spammers from (anonymously?) using misconfigured or otherwise broken services on other ports. For example, using a cross-site scripting problem or busted formail.pl to spew on.
A while ago I was considering setting up a hotspot near my house but decided not to because of the potential for abuse. Sure, in my case I'd see some cars outside my house (or office) and could track them but why take on that hassle? I'll keep my bandwidth to myself!
With all of these municipal and large open wireless networks being discussed I begin to wonder what these organizations will do about network abuse.
If I were a spammer I might consider moving to this town or better yet a town nearby. How's a beat-cop going to know that it's me spewing spam all day - or even a few hours - from various points all over town? I'm sure you can send a lot of spam in a couple hours or so.
My oldest computer still in service is an i386dx25 I bought as my first PC while at UCONN in 1991. For many years it ran DOS -> Win3.1 -> OS/2 and served me well. Of course the hardware was upgraded many times from 2MB RAM to the max of 8MB today, SCSI disks and spare serial ports.
As I saw OS/2 petering out I decided to take the plunge and learn linux. I installed Debian Linux a few times before getting comfortable with it (on a 40MB drive!) I cut my Linux teeth on that thing.
Over the years it has played pretty much every role in my network, from various test servers through development, workstation, firewall and wireless router. Now it just hums away and only reboots for power outages happily serving DHCP and DNS to my network.
It will be a sad day that it doesn't come back from a power outage.
First, synchronize watches - how long before JBOSS integrates this?
Now on to more serious commentary. This story is interesting in that Sun might actually be "getting it". Sure they've been saying "we get it" for some time but that crappy Sun license...that's just what we needed, YACL (Yet Another Community License).
This project is actually on Sourceforge, and with a BSD-looking license no less!! I like what I'm seeing, Sun.
What your mother says is a half-truth at best. I'm not saying she's lying. More likely it's that her sources are stretching the truth.
SBC is forced (via regulation) to lease it's lines to the competition at a discount. That much is true.
I have worked for SBC on and off for 4 years now. I have worked as both a consultant and a full-time employee as a computer professional. I have worked closely with the Telco folk as well as IT people across the country. Software I wrote was the core of one ISP's DSL roll-out some years ago.
My gripe with all these sob stories I always hear from SBC supporters has to do with the "less than cost" complaint.
I honestly never saw enough of the financials to tell how much the phone lines actually *do* cost to keep but then again, I doubt anyone within that company could actually calculate it accurately anyways (not due to incompetance, though that would be a problem, but simply due to the variables involved).
From what I've seen on the inside of SBC is enormous waste which surely contributes to the cost of maintaining *anything* let alone a portion of the last mile. One example: there was a woman within my group who literally read a novel in her office all day long - WTF? I know people who have worked in the Telco and tell me there are IT employees who's sole job is to pick a report up off a printer and deliver it to a manager, once a week!
My group (5+ people) had months(!) worth of (daily/weekly) conference calls with 'security' personel and other groups in various network operation centers trying to convince the folks on the other end to please-please-PLEASE upgrade to SSH2 yet the other groups refused to do so citing the $500 license fee would be too much to bear. Some of the 'security' dudes also said SSH2 wasn't secure enough. What a joke, and SSH1 is any more secure?! In the end, they never did upgrade SSH. I wonder how much $$ the company spent in salaries, phone time, etc to 'save' a $500 license fee? For the record, we did argue the OpenSSH route - didn't work.
Further, I saw legions of managers and other political folk giving lip-service to cost-cutting and such while not actually doing anything that would address the *real* problem.
Not too long ago, we had a department conference call asking us to cut down our use of pencils - no joke. In the meantime, another group purchased $Millions in Sun hardware - including some hot-spare E10Ks(!!) - to upgrade an application server which currently runs on a 450 and has for years. Turns out the guy that made the purchase (and spec'd the hardware) used to work for Sun sales - funny that.
This sort of rampant waste was all around with managers cutting costs in stupid ways like "no coffee or water coolers".
That company is penny-wise and pound-foolish at best.
In the end, I don't believe a lick of what I hear SBC spout about unfair this and boo-hoo that. I suggest you ignore the whoa-is-me stories too. There is plenty of room for SBC to lower it's costs and make a healthy profit.
Take your browser over to Palm's developer
documentation
website and check out their UI guidelines. I like PalmOS because it's simple and straight-forward, not overdone.
Titles on the above page that appear relevant to you are:
Zen of Palm
Palm OS User Interface Guidelines
I suspect your HVAC may not have as sophisticated a UI as a Palm but maybe their guidelines will give you some insights and rules of thumb.
I just happened across this post today. Sorry for coming late to the discussion. I'll keep this post brief so as not to spam too much. 8)
My company offers hands-on Linux and UNIX training. We are located in CT, US. Our training is high-quality and competitively priced. Our instructors are professionals employed full-time in their field of instruction.
We have RHCEs in house and the owners are experienced Software Engineers with real engineering degrees. Our company consults with local enterprises developing Internet applications based around Unix/Linux and Java technologies.
We offer you no-bull, hands-on, down-and-dirty training.
Coincidentally, we have a new set of courses beginning within the next month or so. You can enroll or find more details on our offerings at our website,
http://www.innovationsw.com
Other topics include Apache, Postgres, PHP, Java/JDBC/Servlet/JSP, Solaris. We have plans to expand to J2EE/JBOSS, XML and PERL in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it blend?
This is data that should be collected by the companies looking to know where to invest. That's how commerce works.
I think it's usually called Market Research by the companies.
I certainly don't want to pay for their market research no matter how "cheap" some people think it is on a per taxpayer basis.
-Joe
$ sudo apt-get install girlfriend
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package girlfriend
It's just an extension of your body.
I agree that there is a lack of good titles for young children.
I started playing video games with my oldest son when he was about your daughter's age - about 2.5.
Time limits, "lives", complicated puzzles and strict boundaries kill most games for young kids.
I found the best games for young kids are those that offer free play with no time limits, lives, damage and simple controls. I try to avoid violence too.
Some of the older games that now come in PnP joysticks worked well. My boys like Pole Position.
http://gear.ign.com/articles/526/526873p1.html
I've found the controls in these devices/games to be simple enough that the young kids can "get it" pretty early on. They see cause/effect of button-pushing and action on the TV. After that they can grow into the more advanced controllers.
On our PSX/PS2 the best young kids games I've found are:
- the Spyro series has areas of decent free play for exploring and low violence
- the ATV racing games in free ride with no time limits
As my son has grown older (6 now) he likes the go carts games and Star Wars Lego series.
I just introduced Pole Position to my 3 year old last week.
I use the games to encourage exploring, hand-eye coordination, number/letter/color recognition on menus and "keep trying, you'll get it"
best of luck,
-Joe
My systems are Ultra10s and a Netra T1 100. I've installed Debian sarge and etch on them. I mostly use them as server systems really so Flash and other desktop features are not so useful to me. Kaffe does have compatibility limitations but you can get it to work for a lot of applications. I was impressed that Tomcat and my webapps mostly work. I keep my needs modest at Java 1.4.x code and it largely works.
The most annoying feature is I found Kaffe on sparc linux to be much slower than my sun jdk on intel linux. I just installed Solaris Express on another Ultra10 the other day. It comes with jdk 1.6 so I'm planning to run some speed comparisons one of these days so I can see how much slower on like hardware.
-joe
I use Kaffe (http://kaffe.org) on my Debian Sparc Linux system(s) with OK results. I use the version packaged for etch.
Sure it has limitations:
- it's not up to JDK 1.5+ levels for compatibility
- performance *seems* slow but I haven't compared with Solaris+Sun-JDK on same hardware yet
I wouldn't say "can't use anything Java" though.
-Joe
Did I say hard-line was the only backup?
I don't condone jammers in anyway. I was stating that there should be backup measures in such critical devices. Backup measures should preferably use different communication paths than the primary method of communication.
Do pacemakers use the cell network to call a doctor directly?
Maybe a suitable 'backup' in your pacemaker would be a local wireless to hard-line relay station *not* relying on the jammed cell network. I don't know.
-joe
Maybe so, but I place some blame on the ECG system designer (or implementor) that puts life-critical communications over a jammable channel without backup. If there is a backup plan (hard-line whatever) then, well, that's what it's for.
-joe
If the 911 call doesn't go through, how will anyone know that it was blocked?
Even the 911 caller would likely not distinguish a blocked/jammed call from a normal "no service" area. My assumption is that a jammed call appears as "no service" to the handset. After all, it can't communicate with the tower.
This is an interesting point however.
-joe
The article says that by electrically shocking someone, you can "erase" their memories of the past few hours and even months.
I wonder if this is how the aliens do it?
See there is good reason for wearing a tin foil hat after all!
-joe
While I would generally agree with this sentiment, I think it would be heavily lobbied against by phone soliciting companies. After all, isn't phone communication electronic communications?
-joe
I've had 2 or 3 shoulder type bags from various vendors. My last was an IBM bag.
While I liked the bags, the IBM was nice, I always felt lopsided with the bags. I also broke each bag's shoulder strap.
Due to a car accident a couple years ago, I was seeing a chiropractor. I asked him if he knew of any good laptop backpacks. He recommended the Targus Rakgear. I've been very happy with it. It has ample pockets and padding for my Thinkpad. My back/shoulders no longer complain about carrying my equipment with me.
I definitely recommend a backpack. The only downside is people look at me funny coming into a business meeting with a large backpack. I'll keep my back, and my laptop bag.
-joe
I did RTFA. As CrackHappy pointed out and it's well documented that with sufficient traffic WEP can be easily broken.
Further, I'm sure a spammer stands to make much more than $34.95/mo so the economics are such that the network would be tempting to abuse, particularly if they offer NAT or some other anonymizing features (likely.)
Finally, the article doesn't mention security features at all. Just because they mention a monthly price doesn't mean there is any sort of authentication being employed. Maybe the city will simply pay $35/resident and allow open access. It's unlikely and I hope it won't happen that way but the article doesn't say.
My original comment was meant to raise the question of how are they planning to secure these networks and protect against abuse? I never really hear about that.
-joe
War Spamming... lemme do some numbers.
Note to self: keep the pants ON.
-joe
I made a similar point.
Blocking port 25 would help but wouldn't stop spammers from (anonymously?) using misconfigured or otherwise broken services on other ports. For example, using a cross-site scripting problem or busted formail.pl to spew on.
A while ago I was considering setting up a hotspot near my house but decided not to because of the potential for abuse. Sure, in my case I'd see some cars outside my house (or office) and could track them but why take on that hassle? I'll keep my bandwidth to myself!
-joe
With all of these municipal and large open wireless networks being discussed I begin to wonder what these organizations will do about network abuse.
If I were a spammer I might consider moving to this town or better yet a town nearby. How's a beat-cop going to know that it's me spewing spam all day - or even a few hours - from various points all over town? I'm sure you can send a lot of spam in a couple hours or so.
-joe
My oldest computer still in service is an i386dx25 I bought as my first PC while at UCONN in 1991. For many years it ran DOS -> Win3.1 -> OS/2 and served me well. Of course the hardware was upgraded many times from 2MB RAM to the max of 8MB today, SCSI disks and spare serial ports.
As I saw OS/2 petering out I decided to take the plunge and learn linux. I installed Debian Linux a few times before getting comfortable with it (on a 40MB drive!) I cut my Linux teeth on that thing.
Over the years it has played pretty much every role in my network, from various test servers through development, workstation, firewall and wireless router. Now it just hums away and only reboots for power outages happily serving DHCP and DNS to my network.
It will be a sad day that it doesn't come back from a power outage.
-joe
First, synchronize watches - how long before JBOSS integrates this?
Now on to more serious commentary. This story is interesting in that Sun might actually be "getting it". Sure they've been saying "we get it" for some time but that crappy Sun license...that's just what we needed, YACL (Yet Another Community License).
This project is actually on Sourceforge, and with a BSD-looking license no less!! I like what I'm seeing, Sun.
-joe
What your mother says is a half-truth at best. I'm not saying she's lying. More likely it's that her sources are stretching the truth.
SBC is forced (via regulation) to lease it's lines to the competition at a discount. That much is true.
I have worked for SBC on and off for 4 years now. I have worked as both a consultant and a full-time employee as a computer professional. I have worked closely with the Telco folk as well as IT people across the country. Software I wrote was the core of one ISP's DSL roll-out some years ago.
My gripe with all these sob stories I always hear from SBC supporters has to do with the "less than cost" complaint.
I honestly never saw enough of the financials to tell how much the phone lines actually *do* cost to keep but then again, I doubt anyone within that company could actually calculate it accurately anyways (not due to incompetance, though that would be a problem, but simply due to the variables involved).
From what I've seen on the inside of SBC is enormous waste which surely contributes to the cost of maintaining *anything* let alone a portion of the last mile. One example: there was a woman within my group who literally read a novel in her office all day long - WTF? I know people who have worked in the Telco and tell me there are IT employees who's sole job is to pick a report up off a printer and deliver it to a manager, once a week!
My group (5+ people) had months(!) worth of (daily/weekly) conference calls with 'security' personel and other groups in various network operation centers trying to convince the folks on the other end to please-please-PLEASE upgrade to SSH2 yet the other groups refused to do so citing the $500 license fee would be too much to bear. Some of the 'security' dudes also said SSH2 wasn't secure enough. What a joke, and SSH1 is any more secure?! In the end, they never did upgrade SSH. I wonder how much $$ the company spent in salaries, phone time, etc to 'save' a $500 license fee? For the record, we did argue the OpenSSH route - didn't work.
Further, I saw legions of managers and other political folk giving lip-service to cost-cutting and such while not actually doing anything that would address the *real* problem.
Not too long ago, we had a department conference call asking us to cut down our use of pencils - no joke. In the meantime, another group purchased $Millions in Sun hardware - including some hot-spare E10Ks(!!) - to upgrade an application server which currently runs on a 450 and has for years. Turns out the guy that made the purchase (and spec'd the hardware) used to work for Sun sales - funny that.
This sort of rampant waste was all around with managers cutting costs in stupid ways like "no coffee or water coolers".
That company is penny-wise and pound-foolish at best.
In the end, I don't believe a lick of what I hear SBC spout about unfair this and boo-hoo that. I suggest you ignore the whoa-is-me stories too. There is plenty of room for SBC to lower it's costs and make a healthy profit.
Titles on the above page that appear relevant to you are:
Zen of Palm
Palm OS User Interface Guidelines
I suspect your HVAC may not have as sophisticated a UI as a Palm but maybe their guidelines will give you some insights and rules of thumb.
good luck.
-joe
My company offers hands-on Linux and UNIX training. We are located in CT, US. Our training is high-quality and competitively priced. Our instructors are professionals employed full-time in their field of instruction.
We have RHCEs in house and the owners are experienced Software Engineers with real engineering degrees. Our company consults with local enterprises developing Internet applications based around Unix/Linux and Java technologies.
We offer you no-bull, hands-on, down-and-dirty training.
Coincidentally, we have a new set of courses beginning within the next month or so. You can enroll or find more details on our offerings at our website, http://www.innovationsw.com
Other topics include Apache, Postgres, PHP, Java/JDBC/Servlet/JSP, Solaris. We have plans to expand to J2EE/JBOSS, XML and PERL in the near future.
-joe