Normally I'd agree with you wholeheartedly, and I never purchase them myself on things like TV's, diskmen, etc... However, the one exception that I think is notible here is on laptops. On the first laptop that I purchased for myself (about four years ago), I was able to have it replaced for an albeit kinda crappy newer laptop, but when the motherboard died on my older one I was very happy to know that I wasn't 'up the creek.' Especially since I bought the laptop for university.
This summer I think I'll upgrade to a 12 inch TiBook and will likely purchase AppleCare along with it. From what I hear, it's a worthwhile investment.
Like many other slashdoters, I signed up for Safari way back when it was introduced. After a while I found myself using it periodically and eventually cancelled the service. The fact that the library at my university also provides free access to approximatly 140 books on Safari was also a big influence here.
That being said, Safari is a great service that is well worth it for sysadmins and programmers. I've found it to be a great way to learn about a multitude of things when I either don't have any books relevant to a given subject and google just doesn't cut it.
Now, what would make it really killer would be if that when you purchase a book via safari, you could pay a small additional fee (say $5) to have free access to that book via Safari for a year or two. However I'm sure that this would piss of O'Reilly distributors and bookstores that carry their books to no end. (hmmm... kinda like the RIAA)
While I myself have a 'special skills' section on my resume - I think that putting it at the top would definetly be overkill. Chances are that employers will want to see work experience first and foremost, if it were me putting this stuff on my CV, I'd add it there somehow.
As someone who's considering deploying PHP in a multiuser environment and holding off for security concerns, I'm curious to know when you think this will happen.
In fairness to Nokia, the fact that you can run MIDP apps on this device does provide a certain level of compatibility between this and Palms. So, for a java developer such as myself, once you write the game logic you just have to customize the interface to whatever device you're working with. Sure it's not 100%, but it's also not nothing.
The thing that does suck though is that MIDP is only availble by way of an 'add-on' to Palms. So you can't expect a palm device to have it (unless you load it yourself). But, bearing in mind that this is a very different device than a palm, Nokias approach seems kind of reasonable.
Not that this nessarily has anything to do with the topic at hand, but lamb is just one of those bands that IMHO has done very well through P2P. I got my first listen of Gorecki via napster and it blew my mind. Now I own all their albums when it wouldn't have otherwise
Anyone who relys on mainstream channels (i.e. radio/tv/soundtracks) to pick up new music probably won't get exposed to bands like lamb, as their sound isn't exactly 'radio friendly.' A few exceptions being hearing gorecki on CSI and watching the wedge on much music (in Canada - it plays real alternative music).
Sneaker Pimps on the other hand have had a few
top 40 singles back in the 90's. While they are awesome, I don't own any of their albums myself, but did just recently catch their show in Toronto. While it did rock, it wasn't at all like what you hear on their more popular tracks where the girl who's name I can't remember sings (she wasn't on the tour).
Amazon (I preferred CD-NOW, but now everything is Amazon). Enter in your favorites, and it'll make suggestions based on what other people buy who like music similar to you. Works very well.
Or if you're cheap (like I am - still a student), then get on your P2P network of choice, look for a few bands you know and love and when you find someone with a good collection of something - see what else they're sharing. Sure, sometimes it's crap and it's not like you have to buy the stuff amazon tells you about, but at least there's an alternative as not everything is necessarily listed there.
Not to sound like a leech or anything, but I'm curious if anyone knows anything about ApacheCon material being posted somewhere online. While a couple of sessions seem particularily useful to the stuff I'm looking at right now, they all are to some extent.
I would have loved to have gone, but being a poor starving student and doing apache stuff for a student run organization (non-profit), that was kind of out of the question this year.
Being an evolution user (and former Outlooker) myself, I was curious to see what he plans on doing. But from what I see on his features page I only noticed a couple features that interested me. (Naturally YMMV)
Mail:
auto-archiving of old mail
Information Sharing & Exchange
integrated Instant Messaging and presence management (Jabber)
remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data
flexible security model to control access
file and document sharing
remote queries, e.g., look up address in another person's contact list
automatic updating of information from remote sources: receive new contacts, changes to existing contacts automatically (publish-subscribe)
Access
home and work PC's with complete automatic replication of data
Evolution seems to have all the other features already in place (although some may only be accessible via the Exchange connector). I'm sure they would be able to add the others without too much difficulty.
Although I can certainly understand that sentiment, in some cases the opposite is very true.
My experience in the matter happened this summer. I was working in Zambia and took several trips down to Zimbabwe during all of the land reformation madness. While all my friends and family back in Canada thought I was nuts, I ended up having amazing trips each and every time. Apart from the fact that Zimbabwe is a beautiful country and the people are warm and hospitable, the political instability lead to a black market on American currency (the exchange rate was being regulated by the government). So, while the official exchange rate for US dollars was officially about 75:1, the unofficial rate was somewhere between 400 and 1000 to 1. In the end, this difference translated directly into purchasing power for foreigners and I was consequently able to do stuff that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
Other than a little anticipation the first time I went there, I never felt in any danger at all. As long as you use your good judgement then chances are you'll be fine. That being said, the social and political issues there are immense, and it will be decades before they recover from everything.
" In the future the company is hoping to turn the clothes into a 'smart' material, capable of measuring pulse or body temperature and responding to environmental stimuli."
Well, I for one think that the implications of mood pants are pretty obvious...
I would tend to agree, although it is a very nice feature about current linux distros that there can always be one or two 'pushing the envelope' like this. Alas, I wouldn't be one of the people trying out Mandrake 9 anyway and lack of java support is just one of the many reasons.
Thanks for the very informative post - it's certainly been worthwhile for me.
Just a quick question though - I'm looking into buying an iBook within the next two months or so. How would your stated reccomendations fit in with that? (apart from the obvious differences)
Maybe I can add some insight here. Right now I am working on a project on behalf of CIDA and Statistics Canada to provide IT expertise to the Zambian Census Agency.
Part of said project includes training their LAN Admin's, Sysadmins and Web Developers. Now, while this wouldn't be such a big deal in North America or Europe, please believe me when I tell you that most of the people whom I am working with have little or no experience with these sorts of things whatsoever. None of them (the LAN Admins) had even installed (any) operating system until I walked them through it just yesterday nor do any of the web developers know more than the three or four HTML tags I've made them write out in notepad thus far.
Now I'm not sure exactly what your experience is with open source in Africa, but I think that outside of the more developed countries (i.e. South Africa) you'll probably find little or no acceptance of open source in the public sector merely because these people really lack the basic exposure to computers in general that we take for granted in North America and while they certainly are intelligent enough to understand how to use open source effectively. It is going to take a fair amount of time before they are truely able to use it by themselves.
Another thing that I might add which you may not be aquiainted with is that the 'brain drain' here dwarfs anything you've read about in North America. Government workers in Zambia are paid a pittance compared to private sector IT people. All the people who I've spoken with who (I think) are competant enough to really grasp things like Linux are just using their government jobs as a way to get experience in order to score a private sector job.
(But on the bright side, I do know that most of the the local ISP's/consultanting companies use Linux to a certain degree)
Yeah, but this wasn't a statistical study. If it had been, then you would expect there to be an actual discussion of the statistical methodology used.
I'm certainly not the person to talk to about the different between statistical studies and usability studies, but it does seem to me that the article does give valuable recommendations to designers who are targeting younger age segments.
Right now my laptop is a TTX. Without getting into a long discussion about how much their laptops suck, suffice it to say that their claim to quality is that their laptops are manufactured by the same company as Dell or some other big hardware firm.
On the other hand, from my experiences and what I've seem, Eurocom seem to be pretty solid laptops. Linux friendly too. =)
Right now I'm working on a project to do just that for my networks class. Thus far I've only been working on asynchronous stuff like tic-tac-toe and chess, but what you describe is certainly feasible within a couple of years.
The main limitations as I see it right now are:
Little or no floating point support
No real gaming/multimedia API's (although I understand this will change soon)
The only protocol which has to be implemented on a device is HTTP.
Poor control over the high-level UI
Sharing data is a pain, if it works at all. (I haven't been able to make it, but that's just my experience so far)
Basically programmers should be familiar with J2ME before they go planning any big projects. In the end my belief is that J2ME will be a success if not just for the device-independant aspect of it.
can any local residents recommend some
geeky places for us to visit?
The three main things that I can think of are
Playdium - a big arcade. There used to be one in downtown Toronto, but it doesn't seem to be listed on their web page. Either way, the Mississagua one isn't too hard to get to if you have a car.
Canada's Wonderland - a theme park. Good for a day's worth of entertainment.
Also, how is the night life there? clubs, chicks, beer?
All great! I usually check out toronto.com for that stuff. It's a decent website.
Are there gonna be any lan parties?
Maybe. I don't know. I've reserved a residence for participants who want to stay on campus and it does have ethernet, but I still have to talk to the computing people to arrange for the connectivity to be activiated. So while I can't make any promises, it's pretty likely you'll be able to arrange something.
Drop me a line if you want to know anything else about the venue.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I'd agree with you wholeheartedly, and I never purchase them myself on things like TV's, diskmen, etc... However, the one exception that I think is notible here is on laptops. On the first laptop that I purchased for myself (about four years ago), I was able to have it replaced for an albeit kinda crappy newer laptop, but when the motherboard died on my older one I was very happy to know that I wasn't 'up the creek.' Especially since I bought the laptop for university.
This summer I think I'll upgrade to a 12 inch TiBook and will likely purchase AppleCare along with it. From what I hear, it's a worthwhile investment.
Why not use evolution? Buy the Exchange connector and you should be good to go.
It can synchronize with palm pilots by default and using MultiSync works with a whole bunch of other devices.
Like many other slashdoters, I signed up for Safari way back when it was introduced. After a while I found myself using it periodically and eventually cancelled the service. The fact that the library at my university also provides free access to approximatly 140 books on Safari was also a big influence here.
That being said, Safari is a great service that is well worth it for sysadmins and programmers. I've found it to be a great way to learn about a multitude of things when I either don't have any books relevant to a given subject and google just doesn't cut it.
Now, what would make it really killer would be if that when you purchase a book via safari, you could pay a small additional fee (say $5) to have free access to that book via Safari for a year or two. However I'm sure that this would piss of O'Reilly distributors and bookstores that carry their books to no end. (hmmm... kinda like the RIAA)
While I myself have a 'special skills' section on my resume - I think that putting it at the top would definetly be overkill. Chances are that employers will want to see work experience first and foremost, if it were me putting this stuff on my CV, I'd add it there somehow.
As someone who's considering deploying PHP in a multiuser environment and holding off for security concerns, I'm curious to know when you think this will happen.
In fairness to Nokia, the fact that you can run MIDP apps on this device does provide a certain level of compatibility between this and Palms. So, for a java developer such as myself, once you write the game logic you just have to customize the interface to whatever device you're working with. Sure it's not 100%, but it's also not nothing.
The thing that does suck though is that MIDP is only availble by way of an 'add-on' to Palms. So you can't expect a palm device to have it (unless you load it yourself). But, bearing in mind that this is a very different device than a palm, Nokias approach seems kind of reasonable.
Not that this nessarily has anything to do with the topic at hand, but lamb is just one of those bands that IMHO has done very well through P2P. I got my first listen of Gorecki via napster and it blew my mind. Now I own all their albums when it wouldn't have otherwise
Anyone who relys on mainstream channels (i.e. radio/tv/soundtracks) to pick up new music probably won't get exposed to bands like lamb, as their sound isn't exactly 'radio friendly.' A few exceptions being hearing gorecki on CSI and watching the wedge on much music (in Canada - it plays real alternative music).
Sneaker Pimps on the other hand have had a few top 40 singles back in the 90's. While they are awesome, I don't own any of their albums myself, but did just recently catch their show in Toronto. While it did rock, it wasn't at all like what you hear on their more popular tracks where the girl who's name I can't remember sings (she wasn't on the tour).
Amazon (I preferred CD-NOW, but now everything is Amazon). Enter in your favorites, and it'll make suggestions based on what other people buy who like music similar to you. Works very well.
Or if you're cheap (like I am - still a student), then get on your P2P network of choice, look for a few bands you know and love and when you find someone with a good collection of something - see what else they're sharing. Sure, sometimes it's crap and it's not like you have to buy the stuff amazon tells you about, but at least there's an alternative as not everything is necessarily listed there.
Not to sound like a leech or anything, but I'm curious if anyone knows anything about ApacheCon material being posted somewhere online. While a couple of sessions seem particularily useful to the stuff I'm looking at right now, they all are to some extent.
I would have loved to have gone, but being a poor starving student and doing apache stuff for a student run organization (non-profit), that was kind of out of the question this year.
Being an evolution user (and former Outlooker) myself, I was curious to see what he plans on doing. But from what I see on his features page I only noticed a couple features that interested me. (Naturally YMMV)
Mail:
- auto-archiving of old mail
Information Sharing & Exchange- integrated Instant Messaging and presence management (Jabber)
- remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data
- flexible security model to control access
- file and document sharing
- remote queries, e.g., look up address in another person's contact list
- automatic updating of information from remote sources: receive new contacts, changes to existing contacts automatically (publish-subscribe)
AccessEvolution seems to have all the other features already in place (although some may only be accessible via the Exchange connector). I'm sure they would be able to add the others without too much difficulty.
Apologies for the total cut & paste job.
Although I can certainly understand that sentiment, in some cases the opposite is very true.
My experience in the matter happened this summer. I was working in Zambia and took several trips down to Zimbabwe during all of the land reformation madness. While all my friends and family back in Canada thought I was nuts, I ended up having amazing trips each and every time. Apart from the fact that Zimbabwe is a beautiful country and the people are warm and hospitable, the political instability lead to a black market on American currency (the exchange rate was being regulated by the government). So, while the official exchange rate for US dollars was officially about 75:1, the unofficial rate was somewhere between 400 and 1000 to 1. In the end, this difference translated directly into purchasing power for foreigners and I was consequently able to do stuff that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
Other than a little anticipation the first time I went there, I never felt in any danger at all. As long as you use your good judgement then chances are you'll be fine. That being said, the social and political issues there are immense, and it will be decades before they recover from everything.
From the article:
" In the future the company is hoping to turn the clothes into a 'smart' material, capable of measuring pulse or body temperature and responding to environmental stimuli."
Well, I for one think that the implications of mood pants are pretty obvious...
From the release notes:
6. Why would I want to use 0.2?
It has a cool build ID. 20021001 (October 1, 2002).
...nifty
I would tend to agree, although it is a very nice feature about current linux distros that there can always be one or two 'pushing the envelope' like this. Alas, I wouldn't be one of the people trying out Mandrake 9 anyway and lack of java support is just one of the many reasons.
Thanks for the very informative post - it's certainly been worthwhile for me.
Just a quick question though - I'm looking into buying an iBook within the next two months or so. How would your stated reccomendations fit in with that? (apart from the obvious differences)
Maybe I can add some insight here. Right now I am working on a project on behalf of CIDA and Statistics Canada to provide IT expertise to the Zambian Census Agency.
Part of said project includes training their LAN Admin's, Sysadmins and Web Developers. Now, while this wouldn't be such a big deal in North America or Europe, please believe me when I tell you that most of the people whom I am working with have little or no experience with these sorts of things whatsoever. None of them (the LAN Admins) had even installed (any) operating system until I walked them through it just yesterday nor do any of the web developers know more than the three or four HTML tags I've made them write out in notepad thus far.
Now I'm not sure exactly what your experience is with open source in Africa, but I think that outside of the more developed countries (i.e. South Africa) you'll probably find little or no acceptance of open source in the public sector merely because these people really lack the basic exposure to computers in general that we take for granted in North America and while they certainly are intelligent enough to understand how to use open source effectively. It is going to take a fair amount of time before they are truely able to use it by themselves.
Another thing that I might add which you may not be aquiainted with is that the 'brain drain' here dwarfs anything you've read about in North America. Government workers in Zambia are paid a pittance compared to private sector IT people. All the people who I've spoken with who (I think) are competant enough to really grasp things like Linux are just using their government jobs as a way to get experience in order to score a private sector job.
(But on the bright side, I do know that most of the the local ISP's/consultanting companies use Linux to a certain degree)
Yeah, but this wasn't a statistical study. If it had been, then you would expect there to be an actual discussion of the statistical methodology used.
I'm certainly not the person to talk to about the different between statistical studies and usability studies, but it does seem to me that the article does give valuable recommendations to designers who are targeting younger age segments.
I agree with you to a certain extent that not a whole lot can be done about the DoS problem. But that's not to say that nothing is being done.
Here's a few links to 'recent' publications on the issue.
MULTOPS: a data-structure for bandwidth attack detection
CenterTrack: An IP Overlay Network for Tracking DoS Floods
The Packetstorm DOS paper contest
(You may need to be a USENIX member for the first two. I didn't check. Sorry)
Right now my laptop is a TTX. Without getting into a long discussion about how much their laptops suck, suffice it to say that their claim to quality is that their laptops are manufactured by the same company as Dell or some other big hardware firm.
On the other hand, from my experiences and what I've seem, Eurocom seem to be pretty solid laptops. Linux friendly too. =)
Right now I'm working on a project to do just that for my networks class. Thus far I've only been working on asynchronous stuff like tic-tac-toe and chess, but what you describe is certainly feasible within a couple of years.
The main limitations as I see it right now are:
Little or no floating point support
No real gaming/multimedia API's (although I understand this will change soon)
The only protocol which has to be implemented on a device is HTTP.
Poor control over the high-level UI
Sharing data is a pain, if it works at all. (I haven't been able to make it, but that's just my experience so far)
Basically programmers should be familiar with J2ME before they go planning any big projects. In the end my belief is that J2ME will be a success if not just for the device-independant aspect of it.
Check out MDoom.
Keep in mind it's not a full doom replacement. But it's a start.
How many java viruses have you seen lately?
Yup, it's that Friday to Sunday.
Maybe I can answer some of your questions...
can any local residents recommend some geeky places for us to visit?
The three main things that I can think of are
Playdium - a big arcade. There used to be one in downtown Toronto, but it doesn't seem to be listed on their web page. Either way, the Mississagua one isn't too hard to get to if you have a car.
Canada's Wonderland - a theme park. Good for a day's worth of entertainment.
You also might be interested in the Ontario Science Centre
Also, how is the night life there? clubs, chicks, beer?
All great! I usually check out toronto.com for that stuff. It's a decent website.
Are there gonna be any lan parties?
Maybe. I don't know. I've reserved a residence for participants who want to stay on campus and it does have ethernet, but I still have to talk to the computing people to arrange for the connectivity to be activiated. So while I can't make any promises, it's pretty likely you'll be able to arrange something.
Drop me a line if you want to know anything else about the venue.
Good question.
Unfortunetly I'm not the person to ask =). But maybe this report from last year will give you a better idea of the goings-on.