When we moved to the US from the UK, my dad commented on the number of Traffic Lights everywhere instead of roundabouts. His comment was something to the effect of "the guy that invented traffic lights must have made a fortune and split it with the people planning the roads".
I see it all over the place in every state I've lived in, places where a bad traffic intersection could have been made smoother with a simple roundabout. As the years pass by they rebuild the intersections again and again, and always trying different ways of setting up the lights, or adding turning lanes, or removing them. Never do they try a new roundabout. In fact the only ones I can think of are ones that have been there for years and years, and even they seem fewer and fewer. =(
The trick is not to make slower drivers, the trick is to make SAFER drivers. Slower drivers are not always safer drivers.
1) Set accurate speed limits so people will actually follow them. It is ridiculous that "following traffic" means having to break the law.
2) Mandate *better* and *harder* driver license tests. In the US it is all too easy for someone to get a driving license with little or no training. (seriously; check out this test: "Drive in a straight line, drive backwards in a straight line, parallel park, do a 3 point U-turn", and the kicker is, many states only require you to do TWO of the above. And if you fail the test, you can pay the fee and take it again, and in the mean time despite failing, you're allowed to continue driving with your permit.
3) Have the police start enforcing SAFE driving concerns. Enforce laws about people driving in the wrong lane, driving while on the cell phone, driving with improper equipment. Yes, I know, speeding tickets are great revenue, but stop enforcing only the speeding laws, especially when you're not making anyone any safer you're just picking up revenue from some unlucky sob (or more likely these days lining the pockets of a traffic lawyer).
If the focus was on safety, we could raise speed limits and increase traffic flow and reduce congestion.
disclaimer: I catch a lot of crap for driving a "sporty" car, but I focus all my attention on safe driving. driving should be a cooperative adventure, not a competitive sport. Take all the a-holes and distracted drivers off the road and we could all enjoy our commute and weekend drives a lot more. =) Just telling people to slow down, or trying to find ways to force them to slow down won't really change anything, other than perhaps an increase in speeding tickets. =/
Even if you assume that braking recovers 100% of the same energy used to accelerate, you're still only breaking relatively little compared to how much you're accelerating or using energy to maintain speed.
I don't have Tesla, but I do have the car it's built on, it's a light weight sports car, and you find yourself barely ever braking. The handling is sufficiently impressive that you don't need to. Granted the Tesla weighs significantly more, but it's still going to be lighter than most cars, and you'll find yourself taking corners without braking as much.
My point is, the inevitable loss comes from the fact that you're using power more often than you're getting it back.
As a game developer that runs linux at home and at work, I can tell you, it's hard to get support for creating a linux client. For some reason the bean counters in the company want the client to be profitable.
Cost of porting a windows client to linux has to be less than the expected profit.
While a host of people will always come out and say "I'd buy a linux client" too many of them are also implying "and not buy the windows client". And therefore, they're a net even. The number of people that would only buy a linux client are remakeably small.
That being said, I continue to push for a linux client under the simple belief that the more options you have for people to play the more players you will have. Likewise I want a mac client.
"Finally, Wizards has ensured the demise of their original cashcow, Magic: The Gathering"
Yeah, people have been saying that every year for the past 12 years. But for some reason the product seems to just keep getting more and more popular every year. I don't understand it either, clearly someone is doing something wrong. Surely this is the year when the naysayers will get it right.
I also program games for a living, and a new contract team came in recently to work on a sub section of code for a future project. They discussed the "Agile Method" they want to use, and the basic reaction here was "oh, you mean the way we've always done things". It doesn't translate that far off from the "Iterative Development" or "Stepwise Refinement" methods that they were teaching 20 years ago.
The deal also asserts that Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 will be the exclusive gaming platforms for the PC and console for the events, meaning that other console titles for Sony or Nintendo platforms will not figure in the competitions.
"You just use whatever will work for the project."
More and more I believe you use whatever the programmer knows best.
A co-worker and I working on the same project were equally efficient with him using MSVC while I used emacs and Makefiles. We both were familiar with the tools the other used, we just had our preferences and knew which worked better for us.
It really depends on which company you work for and what their attitude towards the workers and the products they produce is.
I work as a game developer and I love it. My hours aren't long (~40/week), I make decent money, surrounded by people that have a love for games. I can easily imagine however that working for other companies could be a lot less fun. If I didn't like my job I would probably grow to resent the games I'm working on as well. In that case I'd rather go back to the financial market, hate the job, but at least I'd still enjoy my hobby. =)
Try contacting your local schools and ask them what they're looking for. You might find that they have programs set up already and that there are rules you'll need to follow to participate.
Ignore the cynics posting here, you'll find plenty of kids interested in science and projects. Play top your strengths though, don't get involved in stuff that doesn;t relate to what you do or know.
You might consider something simple like a lecture on networking, followed by having them help set up a lan.
Actually the salesman was quite specific, the standard waranty did not include free battery replacement. Which is the reason I bought it.
This was about 8 years ago too. So Best Buy's bad reputation hadn't spread around yet and getting a new cell phone every year wasn't yet common practice.
I bought a cell phone from Best Buy. After being told that the battery would only last a year, and that I needed the warranty because that guaranteed free battery replacements for 5 years, I signed on.
Anyway, I take the phone home, open it up (it was in a sealed new box) and find that it's actually a used phone, someone has put there name on it, and put a password on it so it's unusable. I take it back to Best Buy, where they accuse me of locking it. Then tell me it was just the keyboard lock (it wasn't) and then ask me who's name it was. Eventually they replaced it--with a phone that didn't work. I replace that one too and I'm ok for about a year or so, I'd bought the 4 year warranty (which the clerk mind you had told me was a 5 year plan when I bought it). So I bring the phone back, and they tell me I don't have a warranty. They try to look it up on the computer and it's not there. Well after talking to enough people I find out they only keep the warranty on file for 1 year. After that they're purged, and you better hope you still have the paperwork from it.
A separate experience, my fiancee bought me a cd rom player from Best Buy. It needed repairs a few months later (inexplicably stopped working) took them a month or so of off site repairs, and it had to go back in 3 times, but eventually got it back working. But it took a while for me to prove I was under warranty, despite their claims that they keep it on their computer and can look it up by name, phone, or credit card, they could not find it. Eventually we found the paperwork and was able to bring that in as proof. (We were moving at the time, packed away paperwork was not easy to find).
Sure enough had her name, our phone number and CC right on it.
20/20 also did a news special about Best Buy and their fraudulent warranty practices. I bet you can find info about it online somewhere.
I don't shop there. I advise my friends not to shop there.
The tool he used to spy on his boss showed that 70% of the time he was using the computer was playing solitaire. So what? 0% of the shots showed him to be using the computer for work. All this tells me is his job doesn't require him to be using the computer.
The spy software shut itself off when the computer was in-active, so it's hard to gage from this data how much of the guys day at work was spent playing games. Maybe he used his computer for 15 minutes a day while drinking a cup of coffee everyday and played some games during that time. Maybe he goofed off all day. We don't know. It's impossible to tell from the data given.
I also have to question this guy's motives, did he really want to fix the problem or was it more personal. At no point did it seem like he confronted the supervisor about his "problem". Instead he immediately tried to leapfrog him and get him fired.
Assuming Vernon (the sysadmin) was actually doing his job, and not spending all of his time on this vendetta, I hope he wins the wrongful termination suit. Firing him over this seems to have been overkill. He should have been reprimanded and warned like they did with the game playing supervisor.
I run win98 on my desktop (read game machine and hard drive server). I run win98 dual boot on my laptop with linux. Win98 runs all the games I want, it runs opera, it runs AIM, and it runs my email client. It runs perl, it runs emacs. It connects and shares an internet connection, it manages my hard drives, cdroms, printers etc for my home based network. That's all I need out of it. Anything else I'll do under linux.
I find my win98 installation to be fairly secure. Unless I try and screw it up (ie run an unknown email attachement I was sent by someone I don't trust) it's fine. No services to worry about, no random open ports to be exploited, really unless I try to have the machine hacked it seems perfectly safe.
Plus, it's paid for. I have yet to be given a compelling reason to upgrade to a new version of windows. MS not supporting it any more? So what. It's ran reasonably fine the past 5 years. I'm not surprised MS wants to get rid of it, there's no icentive for there customers to replace it.
By some accounts his neice, by others his daughter, the latter of which seem more accurate.
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/ada-bio.h tm l
quote: After she wrote the description of Babbage's Analytical Engine her life was plagued with illnesses, and her social life, in addition to Charles Babbage, included Sir David Brewster (the originator of the kaleidoscope), Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. Her interests ranged from music to horses to calculating machines. She has been used as a character in Gibson and Sterling's the Difference Engine, shown writing letters to Babbage in the series " The Machine that Changed the World" and I have gathered her letters and writings in "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer Though her life was short (like her father, she died at 36), Ada anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing.
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html http://neil.franklin.ch/Usenet/alt.folklore.comp ut ers/19980911_Who_invented_the_computer
quote:
Since we've strayed onto this topic, I'll throw in a story I've heard in a number of contexts. I have no historical support for any of this - it's just a story I've encountered. Ada Lovelace was a student (the first female mathematics student at Oxford, I believe, and a true genius at it to boot) of Babbage. Babbage was a commoner, and Lovelace was the niece of Lord Byron (an elevated commoner, and poet laureate). Byron was determined that his niece would marry well, and when Ada and Babbage met at Oxford and fell in love, Byron nixed the relationship, because Babbage was a lowly commoner, not well paid as an Oxford don, and had no real future.
Which may actually be the intended result. The one I listed yields: Just another Perl hacker,:-)
Given the input string as he had it. Is their an easy way to get the result I got? (note I modified the input string a little...) Looking for short 1-liners here.
I think you're mistaken, this isn't splitting hairs. They made a wildly inaccurate claim. They claim 'brute force' won't find a non dictionary word. But that's exactly what brute force is, brute force is testing EVERY possible combination.
Sure their email may be secure vs a basic dictionary attack. But they're using "brute force" cause it's a buzz word, without even understanding what the phrase means. In any case, as has been pointed out, their intended audience won't know/care about the difference.;*)
I have this Kinesis keyboard. It's fantastc. You will not find a better keyboard. About half the engineers I work with use it as well
The down side is that it's not terribly cheap. ($200+) Before you buy a keyboard, I suggest doing some research and go find out about this item via their webpage. "http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/"
Looking at their site, the keyboard I'm referring to is the "contoured" one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm clearly doing it wrong. In my case it's more like "3) hope your child goes to bed at some point" =)
When we moved to the US from the UK, my dad commented on the number of Traffic Lights everywhere instead of roundabouts. His comment was something to the effect of "the guy that invented traffic lights must have made a fortune and split it with the people planning the roads".
I see it all over the place in every state I've lived in, places where a bad traffic intersection could have been made smoother with a simple roundabout. As the years pass by they rebuild the intersections again and again, and always trying different ways of setting up the lights, or adding turning lanes, or removing them. Never do they try a new roundabout. In fact the only ones I can think of are ones that have been there for years and years, and even they seem fewer and fewer. =(
The trick is not to make slower drivers, the trick is to make SAFER drivers. Slower drivers are not always safer drivers.
1) Set accurate speed limits so people will actually follow them. It is ridiculous that "following traffic" means having to break the law.
2) Mandate *better* and *harder* driver license tests. In the US it is all too easy for someone to get a driving license with little or no training. (seriously; check out this test: "Drive in a straight line, drive backwards in a straight line, parallel park, do a 3 point U-turn", and the kicker is, many states only require you to do TWO of the above. And if you fail the test, you can pay the fee and take it again, and in the mean time despite failing, you're allowed to continue driving with your permit.
3) Have the police start enforcing SAFE driving concerns. Enforce laws about people driving in the wrong lane, driving while on the cell phone, driving with improper equipment. Yes, I know, speeding tickets are great revenue, but stop enforcing only the speeding laws, especially when you're not making anyone any safer you're just picking up revenue from some unlucky sob (or more likely these days lining the pockets of a traffic lawyer).
If the focus was on safety, we could raise speed limits and increase traffic flow and reduce congestion.
disclaimer: I catch a lot of crap for driving a "sporty" car, but I focus all my attention on safe driving. driving should be a cooperative adventure, not a competitive sport. Take all the a-holes and distracted drivers off the road and we could all enjoy our commute and weekend drives a lot more. =) Just telling people to slow down, or trying to find ways to force them to slow down won't really change anything, other than perhaps an increase in speeding tickets. =/
So, where does the inevitable loss come in then?
Even if you assume that braking recovers 100% of the same energy used to accelerate, you're still only breaking relatively little compared to how much you're accelerating or using energy to maintain speed.
I don't have Tesla, but I do have the car it's built on, it's a light weight sports car, and you find yourself barely ever braking. The handling is sufficiently impressive that you don't need to. Granted the Tesla weighs significantly more, but it's still going to be lighter than most cars, and you'll find yourself taking corners without braking as much.
My point is, the inevitable loss comes from the fact that you're using power more often than you're getting it back.
As a game developer that runs linux at home and at work, I can tell you, it's hard to get support for creating a linux client. For some reason the bean counters in the company want the client to be profitable.
Cost of porting a windows client to linux has to be less than the expected profit.
While a host of people will always come out and say "I'd buy a linux client" too many of them are also implying "and not buy the windows client". And therefore, they're a net even. The number of people that would only buy a linux client are remakeably small.
That being said, I continue to push for a linux client under the simple belief that the more options you have for people to play the more players you will have. Likewise I want a mac client.
-elf
"Finally, Wizards has ensured the demise of their original cashcow, Magic: The Gathering"
Yeah, people have been saying that every year for the past 12 years. But for some reason the product seems to just keep getting more and more popular every year. I don't understand it either, clearly someone is doing something wrong. Surely this is the year when the naysayers will get it right.
-elf
I also program games for a living, and a new contract team came in recently to work on a sub section of code for a future project. They discussed the "Agile Method" they want to use, and the basic reaction here was "oh, you mean the way we've always done things". It doesn't translate that far off from the "Iterative Development" or "Stepwise Refinement" methods that they were teaching 20 years ago.
-elf
-elf
"You just use whatever will work for the project."
More and more I believe you use whatever the programmer knows best.
A co-worker and I working on the same project were equally efficient with him using MSVC while I used emacs and Makefiles. We both were familiar with the tools the other used, we just had our preferences and knew which worked better for us.
-elf
Sr. Software Engineer
Wizards of the Coast
It really depends on which company you work for and what their attitude towards the workers and the products they produce is.
I work as a game developer and I love it. My hours aren't long (~40/week), I make decent money, surrounded by people that have a love for games. I can easily imagine however that working for other companies could be a lot less fun. If I didn't like my job I would probably grow to resent the games I'm working on as well. In that case I'd rather go back to the financial market, hate the job, but at least I'd still enjoy my hobby. =)
-elf
Try contacting your local schools and ask them what they're looking for. You might find that they have programs set up already and that there are rules you'll need to follow to participate.
Ignore the cynics posting here, you'll find plenty of kids interested in science and projects. Play top your strengths though, don't get involved in stuff that doesn;t relate to what you do or know.
You might consider something simple like a lecture on networking, followed by having them help set up a lan.
Actually the salesman was quite specific, the standard waranty did not include free battery replacement. Which is the reason I bought it.
This was about 8 years ago too. So Best Buy's bad reputation hadn't spread around yet and getting a new cell phone every year wasn't yet common practice.
I bought a cell phone from Best Buy. After being told that the battery would only last a year, and that I needed the warranty because that guaranteed free battery replacements for 5 years, I signed on.
Anyway, I take the phone home, open it up (it was in a sealed new box) and find that it's actually a used phone, someone has put there name on it, and put a password on it so it's unusable. I take it back to Best Buy, where they accuse me of locking it. Then tell me it was just the keyboard lock (it wasn't) and then ask me who's name it was. Eventually they replaced it--with a phone that didn't work. I replace that one too and I'm ok for about a year or so, I'd bought the 4 year warranty (which the clerk mind you had told me was a 5 year plan when I bought it). So I bring the phone back, and they tell me I don't have a warranty. They try to look it up on the computer and it's not there. Well after talking to enough people I find out they only keep the warranty on file for 1 year. After that they're purged, and you better hope you still have the paperwork from it.
A separate experience, my fiancee bought me a cd rom player from Best Buy. It needed repairs a few months later (inexplicably stopped working) took them a month or so of off site repairs, and it had to go back in 3 times, but eventually got it back working. But it took a while for me to prove I was under warranty, despite their claims that they keep it on their computer and can look it up by name, phone, or credit card, they could not find it. Eventually we found the paperwork and was able to bring that in as proof. (We were moving at the time, packed away paperwork was not easy to find).
Sure enough had her name, our phone number and CC right on it.
20/20 also did a news special about Best Buy and their fraudulent warranty practices. I bet you can find info about it online somewhere.
I don't shop there. I advise my friends not to shop there.
-elf
The tool he used to spy on his boss showed that 70% of the time he was using the computer was playing solitaire. So what? 0% of the shots showed him to be using the computer for work. All this tells me is his job doesn't require him to be using the computer.
The spy software shut itself off when the computer was in-active, so it's hard to gage from this data how much of the guys day at work was spent playing games. Maybe he used his computer for 15 minutes a day while drinking a cup of coffee everyday and played some games during that time. Maybe he goofed off all day. We don't know. It's impossible to tell from the data given.
I also have to question this guy's motives, did he really want to fix the problem or was it more personal. At no point did it seem like he confronted the supervisor about his "problem". Instead he immediately tried to leapfrog him and get him fired.
Assuming Vernon (the sysadmin) was actually doing his job, and not spending all of his time on this vendetta, I hope he wins the wrongful termination suit. Firing him over this seems to have been overkill. He should have been reprimanded and warned like they did with the game playing supervisor.
Maybe I'm not in the right circles to understand the in-politics, but why was the parent to this reply modded a troll?
I'm probably not up to date on all this stuff, I just use tar and gzip.
How about offensive? Sand what?
I'm sorry this is slashdot, not some juvenile playground. He should keep his bigotry to himself.
I run win98 on my desktop (read game machine and hard drive server). I run win98 dual boot on my laptop with linux. Win98 runs all the games I want, it runs opera, it runs AIM, and it runs my email client. It runs perl, it runs emacs. It connects and shares an internet connection, it manages my hard drives, cdroms, printers etc for my home based network. That's all I need out of it. Anything else I'll do under linux.
I find my win98 installation to be fairly secure. Unless I try and screw it up (ie run an unknown email attachement I was sent by someone I don't trust) it's fine. No services to worry about, no random open ports to be exploited, really unless I try to have the machine hacked it seems perfectly safe.
Plus, it's paid for. I have yet to be given a compelling reason to upgrade to a new version of windows. MS not supporting it any more? So what. It's ran reasonably fine the past 5 years. I'm not surprised MS wants to get rid of it, there's no icentive for there customers to replace it.
--
Michael Feuell
Ada Lovelace
h tm l
p ut ers/19980911_Who_invented_the_computer
By some accounts his neice, by others his daughter, the latter of which seem more accurate.
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/ada-bio.
quote:
After she wrote the description of Babbage's Analytical Engine her life was plagued with illnesses, and her social life, in addition to Charles Babbage, included Sir David Brewster (the originator of the kaleidoscope), Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. Her interests ranged from music to horses to calculating machines. She has been used as a character in Gibson and Sterling's the Difference Engine, shown writing letters to Babbage in the series " The Machine that Changed the World" and I have gathered her letters and writings in "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer Though her life was short (like her father, she died at 36), Ada anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing.
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html
http://neil.franklin.ch/Usenet/alt.folklore.com
quote:
Since we've strayed onto this topic, I'll throw in a story I've heard in a number of contexts. I have no historical support for any of this - it's just a story I've encountered. Ada Lovelace was a student (the first female mathematics student at Oxford, I believe, and a true genius at it to boot) of Babbage. Babbage was a commoner, and Lovelace was the niece of Lord Byron (an elevated commoner, and poet laureate). Byron was determined that his niece would marry well, and when Ada and Babbage met at Oxford and fell in love, Byron nixed the relationship, because Babbage was a lowly commoner, not well paid as an Oxford don, and had no real future.
-elf
http://www.aardman.com/aardnews/
-Michael
perl -e 'print join " ",reverse split " ", ":-) hacker, Perl another Just"'
,hacker Perl another Just)' yields: :-)
:-)
Is their a better way?
(of taking a string, reversing the space seperated fields, as opposed to reversing the fields themselves?)
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
tsuJ rehtona lreP rekcah,
Which may actually be the intended result. The one I listed yields:
Just another Perl hacker,
Given the input string as he had it. Is their an easy way to get the result I got? (note I modified the input string a little...)
Looking for short 1-liners here.
-Michael
I think you're mistaken, this isn't splitting hairs. They made a wildly inaccurate claim. They claim 'brute force' won't find a non dictionary word. But that's exactly what brute force is, brute force is testing EVERY possible combination.
;*)
Sure their email may be secure vs a basic dictionary attack. But they're using "brute force" cause it's a buzz word, without even understanding what the phrase means. In any case, as has been pointed out, their intended audience won't know/care about the difference.
-Michael
I have this Kinesis keyboard. It's fantastc.
You will not find a better keyboard. About
half the engineers I work with use it as well
The down side is that it's not terribly cheap. ($200+)
Before you buy a keyboard, I suggest doing some
research and go find out about this item via
their webpage. "http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/"
Looking at their site, the keyboard I'm referring
to is the "contoured" one.
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contspec.html
-Michael
-elf@cie.cendant.com