Casio, Sony, 3Com, and others have Windows touchpads with a slot for your 802.11 card. They are perfect for surfing the web while sitting on the pot.:) They can also be wall-mounted to avoid spills and splashes.
Yeah, it's Windows, but you're booting from ROM with most of these, so it doesn't take much time to reboot.
The US airlines certainly make their passenger lists available to the IRS... I flew from California to Germany once, during a period of time where I owed the IRS about $4k (the whole thing, amount and payment terms was being disputed and discussed, but the IRS hadn't taken a turn for a number of months).
There was a Treasury agent waiting on the jetway for me. She asked how much cash I had, and wanted to see it! She didn't talk to anyone else, since she spent the whole time trying to get me to say I was carrying a big pile of cash. I wasn't, but I was afraid she was going to pull my backpack out of the luggage bay and search it!
I guess I pissed off a spammer really good a while back, because someone sent a pile of spam with my email address on the From: line. I got hundreds of bounces and NOT ONE REPLY.
So either people aren't interested in what the spammer was selling (spamming tools), or the majority of people with email addresses just ignore it now.
Personally, I'd quit if I couldn't get them to change course. But it's your choice, not mine.
Your first job is not about using what you've learned, it's about finding a place that will teach you how to apply it, and how to play office politics, and the politics of projects in general. All of the best (most productive, least bug-producing, best technical leaders) programmers I've worked with had jobs early in their careers that exposed them to people who helped them to increase and refine their skills and talents.
That's why I think job fairs suck for people just getting out of school. You're unlikely to find a metor at a job fair; they're the people who are too valuable to send out to recruit (though I've seen some exceptions at highly enlightened companies).
It's better to use your friends, family, favorite TAs who graduated ahead of you, etc. to help you find a good environment to really learn your craft. But I work in Silicon Valley, where most people have a very broad network to draw on. Some places don't make it so easy.
> What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see
OK, I really don't want to see *any* ads. Does anyone *want* to see ads? Advertising is a broadcast medium, i.e. one-way, from them to us.
But I don't want to see some useful sites dry up and blow away, so I'll live with a few ads. I don't care what the ads say, because I ignore them (the ones I don't block, anyway).
I think the idea of discussing the ads will turn into a discussion of the products or services being advertised, which advertisers don't really want. It'd be great for consumers, but how long before the first lawsuit for posting derogatory stuff about an advertisor?
Sorry, I don't have a solution to offer. It's a hard problem.
> I will be the first one to sign up for this
> if it will lower the retail cost of games and apps
OK, let's pretend that you're running a big for-profit software company. You find a way to cut costs (actually, someone else forces changes in the tools that people use to eat into your margins a tiny bit; does anyone have real numbers on what software theft costs in the US?). Do you pass that long to your customers? Do you give all the "hard-working developers" raises? If you said "hell no!", you pass CEO 101.
Saying the 'criteria is intent' means we're talking about a thought-crime. Those are pretty tough to enforce, you know, so the courts set a harsh precedent for the first big case to come along, then 'interpret' that precedent a little more reasonably when they feel like it.
IANAL, of course. So take this with a grain of salt.
'Brazil' was Terry Gilliam's interpretation of '1984'. So it may have been a better story than '1984', but as a metaphor, it's pretty much identical.
'The Trial' has been made into a movie, and it was really well done. It has all the frustration of 'Brazil', but it's a low-budget B&W film, so the 'action' scenes aren't quite so exciting.
Re:I have to question the point of this exercise.
on
GeekCorps v2.0
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· Score: 1
What you seem to have missed (did you read anything on their web site?) is that the infrastructure stuff isn't there now, so to do the geek job, these guys aften have to fix the infrastructure.
Parts of Ghana are already in the 19th century, but it's the part of the 19th century when things didn't quite work.
Anyway, just fixing sanitation and agriculture is generally not a service, it's a marriage. Teaching people to fix their own wiring is a true service, and teaching them a skill is giving them hope for a better future. Search Google for 'Abraham Maslow' for more information on the need for hope.
Of course, I got my opinion from reading and studying and considering the effectiveness of past 'humanitarian' projects. I've never been there.
OK, this is cool. But what if some of my 'schemes' need to enable WEP in different ways? Do the schemes extend into the wireless.opts file too?
I have more than just 'work' and 'home'; I have clients' net configs (though simple DHCP often works for wired connections) and I have both wired and wireless at home.
I never noticed that RH6 broke anything in the pcmcia package because I always build a new kernel as soon as the laptop is up and running. But I've heard that they 'simplified' the network.opts file a little too much.
The law says that a fax-spammer can't send more than one per year to each recipient, and there's practically no way to enforce the law. For example, to whom do you report a fax-spammer?
I get junk faxes all the time, and at first I searched and called and threatened. The faxers know that the cost of collecting is way too high. They're careful to send only a few faxes per year (per shell company, of course). They try to appear to take the complainers seriously, and they'll take you off their lists if you give them enough info to do so (unlike email spammers).
What we want for email spam is a national opt-out list, and huge penalties for spamming people who are on that list. I don't want to let them spam me even once per year, or they'll set up multiple shell companies sharing lists but not domains, and spam the hell out of us anyway.
SMP is more than twice as fast because of the way the compiler works; there's a process piping its output to the process in charge of the next compile step. Because two of these can run at the same time (one per CPU), the data doesn't have to be written to the disk between stages.
Jitterbug is simple and fast for reasonably small bug lists, but its reporting sucks hard.
Bugzilla, OTOH, is more full-featured (too full-featured for most small dev groups, IMHO) and uses a SQL database. So you could theoretically run just about any report you like. I don't think it records all the bug dates you'd need for the reports you mentioned, but that's a relatively trivial patch.
I used to hang out with him when he lived in Berkeley, then Alameda. Learned a lot about the Mac in the later days; he had one of the first commercial uses for vblanking code (I'm not doing Mac stuff any more; I hope that's what it's called).
He's a very intense and smart guy. Crazy too, but in a good way. I'd consider buying one of his firewalls if I needed one.
You'll never find a headhunter who will offer you the rates you can get on your own. The job boards and newsgroups are mostly postings by headhunters. Ergo you'll see lots of low rates.
I took my last job through a headhunter a couple years ago, and even though they told me the max rate was $45/hr, I got $75/hr. I get a lot more now because I use my network of friends and former co-workers instead of relying on headhunters.
That was the long answer.... the short answer is much simpler: my clients are paying $150-$250/hour for contractors.
'Not fitting in' is different from being a loser. Fit is a group dynamic thing, where 'group' means two or more people are involved. Losers don't need anyone else around; they just are. #:)
Most bosses will question your abilities anyway, and a poor fit just makes them look harder (and make stuff up when it helps them reach their goals).
The WSJ says there's a tech slowdown, but good people are still hard to find in the valley. It's been that way for years.
Whether you're trying to find a Solaris C++ threads developer or a Linux/PHP developer, it's just hard. The good ones are all working already, probably contracting for $150-250/hr, and you're going to have a hard time getting those people to give up that life and take a *job*.
Ask your best people to recruit their friends. If they won't, they don't believe in your business. If they do and their friends are losers, maybe you should re-evaluate the quality of your employees.
One of the questions I ask prospective employers is the ratio of 'A' people to B's and C's. Good people want to work with good people.
You may have learned less, but would other people in your class have had an opportunity to learn MORE?
I met a psychologist a few years back who suggested putting all the smart/disruptive people in a special school so they couldn't screw up the learning opportunities for everyone else. He was ridiculed for this non-PC idea, but can you suggest a better one?
I'm using an Apple Airport, configured with the no-Windog-required Java program from http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airpor t/ and Lucent/WaveLAN/Orinoco/NameOfTheDay WEP-capable 802.11 cards. Works great. There's a hack to add an external antenna to the Airport which allegedly increases the range dramatically. I haven't needed it.
The parts were cheapest at PC Connection about 6 months ago.
So I was a little surprised to read above that it never crashes. Try this:
create a keystroke macro, a relatively complex one with selection and copy and paste. Make the last keystroke a down arrow so you can just hit ^k repeatedly to activate the macro on successive lines.
Then whack ^k 10 or 15 times.
When I'm running NEdit on a remote host, this will core NEdit every time. The slower the connection, the faster it'll die.
On the plus side, that's the only way I've ever been able to kill it.
It's free for open source projects, and reasonably priced for commercial use (relatively). It has a regular syntax and lots of nice tools (the review daemon is a lifesaver). Because by default it's a command line tool, it's easy to script but there are GUIs for some platforms.
I'm using an Airport with an existing network that coincidentally goes through a Prestige 310 to a DSL bridge (only call it a modem when you want tech support; the phone reps don't understand what a bridge is).
Works great. I use OS drivers from Lucent and a Java configuration program. No Macs on my network (yet), but this works just fine.
And what I really hate is that the lies are so pervasive that they end up shaping the whole
debate. People can only see past a certain limited number of lies at a time. So they'll catch a few, but then they'll accept the bigger lies like "We had to... or lose it".
While I suspect that he knew some of his arguments were flawed, I don't think we're reading the words of a professional PR type, or anyone with experience reading contracts, for that matter.
Consider the lack of polished language, and the obvious lack of grip on the concepts of IP, trademark, and open source.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
OTOH, I believe the poster who suggested that they're trying to compile deep demographic information is probably right.
Slashdot Mirror
This question comes up about every 3-4 months, and never gets 'resolved' (where resolution means a majority agree). Lots of good discussion, though.
Casio, Sony, 3Com, and others have Windows touchpads with a slot for your 802.11 card. They are perfect for surfing the web while sitting on the pot. :) They can also be wall-mounted to avoid spills and splashes.
Yeah, it's Windows, but you're booting from ROM with most of these, so it doesn't take much time to reboot.
The US airlines certainly make their passenger lists available to the IRS... I flew from California to Germany once, during a period of time where I owed the IRS about $4k (the whole thing, amount and payment terms was being disputed and discussed, but the IRS hadn't taken a turn for a number of months).
There was a Treasury agent waiting on the jetway for me. She asked how much cash I had, and wanted to see it! She didn't talk to anyone else, since she spent the whole time trying to get me to say I was carrying a big pile of cash. I wasn't, but I was afraid she was going to pull my backpack out of the luggage bay and search it!
http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/subs ection3.2.1.html
I guess I pissed off a spammer really good a while back, because someone sent a pile of spam with my email address on the From: line. I got hundreds of bounces and NOT ONE REPLY.
So either people aren't interested in what the spammer was selling (spamming tools), or the majority of people with email addresses just ignore it now.
Personally, I'd quit if I couldn't get them to change course. But it's your choice, not mine.
Good luck.
Your first job is not about using what you've learned, it's about finding a place that will teach you how to apply it, and how to play office politics, and the politics of projects in general. All of the best (most productive, least bug-producing, best technical leaders) programmers I've worked with had jobs early in their careers that exposed them to people who helped them to increase and refine their skills and talents.
That's why I think job fairs suck for people just getting out of school. You're unlikely to find a metor at a job fair; they're the people who are too valuable to send out to recruit (though I've seen some exceptions at highly enlightened companies).
It's better to use your friends, family, favorite TAs who graduated ahead of you, etc. to help you find a good environment to really learn your craft. But I work in Silicon Valley, where most people have a very broad network to draw on. Some places don't make it so easy.
Good luck.
> What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see
OK, I really don't want to see *any* ads. Does anyone *want* to see ads? Advertising is a broadcast medium, i.e. one-way, from them to us.
But I don't want to see some useful sites dry up and blow away, so I'll live with a few ads. I don't care what the ads say, because I ignore them (the ones I don't block, anyway).
I think the idea of discussing the ads will turn into a discussion of the products or services being advertised, which advertisers don't really want. It'd be great for consumers, but how long before the first lawsuit for posting derogatory stuff about an advertisor?
Sorry, I don't have a solution to offer. It's a hard problem.
> How big of a deal is this really going to be?
This is a troll, right?
> I will be the first one to sign up for this
> if it will lower the retail cost of games and apps
OK, let's pretend that you're running a big for-profit software company. You find a way to cut costs (actually, someone else forces changes in the tools that people use to eat into your margins a tiny bit; does anyone have real numbers on what software theft costs in the US?). Do you pass that long to your customers? Do you give all the "hard-working developers" raises? If you said "hell no!", you pass CEO 101.
So tell me again why this isn't such a bad idea?
Saying the 'criteria is intent' means we're talking about a thought-crime. Those are pretty tough to enforce, you know, so the courts set a harsh precedent for the first big case to come along, then 'interpret' that precedent a little more reasonably when they feel like it.
IANAL, of course. So take this with a grain of salt.
'Brazil' was Terry Gilliam's interpretation of '1984'. So it may have been a better story than '1984', but as a metaphor, it's pretty much identical.
'The Trial' has been made into a movie, and it was really well done. It has all the frustration of 'Brazil', but it's a low-budget B&W film, so the 'action' scenes aren't quite so exciting.
What you seem to have missed (did you read anything on their web site?) is that the infrastructure stuff isn't there now, so to do the geek job, these guys aften have to fix the infrastructure.
Parts of Ghana are already in the 19th century, but it's the part of the 19th century when things didn't quite work.
Anyway, just fixing sanitation and agriculture is generally not a service, it's a marriage. Teaching people to fix their own wiring is a true service, and teaching them a skill is giving them hope for a better future. Search Google for 'Abraham Maslow' for more information on the need for hope.
Of course, I got my opinion from reading and studying and considering the effectiveness of past 'humanitarian' projects. I've never been there.
OK, this is cool. But what if some of my 'schemes' need to enable WEP in different ways? Do the schemes extend into the wireless.opts file too?
I have more than just 'work' and 'home'; I have clients' net configs (though simple DHCP often works for wired connections) and I have both wired and wireless at home.
I never noticed that RH6 broke anything in the pcmcia package because I always build a new kernel as soon as the laptop is up and running. But I've heard that they 'simplified' the network.opts file a little too much.
The law says that a fax-spammer can't send more than one per year to each recipient, and there's practically no way to enforce the law. For example, to whom do you report a fax-spammer?
I get junk faxes all the time, and at first I searched and called and threatened. The faxers know that the cost of collecting is way too high. They're careful to send only a few faxes per year (per shell company, of course). They try to appear to take the complainers seriously, and they'll take you off their lists if you give them enough info to do so (unlike email spammers).
What we want for email spam is a national opt-out list, and huge penalties for spamming people who are on that list. I don't want to let them spam me even once per year, or they'll set up multiple shell companies sharing lists but not domains, and spam the hell out of us anyway.
SMP is more than twice as fast because of the way the compiler works; there's a process piping its output to the process in charge of the next compile step. Because two of these can run at the same time (one per CPU), the data doesn't have to be written to the disk between stages.
Please pardon the excessive simplification...
Bugzilla, OTOH, is more full-featured (too full-featured for most small dev groups, IMHO) and uses a SQL database. So you could theoretically run just about any report you like. I don't think it records all the bug dates you'd need for the reports you mentioned, but that's a relatively trivial patch.
I used to hang out with him when he lived in Berkeley, then Alameda. Learned a lot about the Mac in the later days; he had one of the first commercial uses for vblanking code (I'm not doing Mac stuff any more; I hope that's what it's called).
He's a very intense and smart guy. Crazy too, but in a good way. I'd consider buying one of his firewalls if I needed one.
You'll never find a headhunter who will offer you the rates you can get on your own. The job boards and newsgroups are mostly postings by headhunters. Ergo you'll see lots of low rates.
I took my last job through a headhunter a couple years ago, and even though they told me the max rate was $45/hr, I got $75/hr. I get a lot more now because I use my network of friends and former co-workers instead of relying on headhunters.
That was the long answer.... the short answer is much simpler: my clients are paying $150-$250/hour for contractors.
'Not fitting in' is different from being a loser. Fit is a group dynamic thing, where 'group' means two or more people are involved. Losers don't need anyone else around; they just are. #:)
Most bosses will question your abilities anyway, and a poor fit just makes them look harder (and make stuff up when it helps them reach their goals).
My condolences to your friend.
The WSJ says there's a tech slowdown, but good people are still hard to find in the valley. It's been that way for years.
Whether you're trying to find a Solaris C++ threads developer or a Linux/PHP developer, it's just hard. The good ones are all working already, probably contracting for $150-250/hr, and you're going to have a hard time getting those people to give up that life and take a *job*.
Ask your best people to recruit their friends. If they won't, they don't believe in your business. If they do and their friends are losers, maybe you should re-evaluate the quality of your employees.
One of the questions I ask prospective employers is the ratio of 'A' people to B's and C's. Good people want to work with good people.
You may have learned less, but would other people in your class have had an opportunity to learn MORE?
I met a psychologist a few years back who suggested putting all the smart/disruptive people in a special school so they couldn't screw up the learning opportunities for everyone else. He was ridiculed for this non-PC idea, but can you suggest a better one?
I'm using an Apple Airport, configured with the no-Windog-required Java program from http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airpor t/ and Lucent/WaveLAN/Orinoco/NameOfTheDay WEP-capable 802.11 cards. Works great. There's a hack to add an external antenna to the Airport which allegedly increases the range dramatically. I haven't needed it.
The parts were cheapest at PC Connection about 6 months ago.
I love NEdit, and use it almost every day.
So I was a little surprised to read above that it never crashes. Try this:
create a keystroke macro, a relatively complex one with selection and copy and paste. Make the last keystroke a down arrow so you can just hit ^k repeatedly to activate the macro on successive lines.
Then whack ^k 10 or 15 times.
When I'm running NEdit on a remote host, this will core NEdit every time. The slower the connection, the faster it'll die.
On the plus side, that's the only way I've ever been able to kill it.
Disclaimer: I break software for a living.
It's free for open source projects, and reasonably priced for commercial use (relatively). It has a regular syntax and lots of nice tools (the review daemon is a lifesaver). Because by default it's a command line tool, it's easy to script but there are GUIs for some platforms.
I'm using an Airport with an existing network that coincidentally goes through a Prestige 310 to a DSL bridge (only call it a modem when you want tech support; the phone reps don't understand what a bridge is).
Works great. I use OS drivers from Lucent and a Java configuration program. No Macs on my network (yet), but this works just fine.
While I suspect that he knew some of his arguments were flawed, I don't think we're reading the words of a professional PR type, or anyone with experience reading contracts, for that matter.
Consider the lack of polished language, and the obvious lack of grip on the concepts of IP, trademark, and open source.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
OTOH, I believe the poster who suggested that they're trying to compile deep demographic information is probably right.