The great thing about running is that it requires so little preparation. No tires to pump, no pool to drive to, no weights to buy. Just you and your shoes.
Yeah, the great thing about running, no shoes to buy! Awesome! Oh wait...
Come on, most pretty serious runners go through a $100 pair of shoes every four months. Not exactly what I'd call minimalist. Its well worth it, don't get me wrong, but lets call it what it is.
I just started my mac os x programming. I wrote a lengthy objective-c tutorial to get familiar with the language, and I'm going to write similar tutorials for AppKit and AppleScript. (I like to write tutorials as part of my learning. Helps me and others at the same time I think).
You wrote a lengthy objective-c tutorial? You've got nerve I'll give you that. The thing reads like a crib sheet to Stephen Kochan's Programming in Objective-C. At least credit the guy when you lift example code from him. Shesh.
Ever notice how just about every "meal" at a fast food restaurant costs about the same? That's because they're in the business of extracting $5 per visitor rather than being interested in the exact margin on stuff. That's also why fries and a coke are thrown in their meals for a relatively low price, and they cost a lot more separately -- it's all about discouraging sub-par revenue customers.
What are you talking about? A fast food restaurant buys coke syrup by the gallon for something like $4. A large coke contains about $0.09 of syrup. Unless you're going to get 15 "free" refills of your drink they're still going to make money off of you. There's absolutely nothing to discourage anyone from going into a fast food restaurant and buying *just* a coke. Of course they want to entice you to buy more. But they are most definitely not losing money.
The french fries are even worse, I think they're the highest margin item in the store. Read _Fast Food Nation_ by Eric Schlosser. Its in your local library, and at Amazon etc. He goes into detail on most aspects of the fast food business. Its not pretty. The last couple chapters on the meat processing industry will have you swearing off burgers for a good long time. I still haven't been able to eat beef since I read that book. And it'll put the current Mad Cow issues in perspective.
If it were left strictly to capitalism the books would be sold for pulp. The cost of hiring someone to sell these off either on the internet or at a book sale is generally going to be more than any amount of revenue generated. What's going to drive this are the volunteers.
I used to work after school at the Northboro library, the library they quoted in the article believe it or not. I emptied the trash and dusted. Wow, that was a very long time ago:)
The Friends of the Library (volunteers) in Northboro were very active then, and I imagine now. You'd need a few pretty dedicated volunteers coming in on a regular basis to handle the internet sales. In many ways just selling off the books in bulk is easier, and that's really what's going to determine what'll happen.
As for being financially responsible, I can't think of a better use of funds in a down economy than in the library, other than perhaps schools and universities. Have you been in the library recently? At least in Mountain View (Silicon Valley) where I live now, virtually every desk is filled with people studing engineering, cs, doing all kinds of homework. Its unbelievable. If I don't get there early I can't find a spot.
And all the good cs books have a sizable waiting list. Don't judge a library by what they have in the stacks anymore. All the good books never make it there. You need to request them on the web these days and get in the queue.
There are far too many other slow aircraft flying at or near Concorde altitudes. Considering the fuel costs involved in getting to supersonic speeds (max drag between 0.97M and 1.4M), the economics of trans-continental supersonic flight would require sterile airspace for end-to-end clearance. The lobby group for bizjet owners would never let that happen at their expense.
The Concord cruises at around 50,000ft, which is well above most other commercial/private aircraft.
In the late 80s and early '90s NASA had a high speed civil transport program running, the goal was to build a commercially successful next generation Concord. Not surprisingly they identified a number of challenges to realize this goal.
1. The boom's perception had to minimized, (or over land boom routes had to be negotiated) 2. The engines needed to be made quieter. 3. Engine exhaust needed to made env. friendly. The altitude these birds fly at put it smack in the middle of the ozone layer. 4. And oh yeah, it had to burn less gas.
In other words, shaping the boom was just one part of the challenge. If you look at the photo of the modified F-5, notice the line running from nose to tail. The little squiggle in the middle that looks like an 'N' is the pressure shape they're shooting for. Note how the first bump is flat?
Back in the 80s NASA gave some money to academics to do a "perceived boom" study They built a box, mounted a bunch of high end speakers to it - pointed in, and got volunteers to sit in the thing and recorded how loud the volunteer felt the boom was. It was all very scientific. The end result was a model that you could plug in a pressure wave on one side and out would come a number of how many people you'd piss off. I'm not kidding. At a flat pressure signiture (no sound) you pissed off 10% of the people by flying over... which I thought was actually just perfect:) A lot of money and time was spent trying real hard to not rattle grammy's china cabinet.
But all this was sort of moot. The far and away front runner in terms of economically viable configurations was a flying wing. At takeoff it would be perpendicular to direction of travel and then as it got up to speed it would fly at more and more of an angle. The question then was, would anyone actually buy a ticket to ride in a wing? Add to that one that's at a crazy angle.
In any case the flying wing made all the fuselage shaping sort of beside the point. There was no fuselage to shape so you had to try and play with the wing and it got crazy complicated fast.
In any case the program wound down with Japan's economy hitting the skids. Golden (came from the space half of the industry) getting appointed as head of NASA didn't help either. The program went by a couple different names over the years: HSCT (High Speed Civil Transport) and a few others I wish I could remember. Goggle away.
You could go visit the birthplace of Silicon Valley: Mountain View/Palo Alto CA (in the Bay Area). On the corner of San Antonio Ave and California Street is a little historical sign indicating the site of what was Shockley Semiconductor. There's a shopping center and an ergonomic chair store there now. Not much to see I'm afraid, but I do like to rub the sign for good luck when I walk past.
Hey, this is a GEEKs tour, is it not?
The computer museum is about a mile away, and would make another good stop. http://www.computerhistory.org/
Probability and Statistics appears, um, almost all the time in your reviews as a prereq. I'm about to take some classes in this area but the field seems to be divided into mathematical vs. applied (a two course series appears for both). Which is more applicable towards cryptography?
I took a quick look at the Australian and NZ regulations. They both have a similar program but with an interesting twist. Because both countries have government sponsored insurance programs companies do not pay for your health insurance? In effect if you're on the equivalent of an H1-B in either of these countries you have to pay for your own, which is pretty much a non-starter.
So a teacher or a nurse could come here to work (my wife's a nurse and we know of lots of Aussie and NZ nurses here in California). But she couldn't go work there? That doesn't seem quite fair. Am I reading the regulations wrong?
Can anyone confirm how these programs work in other countries? Thanks.
I suspect it'll first show up in rocket based artillary. The current mobile rocket launchers are positively pressurized to try and minimize a soldiers exposure to the exhaust from current fuels, but even so, it can't be great for you.
And hey, Zilliac plays a mean softball as well as lighting candles. Greg, you're famous!
Corporate control of our government is, IMO, what plauges our political system the most.
This has very little to do with corporate control of our government. To the FBI this is a quick, inexpensive little memo to home broadband users everywhere. Basically they are letting people know that they should recalculate the cost vs. benefit of reconfiguring their modems and stealing extra bandwidth. The probability of being pursecuted is the same, but the perception is what counts. Net effect, more law abiding broadband users. They're thanking slashdot for spreading the word as we speak.
This is exactly the same kind of tactics that the IRS uses. Around April of every year the IRS makes a big stink about busting a small business owner, or doctor or dentist or waitress and so on to make you think twice about cheating on your taxes. Is it cost effective to bust that one waitress? Yes when you take into account the effect it has on all waitresses.
Is it cost effective to bust a dozen modem hackers? Yes when you take into account the effect it has on all potential modem hackers. It does suck to be one of the dozen.
It'll suck even worse if they find child porn on any one of those computers, even in spam, in their delete box.
Office is $25 for the academic version, probably even less for a whole school's worth of teachers and kids. I'm not sure you're going to save all that much money here.
Reading the original article, I kept thinking, why upgrade? You can save a heck of a lot of money by staying with a working version. You don't need to constantly upgrade.
A little known factoid, Amelia Earhart set a women's altitude record for autogyros in the '30s.
http://www.ameliaearhart.com/achievements.html So yeah, they've been around for a bit.
- ordinarius
Re:Not a job for the government
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Redirecting NASA
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I have worked as a contractor for NASA at the Ames Research Center (in their Numerical Aerodynamic Facility), and I've worked as a contractor for Citibank and other large corporations. I hate to break this to you, but I though NASA was a hell of a lot better run (not even close). Shocking huh?
Yes, at NASA there are/were stupid projects, and yes there were reports to be written, but by and large shit got done and the people were talented, intelligent and highly motivated. It was a fun place to work. Some of the large corporations I've done work for, most projects were a nightmare, and most employees were cashing a paycheck.
Can we stop spewing the same old tired lines some Republican spin doctor shoved down our collective throats? I can not imagine a large corporation running NASA more effectively. Don't get me wrong, I can imagine a more effective NASA. Its not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But to imply every private institution is somehow innately more effective then every public one is silly. Did you sleep through the events of the last couple years or what?
Interesting read, but can we stop abusing the word artist? Screaming into a microphone does not an artist make. Sticking 'dance', 'love', 'baby', 'yeah-yeah-yeah' together in random order does not an artist make. Is there something wrong with the title professional musician?
Ditto for actors. If I read about/listen to one more actor calling themselves an artist I'm going to be sick.
It is called discipline. Its also called desire. If you've got both, then you'll make the time to balance work, job and family resposibilities. If you don't then you won't.
One good trick, at the beginning of the semester sit in on a LOT of classes. I take a couple days off from work and just go. I find the prof I like the best, the one I'm going to learn the most from. Taking a class is a significant investment in both money and time. Don't waste your time with lame ones. A good prof will help keep you motivated. So sit in on a number of different sections, and see which one you like. Its so obvious, but it wasn't until I was going BACK to school that I started doing that.
Going back and getting a degree in CS can be especially depressing at first (I'm still working on mine). Every class has a long list of prerequisites. Classes that I already had a good working understanding of from self study but that I had not had formally. Finding a good prof becomes even more crucial if this is the case, otherwise it becomes a massive waste of time.
Hope this helps.
- Ordinarius
Re:would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine?
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
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You've got some issues to work through there dude.
Here's my opinion. Good service is a very rare thing. You can find good service in small neighborhood stores, and you can find crappy service there. Ditto for bigger companies.
In case you haven't been in a store, big or small, in a while. The general trend has been toward a lower and lower levels of service in exchange for a lower price. Think Walmart. I don't know the name of the owner of my local gas station. I don't know the usher at my local movie theater in fact there isn't one anymore. The guy behind the counter at my local book store is punching a clock and doesn't know diddly about books.
There are a exceptions, thank gawd. I know the boys at my local bike shops and I won't shop anywhere else. I've got a couple favorite waitors/waitresses and they get my business and so on.
Amazon, and every other.com store is a further evolution on what's been happening in retail. Dealing with a web page is faster, easier and more secure (well, mabe) than driving somewhere to interact with a dork punching a timecard.
Call me names, tell me how uncultured I am, tell me how I need to research company practices yadda yadda yadda. I'm still not going to shed a tear about some big or small crappy website from outta state, outta country or otherwise putting a little crappy neighborhood store out of business. The people voted with their wallets, and the customer is never wrong.
If I'm like 90% of the digital camera buyers, I just want to shoot quick pictures of my stuff to post on eBay, make cool Windows.BMP backgrounds out of pictures of my friends and pets, and have an easy way to email photos around. For these purposes, resolutions above 1024x768 are usually more hinderance than help! Your average Windows desktop runs no more than 1024x768 resolution, and you don't want more than either 640x480 or even 320x200 for a small.JPG to upload to eBay or email to a relative.
You forgot one thing, a good chunk of the 90% like to also print out their pictures. With excellent Epson photo printers out there for cheap money, your average user really does need more than 1024x764.
But not much more. Rarely does anyone print out something larger than an 8"x10", which means the current crop of 3 megapixel cameras are about all you need. But even this is iffy, its tough to get a critically good 8"x10" picture out of a camera (35mm or digital) without using a tripod. And that's something the 90% generall doesn't do.
The battle over how many pixels do you really need will go on and on I'm sure.
I'd say we'll see larger sensors in the future rather than more pixels (though I'm sure we'll see more pixels as well since that seems to sell). Some of the good SLR's have sensors as big, or almost as big as a 35mm negative. I suspect this'll become more commonplace.
I can understand why we're all so focused on the predictive aspect of this technology. Can it realistically be used to help stop a terrorist act? Will it work? Maybe, maybe not.
But that wouldn't be its only use. After a terrorist act has taken place, an archive of this information could be used to help identify if there were associates, and possibly even help round them up. And at that task, even with encryption, it could be very effective.
Interesting, but also funny. Yeager and crew begets Cisco. What did Yeager base his code on? Thin air? I doubt it, but I have no idea.
In the same way this article then credits Berners-Lee with the founding of the WWW concept. Again, from thin air? Ah, no. I've heard that groups at DEC pitched WWW like system for Notes to Tim, and I'm sure there are others that I've never seen credited.
In these reworkings of history we seem to like to back up just one step previous to some rich/famous/infamous person and say "Ah hah!". Is that really helping? I guess so. Maybe it is better to just credit the guy who made a name for himself/herself off the thing, wink, and be done with it.
The system most of my cycling buddies with good jobs use is Computrainer. I've tried it and it is excellent. The cool thing about the system is that it very accurately adjusts the watts required. When the screen is showing hill, it hurts. Draft behind someone and it gets easier and so on. Also you put your standard bike in the stand as opposed to sitting on the couch. The real advantage here, I think is for doing interval training. Normally you warm up for 30 minutes or so and then go all out for 1 or 2 minutes then rest for 1 or 2 minutes and repeat over and over again. I'd rather not be on the road with cars towards the end of an interval and you can set it up to be very motivational.
On the downside it is very expensive, which makes it hard to justify. You don't steer, which I found strange. Seems like it would be easy to put you front wheel on a turntable like "mouse" and let you go where you want.
Ultimately it would be sweet to digitize a real bike race, so that the positions of all the riders are accurately known over the whole course. Then you could get on your Computrainer and try and keep up.
Innovation, shminivation. I'm tired of people quibbling over the definition of innovation. Lets give credit where credit is due. Apple doesn't do the impossible. I don't know if they are truely innovative or not. Frankly I don't care. What Apple does do is pay attention to product design, and then leverage that attention with marketing to enable them to charge a premium. Considering what tight-wads the average consumer tends to be, I think we can agree, this ain't easy folks.
The Reuters article on the iPod release quoted Chris Le Tocq (whoever he is) as saying, "I think Apple is making as much on one of these as on a $1000 notebook". Like I said, premium.
The problem is that one can only charge a premium for so long. You can bet that if Apple successfully carves out a market for $250+, Firewire/MP3 players over the next 6 months, there will be 10 different models pretty much just like it for quite a bit less. Apple will then have to cut their prices or come out with iPod2 for people to lust after. But over the short term they'll make a nice chunk of change from those early adopters who can't wait for the prices to drop.
But make no mistake, creating and marketing a product for which people are willing to pay a premium ain't easy. For us free software types make special note of the word "PAY". As in blow the dust off the wallet and wake up George. The fact that Apple has been able to do this not just once, but multiple times in the past is frankly pretty friggin' amazing. We'll see if they're able to pull it off again.
The fuel made the explosion worse, but anything the size of an airplane hitting a building at 350+ MPH will do some serious damage
When you design an aircraft you come to the conclusion that weight is damn near everything. More weight, means bigger wings and more fuel, which means more weight and more fuel and so on.
Rather than trying to swap out fuel x for fuel y, which is going to have to contain the same amount of available chemical energy anyway, focus instead on how to make the aircraft lighter. A lighter aircraft means a heck of a lot less fuel of whatever kind, and lot less damage if it slams into something. An aircraft design that's much much more efficient (and thus lighter, and thus carries less fuel) is a flying wing. But no one builds commercial flying wings because they're afraid no one would buy a ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't do it for me. I'm partial to Hog Bay Notebook
Its got a nice mix of Outliner and Notebook features, which is what I think most people are looking for. Works for me.
The great thing about running is that it requires so little preparation. No tires to pump, no pool to drive to, no weights to buy. Just you and your shoes.
...
Yeah, the great thing about running, no shoes to buy! Awesome! Oh wait
Come on, most pretty serious runners go through a $100 pair of shoes every four months. Not exactly what I'd call minimalist. Its well worth it, don't get me wrong, but lets call it what it is.
I just started my mac os x programming. I wrote a lengthy objective-c tutorial to get familiar with the language, and I'm going to write similar tutorials for AppKit and AppleScript. (I like to write tutorials as part of my learning. Helps me and others at the same time I think).
You wrote a lengthy objective-c tutorial? You've got nerve I'll give you that. The thing reads like a crib sheet to Stephen Kochan's Programming in Objective-C. At least credit the guy when you lift example code from him. Shesh.
Ever notice how just about every "meal" at a fast food restaurant costs about the same? That's because they're in the business of extracting $5 per visitor rather than being interested in the exact margin on stuff. That's also why fries and a coke are thrown in their meals for a relatively low price, and they cost a lot more separately -- it's all about discouraging sub-par revenue customers.
What are you talking about? A fast food restaurant buys coke syrup by the gallon for something like $4. A large coke contains about $0.09 of syrup. Unless you're going to get 15 "free" refills of your drink they're still going to make money off of you. There's absolutely nothing to discourage anyone from going into a fast food restaurant and buying *just* a coke. Of course they want to entice you to buy more. But they are most definitely not losing money.
The french fries are even worse, I think they're the highest margin item in the store. Read _Fast Food Nation_ by Eric Schlosser. Its in your local library, and at Amazon etc. He goes into detail on most aspects of the fast food business. Its not pretty. The last couple chapters on the meat processing industry will have you swearing off burgers for a good long time. I still haven't been able to eat beef since I read that book. And it'll put the current Mad Cow issues in perspective.
If it were left strictly to capitalism the books would be sold for pulp. The cost of hiring someone to sell these off either on the internet or at a book sale is generally going to be more than any amount of revenue generated. What's going to drive this are the volunteers.
:)
I used to work after school at the Northboro library, the library they quoted in the article believe it or not. I emptied the trash and dusted. Wow, that was a very long time ago
The Friends of the Library (volunteers) in Northboro were very active then, and I imagine now. You'd need a few pretty dedicated volunteers coming in on a regular basis to handle the internet sales. In many ways just selling off the books in bulk is easier, and that's really what's going to determine what'll happen.
As for being financially responsible, I can't think of a better use of funds in a down economy than in the library, other than perhaps schools and universities. Have you been in the library recently? At least in Mountain View (Silicon Valley) where I live now, virtually every desk is filled with people studing engineering, cs, doing all kinds of homework. Its unbelievable. If I don't get there early I can't find a spot.
And all the good cs books have a sizable waiting list. Don't judge a library by what they have in the stacks anymore. All the good books never make it there. You need to request them on the web these days and get in the queue.
There are far too many other slow aircraft flying at or near Concorde altitudes. Considering the fuel costs involved in getting to supersonic speeds (max drag between 0.97M and 1.4M), the economics of trans-continental supersonic flight would require sterile airspace for end-to-end clearance. The lobby group for bizjet owners would never let that happen at their expense.
The Concord cruises at around 50,000ft, which is well above most other commercial/private aircraft.
- ordinarius
In the late 80s and early '90s NASA had a high speed civil transport program running, the goal was to build a commercially successful next generation Concord. Not surprisingly they identified a number of challenges to realize this goal.
... which I thought was actually just perfect :) A lot of money and time was spent trying real hard to not rattle grammy's china cabinet.
1. The boom's perception had to minimized, (or over land boom routes had to be negotiated)
2. The engines needed to be made quieter.
3. Engine exhaust needed to made env. friendly. The altitude these birds fly at put it smack in the middle of the ozone layer.
4. And oh yeah, it had to burn less gas.
In other words, shaping the boom was just one part of the challenge. If you look at the photo of the modified F-5, notice the line running from nose to tail. The little squiggle in the middle that looks like an 'N' is the pressure shape they're shooting for. Note how the first bump is flat?
Back in the 80s NASA gave some money to academics to do a "perceived boom" study They built a box, mounted a bunch of high end speakers to it - pointed in, and got volunteers to sit in the thing and recorded how loud the volunteer felt the boom was. It was all very scientific. The end result was a model that you could plug in a pressure wave on one side and out would come a number of how many people you'd piss off. I'm not kidding. At a flat pressure signiture (no sound) you pissed off 10% of the people by flying over
But all this was sort of moot. The far and away front runner in terms of economically viable configurations was a flying wing. At takeoff it would be perpendicular to direction of travel and then as it got up to speed it would fly at more and more of an angle. The question then was, would anyone actually buy a ticket to ride in a wing? Add to that one that's at a crazy angle.
In any case the flying wing made all the fuselage shaping sort of beside the point. There was no fuselage to shape so you had to try and play with the wing and it got crazy complicated fast.
In any case the program wound down with Japan's economy hitting the skids. Golden (came from the space half of the industry) getting appointed as head of NASA didn't help either. The program went by a couple different names over the years: HSCT (High Speed Civil Transport) and a few others I wish I could remember. Goggle away.
- ordinarius
You could go visit the birthplace of Silicon Valley: Mountain View/Palo Alto CA (in the Bay Area). On the corner of San Antonio Ave and California Street is a little historical sign indicating the site of what was Shockley Semiconductor. There's a shopping center and an ergonomic chair store there now. Not much to see I'm afraid, but I do like to rub the sign for good luck when I walk past.
Hey, this is a GEEKs tour, is it not?
The computer museum is about a mile away, and would make another good stop. http://www.computerhistory.org/
- ordinarius
Probability and Statistics appears, um, almost all the time in your reviews as a prereq. I'm about to take some classes in this area but the field seems to be divided into mathematical vs. applied (a two course series appears for both). Which is more applicable towards cryptography?
Thanks.
- ordinarius
I took a quick look at the Australian and NZ regulations. They both have a similar program but with an interesting twist. Because both countries have government sponsored insurance programs companies do not pay for your health insurance? In effect if you're on the equivalent of an H1-B in either of these countries you have to pay for your own, which is pretty much a non-starter.
So a teacher or a nurse could come here to work (my wife's a nurse and we know of lots of Aussie and NZ nurses here in California). But she couldn't go work there? That doesn't seem quite fair. Am I reading the regulations wrong?
Can anyone confirm how these programs work in other countries? Thanks.
- ordinarius
I suspect it'll first show up in rocket based artillary. The current mobile rocket launchers are positively pressurized to try and minimize a soldiers exposure to the exhaust from current fuels, but even so, it can't be great for you.
And hey, Zilliac plays a mean softball as well as lighting candles. Greg, you're famous!
- ordinarius
Corporate control of our government is, IMO, what plauges our political system the most.
This has very little to do with corporate control of our government. To the FBI this is a quick, inexpensive little memo to home broadband users everywhere. Basically they are letting people know that they should recalculate the cost vs. benefit of reconfiguring their modems and stealing extra bandwidth. The probability of being pursecuted is the same, but the perception is what counts. Net effect, more law abiding broadband users. They're thanking slashdot for spreading the word as we speak.
This is exactly the same kind of tactics that the IRS uses. Around April of every year the IRS makes a big stink about busting a small business owner, or doctor or dentist or waitress and so on to make you think twice about cheating on your taxes. Is it cost effective to bust that one waitress? Yes when you take into account the effect it has on all waitresses.
Is it cost effective to bust a dozen modem hackers? Yes when you take into account the effect it has on all potential modem hackers. It does suck to be one of the dozen.
It'll suck even worse if they find child porn on any one of those computers, even in spam, in their delete box.
- ordinarius
Office is $25 for the academic version, probably even less for a whole school's worth of teachers and kids. I'm not sure you're going to save all that much money here.
Reading the original article, I kept thinking, why upgrade? You can save a heck of a lot of money by staying with a working version. You don't need to constantly upgrade.
- ordinarius
A little known factoid, Amelia Earhart set a women's altitude record for autogyros in the '30s.
http://www.ameliaearhart.com/achievements.html
So yeah, they've been around for a bit.
- ordinarius
I have worked as a contractor for NASA at the Ames Research Center (in their Numerical Aerodynamic Facility), and I've worked as a contractor for Citibank and other large corporations. I hate to break this to you, but I though NASA was a hell of a lot better run (not even close). Shocking huh?
Yes, at NASA there are/were stupid projects, and yes there were reports to be written, but by and large shit got done and the people were talented, intelligent and highly motivated. It was a fun place to work. Some of the large corporations I've done work for, most projects were a nightmare, and most employees were cashing a paycheck.
Can we stop spewing the same old tired lines some Republican spin doctor shoved down our collective throats? I can not imagine a large corporation running NASA more effectively. Don't get me wrong, I can imagine a more effective NASA. Its not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But to imply every private institution is somehow innately more effective then every public one is silly. Did you sleep through the events of the last couple years or what?
- ordinarius
Interesting read, but can we stop abusing the word artist? Screaming into a microphone does not an artist make. Sticking 'dance', 'love', 'baby', 'yeah-yeah-yeah' together in random order does not an artist make. Is there something wrong with the title professional musician?
Ditto for actors. If I read about/listen to one more actor calling themselves an artist I'm going to be sick.
Enough. Sorry, you hit a nerve.
- Ordinarius
It is called discipline. Its also called desire. If you've got both, then you'll make the time to balance work, job and family resposibilities. If you don't then you won't.
One good trick, at the beginning of the semester sit in on a LOT of classes. I take a couple days off from work and just go. I find the prof I like the best, the one I'm going to learn the most from. Taking a class is a significant investment in both money and time. Don't waste your time with lame ones. A good prof will help keep you motivated. So sit in on a number of different sections, and see which one you like. Its so obvious, but it wasn't until I was going BACK to school that I started doing that.
Going back and getting a degree in CS can be especially depressing at first (I'm still working on mine). Every class has a long list of prerequisites. Classes that I already had a good working understanding of from self study but that I had not had formally. Finding a good prof becomes even more crucial if this is the case, otherwise it becomes a massive waste of time.
Hope this helps.
- Ordinarius
You've got some issues to work through there dude.
.com store is a further evolution on what's been happening in retail. Dealing with a web page is faster, easier and more secure (well, mabe) than driving somewhere to interact with a dork punching a timecard.
Here's my opinion. Good service is a very rare thing. You can find good service in small neighborhood stores, and you can find crappy service there. Ditto for bigger companies.
In case you haven't been in a store, big or small, in a while. The general trend has been toward a lower and lower levels of service in exchange for a lower price. Think Walmart. I don't know the name of the owner of my local gas station. I don't know the usher at my local movie theater in fact there isn't one anymore. The guy behind the counter at my local book store is punching a clock and doesn't know diddly about books.
There are a exceptions, thank gawd. I know the boys at my local bike shops and I won't shop anywhere else. I've got a couple favorite waitors/waitresses and they get my business and so on.
Amazon, and every other
Call me names, tell me how uncultured I am, tell me how I need to research company practices yadda yadda yadda. I'm still not going to shed a tear about some big or small crappy website from outta state, outta country or otherwise putting a little crappy neighborhood store out of business. The people voted with their wallets, and the customer is never wrong.
- ordinarius
If I'm like 90% of the digital camera buyers, I just want to shoot quick pictures of my stuff to post on eBay, make cool Windows .BMP backgrounds out of pictures of my friends and pets, and have an easy way to email photos around. For these purposes, resolutions above 1024x768 are usually more hinderance than help! Your average Windows desktop runs no more than 1024x768 resolution, and you don't want more than either 640x480 or even 320x200 for a small .JPG to upload to eBay or email to a relative.
You forgot one thing, a good chunk of the 90% like to also print out their pictures. With excellent Epson photo printers out there for cheap money, your average user really does need more than 1024x764.
But not much more. Rarely does anyone print out something larger than an 8"x10", which means the current crop of 3 megapixel cameras are about all you need. But even this is iffy, its tough to get a critically good 8"x10" picture out of a camera (35mm or digital) without using a tripod. And that's something the 90% generall doesn't do.
The battle over how many pixels do you really need will go on and on I'm sure.
I'd say we'll see larger sensors in the future rather than more pixels (though I'm sure we'll see more pixels as well since that seems to sell). Some of the good SLR's have sensors as big, or almost as big as a 35mm negative. I suspect this'll become more commonplace.
- ordinarius
I can understand why we're all so focused on the predictive aspect of this technology. Can it realistically be used to help stop a terrorist act? Will it work? Maybe, maybe not.
But that wouldn't be its only use. After a terrorist act has taken place, an archive of this information could be used to help identify if there were associates, and possibly even help round them up. And at that task, even with encryption, it could be very effective.
- ordinarius
Interesting, but also funny. Yeager and crew begets Cisco. What did Yeager base his code on? Thin air? I doubt it, but I have no idea.
In the same way this article then credits Berners-Lee with the founding of the WWW concept. Again, from thin air? Ah, no. I've heard that groups at DEC pitched WWW like system for Notes to Tim, and I'm sure there are others that I've never seen credited.
In these reworkings of history we seem to like to back up just one step previous to some rich/famous/infamous person and say "Ah hah!". Is that really helping? I guess so. Maybe it is better to just credit the guy who made a name for himself/herself off the thing, wink, and be done with it.
- ordinarius
Agreed. Distasteful, yes. But strangely comforting for those of us with plain old day jobs.
- ordinarius
The system most of my cycling buddies with good jobs use is Computrainer. I've tried it and it is excellent. The cool thing about the system is that it very accurately adjusts the watts required. When the screen is showing hill, it hurts. Draft behind someone and it gets easier and so on. Also you put your standard bike in the stand as opposed to sitting on the couch. The real advantage here, I think is for doing interval training. Normally you warm up for 30 minutes or so and then go all out for 1 or 2 minutes then rest for 1 or 2 minutes and repeat over and over again. I'd rather not be on the road with cars towards the end of an interval and you can set it up to be very motivational.
On the downside it is very expensive, which makes it hard to justify. You don't steer, which I found strange. Seems like it would be easy to put you front wheel on a turntable like "mouse" and let you go where you want.
Ultimately it would be sweet to digitize a real bike race, so that the positions of all the riders are accurately known over the whole course. Then you could get on your Computrainer and try and keep up.
- ordinarius
Innovation, shminivation. I'm tired of people quibbling over the definition of innovation. Lets give credit where credit is due. Apple doesn't do the impossible. I don't know if they are truely innovative or not. Frankly I don't care. What Apple does do is pay attention to product design, and then leverage that attention with marketing to enable them to charge a premium. Considering what tight-wads the average consumer tends to be, I think we can agree, this ain't easy folks.
The Reuters article on the iPod release quoted Chris Le Tocq (whoever he is) as saying, "I think Apple is making as much on one of these as on a $1000 notebook". Like I said, premium.
The problem is that one can only charge a premium for so long. You can bet that if Apple successfully carves out a market for $250+, Firewire/MP3 players over the next 6 months, there will be 10 different models pretty much just like it for quite a bit less. Apple will then have to cut their prices or come out with iPod2 for people to lust after. But over the short term they'll make a nice chunk of change from those early adopters who can't wait for the prices to drop.
But make no mistake, creating and marketing a product for which people are willing to pay a premium ain't easy. For us free software types make special note of the word "PAY". As in blow the dust off the wallet and wake up George. The fact that Apple has been able to do this not just once, but multiple times in the past is frankly pretty friggin' amazing. We'll see if they're able to pull it off again.
- ordinarius
The fuel made the explosion worse, but anything the size of an airplane hitting a building at 350+ MPH will do some serious damage
When you design an aircraft you come to the conclusion that weight is damn near everything. More weight, means bigger wings and more fuel, which means more weight and more fuel and so on.
Rather than trying to swap out fuel x for fuel y, which is going to have to contain the same amount of available chemical energy anyway, focus instead on how to make the aircraft lighter. A lighter aircraft means a heck of a lot less fuel of whatever kind, and lot less damage if it slams into something. An aircraft design that's much much more efficient (and thus lighter, and thus carries less fuel) is a flying wing. But no one builds commercial flying wings because they're afraid no one would buy a ticket.
- Ordinarius