It's a lot easier to remember a series of words than a series of digits that have no obvious relationship to each other.
I'm not worried about people remembering them. I worried about how well they'll be able to type them.
I would guess that most people have to use backspace at least once a sentence, even if they're using common words. These people depend on comparing what's on the screen to what they intended to type. How many of them do you think will make it through an entire sentence that is converted to asterisks on the screen, without an error?
It's a question of risk: if you shoplift, you face a much higher chance of getting caught
I don't think it's so much to do with risk, although that might be what lawmakers tell themselves so they can sleep at night.
The thing is, if you steal a DVD, you steal it from WalMart or Best Buy, not from ABC or Warner Brothers, because the retailer has already purchased it from their supplier, etc.... If you download it, you are stealing it 'directly' from ABC or WB, at least in their eyes. And it's the studios that have the lobbying power, not the retailers.
Seriously though, I tried to repair an old Win98 setup from local files (like how laptops keep a copy of the Win98 CDROM in a C:\Windows subdirectory), except the setup.exe file was corrupted. This was in a DOS shell, mind. I got several screenfuls of ASCII junk and then the following phrase repeated three times, mixed in more junk symbols:
"was influential during the German expressionist era. He taught at the Bauhaus during"
I, too, run my own business. With the article author's definitions, I would be a consultant, although I never really decided what to call myself. The part of the article that I can relate with the most is deciding if you have enough self-discipline to work by yourself at home.
I've been doing this kind of work for the last six or seven years. And it took me the first five to figure out how to work at home. During that first five years, working at home was not easy! I hadn't yet developed the discipline needed, nor the mental state necessary for home and work to co-exist.
I eventually figured it out, and am extremely happy with my lifestyle right now. The first step was learning how far I had to distance my work life from my personal life. For example, we bought a new house this year. When looking for a house, the number one necessity on my list was an office area on a seperate level than the living area. We found one with a basement den that became a really wonderful office. It's a half level from the living room, and a full level from the bedrooms. Wonderful.
Something else I learned was that, no matter how much I thought I could get done with a TV on, it was best to be distanced from all television. The same goes with music with lyrics. For maximum concentration, I need to listen to instrumental music (fortunately my two favorite musical genres are classical and movie soundtracks). Interestingly, as long as I play only instrumental music, I have better concentration than if I don't listen to any music, because it will drown out other distracting noises. (headphones are also a good signal to the wife: don't bother me!)
Speaking of the wife, another challenge after getting married was not only me learning to work at home, but my wife learning to let me work at home. Make sure that everybody in the household knows that work time is work time. If you worked at an office, nobody would expect you to swing by the house to straighten up the living room at 2:30 in the afternoon. Don't make it an excuse for not doing any extra work (believe me, wives hate that), but make sure that your wife knows that while she's welcome to ask you to help out, not to expect it to get done until after your work time.
Now, if anybody has figured out how to cure the/. obsession, please let me know, that would really help with my productivity...
Ok, now that makes sense, at least for software that was started in 2000. Does a lot of software use this method, or is that just the way this one works?
I've seen how these open source version numbers grow. If the last big release was 4.10, and this is an amazing, monumental, complete redesign, this is probably 4.12, right?
more marginal cases will slide down the tube that precludes them from ever having to think critically, thus freeing up salary and promotion space for the rest of us
Unfortunately, nepotism turns a blind eye to ability. There will always be braindead idiots in high-ranking places, as long as they have family and friends in high-ranking places.
This doesn't necessarily reflect the state of competition. Maybe this just reveals what we all knew anyway -- that Microsoft's software was overpriced to begin with, and other companies are finally figuring that out!
To make "relativistic" correction, it needs to be scaled by the quantity called "gamma", which has the form:
gamma = 1.0/sqrt(1.0-(v/c)^2)
For anybody out there wondering why you can't go faster than the speed of light, this equation is the reason. If v is greater than c, then this equation would require the square root of a negative number.
Actually what I'm expecting is that one of these days somebody will introduct a car seat fabric with this stuff in it. So all of the gadgets in your pockets will recharge automatically as you drive.
Sounds good -- but I bet within a couple of years of that hitting the marketplace there will be reports linking it to cancer or sterility or something bad.
From my understanding, it's not the inductive charging that is so cool here (good, since that's been around for a while). It's the fact that they've reduced it to a thin, transparent film that can be applied to any surface, almost invisibly.
Have a nice solid mahogany desk? Just slap this film on it and it's also a recharging station for any device, without looking any different. Do the same to the dash in your car. Or wherever.
Yeah, I've got one of those, too -- a brilliant way to keep rechargable components safe in a moist bathroom environment.
A friend of mine did a year abroad during college, and went to Japan. When he got back, he showed me the cell phone he had in Japan (didn't work with US systems, of course) and it was literally the size of my first two fingers. The phone was all one piece, with an internal unremovable battery. It had a specialized cradle (much like the sonicare cradle) and it recharged without contacts, by induction.
That's not always a good idea. Do a lot of research on the big company before working for them (fortunately the bigger they are the more info there is on them).
I live in the Kansas City area, where the Sprint headquarters has been. They have an incredibly high turnover rate. They go through cycles. Start a new development project, hire a ton of people, run out of money, close the project, and fire all the people. Over and over and over again.
I've never worked for them myself (I have standards, ya know...) I know several people who have, and the environment sounds just flat out terrible. Lots of stress over who will be laid off next.
I've only been in the area four years, but I can remember at least three rounds of layoffs at Sprint that involved more than 500 people. And I stopped paying any attention two years ago....
Be very careful working for the big, public companies, especially if they are in a particularly volatile field.
we made $130,000... our taxes would have been in the neighborhood of at least $10,000
Damn, I only make $60,000, and I pay more than twice the taxes you did at $130,000. If anyone needed any proof that Bush's tax cuts unfairly tax the middle class....
If your estimation isn't extremely low, I think I'll start crying.
It sounds like we have very similar histories. I've been doing web design / development since I was halfway through college, I've been doing this freelance since right after my second year of college. I did have a small string of 'real' jobs here and there for a couple of years after graduation, but I never stopped doing the freelance. This was very fortunate, because all of my 'real' jobs fell through when the companies went under.
What the string of 'real' jobs taught me was how not to do things. Eventually I decided that with all of these examples of how not to do things, it was simply a process of elimination to discover the right way. So I started my own business, about two years ago now. Now this is my 'real' job.
I, too, am discovering that I am stricter -- and more importantly, have higher standards -- than any of my previous bosses. I work 16+ hour days for the same reasons you do. But it's been a learning experience. It certainly wasn't easy, and probably took a good bit of luck as well.
What would have helped is perhaps a few classes on public speaking, running meetings, and creating and adhering to work plan. It would also be nice if they threw in a little about contract law. I'm generally pretty shy and unorganized. It wasn't until I figured a few of these things out that my business started getting really successful.
Congratulations on the big contract, I know how nice that is. Make sure you get paid incrementally so you're not living on reserves and/or loans until the project is over.
Where could this technology lead in a 100 years I wonder?
If the movies are any guide, it will be used to replicate the Perfect Being (aka "hot naked chick") from a DNA blueprint, and somehow preserving her memory in the process. I'll sign up as the cab driver.
The average human being... will refuse to listen to constant warnings about opening suspicious attachments, paying attention to certificate warnings, but will happily supply their credit card numbers to the first guy that comes along
As far as I'm concerned, the point of these security alerts is simply liability. Sure, the idiots won't listen. But at least the alerts were there. When they do get scammed out of their entire bank account, they won't be able to say, "We didn't know!" Instead, the geeks will be able to say, "There were warnings!" and the blame will rest squarely on the idiots' shoulders.
Tada. Liability. The warnings aren't for their sake, it's for ours.
I'm a web designer currently looking for a LCD monitor to use in a LCD/CRT combo. So far, the Samsung 213t looks to be the best bet in the sub-$1000s.
But there are some very good LCDs (according to reviews, at least) if it's worth the extra $$$ to you. Eizo has a couple of very good high end monitors, the FlexScan L885 is a 1600x1200 LCD that has gotten great reviews. This is a quote from the ZDNet review:
"The 20.1-inch Eizo FlexScan L885 LCD offers some of the best image quality and image-adjustment options we've seen in any monitor--LCD or CRT."
I'd love to see one of these, but it's out of my price range.
This needs to be hooked up into a service that archives product manuals. Take a picture of your TV/cell phone/microwave/etc. and this service would be able to give you a PDF of your lost manual.
No more hunting for model numbers (which I've found are not often included somewhere on the actual product).
ditto! I have always been curious and dissappointed about the lack of pretty emerald stars.
fortunately, since moving to the midwest (Kansas City) and seeing the sun set over flat land instead of the mountains where I used to live, I have now seen sunsets with discernable green bands in them. That was my other hope for green.
Now, if I can just witness a green flash sometime....
6) VoIP will continue to shatter the telephone industry with the arrival of WiFi phones, which might finally be the killer app for hotspots. Eventually, all the backbone suppliers will figure out that VoIP is their salvation and will either start their own VoIP companies or ally with big VoIP players.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a lot easier to remember a series of words than a series of digits that have no obvious relationship to each other.
I'm not worried about people remembering them. I worried about how well they'll be able to type them.
I would guess that most people have to use backspace at least once a sentence, even if they're using common words. These people depend on comparing what's on the screen to what they intended to type. How many of them do you think will make it through an entire sentence that is converted to asterisks on the screen, without an error?
It's a question of risk: if you shoplift, you face a much higher chance of getting caught
I don't think it's so much to do with risk, although that might be what lawmakers tell themselves so they can sleep at night.
The thing is, if you steal a DVD, you steal it from WalMart or Best Buy, not from ABC or Warner Brothers, because the retailer has already purchased it from their supplier, etc.... If you download it, you are stealing it 'directly' from ABC or WB, at least in their eyes. And it's the studios that have the lobbying power, not the retailers.
/* Bwahahahahaha! Blue is my favorite color! */
Seriously though, I tried to repair an old Win98 setup from local files (like how laptops keep a copy of the Win98 CDROM in a C:\Windows subdirectory), except the setup.exe file was corrupted. This was in a DOS shell, mind. I got several screenfuls of ASCII junk and then the following phrase repeated three times, mixed in more junk symbols:
"was influential during the German expressionist era. He taught at the Bauhaus during"
Weirdest error I have ever seen, bar none.
And they said the Titanic couldn't sink.
I, too, run my own business. With the article author's definitions, I would be a consultant, although I never really decided what to call myself. The part of the article that I can relate with the most is deciding if you have enough self-discipline to work by yourself at home.
/. obsession, please let me know, that would really help with my productivity...
I've been doing this kind of work for the last six or seven years. And it took me the first five to figure out how to work at home. During that first five years, working at home was not easy! I hadn't yet developed the discipline needed, nor the mental state necessary for home and work to co-exist.
I eventually figured it out, and am extremely happy with my lifestyle right now. The first step was learning how far I had to distance my work life from my personal life. For example, we bought a new house this year. When looking for a house, the number one necessity on my list was an office area on a seperate level than the living area. We found one with a basement den that became a really wonderful office. It's a half level from the living room, and a full level from the bedrooms. Wonderful.
Something else I learned was that, no matter how much I thought I could get done with a TV on, it was best to be distanced from all television. The same goes with music with lyrics. For maximum concentration, I need to listen to instrumental music (fortunately my two favorite musical genres are classical and movie soundtracks). Interestingly, as long as I play only instrumental music, I have better concentration than if I don't listen to any music, because it will drown out other distracting noises. (headphones are also a good signal to the wife: don't bother me!)
Speaking of the wife, another challenge after getting married was not only me learning to work at home, but my wife learning to let me work at home. Make sure that everybody in the household knows that work time is work time. If you worked at an office, nobody would expect you to swing by the house to straighten up the living room at 2:30 in the afternoon. Don't make it an excuse for not doing any extra work (believe me, wives hate that), but make sure that your wife knows that while she's welcome to ask you to help out, not to expect it to get done until after your work time.
Now, if anybody has figured out how to cure the
Ok, now that makes sense, at least for software that was started in 2000. Does a lot of software use this method, or is that just the way this one works?
I've seen how these open source version numbers grow. If the last big release was 4.10, and this is an amazing, monumental, complete redesign, this is probably 4.12, right?
more marginal cases will slide down the tube that precludes them from ever having to think critically, thus freeing up salary and promotion space for the rest of us
Unfortunately, nepotism turns a blind eye to ability. There will always be braindead idiots in high-ranking places, as long as they have family and friends in high-ranking places.
This doesn't necessarily reflect the state of competition. Maybe this just reveals what we all knew anyway -- that Microsoft's software was overpriced to begin with, and other companies are finally figuring that out!
For anybody out there wondering why you can't go faster than the speed of light, this equation is the reason. If v is greater than c, then this equation would require the square root of a negative number.
Actually what I'm expecting is that one of these days somebody will introduct a car seat fabric with this stuff in it. So all of the gadgets in your pockets will recharge automatically as you drive.
Sounds good -- but I bet within a couple of years of that hitting the marketplace there will be reports linking it to cancer or sterility or something bad.
From my understanding, it's not the inductive charging that is so cool here (good, since that's been around for a while). It's the fact that they've reduced it to a thin, transparent film that can be applied to any surface, almost invisibly.
Have a nice solid mahogany desk? Just slap this film on it and it's also a recharging station for any device, without looking any different. Do the same to the dash in your car. Or wherever.
Yeah, I've got one of those, too -- a brilliant way to keep rechargable components safe in a moist bathroom environment.
A friend of mine did a year abroad during college, and went to Japan. When he got back, he showed me the cell phone he had in Japan (didn't work with US systems, of course) and it was literally the size of my first two fingers. The phone was all one piece, with an internal unremovable battery. It had a specialized cradle (much like the sonicare cradle) and it recharged without contacts, by induction.
That's not always a good idea. Do a lot of research on the big company before working for them (fortunately the bigger they are the more info there is on them).
I live in the Kansas City area, where the Sprint headquarters has been. They have an incredibly high turnover rate. They go through cycles. Start a new development project, hire a ton of people, run out of money, close the project, and fire all the people. Over and over and over again.
I've never worked for them myself (I have standards, ya know...) I know several people who have, and the environment sounds just flat out terrible. Lots of stress over who will be laid off next.
I've only been in the area four years, but I can remember at least three rounds of layoffs at Sprint that involved more than 500 people. And I stopped paying any attention two years ago....
Be very careful working for the big, public companies, especially if they are in a particularly volatile field.
we made $130,000 ... our taxes would have been in the neighborhood of at least $10,000
Damn, I only make $60,000, and I pay more than twice the taxes you did at $130,000. If anyone needed any proof that Bush's tax cuts unfairly tax the middle class....
If your estimation isn't extremely low, I think I'll start crying.
It sounds like we have very similar histories. I've been doing web design / development since I was halfway through college, I've been doing this freelance since right after my second year of college. I did have a small string of 'real' jobs here and there for a couple of years after graduation, but I never stopped doing the freelance. This was very fortunate, because all of my 'real' jobs fell through when the companies went under.
What the string of 'real' jobs taught me was how not to do things. Eventually I decided that with all of these examples of how not to do things, it was simply a process of elimination to discover the right way. So I started my own business, about two years ago now. Now this is my 'real' job.
I, too, am discovering that I am stricter -- and more importantly, have higher standards -- than any of my previous bosses. I work 16+ hour days for the same reasons you do. But it's been a learning experience. It certainly wasn't easy, and probably took a good bit of luck as well.
What would have helped is perhaps a few classes on public speaking, running meetings, and creating and adhering to work plan. It would also be nice if they threw in a little about contract law. I'm generally pretty shy and unorganized. It wasn't until I figured a few of these things out that my business started getting really successful.
Congratulations on the big contract, I know how nice that is. Make sure you get paid incrementally so you're not living on reserves and/or loans until the project is over.
Where could this technology lead in a 100 years I wonder?
If the movies are any guide, it will be used to replicate the Perfect Being (aka "hot naked chick") from a DNA blueprint, and somehow preserving her memory in the process. I'll sign up as the cab driver.
The average human being ... will refuse to listen to constant warnings about opening suspicious attachments, paying attention to certificate warnings, but will happily supply their credit card numbers to the first guy that comes along
As far as I'm concerned, the point of these security alerts is simply liability. Sure, the idiots won't listen. But at least the alerts were there. When they do get scammed out of their entire bank account, they won't be able to say, "We didn't know!" Instead, the geeks will be able to say, "There were warnings!" and the blame will rest squarely on the idiots' shoulders.
Tada. Liability. The warnings aren't for their sake, it's for ours.
I'm a web designer currently looking for a LCD monitor to use in a LCD/CRT combo. So far, the Samsung 213t looks to be the best bet in the sub-$1000s.
But there are some very good LCDs (according to reviews, at least) if it's worth the extra $$$ to you. Eizo has a couple of very good high end monitors, the FlexScan L885 is a 1600x1200 LCD that has gotten great reviews. This is a quote from the ZDNet review:
"The 20.1-inch Eizo FlexScan L885 LCD offers some of the best image quality and image-adjustment options we've seen in any monitor--LCD or CRT."
I'd love to see one of these, but it's out of my price range.
Unfortunately, scientists found that the transmission was protected by DRM and was inaccessible to them.
This needs to be hooked up into a service that archives product manuals. Take a picture of your TV/cell phone/microwave/etc. and this service would be able to give you a PDF of your lost manual.
No more hunting for model numbers (which I've found are not often included somewhere on the actual product).
Big Thinkers was an excellent show. I wished I had caught more episodes. Anybody know if you can request them on VHS/DVD at all?
ditto! I have always been curious and dissappointed about the lack of pretty emerald stars.
fortunately, since moving to the midwest (Kansas City) and seeing the sun set over flat land instead of the mountains where I used to live, I have now seen sunsets with discernable green bands in them. That was my other hope for green.
Now, if I can just witness a green flash sometime....
Look on the bright side:
The average male human lifespan just jumped from 72 years to 72 years and 0.6 seconds!
from Betting a Billion: Bob's Predictions for 2005