Personally, I'm addicted to Majesty. It's like Warcraft, but your units have free will and act according to their own internal AI. So you really have to pay attention to dynamics (e.g. rangers and wizards like to team up with barbarians and go out in large, deadly hunting parties).
I'm not a micro-manager, so this is a lot more fun than watching my units stand still in WC. I just get everything set up, place a few rewards on things I really want to happen, and can trust my heroes to do intelligent things while I work on building my economy. There are a dozen different types of heroes and each type has its own special talents and vices (Elves make you more money, but encourage sloth and prostitution, rangers like to explore the whole board, but often stir up trouble, etc.)
Get some very comfy slip-on shoes like these or these.
They don't have laces, so you can slip them off to pass them through security and have them back on in seconds. They also make it easier to run out the door when you're late.:)
A lot of the non-tech's in my life would like to take advantage of the latest technology, but don't know how. So every tech gift should come with free tech support..
For example:
Wireless Router: They'll love surfing the web from the couch on their business laptops -- just be sure to set it all up for them.
Tivo: Most non-techs I know watch a LOT of TV. Tivo is easy enough that they may not even need your help with it.
Universal Remote: Over the years, you've built up their entertainment system with an amplifier, pre-amplifier, DVD player, CD changer, etc but they can't figure out how to just watch TV. Buy a good universal remote and program it to have easy "Watch TV", "Watch a DVD", "Listen to Music" buttons.
MP3 Player: Obviously great for exercise buffs
Roomba: Who wouldn't love a robot vacuum cleaner
Just about anything from Sharper Image or Brookstone, especially the Foot Massager: Everybody loves this stuff but will never buy it for themselves
1. Start working on business apps now. Your network battleship independent project may not impress anyone, but a substantial contribution to an open source workflow system might. Re-engineer some club website in J2EE or.NET just to see how it works. Try to get an understanding for the kinds of problems real applications solve.
2. Lots of companies will take a fresh college grad if it's the right kind of person -- they just don't necessarily advertise that on Monster (since they'd be neck-deep in unqualified resumes). Instead, they go to career fairs at selective universities. Try going to one of those or at least getting a list of attending companies. Then submit your resume directly with a cover letter that explains how you're ready to be relevant right away. (see #1)
What I want to know is whether there really was a drawing for the Lexus RX, since 1 in 33 odds isn't bad for a $40-50K SUV. Maybe spam respondents are being rewarded for their part in the bulkmail plague, thus locking in their seat in that special spammer circle of hell.
Of course, that assumes that only half the 65 respondents got the Lexus email AND that the spammers, having sold their humanity anyway, ever intended to have a dedicated drawing (instead of noting in the fine print that the drawing will take place only after all 60 million chances have been claimed).
So appeal to those same Americans by making it a ferry that lets them bring their cars along. You can't drive your car onto a plane or a Greyhound, but I can easily imagine a 12ft diameter cylinder capable of holding a family sedan. It wouldn't even need life-support if passengers traveled in separate capsules.
Personally, I'd love to be able to use my own car at the other end of a mass-transit trip, though Hertz and Avis might not be as happy about it.
I agree with the general consensus that the Clones novelization is pretty poor, particularly when compared to the last one, but I don't find it representative of Salvatore in general.
The Drizzt Do'Urden books (starting with the Dark Elf Trilogy) are worthy reads, which inclines me to believe that what was missing here was not creative ability, but rather Terry Brooks's willingness to ignore the screenplay and fill in the gaping plot holes with some actual depth.
In the end, Salvatore appears to have been intimidated by the vast Star Wars franchise and has kept too close to the (very bad) screenplay instead of trusting in his own creative instincts. A pity, but not a true reflection of his talent and original works.
After purchasing a Palm V three years ago which has since been gathering dust in a drawer, I convinced myself that I'd never use a PDA. Yet, I couldn't resist the geek-factor of the Zaurus, and picked one up last week at JavaOne.
I'm loving it. The color is vibrant and web sites render exactly as they would on my PC (just need to scroll a bit to see the whole thing). The keyboard was a little clumsy at first, but I'm getting used to it and find it MUCH faster and more reliable than Palm's graffiti. (I have hope that eventually I'll be able to touch-type on it.)
The built-in apps are great for my needs. My only complaint is that the mail client doesn't have an option to authenticate to an outgoing SMTP server (haven't checked yet to see whether there's an update or another client available). Even the games are pretty entertaining when I'm stuck somewhere with time to kill.
The beautiful part, however, is that you don't NEED the cradle to sync. Just slide in the wireless card and ftp your files to it. (This is great for development, letting me deploy to it through a build script instead of a custom app). Plus, it runs PersonalJava -- a much more featureful version than the KVM on my Palm V. Basically, I just write against Java 1.1.8, ftp the class files over, and run them normally.
The battery life can be as short as an hour if you're banging on it with full brightness, but it's easy to plug it in without a cradle, and extra batteries are only $25, so there are ways around that if you're unwilling to dim the screen.
Of course, now I'm dreaming of widespread, open 802.11 networks so I can be fully connected everywhere....
Most stock market message board users are used to paranoid/false posts (e.g. "CEO of MCD has entered talks with Pepsi -- sell now!"). If you look at it objectively, just about every post on those boards is manipulative in some way and/or is designed to further the poster's interests.
The truly dangerous posts are the ones represented as *quoted* fact -- e.g. falsified company press releases. Fortunately, these fall into that aforementioned slice of unprotected, "presented-as-fact" speech and their authors will still be liable.
How supportive has Princeton been during this process? Have you ever felt any pressure from within not to expose the University to costly lawsuits, or have they been behind you all the way?
Speaking as a wife, I must wonder what makes you assume his future spouse isn't going to pull her own weight. I certainly hold up MY side of the household income.
Furthermore, in my experience, happiness in work has a very profound effect on happiness in marriage. I'd much rather see my husband make less money at a fun place with lots of friends than sell his soul for misery and come home in a bad mood every night. As for children -- better that they have a happy father with lots of friends (who perhaps gets trod upon once in a while), than a paranoid loner obsessed with guarding his back.
(There no reason you couldn't have an unconnected, roll-up pad to use for tactile feedback / key-spacing if you really needed it.)
The problem I see is convenience -- those hand grips don't look any less bulky than the rollup keyboards you can already get for PDAs, so this thing is going to have to be much FASTER to catch on.
And, of course, if it's really that fast, it will replace our regular desktop keyboards and the added mobility will just be the icing on the cake.
"DVDCCA's statutory right to protect its economically valuable trade secret is not
an interest that is "more fundamental" than the First Amendment right to freedom of
speech or even on equal footing with the national security interests and other vital
governmental interests that have previously been found insufficient to justify a prior
restraint."
Now if only other courts would follow suit.
(For those who haven't read the decision, "prior restraint" is a court injunction against a particular exercise of free speech before it has even happened -- e.g. forbidding a newspaper to print a list of tomorrow's bombing targets -- and has been found unconstitutional over and over again, even in moderately serious cases of national security)
What they really mean is a PARTIAL known-plaintext attack, where you know or can guess certain words or phrases and use those to crack the rest of the message. This is where cryptography gets away from mathematics and into intelligence - when a message was sent, where it was sent from, who was sending it - all these things are helpful/needed to crack codes.
The only intelligence useful for breaking a OTP is the text of the cipher itself or information about the random bit generator used to create it.
The known-plain-text attacks you describe are not helpful since the sequence is entirely random and every letter is encoded with its own independent cipher.
Or even better yet, how are they going to tell the difference when the recording industry finally gets around to licensing digital content and you've paid your fees...
IIRC, the author mentions this in the context of comparing US students to foreign students.
Aren't those comparisons are usually drawn from standardized test results (SATs, GREs, etc.)? If so, we're talking about basic logic/algebra/geo/trig, not diff eqs and other college level topics. Talent in the former is certainly a good indicator of programming potential.
And we wonder why other companies are paranoid about IP agreements??
(Geesh... if a company is so bad you want to rape it's IP and compete, why do you want to carry their baggage with you and prolong the association? Go out on a limb for a few months to develop a better product and compete in the clear! If you can't get funding and can't stand to miss that weekly paycheck while you're doing it, well then maybe you don't have what it takes to market your own IP -- in which case you may want reconsider the worth of the risks taken by the people who started up that big, bad, oh-so-evil company you just left.)
Anyone else think this hippie thing is a really bad idea? When I'm choosing a platform for a bunch of enterprise servers, I'm looking for "Speed, Power, Stability", not "Peace, Love & a VW bus full of stoned penguins"!
Maybe they're going after the Mac desktop audience here, but it's hardly going to help push Linux in the server room where it's already stereotyped as an idealistic fad.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd second the Tripod trilogy by John Christopher (White Mountains, City of Gold and Lead and Pool of Fire).
Great stuff.
Speaking as a former teenage girl...
The Meri by Maya Bohnhoff
Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy (start with The Crystal Cave)
Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series (start with Magic's Pawn or Arrows of the Queen)
David Eddings's Belgariad and Mallorean (start with Pawn of Prophecy)
Mary Herbert's Dark Horse trilogy (start with Dark Horse)
Trudi Canavan's Black Magician Trilogy (start with Magician's Guild)
Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality Series (start with On a Pale Horse)
Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept Series (start with Split Infinity)
How exactly do you get current employees to take IQ and personality tests (and share the results with management!) without pissing them off?
Personally, I'm addicted to Majesty. It's like Warcraft, but your units have free will and act according to their own internal AI. So you really have to pay attention to dynamics (e.g. rangers and wizards like to team up with barbarians and go out in large, deadly hunting parties).
I'm not a micro-manager, so this is a lot more fun than watching my units stand still in WC. I just get everything set up, place a few rewards on things I really want to happen, and can trust my heroes to do intelligent things while I work on building my economy. There are a dozen different types of heroes and each type has its own special talents and vices (Elves make you more money, but encourage sloth and prostitution, rangers like to explore the whole board, but often stir up trouble, etc.)
Best of all, there's a Linux version!
Get some very comfy slip-on shoes like these or these.
:)
They don't have laces, so you can slip them off to pass them through security and have them back on in seconds. They also make it easier to run out the door when you're late.
A lot of the non-tech's in my life would like to take advantage of the latest technology, but don't know how. So every tech gift should come with free tech support..
For example:
Wireless Router: They'll love surfing the web from the couch on their business laptops -- just be sure to set it all up for them.
Tivo: Most non-techs I know watch a LOT of TV. Tivo is easy enough that they may not even need your help with it.
Universal Remote: Over the years, you've built up their entertainment system with an amplifier, pre-amplifier, DVD player, CD changer, etc but they can't figure out how to just watch TV. Buy a good universal remote and program it to have easy "Watch TV", "Watch a DVD", "Listen to Music" buttons.
MP3 Player: Obviously great for exercise buffs
Roomba: Who wouldn't love a robot vacuum cleaner
Just about anything from Sharper Image or Brookstone, especially the Foot Massager: Everybody loves this stuff but will never buy it for themselves
Depending on where you live, you may be able to sue to recoup airtime costs. For example, California has passed an anti-mobile-spam law.
Unfortunately, unless you're bored and otherwise unemployed, this is hardly worth the while.
1. Start working on business apps now. Your network battleship independent project may not impress anyone, but a substantial contribution to an open source workflow system might. Re-engineer some club website in J2EE or .NET just to see how it works. Try to get an understanding for the kinds of problems real applications solve.
2. Lots of companies will take a fresh college grad if it's the right kind of person -- they just don't necessarily advertise that on Monster (since they'd be neck-deep in unqualified resumes). Instead, they go to career fairs at selective universities. Try going to one of those or at least getting a list of attending companies. Then submit your resume directly with a cover letter that explains how you're ready to be relevant right away. (see #1)
Columbia University actually has a distance learning program (if you qualify for admission there):
http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/
http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/b/degrees/csms.html
Definitely a little more respectable than your average degree-by-mail solicitation.
What I want to know is whether there really was a drawing for the Lexus RX, since 1 in 33 odds isn't bad for a $40-50K SUV. Maybe spam respondents are being rewarded for their part in the bulkmail plague, thus locking in their seat in that special spammer circle of hell.
Of course, that assumes that only half the 65 respondents got the Lexus email AND that the spammers, having sold their humanity anyway, ever intended to have a dedicated drawing (instead of noting in the fine print that the drawing will take place only after all 60 million chances have been claimed).
So appeal to those same Americans by making it a ferry that lets them bring their cars along. You can't drive your car onto a plane or a Greyhound, but I can easily imagine a 12ft diameter cylinder capable of holding a family sedan. It wouldn't even need life-support if passengers traveled in separate capsules.
Personally, I'd love to be able to use my own car at the other end of a mass-transit trip, though Hertz and Avis might not be as happy about it.
I agree with the general consensus that the Clones novelization is pretty poor, particularly when compared to the last one, but I don't find it representative of Salvatore in general.
The Drizzt Do'Urden books (starting with the Dark Elf Trilogy) are worthy reads, which inclines me to believe that what was missing here was not creative ability, but rather Terry Brooks's willingness to ignore the screenplay and fill in the gaping plot holes with some actual depth.
In the end, Salvatore appears to have been intimidated by the vast Star Wars franchise and has kept too close to the (very bad) screenplay instead of trusting in his own creative instincts. A pity, but not a true reflection of his talent and original works.
After purchasing a Palm V three years ago which has since been gathering dust in a drawer, I convinced myself that I'd never use a PDA. Yet, I couldn't resist the geek-factor of the Zaurus, and picked one up last week at JavaOne.
I'm loving it. The color is vibrant and web sites render exactly as they would on my PC (just need to scroll a bit to see the whole thing). The keyboard was a little clumsy at first, but I'm getting used to it and find it MUCH faster and more reliable than Palm's graffiti. (I have hope that eventually I'll be able to touch-type on it.)
The built-in apps are great for my needs. My only complaint is that the mail client doesn't have an option to authenticate to an outgoing SMTP server (haven't checked yet to see whether there's an update or another client available). Even the games are pretty entertaining when I'm stuck somewhere with time to kill.
The beautiful part, however, is that you don't NEED the cradle to sync. Just slide in the wireless card and ftp your files to it. (This is great for development, letting me deploy to it through a build script instead of a custom app). Plus, it runs PersonalJava -- a much more featureful version than the KVM on my Palm V. Basically, I just write against Java 1.1.8, ftp the class files over, and run them normally.
The battery life can be as short as an hour if you're banging on it with full brightness, but it's easy to plug it in without a cradle, and extra batteries are only $25, so there are ways around that if you're unwilling to dim the screen.
Of course, now I'm dreaming of widespread, open 802.11 networks so I can be fully connected everywhere....
Most stock market message board users are used to paranoid/false posts (e.g. "CEO of MCD has entered talks with Pepsi -- sell now!"). If you look at it objectively, just about every post on those boards is manipulative in some way and/or is designed to further the poster's interests.
The truly dangerous posts are the ones represented as *quoted* fact -- e.g. falsified company press releases. Fortunately, these fall into that aforementioned slice of unprotected, "presented-as-fact" speech and their authors will still be liable.
How supportive has Princeton been during this process? Have you ever felt any pressure from within not to expose the University to costly lawsuits, or have they been behind you all the way?
Speaking as a wife, I must wonder what makes you assume his future spouse isn't going to pull her own weight. I certainly hold up MY side of the household income.
Furthermore, in my experience, happiness in work has a very profound effect on happiness in marriage. I'd much rather see my husband make less money at a fun place with lots of friends than sell his soul for misery and come home in a bad mood every night. As for children -- better that they have a happy father with lots of friends (who perhaps gets trod upon once in a while), than a paranoid loner obsessed with guarding his back.
(There no reason you couldn't have an unconnected, roll-up pad to use for tactile feedback / key-spacing if you really needed it.)
The problem I see is convenience -- those hand grips don't look any less bulky than the rollup keyboards you can already get for PDAs, so this thing is going to have to be much FASTER to catch on.
And, of course, if it's really that fast, it will replace our regular desktop keyboards and the added mobility will just be the icing on the cake.
Now if only other courts would follow suit. (For those who haven't read the decision, "prior restraint" is a court injunction against a particular exercise of free speech before it has even happened -- e.g. forbidding a newspaper to print a list of tomorrow's bombing targets -- and has been found unconstitutional over and over again, even in moderately serious cases of national security)
The only intelligence useful for breaking a OTP is the text of the cipher itself or information about the random bit generator used to create it.
The known-plain-text attacks you describe are not helpful since the sequence is entirely random and every letter is encoded with its own independent cipher.
Umm.. can we spell paranoia?
There's nothing to prevent anyone from password-protecting their files underneath this, so it's hardly LESS secure.
Making your username rather ironic! ;)
Or even better yet, how are they going to tell the difference when the recording industry finally gets around to licensing digital content and you've paid your fees...
...oh wait, we'll be long dead by then.
Aren't those comparisons are usually drawn from standardized test results (SATs, GREs, etc.)? If so, we're talking about basic logic/algebra/geo/trig, not diff eqs and other college level topics. Talent in the former is certainly a good indicator of programming potential.
And we wonder why other companies are paranoid about IP agreements?? (Geesh... if a company is so bad you want to rape it's IP and compete, why do you want to carry their baggage with you and prolong the association? Go out on a limb for a few months to develop a better product and compete in the clear! If you can't get funding and can't stand to miss that weekly paycheck while you're doing it, well then maybe you don't have what it takes to market your own IP -- in which case you may want reconsider the worth of the risks taken by the people who started up that big, bad, oh-so-evil company you just left.)
Anyone else think this hippie thing is a really bad idea? When I'm choosing a platform for a bunch of enterprise servers, I'm looking for "Speed, Power, Stability", not "Peace, Love & a VW bus full of stoned penguins"!
Maybe they're going after the Mac desktop audience here, but it's hardly going to help push Linux in the server room where it's already stereotyped as an idealistic fad.