You are correct, the problem is not my son, he either switched the video, or watched it more interested in the balloons themselves than in the 300-pound woman.
The problem is my wife, she'll scream at both of us whenever it happens.
Both Windows 7 and OSX have parental controls that enforce usage times in a per-account basis, which apps can be run from these accounts, which sites can be accessed, etc. I have been using these with OSX (a good write up at http://theappleblog.com/2009/01/13/kid-proofing-a-mac-with-parental-controls/) with my 11-year old autistic boy and they couldn't be any simpler. He can only log into the machine at certain times, and I have the option to set a maximum session time per day. He can only run apps that I approve, and can go to sites only if I explicitly allow them. The bad news is that, at least in OSX, Firefox doesn't respect the parental control settings (Safari does it fine).
My only real annoyance is that Youtube doesn't have real content rating, which makes it a pain to filter properly. My son loves to make balloon sculptures and is always checking for new video tutorials, the problems is that while looking for these, he runs into the videos of the balloon popping fetishists. One second I am hearing a video explaining how to twist balloons into a roadrunner, next I hear a 300-pound woman in a bathing suit giggling and sitting on balloons to pop them. Gross.
I am the father of an 11-year old autistic boy with an escape artist complex. He has already tried to run away from his teachers many times, and in one occasion he actually made it out of the school grounds. My only relief at the time is that when he took off running almost everyone was outside, so everyone, even the principal, took off after him.
It still took a good 15 minutes to catch him, and they had already called the police.
A fence is not going to stop this from happening, but it provides a decent speed bump for wandering children that don't understand the concept of danger.
Are these the only two programmers in this field that lost their jobs today? Not really.
Are these two responsible for writing all the code in the game? Not really, it takes hundreds of people to put out even a mediocre game. There are more QA people in just one game than the total number of programmers I have worked with for the past 10 years.
Plus lets be realistic here, they are lead developers, which means they probably spent most of their days riding the damn phones. I am a lead programmer and there are days that pass without me being able to write one damn line of code, and my projects are tiny in comparison to a retail video game.
By all of the noise published so far about this, one would believe that these two are being canned due to nefarious purposes. Maybe they kept forgetting to use the new TPS cover sheets. Or they said the wrong thing to the wrong exec. If you think that you are "essential" to the company, figure out if the company has key man insurance on you. If they don't, then you probably aren't.
You are missing the biggest part of the $10 debate. Amazon is paying certain publishers $14 wholesaler per title, then turning around and selling the title for $10. Why? Because they are willing to use the books as loss leaders to drive sales of the Kindle, which gives them more strength to negotiate for a lower wholesale price later down the road.
The publishers are whining because at $10 it lowers the perception that the contents books are worth a lot of money. They don't want you to think ebooks can be discounted perpetually until they sell for a buck a title.
Amazon is whining because they are paying the agreed on price to the publisher and it is their business how much money they are willing to lose per title as long as it drives up Kindle sales.
Us ebook buyers are whining because it is borderline price fixing, which is illegal in this country. And while rare titles should command a price, there is no way in hell that a mass release title needs to cost more than $10 for everyone involved to make money.
And yes, the two biggest losers here are going to be the mom and pop bookstores, which are going to be relegated to used bookstore duty only, and the small authors, who are getting sabotaged out of creating grassroots interest in their works since obviously the big publishers aren't interested in marketing them but have no trouble sabotaging new channels that allow them to do the marketing on their own.
I own two Kindle 2s. DRM only means I can only buy protected content from Amazon, I am free to import content from other sources without involving Amazon in the process. Amazon has yet to interfere with any third parties selling content for the Kindle as long as they don't attempt to use their proprietary DRM scheme.
It is one hell of a reader, and in an emergency Whispernet is a nice backup to have. During Snowmaggeddon here in DC I was getting better network performance from the two Kindles than from our AT&T cell phones (probably you can't compare the network traffic between these two, ever).
By the way, two of the most popular tools used to generate content for the Kindle, Stanza and Mobi Pocket creator, are both owned by Amazon. Or you could use Calibre.
Worried about generating DRM-free content for Kindle readers? Release your content as MOBI/PRC or PDF and that should do it, at least until Amazon feels the burn and issues a patch allowing Kindles to read EPUB.
The biggest problem that the Kindle faces is not the DRM, it's the tug of war between Amazon and publishers that want them to raise their $10 price point for new books.
Very true. I personally know two PhDs, the nicest people I have ever worked with btw, that were brilliant only within the very narrow field of their specialty. For anything else they were a very short step above stupid.
After using it for a few minutes I got a link to a preference that makes lite the default site. And you have the option to keep a bar on top of the screen that lets you toggle between the two sites.
I can confidently tell you this after two decades of programming: learn as much math as you can possibly handle. The more the merrier. Algebra, calculus, differential equations, numerical analysis, the works.
Of all of courses I took for my bachelors, the one I remember the most vividly, that was both fun and hard as hell, was numerical analysis because it was the first time after 2+ years of being miserable with my calculus courses that I took a math course with immediate, real world application.
If you can also get some logic for programmers, even better. My school's philosophy department had logic courses aimed specifically at engineering majors instead of forcing us to take the general (what we called poets') version.
It is knowledge that is general and very portable, you can apply it to almost everything that you will ever do as a programmer. You simply can't go wrong.
Yes. And that is a variation of the classic canary trap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap): copies of classified documents that are not 100% identical. When the leaks surface, you can trace the original recipient of the compromised copy.
I like the thing with the maps because it is the kind of thing that makes the violator look like a complete idiot, and it's impossible to defend in court.
Back in the dot com days there was a company that was probably called Freepc.com or something really similar. There was no gimmick: you filled a really long marketing questionnaire, and if you fit certain profiles you were sent a free PC. It was yours to keep as long as you surfed the net X hours per month (it was very low, probably 10 hrs) and you kept whatever made Windows 95/98 or whatever it had to display the ads.
I signed up for it and yup, they sent me one at zero cost to me. It was a cheap Compaq with a 15 or 15 inch monitor. But what the hell, it was free!
The screen was setup so about 800x600 was usable, with the rest of the 1024x768 full of ads. I set it up for my wife and it worked pretty good for as long as we had it. The ads were displayed based on your marketing profile. Most of the time the ads were very relevant.
Eventually that company died, and they gave us the computers because it was too expensive to have them shipped back and disposed through a liquidator. As soon as they went belly up, it became my testbed for SuSe, which it ran really damn nice for a long time. It wasn't fast, but it was very usable.
Mine talks like a parrot, but he won't have a conversation with you unless it is to get something that he wants (when you think about it, most kids are like this). If you take out the autistic meltdowns and the scripted language issues, he is your typical smartass tween that thinks that the world revolves around him.
This is not a troll. While we parents with real needs are delighted to see this kind of product, we are a tiny market. The bulk of the interest for this kind of product is going to be overbearing control freak parents.
Hell, had the technology existed my own mother would had chipped the way they do now with pets.
The struggle is to know he is out. He is a master of sneaking. One day I was sitting at my desk, and I could see into the living room. He figured out the field of vision, moved right beyond that, then calmly broke the Charlie bar.
If I had some kind of perimeter alarm, I would have known he was getting out of the house. Instead he ran about 1/8th of a mile, into a busy 4-lane, where my wife AND her mother were driving back home from the supermarket.
Yes, his own mother saw him run into the street. In her mind she almost ran him over. The worst part of the episode is that I was completely awake and was not even absorbed with what I was doing. I was simply sitting at my desk.
When he is 18 I may be forced by law to seek guardianship. I am responsible to keep that child alive until he is 18, maybe 21 if Virginia state law is weird about it. If I have to be his guardian, I will have to worry about this until he is older enough to understand that cars do run over people.
I had all of our 30+yr old windows replaced with brand new, energy efficient windows. Since they were doing this for all units in our condo complex they asked if there was anything else special we wanted to get done at the same time. I asked if it was possible to get window locks that require a key.
Sure, they said.
I ordered two per window.
What did he do? He figured out how to defeat the Charley bar lock in the sliding patio door. In a fit of rage I took a couple of screws and drilled them into the sliding door base, so it is permanently closed.
Fast forward a month or two: he figured out how to disassemble the keyed locks in the windows, we caught him at 2AM, thunderstorms and all. He had the window already open, we only caught him because he couldn't pick which shoes to wear. I drove even more screws, this time into the window frames.
As a parent of an autistic child with escape artist tendencies, I would love to have this kind of watch. That is, assuming that my kid will wear it for more than 5 minutes in a row without trying to cut it off.
My kid is 10 and incredibly fast. He doesn't understand the concepts of safety and fear, and is constantly figuring out ways to break our locks to go out wandering alone (he's even done it at school, which was actually a bit funny because he took off running in front of the principal, so for the first few minutes there was a gaggle of huffing and puffing teachers and secretaries chasing through an apartment complex until the cops arrived). A watch like this, combined with some kind of alarm could help us keep him alive and unharmed until he is 18.
Same here, it riles me up when people are too lazy to write things right, especially when I know these are educated people. There is no excuse for MBAs and PhDs to send me emails full of spelling and grammar errors, it means they are too lazy/stupid/whatever to figure out how to turn on the spell checker.
Casual messaging? sure, who cares? But in business communications? Absolutely unacceptable.
It is so bad that we have a standing order at our shop to never type customer-provided content. 100% cut-and-paste for any text provided to us. Why? So *their* typos are carried over. If and when they are caught during QA, we have them resubmit the content, instead of doing spot fixes. It is much easier to paste the whole paragraph than to chase each word that is misspelled.
For those of you that already have the Kindle, the Calibre application works extremely nice with it. While it is ugly as sin, it is a very nice book manager and it works with both of our K2s just fine. I see it as a rudimentary iTunes for ebooks.
As a web programmer, I wanted to take offense at your statement, but something that happened to me only a few weeks ago is making me have a hell of a lot less faith about the available pool of web programmers out there:
During a round of interviews, we sent out a take-home quiz. We mostly wanted to know if the candidates either knew the actual answers, or could at least google it. One of the questions involved simple aggregates in SQL. Given a table with a unique id and a date of birth, I wanted a query that would produce a list of the months of the year, and how many unique records had a DOB that fell on that month. It's a one-liner.
One of my candidates wrote TWELVE counting queries, each one counting DOBs between the (hardcoded) start and end of each month, then she used UNION to make it send out the 12 one-row queries as one 12-row query.
Both of us evaluating the results screamed when we read her answer, and we did not pursue her further. I used to complain that programmers simply didn't give a shit about learning beyond the querying aspects of the RDBMS, which kept us at the mercy of overpaid DBAs. Now? Now we are starting to see that programmers don't even give a shit about learning how to query.
Finish your degree, work for a while, then do your masters. Why? So you have field experience before you do your masters.
Why is this important? Because as a norm, you are a less attractive candidate if you are over educated for your experience level. You are in reality a paper Tiger, you have two pieces of parchment that say that you have spent a lot of time in school, but the only practical experience that you bring to your new employer is whatever little you could pick up during school.
Your competitors, on the other hand, got their bachelors degree done, then worked for a few years, and finally got their masters done. Most of them got their masters completed while still working.
When I, either screening resumes or running the interviews, compare you to them, what I see is that for basically the same amount of money I can get an employee with the right education and with some relevant experience, instead of a guy with just the education and still needs to be trained on the job.
Education is awesome, get as much as you can get away with it, but pace yourself. Your school probably isn't going anywhere. Your masters program will be there for you whenever you are ready to go back to it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, the problem is not my son, he either switched the video, or watched it more interested in the balloons themselves than in the 300-pound woman.
The problem is my wife, she'll scream at both of us whenever it happens.
Both Windows 7 and OSX have parental controls that enforce usage times in a per-account basis, which apps can be run from these accounts, which sites can be accessed, etc. I have been using these with OSX (a good write up at http://theappleblog.com/2009/01/13/kid-proofing-a-mac-with-parental-controls/) with my 11-year old autistic boy and they couldn't be any simpler. He can only log into the machine at certain times, and I have the option to set a maximum session time per day. He can only run apps that I approve, and can go to sites only if I explicitly allow them. The bad news is that, at least in OSX, Firefox doesn't respect the parental control settings (Safari does it fine).
I checked with Windows 7 and the parental controls seem to be pretty similar. More at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/parental-controls.aspx
My only real annoyance is that Youtube doesn't have real content rating, which makes it a pain to filter properly. My son loves to make balloon sculptures and is always checking for new video tutorials, the problems is that while looking for these, he runs into the videos of the balloon popping fetishists. One second I am hearing a video explaining how to twist balloons into a roadrunner, next I hear a 300-pound woman in a bathing suit giggling and sitting on balloons to pop them. Gross.
Yup.
I am the father of an 11-year old autistic boy with an escape artist complex. He has already tried to run away from his teachers many times, and in one occasion he actually made it out of the school grounds. My only relief at the time is that when he took off running almost everyone was outside, so everyone, even the principal, took off after him.
It still took a good 15 minutes to catch him, and they had already called the police.
A fence is not going to stop this from happening, but it provides a decent speed bump for wandering children that don't understand the concept of danger.
Are these the only two programmers in this field that lost their jobs today? Not really.
Are these two responsible for writing all the code in the game? Not really, it takes hundreds of people to put out even a mediocre game. There are more QA people in just one game than the total number of programmers I have worked with for the past 10 years.
Plus lets be realistic here, they are lead developers, which means they probably spent most of their days riding the damn phones. I am a lead programmer and there are days that pass without me being able to write one damn line of code, and my projects are tiny in comparison to a retail video game.
By all of the noise published so far about this, one would believe that these two are being canned due to nefarious purposes. Maybe they kept forgetting to use the new TPS cover sheets. Or they said the wrong thing to the wrong exec. If you think that you are "essential" to the company, figure out if the company has key man insurance on you. If they don't, then you probably aren't.
You are missing the biggest part of the $10 debate. Amazon is paying certain publishers $14 wholesaler per title, then turning around and selling the title for $10. Why? Because they are willing to use the books as loss leaders to drive sales of the Kindle, which gives them more strength to negotiate for a lower wholesale price later down the road.
The publishers are whining because at $10 it lowers the perception that the contents books are worth a lot of money. They don't want you to think ebooks can be discounted perpetually until they sell for a buck a title.
Amazon is whining because they are paying the agreed on price to the publisher and it is their business how much money they are willing to lose per title as long as it drives up Kindle sales.
Us ebook buyers are whining because it is borderline price fixing, which is illegal in this country. And while rare titles should command a price, there is no way in hell that a mass release title needs to cost more than $10 for everyone involved to make money.
And yes, the two biggest losers here are going to be the mom and pop bookstores, which are going to be relegated to used bookstore duty only, and the small authors, who are getting sabotaged out of creating grassroots interest in their works since obviously the big publishers aren't interested in marketing them but have no trouble sabotaging new channels that allow them to do the marketing on their own.
I own two Kindle 2s. DRM only means I can only buy protected content from Amazon, I am free to import content from other sources without involving Amazon in the process. Amazon has yet to interfere with any third parties selling content for the Kindle as long as they don't attempt to use their proprietary DRM scheme.
It is one hell of a reader, and in an emergency Whispernet is a nice backup to have. During Snowmaggeddon here in DC I was getting better network performance from the two Kindles than from our AT&T cell phones (probably you can't compare the network traffic between these two, ever).
By the way, two of the most popular tools used to generate content for the Kindle, Stanza and Mobi Pocket creator, are both owned by Amazon. Or you could use Calibre.
Worried about generating DRM-free content for Kindle readers? Release your content as MOBI/PRC or PDF and that should do it, at least until Amazon feels the burn and issues a patch allowing Kindles to read EPUB.
The biggest problem that the Kindle faces is not the DRM, it's the tug of war between Amazon and publishers that want them to raise their $10 price point for new books.
Very true. I personally know two PhDs, the nicest people I have ever worked with btw, that were brilliant only within the very narrow field of their specialty. For anything else they were a very short step above stupid.
After using it for a few minutes I got a link to a preference that makes lite the default site. And you have the option to keep a bar on top of the screen that lets you toggle between the two sites.
I can confidently tell you this after two decades of programming: learn as much math as you can possibly handle. The more the merrier. Algebra, calculus, differential equations, numerical analysis, the works.
Of all of courses I took for my bachelors, the one I remember the most vividly, that was both fun and hard as hell, was numerical analysis because it was the first time after 2+ years of being miserable with my calculus courses that I took a math course with immediate, real world application.
If you can also get some logic for programmers, even better. My school's philosophy department had logic courses aimed specifically at engineering majors instead of forcing us to take the general (what we called poets') version.
It is knowledge that is general and very portable, you can apply it to almost everything that you will ever do as a programmer. You simply can't go wrong.
Your microdot idea is downright evil, I love it.
Yes. And that is a variation of the classic canary trap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap): copies of classified documents that are not 100% identical. When the leaks surface, you can trace the original recipient of the compromised copy. I like the thing with the maps because it is the kind of thing that makes the violator look like a complete idiot, and it's impossible to defend in court.
Back in the dot com days there was a company that was probably called Freepc.com or something really similar. There was no gimmick: you filled a really long marketing questionnaire, and if you fit certain profiles you were sent a free PC. It was yours to keep as long as you surfed the net X hours per month (it was very low, probably 10 hrs) and you kept whatever made Windows 95/98 or whatever it had to display the ads.
I signed up for it and yup, they sent me one at zero cost to me. It was a cheap Compaq with a 15 or 15 inch monitor. But what the hell, it was free!
The screen was setup so about 800x600 was usable, with the rest of the 1024x768 full of ads. I set it up for my wife and it worked pretty good for as long as we had it. The ads were displayed based on your marketing profile. Most of the time the ads were very relevant.
Eventually that company died, and they gave us the computers because it was too expensive to have them shipped back and disposed through a liquidator. As soon as they went belly up, it became my testbed for SuSe, which it ran really damn nice for a long time. It wasn't fast, but it was very usable.
Mine talks like a parrot, but he won't have a conversation with you unless it is to get something that he wants (when you think about it, most kids are like this). If you take out the autistic meltdowns and the scripted language issues, he is your typical smartass tween that thinks that the world revolves around him.
This is not a troll. While we parents with real needs are delighted to see this kind of product, we are a tiny market. The bulk of the interest for this kind of product is going to be overbearing control freak parents.
Hell, had the technology existed my own mother would had chipped the way they do now with pets.
The struggle is to know he is out. He is a master of sneaking. One day I was sitting at my desk, and I could see into the living room. He figured out the field of vision, moved right beyond that, then calmly broke the Charlie bar.
If I had some kind of perimeter alarm, I would have known he was getting out of the house. Instead he ran about 1/8th of a mile, into a busy 4-lane, where my wife AND her mother were driving back home from the supermarket.
Yes, his own mother saw him run into the street. In her mind she almost ran him over. The worst part of the episode is that I was completely awake and was not even absorbed with what I was doing. I was simply sitting at my desk.
When he is 18 I may be forced by law to seek guardianship. I am responsible to keep that child alive until he is 18, maybe 21 if Virginia state law is weird about it. If I have to be his guardian, I will have to worry about this until he is older enough to understand that cars do run over people.
I had all of our 30+yr old windows replaced with brand new, energy efficient windows. Since they were doing this for all units in our condo complex they asked if there was anything else special we wanted to get done at the same time. I asked if it was possible to get window locks that require a key.
Sure, they said.
I ordered two per window.
What did he do? He figured out how to defeat the Charley bar lock in the sliding patio door. In a fit of rage I took a couple of screws and drilled them into the sliding door base, so it is permanently closed.
Fast forward a month or two: he figured out how to disassemble the keyed locks in the windows, we caught him at 2AM, thunderstorms and all. He had the window already open, we only caught him because he couldn't pick which shoes to wear. I drove even more screws, this time into the window frames.
After so many years living in constant terror of the kid bolting out and running under a car, I don't give a shit how much it costs.
As a parent of an autistic child with escape artist tendencies, I would love to have this kind of watch. That is, assuming that my kid will wear it for more than 5 minutes in a row without trying to cut it off.
My kid is 10 and incredibly fast. He doesn't understand the concepts of safety and fear, and is constantly figuring out ways to break our locks to go out wandering alone (he's even done it at school, which was actually a bit funny because he took off running in front of the principal, so for the first few minutes there was a gaggle of huffing and puffing teachers and secretaries chasing through an apartment complex until the cops arrived). A watch like this, combined with some kind of alarm could help us keep him alive and unharmed until he is 18.
Same here, it riles me up when people are too lazy to write things right, especially when I know these are educated people. There is no excuse for MBAs and PhDs to send me emails full of spelling and grammar errors, it means they are too lazy/stupid/whatever to figure out how to turn on the spell checker.
Casual messaging? sure, who cares? But in business communications? Absolutely unacceptable.
It is so bad that we have a standing order at our shop to never type customer-provided content. 100% cut-and-paste for any text provided to us. Why? So *their* typos are carried over. If and when they are caught during QA, we have them resubmit the content, instead of doing spot fixes. It is much easier to paste the whole paragraph than to chase each word that is misspelled.
For those of you that already have the Kindle, the Calibre application works extremely nice with it. While it is ugly as sin, it is a very nice book manager and it works with both of our K2s just fine. I see it as a rudimentary iTunes for ebooks.
As a web programmer, I wanted to take offense at your statement, but something that happened to me only a few weeks ago is making me have a hell of a lot less faith about the available pool of web programmers out there:
During a round of interviews, we sent out a take-home quiz. We mostly wanted to know if the candidates either knew the actual answers, or could at least google it. One of the questions involved simple aggregates in SQL. Given a table with a unique id and a date of birth, I wanted a query that would produce a list of the months of the year, and how many unique records had a DOB that fell on that month. It's a one-liner.
One of my candidates wrote TWELVE counting queries, each one counting DOBs between the (hardcoded) start and end of each month, then she used UNION to make it send out the 12 one-row queries as one 12-row query.
Both of us evaluating the results screamed when we read her answer, and we did not pursue her further. I used to complain that programmers simply didn't give a shit about learning beyond the querying aspects of the RDBMS, which kept us at the mercy of overpaid DBAs. Now? Now we are starting to see that programmers don't even give a shit about learning how to query.
At least for Comcast in zip 20190:
$ nslookup
> insomniaccoder.com
Server: 208.67.222.222
Address: 208.67.222.222#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: insomniaccoder.com
Address: 72.32.231.8
That's one of the two OpenDNS servers on port 53. Unless Comcast is faking/proxying/whatever the traffic and responding with OpenDNS' IP address.
... with SQL Server Data Transformation Services.
The DBA's excuse: it's less of a pain in the ass.
What really happened: the DBA obviously didn't know how to RTFM.
Finish your degree, work for a while, then do your masters. Why? So you have field experience before you do your masters.
Why is this important? Because as a norm, you are a less attractive candidate if you are over educated for your experience level. You are in reality a paper Tiger, you have two pieces of parchment that say that you have spent a lot of time in school, but the only practical experience that you bring to your new employer is whatever little you could pick up during school.
Your competitors, on the other hand, got their bachelors degree done, then worked for a few years, and finally got their masters done. Most of them got their masters completed while still working.
When I, either screening resumes or running the interviews, compare you to them, what I see is that for basically the same amount of money I can get an employee with the right education and with some relevant experience, instead of a guy with just the education and still needs to be trained on the job.
Education is awesome, get as much as you can get away with it, but pace yourself. Your school probably isn't going anywhere. Your masters program will be there for you whenever you are ready to go back to it.