This is a perpetual scrum in medical residency, too. We can't do back-to-back calls, which makes it harder than, "You cover this weekend."
0 - Get a big ass calendar with holidays and some pencils. Decide how many days/year each person will have to work. Break them down into 4 or so categories: weekday, friday, weekend, holiday are ours. Friday is annoying because you can't go out but not as bad as an 24h (weekend/holiday) day. If weekends are light, you could just have "weekday" and "friday + weekend" categories. Anyway, share around evenly.
1 - Holiday parity is a good place to start. Noone wants to get screwed both xmas and new year's. Ask for preferences and nail down someone for coverage for these and Labor day, the 4th, T-day, etc. They can trade later.
2 - Map out the conferences and people's known vacation blocks, anniversaries, exams, etc.
3 - Some people haven't adapted to a totally random fill pattern of coverage, so give people a choice of contiguous blocks/easy to remember patterns (M/W for the month of ___) or irregular blips.
4 - Schedule the parts where many are out of the office with whatever it takes. Subtract these and the holiday days from the totals each person has to work. Schedule the pattern-desiring people and people with evening classes/outside commitments/inability to show up if on a random schedule. Again revise the totals.
5 - Start marching through at the beginning, rotating through the N people available. Keep running track of the fridays/weekends, do a little stagger to keep the weekends from being the same person on the same day, and it will start filling out.
6 - Think outside of the month to fit those last days in. You don't have to fill months contiguously or in date order. If there is a new employee, it may be best to slack off a bit on them (no weekends) at first until they fill out their KB; this gives you some flex.
N - Nothing you can do will make the perfect schedule. You have to have one master list that is the last word, and on which everyone must record their trades. Leftover days are best distributed to the people who took the least holiday days or the dues-paying new hires.
N+1 - Write some open source software to do this. Acrimony might be less, and the legibility would be better for sure.
...all about the drugs and fucking it is not.
on
Drama in the Desert
·
· Score: 1
I have gone out to the playa six years running now, so I am clearly drinking the Kool-Aid.
Each year, wandering around turns up a huge number of jaw-dropping art projects, cool new friends, diverse lectures, performances and debate, and solitary time for reflection. It reinvigorates my sense of the possible, restores my faith in human nature, and pokes me to make more of my extra-desert life. I got the book as a gift yesterday, and it is really really well done; can't speak for the DVD.
Notably, it has given me a whole new outlet for my robotics obsession. I have tinkered with EL wire, LEDs, motors, seismometers, lasers, servos, and sound activated circuits. Other friends have learned to weld, build domes, and created elaborate games ( www.gyft.org ), costumes, props, and sculptures for the event. At the East Coast ( playadelfuego.org ) and Austin regional ( burnaustin.org ) events, an even merrier crew of hard core campers turns out, somehow.
There is a buttload of tech out there, from stage equipment to powerful lasers. There is wireless internet, pirate radio and TV, and amazing one-of-a-kind sound and light sculptures.
Of course, if you can't see past your own cynical ego, maybe it is better you don't come. You can go see bare breasts locally for much cheaper, and their owners won't threaten you for gawking. It is hot and dusty and cold and rainy and loud 24/7, with lines at the portapotties AND these people are freaks.
Brightness in EL is a function of frequency and voltage. With an inverter, you are going to get 200V or so and 800 to 4000Hz, for a much brighter result. Less amps, too, which is safer than the direct plugging method, fuse or no fuse.
I saw one of these out at Burning Man, and the dust there (too much, really) obviated dry ice for seeing the strings. I noodle with MIDI and PICs, so I'll tell you what I saw and how I'd do it.
Need:
lasers - grab a passle of pointers off ebay, watching for sneaky shipping/handling charges. Since you have to mount them, the short-profile "bullet" ones would be nicer than the longer ones. One pointer per string. If you have time, hack the power supply and switch so they all work together and don't eat 600 batteries.
laser detector - a phototransistor, although a photodiode would also work. Photoresistors might be a little slow, but could also work, maybe with a comparator to give it some snap. They also are at every Radio Shack, and their bigger target size may ease alignment.
If you want to do it another way, just have an high-mounted IR emitter that multiple high-looking IR detectors can see, then detect the shadow.
PIC or Basic Stamp - My preference (since I have the programmer already) would be to go with one of the new, larger PICs that has 28/40 pins and built in serial. 33 I/O lines is more than enough for a decent harp. Anything else (small PIC or Stamp) and you will need more external hardware to decode lines; you will have to bit-bang serial as well, potentially losing some notes. At $5 for the right chip, why suffer?
Detect change, spoot MIDI, repeat.
frame: stable alignment for lasers and detectors is key. If a laser turns off or gets misaligned, the detector thinks you are trying to play the note. Depending on the sound patch and your program, you may end up with either a stuck note or a missing note.
random thoughts: Work the one string method out (duh) before you commit it to solder. Use sockets. Have an all-notes-off button.
MIDI: Three bytes, 31250 baud; details everywhere. The velocity byte is going to be fixed unless you decide to do something clever with it; that may not be a problem if the patch/samples you are triggering are not that responsive to velocity. You could subtly vary the velocity plus or minus five or so just for kicks. With the built-in A/D you could read a volume pedal or pressure sensor easily. Note off messages are usually optional, but checking that the string has had some reset time (unshadowed) will have to be done.
Some pointers: www.phanderson.com for cheap PICs/parts www.melabs.com and www.basicmicro.com for PIC protoboards (and compilers). Melabs stuff rocks. www.dontronics.com and john kerr on Ebay also have nice protos which I have used
As someone who literally can fall asleep in two minutes and someone who has to pull 24-28 hour shifts requiring intense attention on a monthly basis (and still make it home), I did reach beyond the caffeine to the antinarcoleptic Provigil. I am not impressed, and will stick to coffee. YMMV, and FWIW I do keep one tab on me in case I absolutely absolutely had to stay awake into the 40-50 hour range for a road trip.
My test drive opinions, negatives first:
- headaches - Very distracting and not fixed with OTC remedies. I consider this a killer side effect. I saw this at both 100mg and 200mg.
- da jitters - well, if you are going all Cornholio, it is going to cut into your productivity. I went from juggling 5 different things at once to dropping three and fucking up one of the remaining two. Maybe you can train yourself to keep it all together.
- elevated blood pressure - This may have something to do with the headaches, but that feeling of impending aneurysm does not rock.
- dehydration - I fly through the water, and all of my piss smells really rank and chemical-like. There is a productivity hit to this I suppose, and it seems like more than that imposed by chugging coffee.
- rebound - the crash can be hard, and the duration of sleep is not really predictable. I tended to be irritable the day after, as well.
positive: you are slightly more alert. 100mg and I can still sleep no problem. in my chair. ..not good. 200mg and you are are awake, but more side effect manifestation.
DO NOT take 4 per shift like the guy up there. You are going to get prescription info from Slashdot?
Don't be a dumbass: check out the info on ANY drug before you take it. Know the maximum dose. Know the interactions. Know the side effects. Know if it is excreted by the liver or kidney if you have problems with one of them. If you are going to take the doctor out of the loop, who is going to look out for your sorry ass?
A dremel tool is great for case mods, toy mods, grinding things so they fit, as well as light drilling/polishing/making purty sparks.
Second place goes to a set of car speakers: the stock (usually paper) ones invariably suck, and they are in really bad shape after 2-3 years. Hit crutchfield.com for car-specific sizing specs. A whole new set of four for less than $200, and they will likely be enjoyed daily for years.
Either it is no big deal and no security furor need transpire, OR he should have gone to Alcatel. You can't argue both, OK?
As it turns out, he DID contact Alcatel, and they rebuffed him, even denying (among other things) that the expert mode code existed in the product. That was obviously false, as a technical manual (previously available from Alcatel's Russian site) mentioned it, and it is present in plaintext when the code was disassembled.
"..decided he could make some quick bucks" How is he making quick bucks from this? If anything, it is a major-ass headache to have your phone ringing off the hook 24/7 and explaining things over and over to journalists. He is not going to start consulting more often or write a book, "DSL Takedown" about it (I fervently hope).
At the recent Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference in Chicago, there was a lecture on optical imaging of the brain. I was skeptical (it goes through the skull HOW?). They showed that they could use different frequencies and short pulses to get a low-res view of the brain, largely by calculation of diffusion path lengths. They said that they could detect large asymmetries that you would see with a subdural bleed. Useful, but obvious. Then they said that they could detect smaller regional changes in blood flow caused by brain activity. Skeptical? So was I...Then they put a helmet on one of the researchers and showed raw signal over the motor strip and how it changed when he thought about moving his hand. That was very cool. Sure there are limitations because of the skull, but with a tighter matrix of emitters/detectors and some DSP power, this could be very useful.
Details? All I am sure of is that they were from a university in California. I'll dig around, though.
NB- This is not THAT different from the really really common use of LEDs to measure blood oxygenation and heartrate. It's all bloodflow.
"Anyway, the point is to make something cool with stuff that you might have lying around."
I'll bet 1/5 of the readers do have Mindstorms kits lying around...And the rest are getting them for xmas. FWIW, you can get serially addressable H-bridges and stepper drivers almost as easily as servo controllers. It's easy to go nuts with these once you have them.
Noone has these lying around, but those omnidirectional wheels are something new-ish in the fairly staid field of homebrew robotics, and would be fun to noodle with whether driven from a PIC or an Athlon. Good for mazes, I'm sure.
The same foam-tape-and-superglue chassis could apply, but with a Basic Stamp II or (better and multitasking) BasicX-24, you wouldn't tie up your Palm--you could even use the Palm's IR to interact with the beast.
I agree: there is a non-negligible overhead to testing, installing, and "homogenizing" computers.
However...The (60 minutes) overhead to completely wipe a hard drive, then reinstall a cheap network card, whatever OS and a low overhead web browser (ie-opera) is too much? Burn-in and go. If it dies, take another CPU/monitor/keyboard/mouse off the "just fixed" pile. Availability through redundancy.
Addition (in lots) to the existing school equipment auction would at least get it into someone else's hands and free up space. You see a dusty pile; someone else sees usable or repairable monitors; someone else sees a pile of rare-earth magnets and stepper motors; someone else is hoping you didn't pull all the memory and hard drives.
About noone here on Slashdot learned programming on anything faster than a 486.
I think microcontrollers are another reasonable vector for early mind-molding:
(0) really pretty much dirt cheap: PIC or 68HC11 + C compiler + programmers + support hardware will run less than $200 / station and will fly even on outdated computers. (1) Standard C is available; why learn a funky-ass dialect that limits you later? You get plenty of I/O experience, to boot. (2) Provides understanding at the hardware level, with modest restrictions that tend to encourage creativity and discourage bloatware. (3) teaches basic electronic skills, always a boon. (4) projects are sooooo cheap that students can take them home when they are done!
J
Good compiler comparison info, C code, and parts: www.phanderson.com
Y'all are a bunch of screaming meemees. It is done, and the disclaimers and such are out there in the open just like in every other news media...
Take the recent Time/Warner/AOL merger: Time magazine routinely announced the obvious conflict of interest in reporting on the subsidiary branches' issues. Actually, IMO they tended to be a little bit harsh in their judgements. Maybe it is just to put the less paranoid of us at ease while they are in the spotlight...or maybe they actually have Ethics.
Should we hold/. to a higher standard than TIME? Well, we can and DO...with the open forum here.
Is anyone really wound up enough to leave/. now? More importantly, are we going to have to go through 1001 days/threads of haranguing them for their angle on this or that story? If so, the S/N ratio is going to take a hit and we are going to see an increase in "good ol' days before they got bought out" threads--->lower S/N
Can we have a "no finger-pointing bullshit ethics discussion" checkbox? That would help. Some people can't see the forest for the ticks.
seriously, although I have no problem with domain-grabbing, the broad availability of addresses in other countries TLDs makes it seems like a losing battle. Then again, the average AOLer may not even know there is anything *but*.com addresses.
onjay "whap or be whapped"
Who put the . in.edu? Probably all those old VAX honkers. yeeesh.
1) Smart pills: People are generally non-compliant medicationwise...I see people every day who have (or had) the means to deliver themselves from imminent morbidity/death, but do not. I hesitate to use the term "choose" because they really have the best intentions but their actions belie some lack of will or something. I posit that mere neuronal fluffiness is not motivation enough for anyone to do anything about. It reminds me of the ironic* mope of the Life Extension crowd in the late 80's, "I forgot to take my Hydergine."
2) You can forestall the detriment and up your charm points just by cross training your brain NOW so you have a higher baseline functionality. Remember the awesome global mental shift that occurred when you learned to play chess? Where is the challenge and growth now? Go out there and schmooze and dance and paint and juggle and use that other lobe. At least get so you can memorize 16 digit credit card numbers over people's shoulders.
onjay (not one of those pi-memorizing MENSA types)
Their non-acceptance is well studied, and generally thought to be a function of user preference. We don't want to have to "get our muff fluffy" every damn time the phone rings, apparently.
"His new venture will not patent the human genome sequence itself, Venter states."
No, not the whole enchilada...only the GENES he finds (which will be tiny non-contiguous subsets of the genome). This guy is NOT benign, and his "I'll do it for free and give it away, so why don't you cut the Genome Project's funding, Honorable Congressman?" routine is the biotech version of FUD. What we will get for free is a picked-through-and-genes-patented, incomplete, and error-filled genome that other researchers will have to debug before using. Debug and LICENSE, if they want to use any of the parts that looked genelike when Ventner's team sped through. It's a gold rush mentality on his side of the coin, and he has free machines and reagents to turbocharge his efforts.
FWIW, The Genome Project is very OSS-like: daily updates to the shared genome database; shared technology (software, robotics, modifications on the PE machines), and nothing held back for patenting sake (you want to comb through and find a gene? Be their guest!). They are making amazing progress, partially due to Ventner setting their clothes on fire.
I have it on good authority that parallel development of Intel versions continues. It is just too large a potential market to ignore, esp having done all of the preceding work...I am NOT saying they have any plans to spring it on us anytime soon. Not at all. Nope. Sorry.
As a commmunity service, Rob should track us, send warnings, and then refer us to the proper agencies if we don't log in from another network address (indicating movement of some mild sort).
This sort of passive health measure is the wave of the future...salt shakers that screech when moved, pictures of smoker's lungs on the cigarette package (which will include a free nicotine patch), pictures of smokers' lungs on Godiva and Ben&Jerry's ice cream packages. Utensils that analyse and resist picking up food that is "unhealthy". Elevators that only go to a landing between every other floor (thus always a half floor of stairs + faster elevators).
Seriously, some little nag window to say, "Take a long focus break" would probably help some with that weird can't-focus-except-at-18-inches thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's offtopic, but things are running 80% offtopic so far...members of the NBC network. And this is before the recent deregulation that one of the FCC's own condemns. (pdf)
$9.99 Spanking new from Overstock.com, if you really want to pinch ze pennies. Cheapskate!
This is a perpetual scrum in medical residency, too. We can't do back-to-back calls, which makes it harder than, "You cover this weekend."
0 - Get a big ass calendar with holidays and some pencils. Decide how many days/year each person will have to work. Break them down into 4 or so categories: weekday, friday, weekend, holiday are ours. Friday is annoying because you can't go out but not as bad as an 24h (weekend/holiday) day. If weekends are light, you could just have "weekday" and "friday + weekend" categories. Anyway, share around evenly.
1 - Holiday parity is a good place to start. Noone wants to get screwed both xmas and new year's. Ask for preferences and nail down someone for coverage for these and Labor day, the 4th, T-day, etc. They can trade later.
2 - Map out the conferences and people's known vacation blocks, anniversaries, exams, etc.
3 - Some people haven't adapted to a totally random fill pattern of coverage, so give people a choice of contiguous blocks/easy to remember patterns (M/W for the month of ___) or irregular blips.
4 - Schedule the parts where many are out of the office with whatever it takes. Subtract these and the holiday days from the totals each person has to work. Schedule the pattern-desiring people and people with evening classes/outside commitments/inability to show up if on a random schedule. Again revise the totals.
5 - Start marching through at the beginning, rotating through the N people available. Keep running track of the fridays/weekends, do a little stagger to keep the weekends from being the same person on the same day, and it will start filling out.
6 - Think outside of the month to fit those last days in. You don't have to fill months contiguously or in date order. If there is a new employee, it may be best to slack off a bit on them (no weekends) at first until they fill out their KB; this gives you some flex.
N - Nothing you can do will make the perfect schedule. You have to have one master list that is the last word, and on which everyone must record their trades. Leftover days are best distributed to the people who took the least holiday days or the dues-paying new hires.
N+1 - Write some open source software to do this. Acrimony might be less, and the legibility would be better for sure.
I have gone out to the playa six years running now, so I am clearly drinking the Kool-Aid.
Each year, wandering around turns up a huge number of jaw-dropping art projects, cool new friends, diverse lectures, performances and debate, and solitary time for reflection. It reinvigorates my sense of the possible, restores my faith in human nature, and pokes me to make more of my extra-desert life. I got the book as a gift yesterday, and it is really really well done; can't speak for the DVD.
Notably, it has given me a whole new outlet for my robotics obsession. I have tinkered with EL wire, LEDs, motors, seismometers, lasers, servos, and sound activated circuits. Other friends have learned to weld, build domes, and created elaborate games ( www.gyft.org ), costumes, props, and sculptures for the event. At the East Coast ( playadelfuego.org ) and Austin regional ( burnaustin.org ) events, an even merrier crew of hard core campers turns out, somehow.
There is a buttload of tech out there, from stage equipment to powerful lasers. There is wireless internet, pirate radio and TV, and amazing one-of-a-kind sound and light sculptures.
Of course, if you can't see past your own cynical ego, maybe it is better you don't come. You can go see bare breasts locally for much cheaper, and their owners won't threaten you for gawking. It is hot and dusty and cold and rainy and loud 24/7, with lines at the portapotties AND these people are freaks.
They're my people.
Heavy Duty Technical Data
I saw one of these out at Burning Man, and the dust there (too much, really) obviated dry ice for seeing the strings. I noodle with MIDI and PICs, so I'll tell you what I saw and how I'd do it.
Need:
lasers - grab a passle of pointers off ebay, watching for sneaky shipping/handling charges. Since you have to mount them, the short-profile "bullet" ones would be nicer than the longer ones. One pointer per string. If you have time, hack the power supply and switch so they all work together and don't eat 600 batteries.
laser detector - a phototransistor, although a photodiode would also work. Photoresistors might be a little slow, but could also work, maybe with a comparator to give it some snap. They also are at every Radio Shack, and their bigger target size may ease alignment.
If you want to do it another way, just have an high-mounted IR emitter that multiple high-looking IR detectors can see, then detect the shadow.
PIC or Basic Stamp - My preference (since I have the programmer already) would be to go with one of the new, larger PICs that has 28/40 pins and built in serial. 33 I/O lines is more than enough for a decent harp. Anything else (small PIC or Stamp) and you will need more external hardware to decode lines; you will have to bit-bang serial as well, potentially losing some notes. At $5 for the right chip, why suffer?
Detect change, spoot MIDI, repeat.
frame: stable alignment for lasers and detectors is key. If a laser turns off or gets misaligned, the detector thinks you are trying to play the note. Depending on the sound patch and your program, you may end up with either a stuck note or a missing note.
random thoughts: Work the one string method out (duh) before you commit it to solder. Use sockets. Have an all-notes-off button.
MIDI: Three bytes, 31250 baud; details everywhere. The velocity byte is going to be fixed unless you decide to do something clever with it; that may not be a problem if the patch/samples you are triggering are not that responsive to velocity. You could subtly vary the velocity plus or minus five or so just for kicks. With the built-in A/D you could read a volume pedal or pressure sensor easily. Note off messages are usually optional, but checking that the string has had some reset time (unshadowed) will have to be done.
Some pointers:
www.phanderson.com for cheap PICs/parts
www.melabs.com and www.basicmicro.com for PIC protoboards (and compilers). Melabs stuff rocks.
www.dontronics.com and john kerr on Ebay also have nice protos which I have used
Have fun!
My test drive opinions, negatives first:
- headaches - Very distracting and not fixed with OTC remedies. I consider this a killer side effect. I saw this at both 100mg and 200mg.
- da jitters - well, if you are going all Cornholio, it is going to cut into your productivity. I went from juggling 5 different things at once to dropping three and fucking up one of the remaining two. Maybe you can train yourself to keep it all together.
- elevated blood pressure - This may have something to do with the headaches, but that feeling of impending aneurysm does not rock.
- dehydration - I fly through the water, and all of my piss smells really rank and chemical-like. There is a productivity hit to this I suppose, and it seems like more than that imposed by chugging coffee.
- rebound - the crash can be hard, and the duration of sleep is not really predictable. I tended to be irritable the day after, as well.
positive: you are slightly more alert. 100mg and I can still sleep no problem. in my chair. . .not good. 200mg and you are are awake, but more side effect manifestation.
DO NOT take 4 per shift like the guy up there. You are going to get prescription info from Slashdot?
Don't be a dumbass: check out the info on ANY drug before you take it. Know the maximum dose. Know the interactions. Know the side effects. Know if it is excreted by the liver or kidney if you have problems with one of them. If you are going to take the doctor out of the loop, who is going to look out for your sorry ass?
If you can't figure out the majority of what the programmer is getting at... There's more than one way to RE-do it.
A dremel tool is great for case mods, toy mods, grinding things so they fit, as well as light drilling/polishing/making purty sparks.
Second place goes to a set of car speakers: the stock (usually paper) ones invariably suck, and they are in really bad shape after 2-3 years. Hit crutchfield.com for car-specific sizing specs. A whole new set of four for less than $200, and they will likely be enjoyed daily for years.
A few notes on your mini-screed:
Either it is no big deal and no security furor need transpire, OR he should have gone to Alcatel. You can't argue both, OK?
As it turns out, he DID contact Alcatel, and they rebuffed him, even denying (among other things) that the expert mode code existed in the product. That was obviously false, as a technical manual (previously available from Alcatel's Russian site) mentioned it, and it is present in plaintext when the code was disassembled.
"..decided he could make some quick bucks" How is he making quick bucks from this? If anything, it is a major-ass headache to have your phone ringing off the hook 24/7 and explaining things over and over to journalists. He is not going to start consulting more often or write a book, "DSL Takedown" about it (I fervently hope).
They have already started the closings in my neighborhood. Read the very interesting long term plans:
s e_ two.html
http://www.theonion.com/onion3709/starbucks_pha
At the recent Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference in Chicago, there was a lecture on optical imaging of the brain. I was skeptical (it goes through the skull HOW?). They showed that they could use different frequencies and short pulses to get a low-res view of the brain, largely by calculation of diffusion path lengths. They said that they could detect large asymmetries that you would see with a subdural bleed. Useful, but obvious. Then they said that they could detect smaller regional changes in blood flow caused by brain activity. Skeptical? So was I...Then they put a helmet on one of the researchers and showed raw signal over the motor strip and how it changed when he thought about moving his hand. That was very cool. Sure there are limitations because of the skull, but with a tighter matrix of emitters/detectors and some DSP power, this could be very useful.
Details? All I am sure of is that they were from a university in California. I'll dig around, though.
NB- This is not THAT different from the really really common use of LEDs to measure blood oxygenation and heartrate. It's all bloodflow.
I'll bet 1/5 of the readers do have Mindstorms kits lying around...And the rest are getting them for xmas. FWIW, you can get serially addressable H-bridges and stepper drivers almost as easily as servo controllers. It's easy to go nuts with these once you have them.
Noone has these lying around, but those omnidirectional wheels are something new-ish in the fairly staid field of homebrew robotics, and would be fun to noodle with whether driven from a PIC or an Athlon. Good for mazes, I'm sure.
The same foam-tape-and-superglue chassis could apply, but with a Basic Stamp II or (better and multitasking) BasicX-24, you wouldn't tie up your Palm--you could even use the Palm's IR to interact with the beast.
I agree: there is a non-negligible overhead to testing, installing, and "homogenizing" computers.
However...The (60 minutes) overhead to completely wipe a hard drive, then reinstall a cheap network card, whatever OS and a low overhead web browser (ie-opera) is too much? Burn-in and go. If it dies, take another CPU/monitor/keyboard/mouse off the "just fixed" pile. Availability through redundancy.
Addition (in lots) to the existing school equipment auction would at least get it into someone else's hands and free up space. You see a dusty pile; someone else sees usable or repairable monitors; someone else sees a pile of rare-earth magnets and stepper motors; someone else is hoping you didn't pull all the memory and hard drives.
About noone here on Slashdot learned programming on anything faster than a 486.
John (crusty old auction / hamfest veteran)
I think microcontrollers are another reasonable vector for early mind-molding:
(0) really pretty much dirt cheap: PIC or 68HC11 + C compiler + programmers + support hardware will run less than $200 / station and will fly even on outdated computers.
(1) Standard C is available; why learn a funky-ass dialect that limits you later? You get plenty of I/O experience, to boot.
(2) Provides understanding at the hardware level, with modest restrictions that tend to encourage creativity and discourage bloatware.
(3) teaches basic electronic skills, always a boon.
(4) projects are sooooo cheap that students can take them home when they are done!
J
Good compiler comparison info, C code, and parts: www.phanderson.com
The "priapism"...
Y'all are a bunch of screaming meemees. It is done, and the disclaimers and such are out there in the open just like in every other news media...
/. to a higher standard than TIME?
/. now?
Take the recent Time/Warner/AOL merger: Time magazine routinely announced the obvious conflict of interest in reporting on the subsidiary branches' issues. Actually, IMO they tended to be a little bit harsh in their judgements. Maybe it is just to put the less paranoid of us at ease while they are in the spotlight...or maybe they actually have Ethics.
Should we hold
Well, we can and DO...with the open forum here.
Is anyone really wound up enough to leave
More importantly, are we going to have to go through 1001 days/threads of haranguing them for their angle on this or that story? If so, the S/N ratio is going to take a hit and we are going to see an increase in "good ol' days before they got bought out" threads--->lower S/N
Can we have a "no finger-pointing bullshit ethics discussion" checkbox? That would help. Some people can't see the forest for the ticks.
John
untaken: www.killwhitey.com
.com addresses.
.edu? Probably all those old VAX honkers. yeeesh.
seriously, although I have no problem with domain-grabbing, the broad availability of addresses in other countries TLDs makes it seems like a losing battle. Then again, the average AOLer may not even know there is anything *but*
onjay
"whap or be whapped"
Who put the . in
Soma thoughts:
1) Smart pills: People are generally non-compliant medicationwise...I see people every day who have (or had) the means to deliver themselves from imminent morbidity/death, but do not. I hesitate to use the term "choose" because they really have the best intentions but their actions belie some lack of will or something. I posit that mere neuronal fluffiness is not motivation enough for anyone to do anything about. It reminds me of the ironic* mope of the Life Extension crowd in the late 80's, "I forgot to take my Hydergine."
2) You can forestall the detriment and up your charm points just by cross training your brain NOW so you have a higher baseline functionality. Remember the awesome global mental shift that occurred when you learned to play chess? Where is the challenge and growth now? Go out there and schmooze and dance and paint and juggle and use that other lobe. At least get so you can memorize 16 digit credit card numbers over people's shoulders.
onjay
(not one of those pi-memorizing MENSA types)
*True irony, not like "rain on your wedding day."
Their non-acceptance is well studied, and generally thought to be a function of user preference. We don't want to have to "get our muff fluffy" every damn time the phone rings, apparently.
onjay
definitively unfluffy
The SA article is very good...MHO:
"His new venture will not patent the human genome sequence itself, Venter states."
No, not the whole enchilada...only the GENES he finds (which will be tiny non-contiguous subsets of the genome). This guy is NOT benign, and his "I'll do it for free and give it away, so why don't you cut the Genome Project's funding, Honorable Congressman?" routine is the biotech version of FUD. What we will get for free is a picked-through-and-genes-patented, incomplete, and error-filled genome that other researchers will have to debug before using. Debug and LICENSE, if they want to use any of the parts that looked genelike when Ventner's team sped through. It's a gold rush mentality on his side of the coin, and he has free machines and reagents to turbocharge his efforts.
FWIW, The Genome Project is very OSS-like: daily updates to the shared genome database; shared technology (software, robotics, modifications on the PE machines), and nothing held back for patenting sake (you want to comb through and find a gene? Be their guest!). They are making amazing progress, partially due to Ventner setting their clothes on fire.
I gotta root for them, it's in my blood.
I have it on good authority that parallel development of Intel versions continues. It is just too large a potential market to ignore, esp having done all of the preceding work...I am NOT saying they have any plans to spring it on us anytime soon. Not at all. Nope. Sorry.
As a commmunity service, Rob should track us, send warnings, and then refer us to the proper agencies if we don't log in from another network address (indicating movement of some mild sort).
This sort of passive health measure is the wave of the future...salt shakers that screech when moved, pictures of smoker's lungs on the cigarette package (which will include a free nicotine patch), pictures of smokers' lungs on Godiva and Ben&Jerry's ice cream packages. Utensils that analyse and resist picking up food that is "unhealthy". Elevators that only go to a landing between every other floor (thus always a half floor of stairs + faster elevators).
Seriously, some little nag window to say, "Take a long focus break" would probably help some with that weird can't-focus-except-at-18-inches thing.
Pets are good for that.
John
(At burning man...what...a WEEK from now?)