My biggest technical find (although video rather than audio) has to be the University of Washington's CSE Colloquia. These are videos of presentations done in the University, and they are pure content gold. Given by people who know exactly what they're doing, and a focus on real technical complexity rather than hype.
There are a number of PDAs out that that sport full keyboards. Of them, the Psion 5a was probably the best. I still don't understand why clamshell keyboards aren't more popular.
My dad still owns an HP 2000, going on for more than 10 years now, and refuses to even touch Palm or Windows Mobile.
Seconded. I'd even go so far as to get a specialized backup box like a Buffalo Linkstation or a Mirra. Quieter, and probably more reliable than an old pentium as well. Old boxes have a tendency to flake out for me.
I dunno, it's gonna be hard to be more real than a guy falling into a vat of acid, having plastic surgery done to make himself look like clown and then defacing an art museum while dancing around to Prince music....
Yes, there are real differences between server equipment and desktop equipment. Most desktop components are built to be fast, cheap, and unreliable. They can and will flake if left on for long enough and subjected to server-grade levels of abuse.
I have a Sager 5670, but I just got an Athlon 64 to play games.
The Sager is good for things like Half-Life, but anything recent like Far Cry will kill it instantly. There's just no comparison between graphics cards for FPS. However, it plays Total Annihilation like no-one's business.
If you want a games machine, get a small form factor PC. Arstechnica has a handy buyer's guide, and the hot rod comes out to less than 2K (although w/o monitor).
There was a pretty huge list of PIMs, but the market was exterminated by Microsoft Outlook and never really recovered. In addition, only some of them integration with Palms.
RSIGuard has been really helpful at making me take breaks. It comes with a feature which remembers how many times you've skipped breaks and calculates your willpower from that.
It thinks I have very low willpower and won't let me skip any breaks. Locks me out of the computer completely, keyboard doesn't work.
The military, as one of the largest software developers on Earth, basically created software engineering and still pushes for hard numbers from projects and code.
When the military tried out OO technologies on flight simulators, they scheduled five different projects, the first one of which was set up to fail(!) so they could accurately determine what actual benefit they could get from OO.
The military is funding the semantic web technologies, notably DAML, in hopes of getting better AI -- this will be needed for better drones and autonomous agents, not to mention scanning for terrorist activities...
There's just no question involved. The military will do things no other organization would even think of doing.
Installing Java required patches all over the place, and the ports system of compiling from code meant that trying to set up a server with Java (like Tomcat or Resin) would pull down a ton of X related UI stuff that you'd have to clean up afterwards.
On top of that, there were some stability issues because of the differences in threading models and wotnot.
Admittedly I only have two machines to worry about, but since Perforce allows you two free clients, you can check in all your.zshrc and miscellaneous binaries into a Perforce repository. Mapping to my home directory is as simple as//users/wsargent/home/...//myclient/wsargent/...
and I don't have to mess around with CVS directories.
Slashdot Mirror
A low slashdot id is not a sign of intelligence.
My biggest technical find (although video rather than audio) has to be the University of Washington's CSE Colloquia. These are videos of presentations done in the University, and they are pure content gold. Given by people who know exactly what they're doing, and a focus on real technical complexity rather than hype.
l lid=485
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayseries.asp?co
There are a number of PDAs out that that sport full keyboards. Of them, the Psion 5a was probably the best. I still don't understand why clamshell keyboards aren't more popular.
My dad still owns an HP 2000, going on for more than 10 years now, and refuses to even touch Palm or Windows Mobile.
True, but it can take a while for me to find out that the box is dead. I'm not as careful as I should be about verifying my backups.
Seconded. I'd even go so far as to get a specialized backup box like a Buffalo Linkstation or a Mirra. Quieter, and probably more reliable than an old pentium as well. Old boxes have a tendency to flake out for me.
Seen the Michael Jackson trial recently?
yEd is pretty good. It builds off the yFiles library.
Also see the previous slashdot article about this and my own long boring post.
More details here.
The Sager is good for things like Half-Life, but anything recent like Far Cry will kill it instantly. There's just no comparison between graphics cards for FPS. However, it plays Total Annihilation like no-one's business.
If you want a games machine, get a small form factor PC. Arstechnica has a handy buyer's guide, and the hot rod comes out to less than 2K (although w/o monitor).
Visual Thought is freeware. Works on Windows, Solaris, HP, and Linux (under Wine).
There's also an Outlook plugin available.
I like using Ecco Pro and Shadow Plan. Details here and here.
http://john.redmood.com/organizers.htmlt ml
http://www.ypsolog.com/docs/comp/other/pim.html
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/toolkinds/organize.h
The odds are good that you'll find something that works.
I personally use Ecco Pro, Shadow Palm and DateBk5.
But then again, I'm a zealot.
"process model for a long time"
It's called isolates, and it's supposed to be in Java 1.6: http://www.bitser.net/isolate-interest/
There's a proof of concept in KaffeOS.
RSIGuard has been really helpful at making me take breaks. It comes with a feature which remembers how many times you've skipped breaks and calculates your willpower from that.
It thinks I have very low willpower and won't let me skip any breaks. Locks me out of the computer completely, keyboard doesn't work.
If she really wants to stay mobile and wants "small and light" then get her a TR series Vaio. If she's not a computer user, get her an 12 inch iBook.
Neither of them are cheap, but it'll be easier than doing tech support the next time she drops it...
Also check out:
. ht ml
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/toolkinds/organize
and
http://www.ypsolog.com/docs/comp/other/pim.html
It sounds like Inspiration and Zoot might be useful as well.
Things like PMD are pretty damn helpful as well. :-)
The military funded the Internet.
The military, as one of the largest software developers on Earth, basically created software engineering and still pushes for hard numbers from projects and code.
When the military tried out OO technologies on flight simulators, they scheduled five different projects, the first one of which was set up to fail(!) so they could accurately determine what actual benefit they could get from OO.
The military is funding the semantic web technologies, notably DAML, in hopes of getting better AI -- this will be needed for better drones and autonomous agents, not to mention scanning for terrorist activities...
There's just no question involved. The military will do things no other organization would even think of doing.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/1/17/21155/1564
"every response is basically the same"
Graham goes into this point explicitly -- a group strong enough to enforce groupthink, but weak enough to need it will enforce a taboo.
It's also not the case that Slashdot is open. You can't comment on Slashdot moderation policies, or criticize Slashdot policies openly in the forums.
I did.
Admittedly, most of it is incredibly boring if you're just randomly stumbling on it, but I get a fair amount of google hits.
You could do before, but it was really ugly.
Installing Java required patches all over the place, and the ports system of compiling from code meant that trying to set up a server with Java (like Tomcat or Resin) would pull down a ton of X related UI stuff that you'd have to clean up afterwards.
On top of that, there were some stability issues because of the differences in threading models and wotnot.
I'm happy with the service. They're not fast, but they're effective when it comes to something that would stump most admins.
Admittedly I only have two machines to worry about, but since Perforce allows you two free clients, you can check in all your .zshrc and miscellaneous binaries into a Perforce repository. Mapping to my home directory is as simple as //users/wsargent/home/... //myclient/wsargent/...
and I don't have to mess around with CVS directories.