There are a few technical pieces missing from the comments here, and this story is still definitely developing. From Cyanogen's twitter feed today: "This is about proprietary device drivers and not Google at this point. These drivers are not redistributable."
This is a nice reminder that there's likely no building a usable phone room without infringing on some agreements. I do not expect this to change in the near future; what this means is that a sort of 'merge' or 'overwrite' or patch system will need to be put in place for people modding their phones.
This will take a little time to build would be my guess, but isn't insurmountable; I think the complexity of building such a thing should fit inside of the typical hacker attention span that's been piqued right now.
The most practical solution probably won't get you many friends, commodore64_love. I think that the original question asker wants to, you know, have people who like and appreciate him at his art-oriented school.
Since you seem like a black and white sort of dude, I'll say it in nerdish black and white: refusing to participate in social 'gifting' if you are not an alpha male guarantees that you will drop to the bottom of the social pecking order. Most non-outcast-y people get this intuitively, and it's one reason they have more friends. Outcasts can learn to do this, along with other social niceties and reintegrate, if they choose to.
Or, they can, you know, keep their laptops to themselves.
If it sounds harsh, sorry. I'm just trying to engage with you on the level and tone you did. Maybe it will help your social life.
For a number of years I've wanted a slashdot greasemonkey extension called something like "slashback" which would restrict all comments to people with UID lower than your own, thus returning slashdot to the same user community that got you to sign up in the first place.
I tear up a little just thinking about it, of course not enough to actually write such a thing.
Maybe next year, Taco? And, please keep the achievements, I love them! I'll come back tomorrow and be logged in, I promise!
You know I'm a geek and yet I cannot find one single person in the entire world to explain to me just what the fuck Pivot Tables are and why I would want to use them.
You are a geek. I assume therefore that you understand how to write queries in SQL which combine data for you in interesting ways, like say select sum(winnings) from roulette_betting_table group by betting_strategy;
Pivot Tables let stupid people do that in excel.
You could probably use Pivot Tables to count how many of your friends are K++ in the geek code or better, I suppose, if you kept them in an excel spreadsheet.
So, I guess the upshot is: don't bet on roulette? Pick up a book on SQL? Maybe you need some more geeky friends, or you could add "aspiring" to your geek appellation.
Oops, this is slashdot, and I responded in kind. What I meant to say is: "Don't be deliberately stupid, it gives geeks a bad name. Pivot Tables are useful to finance people and others who want to combine and analyze financial data in Excel."
The Nokia E90 Communicator is the only thing you really need on this trip.
First, my credentials: I travel all over the world for business, frequently. I have lugged Macs and PC's. I take multiple backup phones with me when I travel. I have personally used chinese tech-support spreadsheets to hack GPRS data settings into my phone in places like Mozambique.
Basically, you want an unlocked 3.5G phone, high quality e-mail support, probably occasional office format support, camera would be nice, but instant-on data is critical.
I've traveled with a bunch of HTC's, and still use an S710 as a backup / second SIM card phone when I travel, (and an iPhone for receiving personal calls) but I've found I don't really use my laptop that much when I travel as long as I have the Nokia on me. The keyboard is large enough that you can write something approximating business communication without major headaches.
Little features like instant internet data settings for 600+ cell providers world-wide are programmed into these phones: within a minute or two of landing in almost any country in the world, you can be up and running at 1.5 to 7 megabits on your damn phone!
The E90 has a built-in SIP client, so if you have a SIP-compatible provider in the states, you can even sign up for local data on a local SIM and have your home number ring through instantly.
Also, it has a FOCUSING 3megapixel camera, TV quality video camera, an okay media player, can print using bluetooth or infrared, has FM (and AM?) Radio, has fax support. Really, there's nothing like an E90. Did I mention it has a videophone built in? And a backlit keyboard. And it uses (I believe) Konqueror as the web-browser.
For what it's worth, I also typically travel with a thinkpad X61s (soon to be an X300), but it just doesn't come out of the bag that often unless I'm working on spreadsheet modeling. If I had to pick between losing my backed-up laptop on a trip, or my E90 so that I would have to downgrade to the HTC, I'd probably choose to lose the laptop.
I'm not going to be on the front lines anywhere and a minefield means that fewer of us have to be there.
That's an immensely selfish position, given the long-term civillian [sic] damage landmines have caused. I've been to towns in Cambodia where close to half of the inhabitants were missing limbs from old landmines. I'm given to understand that similar conditions exist in parts of Africa.
Similar conditions do exist in Africa; in Mozambique where some friends of mine do relief work, land mines are a huge problem. These particular landmines are plastic, and during flood season move around with the flooding mud. Much of Mozambique is unfarmable because nobody knows where these undetectable plastic landmines are. Estimated time to clean the country up from landmines is over 100 years with current methods.
(Actually, they are detectable. My friend Roland says the best way is crawling forward with a long heavy stick). The mines in Mozambique are tuned to explode at anything a child's weight or more. However 'useful' landmines are in wartime engagements, they encourage people to leave them behind where they can kill little children, as well as farmers. This is not a good weapon in my opinion.
It seems to me that landmines with radio signaling are a step in the right direction though; a metal detector could tell you where they are, and if they do hop, as described, you'd at least be able to locate them.
What bugs me is that I gave money to the buy Ghyslain a new Apple and ipod. People gave over $5,000 in appreciation for the enjoyment they got from his awesome video, including me.
I think taking the money and suing is what bugs me; it would be fine to sue (although I consider it a little socially irresponsible), and it would be better to take the free love from the internet and use your fame for something good like talking about teenage obesity. Doing both just rubs me the wrong way.
John Dvorak continues to be the biggest idiot in the tech commentator business. He's been making stupid predictions since at least the '80s, and shows no sign of stopping now. Dvorak wishes he had 1/10th of Robert Cringely's wit and insight. We wish that Dvorak would start scorecarding himself the way that Cringely does, and give up so that he can do something else with his time.
Okay, the story summary goes: Apple and Jobs have recently spent multi-tens of millions developing an Intel version of their operating system so that they can use Intel chips. Soon, they will throw away all that development work, infrastructure work, and vendor relationship work and just use Windows, maybe putting a pretty little 'Mac-a-like' face on top of Windows, because, wait for it, because: Steve Jobs wants to be just like Dell and Compaq.
The ignorance beggars comprehension.
As a comparison, Robert Cringely's prediction: free versions of OS X 10.4/intel given away on bootable ipods so that windows users can try mac for free (once 10.5 comes out.)
Fun first nine minutes. Very exciting. These people are idiots, though. The beginning was so awesome I definitely would have paid four or five bucks to watch it after watching the beginning. I'll go to the theater to see it, but I doubt they'll see four or five dollars of my money once the theater cut is out of the way.
I clearly remember thinking he was a huge idiot when I was 13 years old, in 1988. To this day, I find him annoying. Dvorak is like Robert Cringeley but two standard deviations down the IQ scale.
Of course, I also loved "Winger" when I was 13, so I probably shouldn't throw stones.
There's already a lot of discussion here about how IE's XSL transforms (and CSS support in printing) both suck, and how a proper workflow for XSL involves a server-side transform.
The authors of their CSS Rocks article are imagining that you're going to use software like Prince, (software that one of them created) to apply CSS3 rules to XML and get PDFs out of them.
Another way to say this is that they're not talking about how to fix the browser -> print workflow in this article (although one of the authors works for Opera, so I imagine he's thinking about it). They're talking about easy ways to transform XML to PDFs, and discussing why you might use CSS to do such a thing.
This courteous and friendly rationalizing of the slashdot editor's inflammatory post has been brought to you by my company, which is paying me for the time I use to write this. The opinions, of course, are mine only.
I'd let him comment on my writing, too. Just because it would make me look great.
His writing is so abysmal that it just makes Stephenson look even smarter by comparison. I stopped after he turned the car dealer metaphor into a monkey metaphor.
Monkeys? Chauffering me around? Dude, I'm freaking out. Car dealers I get. Linux, OS X, BeOS and Microsoft, I get.
Chauffer monkeys? I don't get. Never had one, never want to have one. I don't even want to think about little blue-suit monkey-men driving me around. What kind of world do you live in??
I'm stuck now, because I want to go back and re-read the original, but I can't take more of the monkeys. Google gave me this link: perhaps you all will appreciate it as well. Original Command Line essay without the monkeys.
Unless I just totally missed the boat, Windows and Linux have a file size limitation of around 2 gigabytes.
You just totally missed the boat. On Linux, ext2 has a 2 gig size limit, but ext3 and other modern filesystems don't have such a limit. I'm also fairly sure that Windows XP has no such limit on NTFS.
hopefully the 'human' factor is addressed. You know, passwords like 'password' or the person's initials. The weakest link in the chain has always been the humans...well, save for that time in the 2001 movie, but I digress.
Actually, you have literally no idea of how a quantum encrypted network works. What's interesting about the quantum encrypted network is not whether it keeps password cracking from L33T hackers, but how it makes sniffing along the connection either impossible, or impossible without being noticeable, depending on the implementation.
This is a bit disingenous: Here's a table with US / Sweden / SK Military spending as a percent of 2003 GDP:
All in Billions of US$
Mil. Budget GDP Percent US $399 $10,381 3.6% Sweden 4.5 238 1.9% South Korea 14.1 855 1.2% Saudi Arabia 21.3 286 7.4% Japan 42.6 3,567 1.2%
Compare this to World War 2 when German military spending as percent of GDP was well over 100%. (Easy to understand why 'hyperinflation' was a problem.)
So, I would agree that the US spends more of its budget on military than sweden (duh, I suppose), but the US doesn't spend 100x as your numbers make it look, once you've adjusted for the productivity of America. In fact, it's closer to double as a percent of the US' total output.
Here are some results from IBM's long term research on programmers / "thought" type workers in general:
Programmers need 100 square feet of space, and 30 square feet of desk space for optimal productivity. More doesn't really help. I also personally feel two monitors drastically increases efficiency, but IBM didn't make any comments on this in the 80s when they did this research.
Offices are good. Cubes are bad. If your cube walls are over 7 feet tall, they function about like walls would. (But, since you're rolling your own space, go with offices. Note that Microsoft uses offices as well.)
People need their back to a wall. Backs to the door / window = tension.
Programmers need to be able to close the door, so:
Doors
Phones with "Do Not Disturb" Buttons
A culture that lets them close the door
Also, programmers frequently work in small groups; this means that they're more efficient when they can talk to each other. This also works contrary to the 'doors' stuff above: Here's one suggestion I read which synthesizes all this:
Three programmer team: They get one office, 300 square feet, arranged as follows, each one has a desk, and faces out from the wall. Partitions / dividers / plants, create some privacy. This is about 200 of the square feet. The remaining is a small couch and a chair, plus a whiteboard area for those really great discussions. The whole room has a door, which will probably be mostly closed. The common area is nearest the door.
You get the idea. This space is centered around helping programmers get in the 'zone' when they need to, and helping them get quick answers from their team when they need to.
Wrong. Widespread use of graphics on the Internet didn't really take off until JPEG and GIF compression became common. The Web-- which is only one part of the Internet, and not a synonym for it-- had GIF and JPEG from day one.
Sorry, wrong! Mosaic did not include JPEG support in early revs. JPEG was one of the 'killer features' of the upstart Netscape browser written by some whipper snapper from UIUC, I forget his name.. So much more is wrong with your post, but I'll restrain myself from commenting on the rest of it.
The specs look like this is aimed at a corporate market? Strange since a whitebox computer would be cheaper. I suppose power consumption, etc. are all important. The T5500 comes with 128mb of RAM, and the 733mhz Crusoe 5800 processor, runs Windows CE and IE 6, and supports Citrix, etc.
I still think I'd prefer a whitebox with no hard drive running LTSP.
Airplanes can be crashed / have their course change by a sufficient number of people turning on their cell phones during flight?
RIGHT. This is why they search your shoes for bombs, but don't bother to take away your laptop, cell phone, and pager. Because the laptop cell phone and pager are HIGHLY dangerous articles.
If the FAA were convinced, even slightly, that your cellphone could have a legitimately bad effect on the safety of the flight, THEY WOULD NOT LET YOU HAVE IT. That should be obvious to anyone who has flown in the last two years.
I find that the original, color IBM PC text interface for nethack is the one I'm best at. I think this is for a few reasons:
The Information density of colored text is quite high. This is because font designers spent years making sure that for your 96 pixels, you got 128 very different looking things. Frankly, the text is easier to read than most tilesets. I know at a glance that two small light blue ds are winter wolves. How many artists can accurately convey 'winter wolf' to me in a 32x32 icon? And make it distinguishable from a silver wolf?
Having played nethack for 10 years or so, I definitely 'get' the map generator. So I almost always know which rooms have secret doors, where to look for passages, etc. I've found this really hard to do in isometric view. Also, even though I run at 1600x1200, I haven't found an isometric view which lets me see the whole level at a time. Unlike ASCII.
I already am bad enough at the game that I don't need another layer of confusion (What, those were Uruk-hai? Not gnomes?) added to my poor playing. I'll stick with ASCII, thank you very much.
I used to think this, too, until Mr. Checkers in Harvard Square gave me a 45 minute lesson. Did you know that you can manipulate who will eventually lose a piece by making sure that you have an odd number of pieces on a column at the end of the move, as long as your opponent has an even number?
This is a classic problem for people who are just starting to contract out. As someone who use to contract out, and someone who now frequently hires young contractors, I can give you a few thoughts from both sides of the fence:
Every employer worth working for will expect to pay you something for your time. A helpful employer working with a young contractor will bring up the topic of compensation for you. Don't expect that to happen.
Here's how to bring up the topic of compensation if you're not talking to a particularly helpful one:
Say "I'd be happy to help, and I think I have a good mix of skills to do that. My going rate is $x an hour, with a minimum of $y."
Agree on a price with yourself before you sit down to the negotiation. Until you've done this for a while, you're going to talk yourself down in the meeting. So, you'll intend to say the above, but instead you'll say "My going rate is $x an hour. [1 second pause, in which you think "Oh my God, that's too high. They're going to be angry."] But, for you, $x/3." I have done this, and seen it happen so many times, I can't even count them. Younger types sometimes have their hands shake when they say their price. That's a sure tip-off to an employer that they can lowball an offer.
When you're starting out, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE that you are going to ask for a price higher than you're worth. I know it won't feel like it, but believe me, it's true. Use the following calculation to get at a price you SHOULD NOT go lower than in your offer: Take your fair Annual Salary, divide by $2,000. This is what you would get in salary per hour as a full time employee of a company. Now, multiple by 1+ (50% for taxes and expenses + at least 50% to account for sales time, time you're not working, time you spend pitching and doing project spec and evaluation + 50-80% to account for the employers lower costs hiring a contractor, [no social security, medicare, can fire you when they want, etc.] ) = multiply by 2.8 as a BASELINE. It's not worth going below this number, trust me. You are losing money, net. So, if you made 60k as a programmer, that = $30 an hour * 2.8 = $94/hr as a baseline.
If you want to get to your baseline number, you can't start there with an offer. Start higher. That way IF you are talked down, you have some room before you have to say "no, sorry."
Don't be afraid to say "Sorry, sounds like it won't work. Call me if you change your mind." If you're never turned down at a certain price, you are too cheap!.
NEVER work with an employer who asks for free work, etc. You should prove your value to them, but not by doing free work. Just say "Actually, I don't work in situations like that because I've found that usually people who want a situation like that aren't prepared to pay for my real value." If they ask again, just say goodbye. TRUST ME, the money that you finally get out of them WILL NOT BE WORTH IT.
Sadly, I'm late, and have to go before I finish, but for a simple book on how to negotiate, I'd recommend Gary Karrass' book, Negotiate to Close. Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few technical pieces missing from the comments here, and this story is still definitely developing. From Cyanogen's twitter feed today: "This is about proprietary device drivers and not Google at this point. These drivers are not redistributable."
This is a nice reminder that there's likely no building a usable phone room without infringing on some agreements. I do not expect this to change in the near future; what this means is that a sort of 'merge' or 'overwrite' or patch system will need to be put in place for people modding their phones.
This will take a little time to build would be my guess, but isn't insurmountable; I think the complexity of building such a thing should fit inside of the typical hacker attention span that's been piqued right now.
The most practical solution probably won't get you many friends, commodore64_love. I think that the original question asker wants to, you know, have people who like and appreciate him at his art-oriented school.
Since you seem like a black and white sort of dude, I'll say it in nerdish black and white: refusing to participate in social 'gifting' if you are not an alpha male guarantees that you will drop to the bottom of the social pecking order. Most non-outcast-y people get this intuitively, and it's one reason they have more friends. Outcasts can learn to do this, along with other social niceties and reintegrate, if they choose to.
Or, they can, you know, keep their laptops to themselves.
If it sounds harsh, sorry. I'm just trying to engage with you on the level and tone you did. Maybe it will help your social life.
For a number of years I've wanted a slashdot greasemonkey extension called something like "slashback" which would restrict all comments to people with UID lower than your own, thus returning slashdot to the same user community that got you to sign up in the first place.
I tear up a little just thinking about it, of course not enough to actually write such a thing.
Maybe next year, Taco? And, please keep the achievements, I love them! I'll come back tomorrow and be logged in, I promise!
You know I'm a geek and yet I cannot find one single person in the entire world to explain to me just what the fuck Pivot Tables are and why I would want to use them.
You are a geek. I assume therefore that you understand how to write queries in SQL which combine data for you in interesting ways, like say select sum(winnings) from roulette_betting_table group by betting_strategy;
Pivot Tables let stupid people do that in excel.
You could probably use Pivot Tables to count how many of your friends are K++ in the geek code or better, I suppose, if you kept them in an excel spreadsheet.
So, I guess the upshot is: don't bet on roulette? Pick up a book on SQL? Maybe you need some more geeky friends, or you could add "aspiring" to your geek appellation.
Oops, this is slashdot, and I responded in kind. What I meant to say is: "Don't be deliberately stupid, it gives geeks a bad name. Pivot Tables are useful to finance people and others who want to combine and analyze financial data in Excel."
The Nokia E90 Communicator is the only thing you really need on this trip.
First, my credentials: I travel all over the world for business, frequently. I have lugged Macs and PC's. I take multiple backup phones with me when I travel. I have personally used chinese tech-support spreadsheets to hack GPRS data settings into my phone in places like Mozambique.
Basically, you want an unlocked 3.5G phone, high quality e-mail support, probably occasional office format support, camera would be nice, but instant-on data is critical.
I've traveled with a bunch of HTC's, and still use an S710 as a backup / second SIM card phone when I travel, (and an iPhone for receiving personal calls) but I've found I don't really use my laptop that much when I travel as long as I have the Nokia on me. The keyboard is large enough that you can write something approximating business communication without major headaches.
Little features like instant internet data settings for 600+ cell providers world-wide are programmed into these phones: within a minute or two of landing in almost any country in the world, you can be up and running at 1.5 to 7 megabits on your damn phone!
The E90 has a built-in SIP client, so if you have a SIP-compatible provider in the states, you can even sign up for local data on a local SIM and have your home number ring through instantly.
Also, it has a FOCUSING 3megapixel camera, TV quality video camera, an okay media player, can print using bluetooth or infrared, has FM (and AM?) Radio, has fax support. Really, there's nothing like an E90. Did I mention it has a videophone built in? And a backlit keyboard. And it uses (I believe) Konqueror as the web-browser.
For what it's worth, I also typically travel with a thinkpad X61s (soon to be an X300), but it just doesn't come out of the bag that often unless I'm working on spreadsheet modeling. If I had to pick between losing my backed-up laptop on a trip, or my E90 so that I would have to downgrade to the HTC, I'd probably choose to lose the laptop.
Similar conditions do exist in Africa; in Mozambique where some friends of mine do relief work, land mines are a huge problem. These particular landmines are plastic, and during flood season move around with the flooding mud. Much of Mozambique is unfarmable because nobody knows where these undetectable plastic landmines are. Estimated time to clean the country up from landmines is over 100 years with current methods.
(Actually, they are detectable. My friend Roland says the best way is crawling forward with a long heavy stick). The mines in Mozambique are tuned to explode at anything a child's weight or more. However 'useful' landmines are in wartime engagements, they encourage people to leave them behind where they can kill little children, as well as farmers. This is not a good weapon in my opinion.
It seems to me that landmines with radio signaling are a step in the right direction though; a metal detector could tell you where they are, and if they do hop, as described, you'd at least be able to locate them.
What bugs me is that I gave money to the buy Ghyslain a new Apple and ipod. People gave over $5,000 in appreciation for the enjoyment they got from his awesome video, including me.
I think taking the money and suing is what bugs me; it would be fine to sue (although I consider it a little socially irresponsible), and it would be better to take the free love from the internet and use your fame for something good like talking about teenage obesity. Doing both just rubs me the wrong way.
Story restated
John Dvorak continues to be the biggest idiot in the tech commentator business. He's been making stupid predictions since at least the '80s, and shows no sign of stopping now. Dvorak wishes he had 1/10th of Robert Cringely's wit and insight. We wish that Dvorak would start scorecarding himself the way that Cringely does, and give up so that he can do something else with his time.
Okay, the story summary goes: Apple and Jobs have recently spent multi-tens of millions developing an Intel version of their operating system so that they can use Intel chips. Soon, they will throw away all that development work, infrastructure work, and vendor relationship work and just use Windows, maybe putting a pretty little 'Mac-a-like' face on top of Windows, because, wait for it, because: Steve Jobs wants to be just like Dell and Compaq.
The ignorance beggars comprehension.
As a comparison, Robert Cringely's prediction: free versions of OS X 10.4/intel given away on bootable ipods so that windows users can try mac for free (once 10.5 comes out.)
Fun first nine minutes. Very exciting. These people are idiots, though. The beginning was so awesome I definitely would have paid four or five bucks to watch it after watching the beginning. I'll go to the theater to see it, but I doubt they'll see four or five dollars of my money once the theater cut is out of the way.
Cluetrain coming? Someday soon.
Ding Ding Ding!
I clearly remember thinking he was a huge idiot when I was 13 years old, in 1988. To this day, I find him annoying. Dvorak is like Robert Cringeley but two standard deviations down the IQ scale.
Of course, I also loved "Winger" when I was 13, so I probably shouldn't throw stones.
There's already a lot of discussion here about how IE's XSL transforms (and CSS support in printing) both suck, and how a proper workflow for XSL involves a server-side transform.
The authors of their CSS Rocks article are imagining that you're going to use software like Prince, (software that one of them created) to apply CSS3 rules to XML and get PDFs out of them.
Another way to say this is that they're not talking about how to fix the browser -> print workflow in this article (although one of the authors works for Opera, so I imagine he's thinking about it). They're talking about easy ways to transform XML to PDFs, and discussing why you might use CSS to do such a thing.
This courteous and friendly rationalizing of the slashdot editor's inflammatory post has been brought to you by my company, which is paying me for the time I use to write this. The opinions, of course, are mine only.
I'd let him comment on my writing, too. Just because it would make me look great.
His writing is so abysmal that it just makes Stephenson look even smarter by comparison. I stopped after he turned the car dealer metaphor into a monkey metaphor.
Monkeys? Chauffering me around? Dude, I'm freaking out. Car dealers I get. Linux, OS X, BeOS and Microsoft, I get.
Chauffer monkeys? I don't get. Never had one, never want to have one. I don't even want to think about little blue-suit monkey-men driving me around. What kind of world do you live in??
I'm stuck now, because I want to go back and re-read the original, but I can't take more of the monkeys. Google gave me this link: perhaps you all will appreciate it as well. Original Command Line essay without the monkeys.
Unless I just totally missed the boat, Windows and Linux have a file size limitation of around 2 gigabytes.
You just totally missed the boat. On Linux, ext2 has a 2 gig size limit, but ext3 and other modern filesystems don't have such a limit. I'm also fairly sure that Windows XP has no such limit on NTFS.
Sounds like good news for you!
Actually, you have literally no idea of how a quantum encrypted network works. What's interesting about the quantum encrypted network is not whether it keeps password cracking from L33T hackers, but how it makes sniffing along the connection either impossible, or impossible without being noticeable, depending on the implementation.
All in Billions of US$Compare this to World War 2 when German military spending as percent of GDP was well over 100%. (Easy to understand why 'hyperinflation' was a problem.)
So, I would agree that the US spends more of its budget on military than sweden (duh, I suppose), but the US doesn't spend 100x as your numbers make it look, once you've adjusted for the productivity of America. In fact, it's closer to double as a percent of the US' total output.
Programmers need 100 square feet of space, and 30 square feet of desk space for optimal productivity. More doesn't really help. I also personally feel two monitors drastically increases efficiency, but IBM didn't make any comments on this in the 80s when they did this research.
Offices are good. Cubes are bad. If your cube walls are over 7 feet tall, they function about like walls would. (But, since you're rolling your own space, go with offices. Note that Microsoft uses offices as well.)
People need their back to a wall. Backs to the door / window = tension.
Programmers need to be able to close the door, so:
Also, programmers frequently work in small groups; this means that they're more efficient when they can talk to each other. This also works contrary to the 'doors' stuff above: Here's one suggestion I read which synthesizes all this:
Three programmer team: They get one office, 300 square feet, arranged as follows, each one has a desk, and faces out from the wall. Partitions / dividers / plants, create some privacy. This is about 200 of the square feet. The remaining is a small couch and a chair, plus a whiteboard area for those really great discussions. The whole room has a door, which will probably be mostly closed. The common area is nearest the door.
You get the idea. This space is centered around helping programmers get in the 'zone' when they need to, and helping them get quick answers from their team when they need to.
Sorry, wrong! Mosaic did not include JPEG support in early revs. JPEG was one of the 'killer features' of the upstart Netscape browser written by some whipper snapper from UIUC, I forget his name.. So much more is wrong with your post, but I'll restrain myself from commenting on the rest of it.
The first time I saw one of these, I had the following conversation:
Chat Popup: Hi, My name is John, do you have any questions about our products?
Me: <pause> Hi, John. What do you do again?
Chat Popup: I'm just here to help you, and make sure any questions you have are answered. What can I do for you?
Me: <pause> Interesting... Can you prove you're a human?
At this point, the chat window closed suddenly. I thought, "damn. pretty good.."
Who will set up a legal defense fund for this woman?
(erm, this is slashdot. Let me restate:)
Who will setup a trustworthy legal defense fund for this woman?
Have you heard of Vessenes' Rule of Pornography? You might be more right than you think.
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/1174 6_ca/11746_ca.PDF
The specs look like this is aimed at a corporate market? Strange since a whitebox computer would be cheaper. I suppose power consumption, etc. are all important. The T5500 comes with 128mb of RAM, and the 733mhz Crusoe 5800 processor, runs Windows CE and IE 6, and supports Citrix, etc.
I still think I'd prefer a whitebox with no hard drive running LTSP.
Just to check in --
Airplanes can be crashed / have their course change by a sufficient number of people turning on their cell phones during flight?
RIGHT. This is why they search your shoes for bombs, but don't bother to take away your laptop, cell phone, and pager. Because the laptop cell phone and pager are HIGHLY dangerous articles.
If the FAA were convinced, even slightly, that your cellphone could have a legitimately bad effect on the safety of the flight, THEY WOULD NOT LET YOU HAVE IT. That should be obvious to anyone who has flown in the last two years.
- The Information density of colored text is quite high. This is because font designers spent years making sure that for your 96 pixels, you got 128 very different looking things. Frankly, the text is easier to read than most tilesets. I know at a glance that two small light blue ds are winter wolves. How many artists can accurately convey 'winter wolf' to me in a 32x32 icon? And make it distinguishable from a silver wolf?
- Having played nethack for 10 years or so, I definitely 'get' the map generator. So I almost always know which rooms have secret doors, where to look for passages, etc. I've found this really hard to do in isometric view. Also, even though I run at 1600x1200, I haven't found an isometric view which lets me see the whole level at a time. Unlike ASCII.
I already am bad enough at the game that I don't need another layer of confusion (What, those were Uruk-hai? Not gnomes?) added to my poor playing. I'll stick with ASCII, thank you very much.I used to think this, too, until Mr. Checkers in Harvard Square gave me a 45 minute lesson. Did you know that you can manipulate who will eventually lose a piece by making sure that you have an odd number of pieces on a column at the end of the move, as long as your opponent has an even number?
Here's how to bring up the topic of compensation if you're not talking to a particularly helpful one: