as the subject says, if 'soundproof foam' existed folks building recording studios, vocal booths, practice rooms and so on would have a lot less issues!
As somebody that is also easily annoyed by noises and especially by people talking, the only things I can suggest are noise isolation headphones and a suitable source of noise (pink noise or something like raindrops, running water, etc.), the noise isolation headphones to lower the outside noise as much as possible, and the pink noise to mask it (otherwise you'd have to have the volume in your headphones way too loud).
You will find that pink noise or water noise masks voices pretty well if in tandem with the above, I sometimes even have to use isolation headphones (similar to the headphones that pit crews use on racing tracks) AND foam earplugs AND http://rain.simplynoise.com/ (with thunder disabled) to be able to concentrate in my current work environment.
... in a study that applied this concept to things like lottery winnings (would people buy lottery tickets as much if they didn't know anybody who won?) fear-based behaviors (would people be avoiding running in parks so much if they very rarely heard of related crimes?) dishonesty/narcissism (would people try so much to 'get ahead' by dishonest means if they didn't think that 'everybody does it' which is validated by watching the national news?) etc. etc. etc.
It seems that we spent many, many, many hundreds of years being routinely exposed only to a very small set of other people (the ones living in our village) which gave us a push towards conformity with our limited surroundings and its values and calibrated our 'probability meter' with that amount of 'throws of the dice' in mind. Nowadays no matter what you want to think/believe it is trivial to find many people sharing your point of view and/or finding events that validate your belief/magical thinking.
As I was saying before, if you had never ever met anybody in your life who won a lottery, you would be a lot more likely to look at lottery tickets as a very frivolous use of money, while nowadays where every few weeks you see in the news (with a special interest story, that makes you think you "know" these people) somebody wins a significant amount of money somewhere it's a lot easier to 'magical think' that lottery tickets are instead a lot more worth it (in statistical terms) than they really are.
Just like a lot of people I know that will not run alone in a park because somebody somewhere was victim of a crime and so they are afraid of doing so (without obviously realizing how low the probability that something like that would happen to them, much lower than the probability of them being run over by a car when they run along a road instead).
I don't think that we are equipped to extrapolate probabilities from the small to the large: when it comes to 50 people we are fairly capable of distinguishing normal occurrences, low probability occurrences and once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences, but when it comes to several hundred millions we really can't cope and cannot relate how something that happens to 10 people on a nation-wide level (say, win a lottery jackpot of 100+ millions) is way, way, way unlikely that will happen to us or to somebody we know personally. This is definitely affecting most people's behaviors, in some cases positively (say, rare disease sufferers can find somebody else somewhere that has their same symptoms and can get care, instead of being dismissed) but in many cases not overly so unfortunately.
you are kidding right? when learning English music was the hardest thing to learn to understand, and even now after many years it's still difficult to pick up words in a lot of cases. Why do you think they have all those 'misheard lyrics' websites?
I would like to see somebody learning English by listening to Elton John songs:)
which would be great so it'd be a lot more unlikely for drive-by malware install ads to run, and if they ran the website owners wouldn't have the typical excuse of "oh sorry, one of our ad networks was compromised, we apologize"
... that believes that the cloud is this magical place disconnected from the utility grid, immune to lightning strikes, floods, storm surges, etc. etc.
... it's that so many times ad-serving networks end up being compromised and send ads that end up installing malware on your computer: if sites ran their own SIMPLE ads (plain images, served by their own website, no flash/iframe/... crap) there would be a lot less problems.
Unfortunately that kind of ad-serving costs more money to do (easier to farm this out to an ad network) and since there are no penalties for doing so (if your ad provider is compromised and thousands of your users get hit by drive-by malware you say "sorry, not responsible, it's the ad provider's fault") that's why we're in the situation we're in where most tech savy people adblock as much as possible to reduce risks, which unfortunately hurts the content providers...
I honestly wish there was some sort of scheme where you could have some sort of microtransaction way to give $$$ to websites you use. Say you like/. a lot, you could decide that every time you visit, you'd pay $0.01 with a maximum of $0.25/day, say you don't like as much another site but you don't want to completely freeload, you could decide you still give them $0.01 but only with a maximum of $0.01/day. It might seem low, but with a lot of users it could add up quite a bit for sites, and I think more than the current ad-based approach.
Yes, this could probably add up to $50-100/month, but I'd be totally willing to pay that because I'd be supporting the sites I chose to, and sites wouldn't have to deal with subscriptions, they'd just get paid by the microtransaction provider once a month (minus of course a flat fee of some sort). The microtransaction providers could compete on fees etc. as long as there was interoperability so users wouldn't have to worry...
... software just based on how long it takes to launch things. If I want to play something it's not a big deal to wait the 10-20 seconds it takes to launch steam and waiting for it to connect to my account to allow the game to launch, but if I have some software I need to use for work and/or open/close several times that would get pretty annoying.
This said the steam advantages (and the inevitable steam sales) might make it more likely that people would overlook the speed issues, I am not sure.
that is pretty much what I ended up doing myself, I do think it was one of the reasons why I ended up in computer programming as a career, as there wasn't really much to buy in terms of prepackaged software... having an internal tape recorder (which worked quite well, not flaky at all) and a plotter to print out code and do fun stuff with was definitely nice.
I had made a deal with my dad that if I scored well in my middle school exam he'd buy me a C64, I studied really hard and did better than he expected, I was so happy when he went to the store but when he came back he had a Sharp MZ-700 instead (apparently the salesperson told him that was a much better computer, cough cough)
As much as I had fond memories of learning how to program on the MZ-700 and trying to get the built-in plotter to plot 3d math functions, still I remember the afternoons spent at my friends' house playing Archon and listening to SID music and wishing my computer could do more than beep... amazing it's already been 30 years!
Other than Python being inherently object-oriented, I can't fathom any reason for it over Perl for most tasks.
that is a really big 'other than', having had a lot of experience in both perl and python I have to say that as much as you can write workable software in either environment, for large applications I would give python the nod, given its better OO model.
For other tasks it's pretty much a wash between the two IMHO, although when working in a multi-developer environment python's whitespace constraints make the codebase look a lot cleaner (especially if you use things like pep8), and as a previous commenter said once you set things up in your editor of choice it's not that big of a deal.
that is because people running dynamos (usually randonneurs and/or long-distance cyclists in general) run hub dynamos, which are more efficient and don't chew your tires... as much as I agree that likely anything impinging on the walking mechanics could cause injuries, it really depends by the kind of dynamic resistance this type of device has and in which part of the walking cycle it would provide it.
that's why most people I know that listen to music while working/coding do not listen to pop (or vocal music in general), but to classical, trance etc. also the article says that silence is better than music in general, which is likely true, but among music and office noises (with random conversations/noises) I am sure people are more productive with music vs without
I think you might want to re-evaluate your comment, I am pretty sure I've read articles where football players (the soccer kind) had issues as well (although maybe not as severe) due to the large amount of headers that are required in certain roles
I don't think you're understanding what the other poster proposed: a well designed system, like they said, would have a user-modifiable root password (that you can set to whatever and change according to your password guidelines) *AND* a hardware switch that allows a default password to be used instead (so that if you lose your root password you can fix things without having major downtime).
The other poster's addition of flipping the switch = the device does not work (save for maybe a "change the password" function and a "update the firmware" one) is also extremely well advised so the switch can't be "forgotten" in the "vulnerable" position.
There is no $100k in downtime costs, on a day-to-day basis you use your own root password to do your own updates/changes, if your vendor needs to log in to do something you'd have to take your device offline anyways (or do you trust your vendor to muck around your production system while it's running?) so flipping a switch while coordinating the maintenance seems a trivial addition to the procedure (and secures you from somebody hacking into your vendor and updating your firmware without your knowledge, which could happen if you don't have something like this)
It's been xgames where the real athletes compete for more than a decade at this point.
you are right, I remember Michael Phelps really laying it down in the 200m freestyle, amazing how he could swim so fast in that snow powder filled pool, will be interesting to see the event this year without being allowed to wear those floating balloon suits...
and let's not forget Usain Bolt's great 100m-200m double, the snowshoes he wore were really cool!
... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
Personally I view it as protecting the right to sin. We have to have free choice, which means we have to have the right to be able to freely choose what is wrong for both us and society.
how can the choice be truly free if you don't have access to information about your choice? And how is legislating access to information impinging on your freedom? You can still eat a 1500kcal popcorn bucket if you so choose, nobody is forcing you to look at the nutritional information label.
It's just like if all food also had a carbon impact value as part of its labeling, you could still easily decide to buy fresh fruit from out of season imported from halfway around the world, or buy that coffee table you like so much made from rainforest wood, you just would be fully aware of the ramifications of your choice.
Or are you saying that having the information available infringes your right to be ignorant? in that case do you really believe your choice is free when you don't know if it's right/wrong for you/society (regardless if you want to choose right or wrong)? and what about the right of people that actually *do* want to make informed choices and so need the carbon/environmental/calorie data, shouldn't their rights be protected?
this +10000000000, the fact though is that there seems to be a perception in North America that sweating is "bad" (look at all the endless commercials about anti-perspirants, I mean, if an anti-perspirant worked as advertised you'd die due to not being able to thermoregulate)
When people say "I don't want to get to work and smell" what they are saying is more "I don't want to sweat and deal with it" IMHO. As you said as long as you shower in the morning before leaving (and don't live on garlic) you don't "smell" even if you sweat on your way to work...
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as the subject says, if 'soundproof foam' existed folks building recording studios, vocal booths, practice rooms and so on would have a lot less issues!
As somebody that is also easily annoyed by noises and especially by people talking, the only things I can suggest are noise isolation headphones and a suitable source of noise (pink noise or something like raindrops, running water, etc.), the noise isolation headphones to lower the outside noise as much as possible, and the pink noise to mask it (otherwise you'd have to have the volume in your headphones way too loud).
You will find that pink noise or water noise masks voices pretty well if in tandem with the above, I sometimes even have to use isolation headphones (similar to the headphones that pit crews use on racing tracks) AND foam earplugs AND http://rain.simplynoise.com/ (with thunder disabled) to be able to concentrate in my current work environment.
with a setter/getter you can
- make it thread safe
- set up defaults
- set up boundary/sanity checking
- easily debug any of the sets/gets if you need to
I don't think saving a few keystrokes is worth giving up all of the above...
... in a study that applied this concept to things like lottery winnings (would people buy lottery tickets as much if they didn't know anybody who won?) fear-based behaviors (would people be avoiding running in parks so much if they very rarely heard of related crimes?) dishonesty/narcissism (would people try so much to 'get ahead' by dishonest means if they didn't think that 'everybody does it' which is validated by watching the national news?) etc. etc. etc.
It seems that we spent many, many, many hundreds of years being routinely exposed only to a very small set of other people (the ones living in our village) which gave us a push towards conformity with our limited surroundings and its values and calibrated our 'probability meter' with that amount of 'throws of the dice' in mind. Nowadays no matter what you want to think/believe it is trivial to find many people sharing your point of view and/or finding events that validate your belief/magical thinking.
As I was saying before, if you had never ever met anybody in your life who won a lottery, you would be a lot more likely to look at lottery tickets as a very frivolous use of money, while nowadays where every few weeks you see in the news (with a special interest story, that makes you think you "know" these people) somebody wins a significant amount of money somewhere it's a lot easier to 'magical think' that lottery tickets are instead a lot more worth it (in statistical terms) than they really are.
Just like a lot of people I know that will not run alone in a park because somebody somewhere was victim of a crime and so they are afraid of doing so (without obviously realizing how low the probability that something like that would happen to them, much lower than the probability of them being run over by a car when they run along a road instead).
I don't think that we are equipped to extrapolate probabilities from the small to the large: when it comes to 50 people we are fairly capable of distinguishing normal occurrences, low probability occurrences and once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences, but when it comes to several hundred millions we really can't cope and cannot relate how something that happens to 10 people on a nation-wide level (say, win a lottery jackpot of 100+ millions) is way, way, way unlikely that will happen to us or to somebody we know personally. This is definitely affecting most people's behaviors, in some cases positively (say, rare disease sufferers can find somebody else somewhere that has their same symptoms and can get care, instead of being dismissed) but in many cases not overly so unfortunately.
I think 'vastly better security' is being able to run noscript + adblock + requestpolicy, I don't think you can do that in chrome, can you?
there sure is, although it wasn't on by default for me: enable pdfjs inside about:config and set the pdf in content to 'preview in firefox'
you are kidding right? when learning English music was the hardest thing to learn to understand, and even now after many years it's still difficult to pick up words in a lot of cases. Why do you think they have all those 'misheard lyrics' websites?
I would like to see somebody learning English by listening to Elton John songs :)
which would be great so it'd be a lot more unlikely for drive-by malware install ads to run, and if they ran the website owners wouldn't have the typical excuse of "oh sorry, one of our ad networks was compromised, we apologize"
... that believes that the cloud is this magical place disconnected from the utility grid, immune to lightning strikes, floods, storm surges, etc. etc.
... it's that so many times ad-serving networks end up being compromised and send ads that end up installing malware on your computer: if sites ran their own SIMPLE ads (plain images, served by their own website, no flash/iframe/... crap) there would be a lot less problems.
Unfortunately that kind of ad-serving costs more money to do (easier to farm this out to an ad network) and since there are no penalties for doing so (if your ad provider is compromised and thousands of your users get hit by drive-by malware you say "sorry, not responsible, it's the ad provider's fault") that's why we're in the situation we're in where most tech savy people adblock as much as possible to reduce risks, which unfortunately hurts the content providers...
I honestly wish there was some sort of scheme where you could have some sort of microtransaction way to give $$$ to websites you use. Say you like /. a lot, you could decide that every time you visit, you'd pay $0.01 with a maximum of $0.25/day, say you don't like as much another site but you don't want to completely freeload, you could decide you still give them $0.01 but only with a maximum of $0.01/day. It might seem low, but with a lot of users it could add up quite a bit for sites, and I think more than the current ad-based approach.
Yes, this could probably add up to $50-100/month, but I'd be totally willing to pay that because I'd be supporting the sites I chose to, and sites wouldn't have to deal with subscriptions, they'd just get paid by the microtransaction provider once a month (minus of course a flat fee of some sort). The microtransaction providers could compete on fees etc. as long as there was interoperability so users wouldn't have to worry...
... software just based on how long it takes to launch things. If I want to play something it's not a big deal to wait the 10-20 seconds it takes to launch steam and waiting for it to connect to my account to allow the game to launch, but if I have some software I need to use for work and/or open/close several times that would get pretty annoying.
This said the steam advantages (and the inevitable steam sales) might make it more likely that people would overlook the speed issues, I am not sure.
that is pretty much what I ended up doing myself, I do think it was one of the reasons why I ended up in computer programming as a career, as there wasn't really much to buy in terms of prepackaged software... having an internal tape recorder (which worked quite well, not flaky at all) and a plotter to print out code and do fun stuff with was definitely nice.
I had made a deal with my dad that if I scored well in my middle school exam he'd buy me a C64, I studied really hard and did better than he expected, I was so happy when he went to the store but when he came back he had a Sharp MZ-700 instead (apparently the salesperson told him that was a much better computer, cough cough)
As much as I had fond memories of learning how to program on the MZ-700 and trying to get the built-in plotter to plot 3d math functions, still I remember the afternoons spent at my friends' house playing Archon and listening to SID music and wishing my computer could do more than beep... amazing it's already been 30 years!
that is a really big 'other than', having had a lot of experience in both perl and python I have to say that as much as you can write workable software in either environment, for large applications I would give python the nod, given its better OO model.
For other tasks it's pretty much a wash between the two IMHO, although when working in a multi-developer environment python's whitespace constraints make the codebase look a lot cleaner (especially if you use things like pep8), and as a previous commenter said once you set things up in your editor of choice it's not that big of a deal.
For emacs this http://pedrokroger.net/2010/07/configuring-emacs-as-a-python-ide-2/ and this http://gabrielelanaro.github.com/emacs-for-python/ would be good starting points.
that is because people running dynamos (usually randonneurs and/or long-distance cyclists in general) run hub dynamos, which are more efficient and don't chew your tires... as much as I agree that likely anything impinging on the walking mechanics could cause injuries, it really depends by the kind of dynamic resistance this type of device has and in which part of the walking cycle it would provide it.
that's why most people I know that listen to music while working/coding do not listen to pop (or vocal music in general), but to classical, trance etc. also the article says that silence is better than music in general, which is likely true, but among music and office noises (with random conversations/noises) I am sure people are more productive with music vs without
he said "EARLY" airplane travel
I think you might want to re-evaluate your comment, I am pretty sure I've read articles where football players (the soccer kind) had issues as well (although maybe not as severe) due to the large amount of headers that are required in certain roles
I don't think you're understanding what the other poster proposed: a well designed system, like they said, would have a user-modifiable root password (that you can set to whatever and change according to your password guidelines) *AND* a hardware switch that allows a default password to be used instead (so that if you lose your root password you can fix things without having major downtime).
The other poster's addition of flipping the switch = the device does not work (save for maybe a "change the password" function and a "update the firmware" one) is also extremely well advised so the switch can't be "forgotten" in the "vulnerable" position.
There is no $100k in downtime costs, on a day-to-day basis you use your own root password to do your own updates/changes, if your vendor needs to log in to do something you'd have to take your device offline anyways (or do you trust your vendor to muck around your production system while it's running?) so flipping a switch while coordinating the maintenance seems a trivial addition to the procedure (and secures you from somebody hacking into your vendor and updating your firmware without your knowledge, which could happen if you don't have something like this)
you are right, I remember Michael Phelps really laying it down in the 200m freestyle, amazing how he could swim so fast in that snow powder filled pool, will be interesting to see the event this year without being allowed to wear those floating balloon suits...
and let's not forget Usain Bolt's great 100m-200m double, the snowshoes he wore were really cool!
oh, wait...
not talking about Syquest, talking about these
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
esp. the Fujitsu offerings seemed quite widespread at the time (a lot of people I knew had the 230MB ones)
you sure about that? if you cared about your files back then you'd use magneto-optical drives, which were quite reliable.
those look like "bad management" to me rather than intrinsic issues with excess workforce...
... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
how can the choice be truly free if you don't have access to information about your choice? And how is legislating access to information impinging on your freedom? You can still eat a 1500kcal popcorn bucket if you so choose, nobody is forcing you to look at the nutritional information label.
It's just like if all food also had a carbon impact value as part of its labeling, you could still easily decide to buy fresh fruit from out of season imported from halfway around the world, or buy that coffee table you like so much made from rainforest wood, you just would be fully aware of the ramifications of your choice.
Or are you saying that having the information available infringes your right to be ignorant? in that case do you really believe your choice is free when you don't know if it's right/wrong for you/society (regardless if you want to choose right or wrong)? and what about the right of people that actually *do* want to make informed choices and so need the carbon/environmental/calorie data, shouldn't their rights be protected?
this +10000000000, the fact though is that there seems to be a perception in North America that sweating is "bad" (look at all the endless commercials about anti-perspirants, I mean, if an anti-perspirant worked as advertised you'd die due to not being able to thermoregulate)
When people say "I don't want to get to work and smell" what they are saying is more "I don't want to sweat and deal with it" IMHO. As you said as long as you shower in the morning before leaving (and don't live on garlic) you don't "smell" even if you sweat on your way to work...