A web proxy can rewrite content arbitrarily, including this type of mod. Just run your own proxy on your own server. Maybe even a home server if your ISP doesn't block that: this example is a very good reason to make a political push for the expanded definition of "network neutrality", that is, all ports are open, nothing is blocked, you have the freedom to publish from home. (You can always secure your own proxy if you don't want other people to use it.)
Failing that, there is shared hosting where you could run your own personal proxy that augments the capabilities of the browser itself.
Another feature I've been wanting to write a proxy for (and haven't gotten around to!) is to store my web history permanently and make it searchable, so I can find forgotten web sites again. It should be able to store notes I write about sites, so I can search those too.
Installing a lot of redundant "last mile" paths is hard. Redundant == inefficient. Maybe there's more competition in Tokyo because of the density, whereas in the US, how many different ways can we afford to wire the same suburban subdivision? Having copper pairs and coax cable at the same time is already better than just one or the other.
The future is probably wireless. In a decade or two these arguments about whether there is enough fiber going to every house, and what the government ought to do to encourage it, will seem quaint.
The FCC should have the proliferation of wireless internet services as its top priority. There needs to be a huge chunk of bandwidth (like say a couple of those sweet VHF TV channels) that is not sold off but really belongs to the people, dedicated to free and open networks (WiFi with longer range) and let companies and individuals share that band, just as with the coexistence of commercial hotspots and open routers today. Then let the companies who bought licenses for narrower bands try to compete with that. Some of them will find lucrative niches, but everyone will have the lowest-common-denominator open network at low cost. And let the ground-based networks (fiber, cable etc.) compete with that too. They will have to offer really insane bandwidth to stay ahead of the cheaper wireless services. For a while they will offer an advantage. But wireless will take over eventually.
instead of the year or some letter combination or a random word... geez they could have been consistent all these years, but no. After trying everything else, we're back to just the numbers. (Will there be a 7.1 too?)
No, that means if you *charge* your laptop battery every day you'll need one that often (I didn't check your math, but that's not my point). If you use your laptop as a desktop replacement, as many Apple owners seem to do (especially that big honkin' 17" we're talking about), it's probably plugged-in all the time, and I'm hoping that Apple made it not recharge the battery all the time it's plugged in, so it may last much, much longer than that.
Yeah one would hope.:-)
Nevertheless LiPoly batteries seem to last 3 years or less even when you are kind to them, before something goes wrong (severe reduction of capacity, start expanding like a balloon and prying the case apart, total failure etc.)
Yesterday (and before) the rumor was that it would be a ZPower silver-zinc battery which would last 5 years or so. But this is the same old Lithium Polymer technology, which starts degrading right away and will need to be replaced in 3 years (or much less if you charge it too often). It's a bummer to know right up-front that you are going to have this pain in the butt to look forward to so soon. Long life between charges is not enough: it needs to have a long total lifetime before they should be making it non-removeable. The computer will definitely not be obsolete by the time the battery wears out, so you will have to replace it at least once. And the "recycling" for LiPoly is pathetic (they just recover the cobalt and burn all the lithium, which is quite a waste of such a rare metal).
And still no tablet! (iPhone doesn't count, I mean a real tablet Mac) And no upgraded Mini!
Software engineering is a relatively cushy job - good pay, sitting comfortably and thinking and writing. Of course it has its annoyances (meetings, bad managers, ridiculous deadlines, some coworkers more motivated while others get in your way, etc.) I used to think when I was starting college that I didn't want to spend my life sitting in front of a computer - even though I'd already seen by that point that writing software was one of the things I was best at, had a real aptitude for. So I got an electrical engineering degree, thinking it might lead to some slightly more physically active work of some sort (I had no idea what) and less carpal-tunnel syndrome. But my grades were disappointing at times, so maybe it was not right that I was doing something a little to the side of what I really loved most. I liked the digital stuff but had a hard time with anything too math intensive (semiconductor stuff, e-mag etc.) CS would have been so much easier for me.
Then when I graduated, I happened to land a software job. After that got my career started, there didn't seem to be any point in going back (look for an entry-level job in a different field, or get a big raise by taking the job in which you already have experience... hmm tough choice). So it might turn out the same way for you - you tend to get sucked in, because there are so many software jobs and it's kindof fun and pays well. Unless you are really determined to do something else... but then I guess you will have to think of those ideas yourself. If you were more entrepreneurial by nature I guess you wouldn't be asking here "what do I do now".
You could always go on and get an advanced degree while you figure out what else to do. I wish I had done that, but my financial situation was bad (came from a poor family, had to work my way through the university) and I was so ready to go get a real job and make some real money.:-) Then after getting sucked in like that you don't feel so inclined to go back to academia, although it sure would have been a good idea. (Maybe I still will, but it's so much easier to procrastinate. And I tend to think my time might be better spent starting a company... something else I procrastinate too much.)
If I had it to do over (and could somehow figure out how to afford it), I'd have gone to MIT or University of Indiana or some other place that teaches in Scheme. And I'd go right on and get a master's or PhD after that.
Of course take every advantage that you can, of summer internship opportunities. I didn't do much of that: wish I had been able to find good ones. I have worked with interns in my career and seen how they tend to be sucked in too, which can be an awesome thing if you get the right internship at a company where you'd really like to work.
By all means put off getting married as long as possible (or maybe never do it)... as emotionally satisfying as it is, it really does slow you down from whatever you planned to achieve.
iTunes is great for "window shopping" but why buy hobbled content when the physical CD can often be had for less money on ebay or amazon? (assuming you pay 99 cents - 1.29 for each track, and there are 10 or more on the disc) I might make an exception for the DRM-free MP3, but it's MP3... yuck. I like to rip my CDs to FLAC for the Squeezebox and MP3 for the iPhone. To me the DRM-free MP3s are worth about 25 - 50 cents per track, no more. If it was that cheap I'd go for the convenience factor I guess.
So I guess you could say I've been "boycotting" DRM all along. I could count the tracks I've bought on iTunes on one hand.
Anybody who read On Intelligence would have already gotten that point, loud and clear. It presents what seems like some believable hypotheses to me, but there is a lot of speculation, and at the end he proposes experiments that could be used to verify the hypotheses. He also makes the point that indeed we still don't know much about how the brain works, and had better start figuring it out and earnestly trying to emulate it, rather than keep working with our existing pale immitations such as conventional AI and primitive neural nets which seem to have reached their limits.
The first approach I can think of would be to imagine a vector (a ray) going from the center of each dial to its circumference. Step the angle of the vector, from 0 to 360 degrees, and for each step, iterate along the vector from the center out, find pixel coordinates along the vector, and count how many dark pixels (darker than some threshold) you find along that vector. When you find several vector angles which all have high dark-pixel counts, take the middle one as being the angle of that dial.
The critical thing in that case will be positioning the camera solidly so that the centers are always aligned the same way in the webcam pics, unless you find a way to recognize the centers of the dials too.
It's very easy to make a black line to complete the arrow, and the scanners are old, fully depreciated and simple - a handful of photodetectors would be enough to find those black lines.
I recently got a Mini and managed to hook it up via a USB-to-PS/2 converter to my KVM, to which is attached a real IBM keyboard, which I really don't want to replace. So I had to figure out how to make Ctrl act like Command on the Mac. IMO this is very natural - Ctrl is in a better location, and now Mac-style commands that I'm already used to, like Ctrl-W to close a window, work the same on all 3 platforms with the same keyboard. What annoys me though is when using the Mac terminal, I have to use a different key to generate Ctrl-C Ctrl-D etc. I mapped the right Alt to that.
What I have not found is a way on the Mac to make Caps Lock act as a control key. That would be ideal. Then the existing Ctrl is in the best position to be the Command key, Caps Lock is in the best position to be Control (like on a real Unix machine) and I already know how to make it act the same on Windows and Linux.
I haven't checked into it but can any ordinary person rent a billboard and put some kind of political message on it? There must be some reason we don't see much of that... they are nearly always commercial ads. In some Bible Belt regions you can see religious messages sometimes, but not where I live (Phoenix, AZ).
Any power plant is more efficient and produces less pollution per watt than a car engine, especially when coupled to a car's inefficient drive train. Then there are the cleaner alternatives some utilities have already been using for decades, like hydro.
Right now for the cost of a nice car you can cover your roof with solar panels and have almost no power bill at all. That would more than offset the extra cost and pollution from charging your electric car.
If you believe otherwise I guess you could power your house with a V8 hooked up to a generator.
One place I worked, the lead developer was paranoid and liked to review and understand every change I made to the code before "committing" it to his own tree. (Yeah they didn't use source control much either. Very stupid...) So we got really good at using WinMerge. It has good keyboard shortcuts that let you step through the diffs between two files, one at a time, and merge them from one to the other.
On Linux, meld is comparable (except the keyboard shortcuts are inferior, IMO, but you can probably change them).
I have many boxes of old magazines too - Radio-Electronics being the most valuable to me. But paper is not made to last, and takes up too much room. I cringed at first, but a digital archive is really much better.
I got one of these stack paper cutters (seems to be a good model), cut the spines off the magazines, and use the networked scanner/copier/fax combo we have at work. It doesn't have enough options and file formats, but PDF is good enough for this purpose in practice. It saves the PDFs to a network drive and I copy them to a thumb drive. Then at home I use Acrobat to OCR the PDFs, rearrange pages if necessary, split/combine PDFs, number the pages, insert page thumbnails, and re-compress them. (Yes, ick, commercial software on Windows... but there aren't many alternatives.)
It's still a slow process though. The ADF on the copier jams up sometimes, and processing one magazine at a time adds up to a lot of time when you've got so many like I do.
DVDs are nearly obsolete. I'm running MythTV, so pretty soon I would tend to view home videos in the form of video files anyway rather than physical discs (although I still burn DVDs, but only bother editing about one DVD per year anyway. We send them to family at Christmas.)
A couple months ago I got a terabyte drive, re-ripped all my digital 8mm tapes (30 or so) to files, and then gave the camera and tapes to my sister-in-law who had a baby (they need a camcorder more than we do at this stage). DV files take more space than MPEG but I didn't want to lose whatever additional quality the originals might have had. Even so, there is enough space left on the drive for the edited-for-DVD versions of all those home movies, various other media files, compressed tar backups of my other systems, etc. I then backed it up again onto a 750G external drive and store that one off-site. (And I would recommend to anyone to do the same... don't trust a single hard drive without other backups. At the very least have two systems and back them up mutually over the network.)
My next step: get an HD camera. Then I wonder if 1TB will still be enough.:-) But in a year or two I may just need an additional terabyte, that's all, and we'll see how much more the typical capacity goes up during that time.
What I'm waiting for is an SLR that can also shoot full HD video (1920x1080 or so). I figure that's a year or two out. 1280x720 video mode already exists on some digital cameras. Meanwhile I can shoot 640x480 on my existing point-and-shoot, which is nearly as good as the camcorder (if only it had better sound).
I thought it was just ASU.:-) It was a depressing 5 years of my life. But really, I think you'd have to choose the university carefully to get a good experience. And it would help to be more socially adept than I was at that age. MIT should have been my choice, but then again they are known for a high rate of suicide aren't they...
why copy from RAM to RAM, just to make the distinction that one part of RAM is a filesystem and another part is the working copy? Revision control. Yeah but some in-memory techniques could be invented for that.
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A web proxy can rewrite content arbitrarily, including this type of mod. Just run your own proxy on your own server. Maybe even a home server if your ISP doesn't block that: this example is a very good reason to make a political push for the expanded definition of "network neutrality", that is, all ports are open, nothing is blocked, you have the freedom to publish from home. (You can always secure your own proxy if you don't want other people to use it.)
Failing that, there is shared hosting where you could run your own personal proxy that augments the capabilities of the browser itself.
Another feature I've been wanting to write a proxy for (and haven't gotten around to!) is to store my web history permanently and make it searchable, so I can find forgotten web sites again. It should be able to store notes I write about sites, so I can search those too.
Failing that, there is greasemonkey.
This will result in a feedback loop and next thing you know you will have a petabyte drive at home, making your current terabyte drive obsolete.
The authors tend to be dead and it's their grandchildren receiving this extra money.
Whenever a Disney property is headed towards copyright expiration, the copyright term gets extended anyway.
Installing a lot of redundant "last mile" paths is hard. Redundant == inefficient. Maybe there's more competition in Tokyo because of the density, whereas in the US, how many different ways can we afford to wire the same suburban subdivision? Having copper pairs and coax cable at the same time is already better than just one or the other.
The future is probably wireless. In a decade or two these arguments about whether there is enough fiber going to every house, and what the government ought to do to encourage it, will seem quaint.
The FCC should have the proliferation of wireless internet services as its top priority. There needs to be a huge chunk of bandwidth (like say a couple of those sweet VHF TV channels) that is not sold off but really belongs to the people, dedicated to free and open networks (WiFi with longer range) and let companies and individuals share that band, just as with the coexistence of commercial hotspots and open routers today. Then let the companies who bought licenses for narrower bands try to compete with that. Some of them will find lucrative niches, but everyone will have the lowest-common-denominator open network at low cost. And let the ground-based networks (fiber, cable etc.) compete with that too. They will have to offer really insane bandwidth to stay ahead of the cheaper wireless services. For a while they will offer an advantage. But wireless will take over eventually.
instead of the year or some letter combination or a random word... geez they could have been consistent all these years, but no. After trying everything else, we're back to just the numbers. (Will there be a 7.1 too?)
No, that means if you *charge* your laptop battery every day you'll need one that often (I didn't check your math, but that's not my point). If you use your laptop as a desktop replacement, as many Apple owners seem to do (especially that big honkin' 17" we're talking about), it's probably plugged-in all the time, and I'm hoping that Apple made it not recharge the battery all the time it's plugged in, so it may last much, much longer than that.
Yeah one would hope. :-)
Nevertheless LiPoly batteries seem to last 3 years or less even when you are kind to them, before something goes wrong (severe reduction of capacity, start expanding like a balloon and prying the case apart, total failure etc.)
DRM or not, tracks with lossy compression shouldn't cost more than 25 cents, that's my excuse. :-) For 69 cents I want FLAC.
Yesterday (and before) the rumor was that it would be a ZPower silver-zinc battery which would last 5 years or so. But this is the same old Lithium Polymer technology, which starts degrading right away and will need to be replaced in 3 years (or much less if you charge it too often). It's a bummer to know right up-front that you are going to have this pain in the butt to look forward to so soon. Long life between charges is not enough: it needs to have a long total lifetime before they should be making it non-removeable. The computer will definitely not be obsolete by the time the battery wears out, so you will have to replace it at least once. And the "recycling" for LiPoly is pathetic (they just recover the cobalt and burn all the lithium, which is quite a waste of such a rare metal).
And still no tablet! (iPhone doesn't count, I mean a real tablet Mac) And no upgraded Mini!
...and neither does farming!
(slogan I saw on a baseball cap as a kid, maybe 25 years ago. One of my grandpa's buddies was wearing it.)
Software engineering is a relatively cushy job - good pay, sitting comfortably and thinking and writing. Of course it has its annoyances (meetings, bad managers, ridiculous deadlines, some coworkers more motivated while others get in your way, etc.) I used to think when I was starting college that I didn't want to spend my life sitting in front of a computer - even though I'd already seen by that point that writing software was one of the things I was best at, had a real aptitude for. So I got an electrical engineering degree, thinking it might lead to some slightly more physically active work of some sort (I had no idea what) and less carpal-tunnel syndrome. But my grades were disappointing at times, so maybe it was not right that I was doing something a little to the side of what I really loved most. I liked the digital stuff but had a hard time with anything too math intensive (semiconductor stuff, e-mag etc.) CS would have been so much easier for me.
Then when I graduated, I happened to land a software job. After that got my career started, there didn't seem to be any point in going back (look for an entry-level job in a different field, or get a big raise by taking the job in which you already have experience... hmm tough choice). So it might turn out the same way for you - you tend to get sucked in, because there are so many software jobs and it's kindof fun and pays well. Unless you are really determined to do something else... but then I guess you will have to think of those ideas yourself. If you were more entrepreneurial by nature I guess you wouldn't be asking here "what do I do now".
You could always go on and get an advanced degree while you figure out what else to do. I wish I had done that, but my financial situation was bad (came from a poor family, had to work my way through the university) and I was so ready to go get a real job and make some real money. :-) Then after getting sucked in like that you don't feel so inclined to go back to academia, although it sure would have been a good idea. (Maybe I still will, but it's so much easier to procrastinate. And I tend to think my time might be better spent starting a company... something else I procrastinate too much.)
If I had it to do over (and could somehow figure out how to afford it), I'd have gone to MIT or University of Indiana or some other place that teaches in Scheme. And I'd go right on and get a master's or PhD after that.
Of course take every advantage that you can, of summer internship opportunities. I didn't do much of that: wish I had been able to find good ones. I have worked with interns in my career and seen how they tend to be sucked in too, which can be an awesome thing if you get the right internship at a company where you'd really like to work.
By all means put off getting married as long as possible (or maybe never do it)... as emotionally satisfying as it is, it really does slow you down from whatever you planned to achieve.
iTunes is great for "window shopping" but why buy hobbled content when the physical CD can often be had for less money on ebay or amazon? (assuming you pay 99 cents - 1.29 for each track, and there are 10 or more on the disc) I might make an exception for the DRM-free MP3, but it's MP3... yuck. I like to rip my CDs to FLAC for the Squeezebox and MP3 for the iPhone. To me the DRM-free MP3s are worth about 25 - 50 cents per track, no more. If it was that cheap I'd go for the convenience factor I guess.
So I guess you could say I've been "boycotting" DRM all along. I could count the tracks I've bought on iTunes on one hand.
Anybody who read On Intelligence would have already gotten that point, loud and clear. It presents what seems like some believable hypotheses to me, but there is a lot of speculation, and at the end he proposes experiments that could be used to verify the hypotheses. He also makes the point that indeed we still don't know much about how the brain works, and had better start figuring it out and earnestly trying to emulate it, rather than keep working with our existing pale immitations such as conventional AI and primitive neural nets which seem to have reached their limits.
The first approach I can think of would be to imagine a vector (a ray) going from the center of each dial to its circumference. Step the angle of the vector, from 0 to 360 degrees, and for each step, iterate along the vector from the center out, find pixel coordinates along the vector, and count how many dark pixels (darker than some threshold) you find along that vector. When you find several vector angles which all have high dark-pixel counts, take the middle one as being the angle of that dial.
The critical thing in that case will be positioning the camera solidly so that the centers are always aligned the same way in the webcam pics, unless you find a way to recognize the centers of the dials too.
It's very easy to make a black line to complete the arrow, and the scanners are old, fully depreciated and simple - a handful of photodetectors would be enough to find those black lines.
Ha ha ha. Hahahahahahaha.
I recently got a Mini and managed to hook it up via a USB-to-PS/2 converter to my KVM, to which is attached a real IBM keyboard, which I really don't want to replace. So I had to figure out how to make Ctrl act like Command on the Mac. IMO this is very natural - Ctrl is in a better location, and now Mac-style commands that I'm already used to, like Ctrl-W to close a window, work the same on all 3 platforms with the same keyboard. What annoys me though is when using the Mac terminal, I have to use a different key to generate Ctrl-C Ctrl-D etc. I mapped the right Alt to that.
What I have not found is a way on the Mac to make Caps Lock act as a control key. That would be ideal. Then the existing Ctrl is in the best position to be the Command key, Caps Lock is in the best position to be Control (like on a real Unix machine) and I already know how to make it act the same on Windows and Linux.
You could try Linux BIOS but then the hardware choices are kindof restricted.
I haven't checked into it but can any ordinary person rent a billboard and put some kind of political message on it? There must be some reason we don't see much of that... they are nearly always commercial ads. In some Bible Belt regions you can see religious messages sometimes, but not where I live (Phoenix, AZ).
Any power plant is more efficient and produces less pollution per watt than a car engine, especially when coupled to a car's inefficient drive train. Then there are the cleaner alternatives some utilities have already been using for decades, like hydro.
Right now for the cost of a nice car you can cover your roof with solar panels and have almost no power bill at all. That would more than offset the extra cost and pollution from charging your electric car.
If you believe otherwise I guess you could power your house with a V8 hooked up to a generator.
One place I worked, the lead developer was paranoid and liked to review and understand every change I made to the code before "committing" it to his own tree. (Yeah they didn't use source control much either. Very stupid...) So we got really good at using WinMerge. It has good keyboard shortcuts that let you step through the diffs between two files, one at a time, and merge them from one to the other.
On Linux, meld is comparable (except the keyboard shortcuts are inferior, IMO, but you can probably change them).
I have many boxes of old magazines too - Radio-Electronics being the most valuable to me. But paper is not made to last, and takes up too much room. I cringed at first, but a digital archive is really much better.
I got one of these stack paper cutters (seems to be a good model), cut the spines off the magazines, and use the networked scanner/copier/fax combo we have at work. It doesn't have enough options and file formats, but PDF is good enough for this purpose in practice. It saves the PDFs to a network drive and I copy them to a thumb drive. Then at home I use Acrobat to OCR the PDFs, rearrange pages if necessary, split/combine PDFs, number the pages, insert page thumbnails, and re-compress them. (Yes, ick, commercial software on Windows... but there aren't many alternatives.)
It's still a slow process though. The ADF on the copier jams up sometimes, and processing one magazine at a time adds up to a lot of time when you've got so many like I do.
DVDs are nearly obsolete. I'm running MythTV, so pretty soon I would tend to view home videos in the form of video files anyway rather than physical discs (although I still burn DVDs, but only bother editing about one DVD per year anyway. We send them to family at Christmas.)
A couple months ago I got a terabyte drive, re-ripped all my digital 8mm tapes (30 or so) to files, and then gave the camera and tapes to my sister-in-law who had a baby (they need a camcorder more than we do at this stage). DV files take more space than MPEG but I didn't want to lose whatever additional quality the originals might have had. Even so, there is enough space left on the drive for the edited-for-DVD versions of all those home movies, various other media files, compressed tar backups of my other systems, etc. I then backed it up again onto a 750G external drive and store that one off-site. (And I would recommend to anyone to do the same... don't trust a single hard drive without other backups. At the very least have two systems and back them up mutually over the network.)
My next step: get an HD camera. Then I wonder if 1TB will still be enough. :-) But in a year or two I may just need an additional terabyte, that's all, and we'll see how much more the typical capacity goes up during that time.
What I'm waiting for is an SLR that can also shoot full HD video (1920x1080 or so). I figure that's a year or two out. 1280x720 video mode already exists on some digital cameras. Meanwhile I can shoot 640x480 on my existing point-and-shoot, which is nearly as good as the camcorder (if only it had better sound).
Or was that supposed to be Chloe... or Cleo...
I thought it was just ASU. :-) It was a depressing 5 years of my life. But really, I think you'd have to choose the university carefully to get a good experience. And it would help to be more socially adept than I was at that age. MIT should have been my choice, but then again they are known for a high rate of suicide aren't they...