I would give up a raise for it, but my time not commuting and the ability to work in my own space are more important to me than money. And I'm an introvert, so while I do miss interacting directly with a few people in an office, I definitely don't miss the watercooler moments, endless meetings, office politics, people invading your space, and the other things that go with a shared work space. Your mileage will vary, depending on the relative importance of time and money to you.
And you need to decide if working at home is right for you. It is for me, but as some other posters have mentioned, some people have a hard time with motivation, distractions or whatever if they're not in an office environment. It can be very easy to slide back and forth between 'home' and 'work' if you're at home, but you need to need to keep the two separated. I've heard of some work at home people doing things like walking around the block to start work, and walking back around the block to interrupt work, so that there's a distinct line between the two.
All that said, keep in mind that it's probably a wash or even cheaper for your company to have you work at home. There's additional telephone and 'net costs (be sure they pay for those), but that's one less office space they need, too.
If you've got a tanked heater inside your home, then it isn't losing heat to the outside environment. If you've got it on a south facing side, it can absorb heat from the sun too.
Good point, though you're still heating the water whether you're using it or not, and in summer you've got to be careful you don't lose some of that 120' heat into your cooled living space. Our water heater is in an unheated partial basement so it wasn't an issue, but we have thought about doing a solar pre-heater much as you describe.
We've been following the 10 simple ideas that elid linked to, and while our energy usage wasn't that high to begin with, it's definitely cutting our energy use further.
As bulbs burn out, we've replaced them with fluorescents. These days there are even 3-way fluorescent bulbs and fluorescent exterior flood lights (which coupled with a motion sensor are even better at saving energy).
When it was time for a new clothes washer, we bought the most energy-efficient one we could, a front loading model. They use less water, get clothes cleaner, put less wear on the clothes in the process, and leave clothes dryer, leaving less work for the clothes dryer (or the sun in summer).
When it was time for a new water heater, we spent the extra and got a tankless model with electronic ignition so there's no pilot light and not 30+ gallons of water being kept hot whether any is being used or not.
I no longer leave my computer on over night. Takes longer to get started in the morning, but boot time is now go pour myself some coffee time:-)
We've had a programmable thermostat for the furnace for years. Turns down when you leave for work (before I started working at home), turns up when you get back, with different schedules for weekends versus weekdays. Not only do you use less energy, but the house can be warming up when you wake up in the morning.
In addition to those ideas:
We've had a Toyota Prius since 2001. Simply put, it's the best car my wife or I have ever owned. Great mileage, low emissions, low maintenance, and the newer model is even better. Plus there's a $2000 federal tax break.
Trip-linking. Plan your errands so you can do a number of short, connected trips instead of heading out every time you need something. Or better, figure out how you can skip the trip altogether:-)
Rather than buy an air conditioner for the couple of months a year we'd need one, I installed a ceiling fan in our bedroom.
We have a couple of cloth bags we use for shopping instead of getting new plastic or paper ones every time we go.
I'm in the process of replacing the old single-pane windows with dual-pane. This is more expensive and/or difficult than some people can do, but Marvin makes the Tilt-Pac for replacing just the window but leaving the existing frame. They're cheaper than a whole new window, and simple enough to install that people with some home improvement experience can do it themselves.
I'm also in the process of adding insulation to our house, which was built with exactly none to start with. The attic was easy enough to add insulation to, but insulating existing walls is a bit harder. Blown in loose insulation tends to settle over time, and doesn't fill in small gaps very well. I'm looking at alternatives such as soy-based spray foam insulation.
I'm in the process of designing, permitting, and hopefully in a couple of months, building a small addition to our house (going from about 1000 sq. ft. to about 1300 sq. ft.). The design incorporates as many green building techniques as possible, including more insulation than required by code, south-facing windows for solar heating in winter, large roof overhang to avoid solar heating in summer, natural lighting via well-placed windows, and a large south-facing roof for the future addition of solar panels. That's in addition to stuff like low/no-VOC paints and bamboo flooring which don't necessarily use less energy, but are better for the environment.
Besides the construction, none of these things is that difficult or expensive compared with their alternatives. And most if not all will save you money in the long run if you're in your house any length of time.
I have to give a big thumbs-up to FlashBlock. I've been using it for a while now, and I don't see any of those annoying Flash-based ads unless I choose to. If a site requires Flash for navigation (and very, very few sites I've visited do, and even fewer are ones I visit more than once), then it's a click or two away.
Are these ads as prevelant as the article suggests? I went and browsed with IE a bunch of the sites listed (MSN, ESPN, NY Times) and saw nary a floater.
The bit about the loop with no exit and self-modifying code sounds like a truly grand version of some self-modifying code I was particularly proud of.
Back in the days of Apple GEOS while working at Geoworks (nee Berkeley Softworks), my first task as a co-op was to port Commodore GeoCalc (a spreadsheet program) to run on Apple GEOS (not too bad since they were both 6502 family processors: "6502 -- the original RISC chip...there's no multiply instruction!") and add some new features. I ended up writing a new floating point math libary, too.
At some point during the work, I noticed that it took a really long time for operations on the whole spreadsheet (easy for users since there was a 'select all' button like in the upper left of Excel), even when there was no data in most of the cells. After some profiling, I determined that it was the busy indicator that was chewing up all the cycles. Users like to know the program is busy doing something, after all. But the code had to push a bunch of pseudo-registers (zero-page locations that had been given symbolic labels, for you 6502 fans), load up some coordinates, call the invert rectangle routine, pause a tiny bit, call the invert rectangle routine again, then pop the pseudo-registers. Doesn't seem like too much, but done a bunch of times on a 1MHz machine, it added up to quite a few cycles.
So I replaced the invert-a-rectangle-twice code with some much simpler code that inverted a smaller rectangle (7 pixels wide, to match the wonderfully bizarre hi-res Apple ][ graphics screen) twice by XOR-ing specific memory locations in the graphics memory. The code was now down to a blazing few dozen cycles.
Feeling quite proud of myself, I told a number ^H^H^H a lot of people in the office about my discovery and great solution. One person (Hi, Matt T., if you're reading this) took it as a challenge, and we sat down and optimized the routine further. 40 cycles. 33 cycles. Could we do better?
Finally, with much fanfare, we had it -- 11 cycles or somesuch (yeah, yeah -- I'm sure someone will point out that the following must total X cycles, but frankly I don't care:-) and 7 instructions (though I vaguely remember it as being 1 cycle per instruction, regardless). With an XOR of one graphics memory location, an XOR of the next one, a couple of INC instructions to modify the address of the previous XORs, and (here's the part I especially liked) ANDs to make the addresses wrap around within the same group of 8 memory locations without the need for a comparison. Thus was the birth of the "Frankenstein indicator", because it looked like a tiny little Jacob's ladder (in reverse) of mad-scientist / monster-movie fame.
The routine had gone from who-knows-how-many cycles (in the low thousands, IIRC) down to a dozen. It was fast enough that I could call the 'busy' subroutine once for every cell processed instead of once for every block of 256 cells, and it was still an order of magnitude faster. Operations that had taken minutes before were done in few seconds.
And I'm amazed (and frankly, a bit disturbed) to see that there are still people doing work with the 6502. And I'm definitely disturbed to realize I still remember the hex values of some 6502 instructions ($EA - NOP, $60 - RTS).
The current Toyota Prius is 5 seater with a large cargo space. 60 MPG city, 51 MPG highway, 55 combined. (Yes, higher in city, where speeds are lower and there's more braking and coasting for regeneration potential.)
$21,415 MSRP (no haggling), and there's still a U.S. Federal tax deduction. It started at $2000 and was decreasing, scheduled to be phased out by 2007, but was extended.
They've been selling the Prius in the U.S. for several years (my wife and I have owned a 2002 Prius since the end of '01), and for longer than that in Japan. There's the usual Toyota warranties on the car in general, and an 8-year, 100,000-mile warranty on the hybrid system and battery. Ours has been extremely reliably, with no problems besides a warning light when the gas cap didn't get screwed on tight.
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but besides your own health coverage, etc., consider the possible tax implications when figuring out how much you need to make. If you're a contractor and self-employed, in the U.S. you'll probably have to pay the employer share of share of Social Security in addition to the normal employee side.
As a contractor, you probably won't be able to take part in any employee retirement plans, etc. However, if you do end up self-employed, you may be able to start a Simplified Employee Pension fund (SEP). You'll get some tax benefits for that similar to a 401K.
All in all, worth checking with a tax expert before setting your wage.
They've already done that. Scroll down and look for "Java and Common Lisp reference implementations". It allows you to play the game, and outputs the command string.
The original IPA (India Pale Ale) was brewed in an area of England with hard water, so some recipes for IPAs add gypsum, etc. to the water when preparing the wort, to simulate the original water. You wouldn't want it for most beers, but IPAs are hoppy enough that you wouldn't notice water changes as much.
And Coors is proof that good water doesn't necessarily make good beer.
Professor Graham Stewart, a brewing expert at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and the head of the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling, told CNN that Heiliger's concept was not entirely new.
He says it is a type of "continuous fermentation," which has been used for about 50 years in wine-making and 15 years in beer-making. ...and believes the idea could work well on a small scale.
Makes me wonder if the idea doesn't scale well. That said, IAAB (I am a brewer; I worked in a brewpub and brew on premises for several years and home brew), and I wonder if it might not still be a boon (boont? mmm...amber...) to smaller breweries, brewpubs, and especially brew on premises. Most brewpubs go through much smaller amounts of any given beer than they brew, and this might be away to "brew on demand" or the like, and give a fresher product.
For brew on premises customers, instead of brew, wait two weeks, come back and bottle, it could be brew in the morning, bottle in the afternoon, and might appeal to more people that way. I recall a fair number of people who were put off by two week wait.
And all that said, it seems like there will still be call for the more traditional brewing process, as different beers, etc. use different fermenting processes (lager = cooler, bottom-fermenting yeast; barleywine = two fermentations, one with wine yeast; lambic = 'spontaneous' fermentation)
Recent linguistic fieldwork, however, has confirmed the existence of a word gangurru in the northeast Aboriginal language of Guugu Yimidhirr, referring to a species of kangaroo.
See the word history here, or The Word Detective. (The latter is a great site if you're interested in words.)
...they could face both civil and criminal liabilities if an employee is hurt due to being out in the storm.
A non-essential company that's sleezy enough to force people to come in during a hurricane warning, when the government is telling people to stay home or otherwise seek shelter, probably isn't going to be that worried about could and if. If they think they can make money, and the odds of an employee being hurt are low, they'll do it.
Which makes for one weird sensation the first time you fly out of Orange County / John Wayne Airport. The takeoff starts normally, tons of thrust, engines blasting. Then as soon as they've reached a certain altitude, they cut the engines way back, which causes the plane to drop a bit, or at least stop climbing so rapidly. Which gives you a kind of over-a-rise on a rollercoaster feeling -- not what you want to feel when flying commercially. I don't know if they still do, but when I flew out of there several years ago, they warned you about it ahead of time because it's such an odd feeling. I'm sure it's still not that comforting to people afraid of flying, though:-)
I don't remember anything odd about the landing there, probably because so much less thrust is needed, generating less noise on landings.
It's a picture of the stout infant fish, alright. Check out the Australian Museum Online site for more information and pictures. I believe the picture shown is of a pregnant female, which as other posters have noted is larger than the male at a whopping 8.4mm.
Also, the length is likely the standard length, which is to say, it doesn't include the fleshy bit of the tail, but only up to the end of the spine.
One noteable difference from the dwarf goby fish is that stout infant fish apparently lack pigmentation except in the eyes. The dwarf goby is a nice shade of orange.
I think the "capitals" post probably hits on a big part of it. I just returned from a trip to Europe, and have been to Europe numerous times before (my sister lives just outside Munich (or München, if you prefer, and/. doesn't swallow the u+umlat). In general, more people speak English in the larger cities, and fewer in the smaller towns and countryside.
East of Marseille, for example, we had world's nicest taxi driver (this guy is on the fast-track for sainthood -- super helpful in resolving a problem with a hotel at what ended up being the middle of the night.) But he didn't speak of bit of English.
I've found this elsewhere in the world, too (South America, Africa, Asia). There's usually some English-speakers about, but they're fewer and farther between the further you get from a big city.
And regardless of where you are, it always helps to at least know a couple of words in the native language: hello, please, thank you. If language capacity is limited (like mine, if you're not counting programming languages:-), learning just hello** goes a long ways. Even if people speak English where you go, it's a *lot* more polite, and a lot more likely to get a helpful response if you start with a word or two in the correct language.
(** If you're lucky, 'hello' in the language will be something like in Swedish: 'hej', which is pronounced more or less like 'hey' in English, so just going up to someone and saying 'hey!' works:-) And depending on your needs, you may wish to add 'one beer, please' to the list of words to know:-)
But back to the point: Orkut is a site for networking. As long as people aren't hijacking existing threads into one language or another, they should use whatever language they want to network with others. If that's Portuguese, more power to them. I think it's a cool-sounding language. Oddly enough, the guy who invited me to Orkut is...Brazilian.
PC-GEOS didn't share anything in common with Commodore GEOS 64 / 128 or Apple GEOS except the name GEOS and the fact some of the same engineers worked on all of them. I did some work on Apple GEOS applications, and was part of the team that wrote PC-GEOS and its applications.
Microsoft hadn't yet dominated the desktop market when PC-GEOS came out. But pressure from Microsoft on OEMs (e.g., if you're going to bundle DOS, you have to pay for Windows even if you're not going to include it), plus bad marketing by Geoworks, and lack of an SDK in time doomed it for that market.
PC-GEOS was written from scratch. It used a generic UI, which was built out into a specific UI at runtime. Generic objects could build out into a single specific object (e.g., a button), an entire menu tree (e.g., all of the common File, Edit, View menus), or anything in between. This was the basis of one of Geoworks' patents. It made it very easy to get the basic functionality of an application up and running quickly. It also had an amazingly powerful text object, that was basically a word processor.
Because the generic to specific buildout happened at run time, these could be a lot more than superficial 'skins'. Unless you were designing for a handheld or other small device, no changes were required in the applications themselves to run under any of the UIs.
The first released UI was based on the Motif look-and-feel, but didn't use any Motif API. The original specific UI was based on OpenLook, but for a variety of reasons that wasn't used. There was also a CUA UI (think OS/2, much like Windows 3.0), a variety of OEM-specific UIs, a Deskmate UI for demo to Tandy Corp., and even a Macintosh UI for demo to Apple and Claris. NewDeal later added a "industry standard UI" (Win95 look-and-feel), and Breadbox a similar ISUI (Wind2000 look-and-feel).
Geoworks is now a corporate shell based in Texas. NewDeal is completely defunct. Breadbox currently owns the rights to PC-GEOS, and is alive and well. GEOS freeware, shareware, etc. live on at Tva Katter. (I maintain the TK site. There should be a ring over the 'a' in tva, but/. keeps eating it. The name is Swedish for 'two cats')
Did anyone else get an ad for the BMW X3 at the top of the page? I did, the result being that the first car I saw in the 'Worst Cars of All Time' article was...the BMW X3.
BMW can't be happy with that kind of ad placement:-)
(and yes, I've sinced blocked images from that ad server with Mozilla)
Alt Gr comes from the PC. On keyboards in general, most keys generates two characters. This is fine for English, not using any letters besides A-Z or any accents as far as ASCII is concerned.
However, for many European languages, there are additional characters, like a+ring (U+0035) in Swedish, and accented characters, like e+acute (U+00E9) in French. Since back in the days of PC/XTs, there were only 83/84 keys to go around, they made some keys produce a third and sometimes fourth character. These were accessed by pressing Ctrl and Alt for the third char and Ctrl, Alt and Shift for the fourth char and then the key.
At some point, it was (rightfully) decided this was unnecessarily clunky. Keyboard BIOSes/drivers were changed to support the Mac-style input of accent + character to generate that character accented. That still left the 'standard' for older keyboards to be backward compatible with, and other chars that didn't fit that pattern.
So when the 101/102 key keyboards came out, for European languages that changed the right Alt key to Alt Gr, or alternate graphic. (For some languages it had a different abbreviation, like Alt Car). This allowed typing Alt Gr plus one of the 3- or 4-character keys to access the 3rd (and with Shift, the 4th) character. Still a pain, but less so than a 3 or 4 finger salute to get a single character.
On keyboards in general, most keys generates two characters. This is fine for English, not using any letters besides A-Z or any accents as far as ASCII is concerned.
However, for many European languages, there are additional characters, like a+ring (U+0035) in Swedish, and accented characters, like e+acute (U+00E9) in French. Since back in the days of XTs, there were only 83/84 keys to go around, they made some keys produce a third and sometimes fourth character. These were accessed by pressing Ctrl and Alt for the third char and Ctrl, Alt and Shift for the fourth char and then the key.
At some point, it was (rightfully) decided this was unnecessarily clunky. Keyboard BIOSes/drivers were changed to support the Mac-style input of accent + character to generate that character accented. That still left the 'standard' for older keyboards to be backward compatible with, and other chars that didn't fit that pattern.
So when the 101/102 key keyboards came out, for European languages that changed the right Alt key to Alt Gr, or alternate graphic. (For some languages it had a different abbreviation, like Alt Car). This allowed typing Alt Gr plus one of the 3- or 4-character keys to access the 3rd (and with Shift, the 4th) character. Still a pain, but less so than a 3 or 4 finger salute to get a single character.
At a software company, a co-worker and I wrote a new mouse driver for a cube neighbor's development machine, and slipped it on when he wasn't around. It simply added +1 to the y value, so that as you moved around it would slowly sink to the bottom of the screen. With a little effort you could get it back to the top of the screen, but then it would slowly work its way down again. It was still usable, just very confusing.
Nothing so blatant as a screenshot of the desktop or changing people's 'new mail' or shutdown sounds. Sheesh.:-)
But keep in mind that as much fun as a good prank can be, don't get carried away. If you disrupt people's work too badly, you may find yourself on the receiving end of the "pink slip" prank or the "reprimand" trick.
The chewing out we got for the above prank convinced not to do the next one we'd planned, a new, only sometimes remapped keyboard driver...
Some of the people who worry about full-frame sensors are like me that (a) shoot a lot of wide angle shots (for me, nature) and (b) have an investment in existing wide-angle lenses.
The issue isn't the size of the sensor per se, it's that with a smaller sensor you end up with an effective 1.5X multiplier to the focal length with existing lenses. So your 20mm lens (wide) is now effectively 30mm (not very wide). Great if you're shooting with a telephoto (600mm becomes 900mm), but not so great for wide angle.
You can get even wider lenses to compensate for some of it, but that means a further investment in lenses, and after a certain point (around 15mm for 35mm SLRs, IIRC) the optics start getting kind of weird and lenses that will compensate completely are either very expensive or don't exist at all. To get a 24mm equivalent you'd need a 16mm lens (doable, but fairly pricey; $1000+ retail); to get a 20mm equivalent you'd need a 13mm lens (almost doable (Nikon sells a 14mm), but getting very pricey and into the weird optics range).
That said, I'm still considering getting a non-full size digital, using what lenses I've got, and using the large amount I'll save in film and E6 processing fees towards new lenses. I've been waiting for a full-frame digital (Nikon mount since that's what my money is in), but I may give up.
I'd been hoping the Kodak DCS-14n was 'it', but although it's full frame, the sensor it uses is so noisy and unsharp that the effective resolution is lower than a lot of other non full-frame sensor cameras, and a lot lower than its stated values.
Slashdot Mirror
I would give up a raise for it, but my time not commuting and the ability to work in my own space are more important to me than money. And I'm an introvert, so while I do miss interacting directly with a few people in an office, I definitely don't miss the watercooler moments, endless meetings, office politics, people invading your space, and the other things that go with a shared work space. Your mileage will vary, depending on the relative importance of time and money to you.
And you need to decide if working at home is right for you. It is for me, but as some other posters have mentioned, some people have a hard time with motivation, distractions or whatever if they're not in an office environment. It can be very easy to slide back and forth between 'home' and 'work' if you're at home, but you need to need to keep the two separated. I've heard of some work at home people doing things like walking around the block to start work, and walking back around the block to interrupt work, so that there's a distinct line between the two.
All that said, keep in mind that it's probably a wash or even cheaper for your company to have you work at home. There's additional telephone and 'net costs (be sure they pay for those), but that's one less office space they need, too.
Good point, though you're still heating the water whether you're using it or not, and in summer you've got to be careful you don't lose some of that 120' heat into your cooled living space. Our water heater is in an unheated partial basement so it wasn't an issue, but we have thought about doing a solar pre-heater much as you describe.
- As bulbs burn out, we've replaced them with fluorescents. These days there are even 3-way fluorescent bulbs and fluorescent exterior flood lights (which coupled with a motion sensor are even better at saving energy).
- When it was time for a new clothes washer, we bought the most energy-efficient one we could, a front loading model. They use less water, get clothes cleaner, put less wear on the clothes in the process, and leave clothes dryer, leaving less work for the clothes dryer (or the sun in summer).
- When it was time for a new water heater, we spent the extra and got a tankless model with electronic ignition so there's no pilot light and not 30+ gallons of water being kept hot whether any is being used or not.
- I no longer leave my computer on over night. Takes longer to get started in the morning, but boot time is now go pour myself some coffee time
:-)
- We've had a programmable thermostat for the furnace for years. Turns down when you leave for work (before I started working at home), turns up when you get back, with different schedules for weekends versus weekdays. Not only do you use less energy, but the house can be warming up when you wake up in the morning.
In addition to those ideas:- We've had a Toyota Prius since 2001. Simply put, it's the best car my wife or I have ever owned. Great mileage, low emissions, low maintenance, and the newer model is even better. Plus there's a $2000 federal tax break.
- Trip-linking. Plan your errands so you can do a number of short, connected trips instead of heading out every time you need something. Or better, figure out how you can skip the trip altogether
:-)
- Rather than buy an air conditioner for the couple of months a year we'd need one, I installed a ceiling fan in our bedroom.
- We have a couple of cloth bags we use for shopping instead of getting new plastic or paper ones every time we go.
- I'm in the process of replacing the old single-pane windows with dual-pane. This is more expensive and/or difficult than some people can do, but Marvin makes the Tilt-Pac for replacing just the window but leaving the existing frame. They're cheaper than a whole new window, and simple enough to install that people with some home improvement experience can do it themselves.
- I'm also in the process of adding insulation to our house, which was built with exactly none to start with. The attic was easy enough to add insulation to, but insulating existing walls is a bit harder. Blown in loose insulation tends to settle over time, and doesn't fill in small gaps very well. I'm looking at alternatives such as soy-based spray foam insulation.
- I'm in the process of designing, permitting, and hopefully in a couple of months, building a small addition to our house (going from about 1000 sq. ft. to about 1300 sq. ft.). The design incorporates as many green building techniques as possible, including more insulation than required by code, south-facing windows for solar heating in winter, large roof overhang to avoid solar heating in summer, natural lighting via well-placed windows, and a large south-facing roof for the future addition of solar panels. That's in addition to stuff like low/no-VOC paints and bamboo flooring which don't necessarily use less energy, but are better for the environment.
Besides the construction, none of these things is that difficult or expensive compared with their alternatives. And most if not all will save you money in the long run if you're in your house any length of time.Are these ads as prevelant as the article suggests? I went and browsed with IE a bunch of the sites listed (MSN, ESPN, NY Times) and saw nary a floater.
The bit about the loop with no exit and self-modifying code sounds like a truly grand version of some self-modifying code I was particularly proud of.
Back in the days of Apple GEOS while working at Geoworks (nee Berkeley Softworks), my first task as a co-op was to port Commodore GeoCalc (a spreadsheet program) to run on Apple GEOS (not too bad since they were both 6502 family processors: "6502 -- the original RISC chip...there's no multiply instruction!") and add some new features. I ended up writing a new floating point math libary, too.
At some point during the work, I noticed that it took a really long time for operations on the whole spreadsheet (easy for users since there was a 'select all' button like in the upper left of Excel), even when there was no data in most of the cells. After some profiling, I determined that it was the busy indicator that was chewing up all the cycles. Users like to know the program is busy doing something, after all. But the code had to push a bunch of pseudo-registers (zero-page locations that had been given symbolic labels, for you 6502 fans), load up some coordinates, call the invert rectangle routine, pause a tiny bit, call the invert rectangle routine again, then pop the pseudo-registers. Doesn't seem like too much, but done a bunch of times on a 1MHz machine, it added up to quite a few cycles.
So I replaced the invert-a-rectangle-twice code with some much simpler code that inverted a smaller rectangle (7 pixels wide, to match the wonderfully bizarre hi-res Apple ][ graphics screen) twice by XOR-ing specific memory locations in the graphics memory. The code was now down to a blazing few dozen cycles.
Feeling quite proud of myself, I told a number ^H^H^H a lot of people in the office about my discovery and great solution. One person (Hi, Matt T., if you're reading this) took it as a challenge, and we sat down and optimized the routine further. 40 cycles. 33 cycles. Could we do better?
Finally, with much fanfare, we had it -- 11 cycles or somesuch (yeah, yeah -- I'm sure someone will point out that the following must total X cycles, but frankly I don't care :-) and 7 instructions (though I vaguely remember it as being 1 cycle per instruction, regardless). With an XOR of one graphics memory location, an XOR of the next one, a couple of INC instructions to modify the address of the previous XORs, and (here's the part I especially liked) ANDs to make the addresses wrap around within the same group of 8 memory locations without the need for a comparison. Thus was the birth of the "Frankenstein indicator", because it looked like a tiny little Jacob's ladder (in reverse) of mad-scientist / monster-movie fame.
The routine had gone from who-knows-how-many cycles (in the low thousands, IIRC) down to a dozen. It was fast enough that I could call the 'busy' subroutine once for every cell processed instead of once for every block of 256 cells, and it was still an order of magnitude faster. Operations that had taken minutes before were done in few seconds.
And I'm amazed (and frankly, a bit disturbed) to see that there are still people doing work with the 6502. And I'm definitely disturbed to realize I still remember the hex values of some 6502 instructions ($EA - NOP, $60 - RTS).
$21,415 MSRP (no haggling), and there's still a U.S. Federal tax deduction. It started at $2000 and was decreasing, scheduled to be phased out by 2007, but was extended.
They've been selling the Prius in the U.S. for several years (my wife and I have owned a 2002 Prius since the end of '01), and for longer than that in Japan. There's the usual Toyota warranties on the car in general, and an 8-year, 100,000-mile warranty on the hybrid system and battery. Ours has been extremely reliably, with no problems besides a warning light when the gas cap didn't get screwed on tight.
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but besides your own health coverage, etc., consider the possible tax implications when figuring out how much you need to make. If you're a contractor and self-employed, in the U.S. you'll probably have to pay the employer share of share of Social Security in addition to the normal employee side.
As a contractor, you probably won't be able to take part in any employee retirement plans, etc. However, if you do end up self-employed, you may be able to start a Simplified Employee Pension fund (SEP). You'll get some tax benefits for that similar to a 401K.
All in all, worth checking with a tax expert before setting your wage.
They've already done that. Scroll down and look for "Java and Common Lisp reference implementations". It allows you to play the game, and outputs the command string.
The original IPA (India Pale Ale) was brewed in an area of England with hard water, so some recipes for IPAs add gypsum, etc. to the water when preparing the wort, to simulate the original water. You wouldn't want it for most beers, but IPAs are hoppy enough that you wouldn't notice water changes as much.
And Coors is proof that good water doesn't necessarily make good beer.
Makes me wonder if the idea doesn't scale well. That said, IAAB (I am a brewer; I worked in a brewpub and brew on premises for several years and home brew), and I wonder if it might not still be a boon (boont? mmm...amber...) to smaller breweries, brewpubs, and especially brew on premises. Most brewpubs go through much smaller amounts of any given beer than they brew, and this might be away to "brew on demand" or the like, and give a fresher product.
For brew on premises customers, instead of brew, wait two weeks, come back and bottle, it could be brew in the morning, bottle in the afternoon, and might appeal to more people that way. I recall a fair number of people who were put off by two week wait.
And all that said, it seems like there will still be call for the more traditional brewing process, as different beers, etc. use different fermenting processes (lager = cooler, bottom-fermenting yeast; barleywine = two fermentations, one with wine yeast; lambic = 'spontaneous' fermentation)
See the word history here, or The Word Detective. (The latter is a great site if you're interested in words.)
Non-obligatory Shrek quote: "Parfait got layers. Ain't nobody don't like parfait."
A non-essential company that's sleezy enough to force people to come in during a hurricane warning, when the government is telling people to stay home or otherwise seek shelter, probably isn't going to be that worried about could and if. If they think they can make money, and the odds of an employee being hurt are low, they'll do it.
If you read the article... :-)
You're new here, aren't you?
Which makes for one weird sensation the first time you fly out of Orange County / John Wayne Airport. The takeoff starts normally, tons of thrust, engines blasting. Then as soon as they've reached a certain altitude, they cut the engines way back, which causes the plane to drop a bit, or at least stop climbing so rapidly. Which gives you a kind of over-a-rise on a rollercoaster feeling -- not what you want to feel when flying commercially. I don't know if they still do, but when I flew out of there several years ago, they warned you about it ahead of time because it's such an odd feeling. I'm sure it's still not that comforting to people afraid of flying, though :-)
I don't remember anything odd about the landing there, probably because so much less thrust is needed, generating less noise on landings.
My knowledge of marine life is minor. My knowledge of Google is sufficient for many tasks :-)
It's a picture of the stout infant fish, alright. Check out the Australian Museum Online site for more information and pictures. I believe the picture shown is of a pregnant female, which as other posters have noted is larger than the male at a whopping 8.4mm.
Also, the length is likely the standard length, which is to say, it doesn't include the fleshy bit of the tail, but only up to the end of the spine.
One noteable difference from the dwarf goby fish is that stout infant fish apparently lack pigmentation except in the eyes. The dwarf goby is a nice shade of orange.
I think the "capitals" post probably hits on a big part of it. I just returned from a trip to Europe, and have been to Europe numerous times before (my sister lives just outside Munich (or München, if you prefer, and /. doesn't swallow the u+umlat). In general, more people speak English in the larger cities, and fewer in the smaller towns and countryside.
:-), learning just hello** goes a long ways. Even if people speak English where you go, it's a *lot* more polite, and a lot more likely to get a helpful response if you start with a word or two in the correct language.
:-) And depending on your needs, you may wish to add 'one beer, please' to the list of words to know :-)
East of Marseille, for example, we had world's nicest taxi driver (this guy is on the fast-track for sainthood -- super helpful in resolving a problem with a hotel at what ended up being the middle of the night.) But he didn't speak of bit of English.
I've found this elsewhere in the world, too (South America, Africa, Asia). There's usually some English-speakers about, but they're fewer and farther between the further you get from a big city.
And regardless of where you are, it always helps to at least know a couple of words in the native language: hello, please, thank you. If language capacity is limited (like mine, if you're not counting programming languages
(** If you're lucky, 'hello' in the language will be something like in Swedish: 'hej', which is pronounced more or less like 'hey' in English, so just going up to someone and saying 'hey!' works
But back to the point: Orkut is a site for networking. As long as people aren't hijacking existing threads into one language or another, they should use whatever language they want to network with others. If that's Portuguese, more power to them. I think it's a cool-sounding language. Oddly enough, the guy who invited me to Orkut is...Brazilian.
Since HSW is grinding to a halt and no longer serving up images, you can see pics of the rolling coffin and more info from Toyota here.
PC-GEOS didn't share anything in common with Commodore GEOS 64 / 128 or Apple GEOS except the name GEOS and the fact some of the same engineers worked on all of them. I did some work on Apple GEOS applications, and was part of the team that wrote PC-GEOS and its applications.
Microsoft hadn't yet dominated the desktop market when PC-GEOS came out. But pressure from Microsoft on OEMs (e.g., if you're going to bundle DOS, you have to pay for Windows even if you're not going to include it), plus bad marketing by Geoworks, and lack of an SDK in time doomed it for that market.
PC-GEOS was written from scratch. It used a generic UI, which was built out into a specific UI at runtime. Generic objects could build out into a single specific object (e.g., a button), an entire menu tree (e.g., all of the common File, Edit, View menus), or anything in between. This was the basis of one of Geoworks' patents. It made it very easy to get the basic functionality of an application up and running quickly. It also had an amazingly powerful text object, that was basically a word processor.
Because the generic to specific buildout happened at run time, these could be a lot more than superficial 'skins'. Unless you were designing for a handheld or other small device, no changes were required in the applications themselves to run under any of the UIs.
The first released UI was based on the Motif look-and-feel, but didn't use any Motif API. The original specific UI was based on OpenLook, but for a variety of reasons that wasn't used. There was also a CUA UI (think OS/2, much like Windows 3.0), a variety of OEM-specific UIs, a Deskmate UI for demo to Tandy Corp., and even a Macintosh UI for demo to Apple and Claris. NewDeal later added a "industry standard UI" (Win95 look-and-feel), and Breadbox a similar ISUI (Wind2000 look-and-feel).
Geoworks is now a corporate shell based in Texas. NewDeal is completely defunct. Breadbox currently owns the rights to PC-GEOS, and is alive and well. GEOS freeware, shareware, etc. live on at Tva Katter. (I maintain the TK site. There should be a ring over the 'a' in tva, but /. keeps eating it. The name is Swedish for 'two cats')
Did anyone else get an ad for the BMW X3 at the top of the page? I did, the result being that the first car I saw in the 'Worst Cars of All Time' article was...the BMW X3.
:-)
BMW can't be happy with that kind of ad placement
(and yes, I've sinced blocked images from that ad server with Mozilla)
Alt Gr comes from the PC. On keyboards in general, most keys generates two characters. This is fine for English, not using any letters besides A-Z or any accents as far as ASCII is concerned.
However, for many European languages, there are additional characters, like a+ring (U+0035) in Swedish, and accented characters, like e+acute (U+00E9) in French. Since back in the days of PC/XTs, there were only 83/84 keys to go around, they made some keys produce a third and sometimes fourth character. These were accessed by pressing Ctrl and Alt for the third char and Ctrl, Alt and Shift for the fourth char and then the key.
At some point, it was (rightfully) decided this was unnecessarily clunky. Keyboard BIOSes/drivers were changed to support the Mac-style input of accent + character to generate that character accented. That still left the 'standard' for older keyboards to be backward compatible with, and other chars that didn't fit that pattern.
So when the 101/102 key keyboards came out, for European languages that changed the right Alt key to Alt Gr, or alternate graphic. (For some languages it had a different abbreviation, like Alt Car). This allowed typing Alt Gr plus one of the 3- or 4-character keys to access the 3rd (and with Shift, the 4th) character. Still a pain, but less so than a 3 or 4 finger salute to get a single character.
On keyboards in general, most keys generates two characters. This is fine for English, not using any letters besides A-Z or any accents as far as ASCII is concerned.
However, for many European languages, there are additional characters, like a+ring (U+0035) in Swedish, and accented characters, like e+acute (U+00E9) in French. Since back in the days of XTs, there were only 83/84 keys to go around, they made some keys produce a third and sometimes fourth character. These were accessed by pressing Ctrl and Alt for the third char and Ctrl, Alt and Shift for the fourth char and then the key.
At some point, it was (rightfully) decided this was unnecessarily clunky. Keyboard BIOSes/drivers were changed to support the Mac-style input of accent + character to generate that character accented. That still left the 'standard' for older keyboards to be backward compatible with, and other chars that didn't fit that pattern.
So when the 101/102 key keyboards came out, for European languages that changed the right Alt key to Alt Gr, or alternate graphic. (For some languages it had a different abbreviation, like Alt Car). This allowed typing Alt Gr plus one of the 3- or 4-character keys to access the 3rd (and with Shift, the 4th) character. Still a pain, but less so than a 3 or 4 finger salute to get a single character.
At a software company, a co-worker and I wrote a new mouse driver for a cube neighbor's development machine, and slipped it on when he wasn't around. It simply added +1 to the y value, so that as you moved around it would slowly sink to the bottom of the screen. With a little effort you could get it back to the top of the screen, but then it would slowly work its way down again. It was still usable, just very confusing.
:-)
Nothing so blatant as a screenshot of the desktop or changing people's 'new mail' or shutdown sounds. Sheesh.
But keep in mind that as much fun as a good prank can be, don't get carried away. If you disrupt people's work too badly, you may find yourself on the receiving end of the "pink slip" prank or the "reprimand" trick.
The chewing out we got for the above prank convinced not to do the next one we'd planned, a new, only sometimes remapped keyboard driver...
Some of the people who worry about full-frame sensors are like me that (a) shoot a lot of wide angle shots (for me, nature) and (b) have an investment in existing wide-angle lenses.
The issue isn't the size of the sensor per se, it's that with a smaller sensor you end up with an effective 1.5X multiplier to the focal length with existing lenses. So your 20mm lens (wide) is now effectively 30mm (not very wide). Great if you're shooting with a telephoto (600mm becomes 900mm), but not so great for wide angle.
You can get even wider lenses to compensate for some of it, but that means a further investment in lenses, and after a certain point (around 15mm for 35mm SLRs, IIRC) the optics start getting kind of weird and lenses that will compensate completely are either very expensive or don't exist at all. To get a 24mm equivalent you'd need a 16mm lens (doable, but fairly pricey; $1000+ retail); to get a 20mm equivalent you'd need a 13mm lens (almost doable (Nikon sells a 14mm), but getting very pricey and into the weird optics range).
That said, I'm still considering getting a non-full size digital, using what lenses I've got, and using the large amount I'll save in film and E6 processing fees towards new lenses. I've been waiting for a full-frame digital (Nikon mount since that's what my money is in), but I may give up.
I'd been hoping the Kodak DCS-14n was 'it', but although it's full frame, the sensor it uses is so noisy and unsharp that the effective resolution is lower than a lot of other non full-frame sensor cameras, and a lot lower than its stated values.