I simply cannot keep up when I write notes by hand -- but I type very quickly. I too have had trouble with equations, and my solution works for me, but isn't the best. Here's my approach, fwiw.
Type notes on my Eee, it has a 7-8 hr (actual) battery, and a relatively quiet keyboard, so as not to be a distraction. I can watch the instructor and the board while typing, unlike handwriting. Using emacs under windows at the moment (better battery life pending some driver updates for linux)
I keep a notepad for any graphs, and I just number any figures I draw. I switch between keyboard and pen as rarely as possible.
Equations are important -- I'm a math major now! For some classes, equations will come as fast as the instructor can scrawl them on the board. I write in an abbreviated shorthand, basically supremely-lazy latex. I neglect anything that could be implicit, and write, for example, omg and Omg instead of \omega and \Omega. I only started a little while back, and I still adjust my abbreviations as I go. That means it's not really parsable yet, but I am doing a good job of figuring out the minimum number of key presses to say what I need to say. After writing it for a while, at least it's easy to read (much like latex, you'll start to see it without needing to render it before long).
I like the mention of cameras. I've started doing that for meetings with my advisor, just using my iPhone to capture the whiteboard after we've gone back and forth on a few ideas.
I've been through N (where N is large) years of school, but only in this last year have I switched to typing. I have a great deal of trouble with handwritten anything (random word and letter transpositions everywhere, HORRIBLE if you're trying to write a mathematical theorem). Switching to typed notes has been one of the best decisions I ever made wrt taking classes.
For different people, different things work. If I just listen, I follow well, but forget quickly. If I take notes, I struggle more to keep up, but I remember things well -- even if I throw my notes away.
Actually, that's really important, but it's talking more about the software than the hardware.
For most problems, it can be very difficult to find a way to write the program so that it efficiently utilizes many processors at once. Typically, a poorly-written MPI (or PVM, or whatever distributed computing model you use) program will leave many CPUs idling much of the time. For some problems the division of labor is fairly straightforward, but for most it's not.
Now, this comment implies that the code is well-written for a cluster. It could also just have CPUs spinning around on redundant calculations. If the size of sending a chunk of data outstrips the cost of computing it (for example), you might recompute it locally, even if that would be redundant work. Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that this is only related to parallel efficiency, not equivalent.
Anyway, I'm babbling, but sorry, I live and breath this stuff these days. In short, a point like "well above 90% of each processor core" is commonly taken to imply that the parallel efficiency is pretty damn good. To summarize even further, sexy!
Gotta give some sympathy to the Flems. For those of you who don't know, with the South Hovse rennovations going on, the cannon hasn't been located at its usual lockdown.
And just because Flemming happens to be the victim doesn't mean it's not game-on for all of Caltech. I'm looking forward to whatever comes next.
Well, not so much "experiments" as "crushing bouts of insomnia".
I have, in the past, maintained sleep schedules where I averaged just under 3 hours of sleep a night for well over a month at a time. I know precisely how much I was sleeping because I kept precise logs, as per my doctor's request. This wasn't by choice--I simply couldn't sleep.
You see, I've always struggled with insomnia, and twice in my life it's gotten this bad. As such, I've come to be aquainted with what affect sleep patterns can have on a person. I can say that a lot of what I'm reading in the "Uberman's Sleep Schedule" seems plausible, except the bit about not being tired. You're tired, damn tired, but you can't tell after a while.
Naturally, the circumstances for me were a bit... different, but I can't really recommend a schedule like this. When you don't get enough sleep, you're never really awake. Worse, you can't really tell how much it's affecting you while you're still suffering from sleep deprevation--it's a lot like being drunk in that regard. Only the incredibly foolish (or incredibly experienced) think they can tell how drunk they are.
What's the point of spending more time awake if you're only sort of awake?
On the other hand, it's only fair to mention that my curiosity is in fact piqued. I'm tempted to try it myself, and see what happens. Worst comes to worst, it could trigger another long-term disruption in my sleep schedule, but hey, at least that's a known evil!
I also have all sorts of 2D and 3D plotting requirements for work... The most complicated being the need to visualize scalar data associated with points on an arbitrary triangle (or square) mesh in 3D.
At the moment, I use a combination of Matlab and Maple, both commercial programs that we have licenses for. They get the job done, but I find them both to be woefully inadequate. First and foremost, they are horrifically slow (at least in terms of actually plotting the data) for otherwise simple tasks.
I don't want to get into a flamewar with any Matlab or Maple users out there, by the way, so I'm really only making a point about the responsiveness of the GUI and the speed of generating the plots.
If there is a good open source tool for this, I'd love to hear it. I've looked and found a few things, but nothing quite adequate.
There was a time, long ago, when Enlightenment was my WM of choice, and WindowMaker played backup, when I needed things to either be a bit more lightweight, or I was working over the network, or whatever.
Nowadays, I want a lot less visually from a WM--I want it to be as unobtrusive and thin as possible. I put up with Gnome/KDE (depends on what machine I'm working on) because of the nicer and nicer applications being built around them, but I dislike all of that extra overhead--"this app depends on *WHAT*?" This is, of course, my personal taste, and nothing more.
Enlightenment, how I used to long for you. I yearned for another release. I ached to spend long nights interfacing with you... but that was long ago. I've grown up, you've chnaged. We've moved apart. Can it ever really work again between us? Can't we just let the past stay the past, beautiful in what it is, but nothing more?
I did it, just to see if I could. It worked fine for some movies, but couldn't quite keep up with some higher-res files. That, and I didn't have anything set up for sound at the time. This wasn't with LTSP, however, this was between my WinXP box (running the cygwin X server) and connecting to my Debian box with XDMCP.
I pose another question: When I tried to do the same thing, but run the X server on my laptop (G4 Titanium PowerBook, Mac OS 10.3) it completely failed to keep up. Any idea why this wouldn't work?
It seems ridiculous to me to send the uncompressed video over the ethernet, just seems like a complete and total waste of bandwidth. If you're opposed to including potentially large programs on the client side (ie mplayer or whatever), maybe it would make sense to set up some sort of on-demand-download system for certain programs that should be run locally?
Agreed. The actual content and presentation of a programming languages is, in my opinion, an important and useful distinction to make, especially after you've learned enough different languages. I always think of languages in terms of a) what they can easily express and b) how they express it. There have been a number of languages that I loved content wise, but couldn't stand presentation wise. Just as tabulation style, commenting style, naming conventions, and so on are usually up the to programmer, why not leave the *rest* up to them as well, assuming there was some underlying, unifying way of making it all cohesive?
I've been thinking about this for a while. What makes the most sense to me is some XML representation of the content, and then an editor would be required to interpret as { and }, for example. If the representation is chosen carefully, I imagine that many small code blocks could, potentially, be mostly language independent, or at least compatible with many different languages without changing a single "line" (of the XML representation).
I've considered on occasion putting in some work to get a small proof-of-concept project off of the ground, but don't really have the time. If anyone is actually interested in this, I'd be happy to help contribute to such a project.
I feel retarded for even brining this up, but since You mentioned the Cyrix P166+, and that's what I was running at the time, I feel compelled to nitpick. Yes, I'm being dumb, and doing nothing more than trying to show off (and failing) my knowledge of obscure, outdated and useless information, but...
The P166+ ran at 150MHz by default. It was the first CPU I had that was marketed to be "competetive with the equivilent speed Pentium" or some bull like that. Basically, all of the Cyrix 6x86 line chips ran one notch slower than their names implied. I felt ripped for a little bit, then I thought about how little I paid for the dang thing, and felt a little better.
I think I lost my MP3 virginity to EMF - Unbelievable. Nothing special about it, just the first download that succeeded. The file was full of those skips and bleep-blip sounds that plagued the early days of MP3s. And yes, after some testing of different players for about an hour or two, I settled on Winamp. Still use Winamp now, though I'm also enjoying iTunes.
Now, so many years down the road, and surprisingly most of my music collection is legal. I think that's more a function of being employed as opposed to a poor college student, but it could be due to other factors as well.
Here's an interesting perspective for you, though... When you look at the technology we were using in 1997 (I got my first MP3 in September of '97, I think... maybe October), I for one had a 3G hard drive. It was huge, and I was so proud. Now, in 2004, my laptop has 10 times that, and my desktop 30 times that. Also, DVD+/-Rs are becoming more popular, and they have about 10x the space of an old CD-R (I'm talking 640megs). Furthermore, these days I'm typically wired to a 100baseT network instead of a 10baseT, not to mention I'm on DSL as opposed to dialup when I'm at home. What am I getting at? Today, if you wanted to share and store uncompressed 44kHz stereo wave files, at least relative to the technology available now they are SMALLER than MP3s were back then. I can fit more wave files on my computer now than I could fit mp3s then, and I can download waves faster now than I could download mp3s then... It's all about perspective.
I've been having problems with one hand lately, due to over-clicking while playing Morrowind (damn fine game though!).
I've found that I can't type for very long before it becomes very uncomfortable for my right hand. Presently I've taken to switching to typing entirely left-handed, but this is difficult. It also makes it impossible to use my favorite keyboard, one which I meticulously painted over with a sunset--the painting makes it impossible to see the lettering, and I need to look at the keyboard when I type one-handed.
I also have a Fingerworks keyboard, specifically for my 15" TiBook--I love it to death, and the gesture system is wonderful, but it is very slow to learn to type on (as some people have already mentioned).
Another option that I'm aware of lies in an old linux kernel patch to the keyboard driver--I only know of it because a friend of mine wrote it. The patch makes it so that if you hold down the spacebar, the keyboard is mirrored, so that you can continue to type one-handed, and allegedly learning the reflected keys is very fast, since you already sort of know where they are. In case this wasn't clear, if you wanted to type "type", you would type T-(hold space)-T-Q-(release space)-E. I'm not sure where the link is, but if people want I'll try and find it.
I make it to work on time every day, and I consider punctuality to be a matter of pride. That's just me though, of course.
If your workplace has strict timekeeping, which is not at all an unfair practice, you would expect your employer to name some time that would be considered "late". It's a simple necessity that a hard line be drawn somewhere. If you're only considered late if you're 15 minutes late or more, everyone will start showing up 10 minutes late.
If you're being paid to start working at a certain time, show some self respect and start working at that time, and don't whine about it.
Moreover, and this is just personal opinion, I also feel that if you're expected to be at work at 7:30, you're actually expected to be ready to start work at 7:30, not take 30 minutes to get coffee and "settle in." I'll probably be tarred and feathered for this one though.
I just figure my time is my business, and my boss's time is my boss's business. Simple.
Actually, there's more to this than that. I forget the actual numbers, but if you typed in "cookie", the prompt would go away from some number of days, I believe. If you typed in "oreo", it would go away for the same number of weeks.
Hackers was actually a really fun movie, and had some really cool/really obscure computer geek culture references hidden under piles of unbelievable but amusing crap.
Perhaps I used too strong words to make my point. I'm only trying to point out that should slashdot ever get sued, this is the kind of thing that the opposition would bring up to "soil" the reputation of slashdot in the public eye. Look at the the things brought up in court cases regarding decss and 2600. It's just that there are a lot of sites out there that would be afraid to let something like this get posted. That's all.
Unfortunately, asking questions like these can actually endanger slashdot. Stuff like this would be the first things brought up if anyone tried to make a serious attack (legally or otherwise in the public eye) against slashdot.
At the same time, I'm glad we can still have this sort of discussion. I'm scared to think that the threat of net censorship could make things like this nonexistant, and I'm thankful that slashdot can cover this sort of material.
I realize that this is an "Ask Slashdot," and not actually material by the people who run slashdot. So what. Slashdot is run by CmdrTaco and company, but a very large portion of it is defined by the slashdot community.
In a nutshell, I think everyone should be thankful that we can still ask questions like this.
Hey, any chance I could get your email/ask you a few questions? I'm maintaining a box in a chem lab for a friend that is used for chem. simulations (I think quantum chem, since that's his bag, but I can't stand the subject myself). I'd be really interested in hearing anything you have to say on the matter. He's running a dual-xeon box and using gamma for most of his sims.
Thanx a bundle if you can get back to me--just despam my email address, or reply to this message. thx
Yes, Sheakespeare frequently stole stories. In fact, many of his best works were taken from other sources. His talent, however, was as a storyteller, not a story *writer*. He may not have come up with an original plot, but the words were his. His talent was expression, not creation.
As far as Teddy Ruxpin goes, I totally agree. Mine, however, had a busted eye and was missing part of his mouth, such that he looked demonic. Gave me no end of disturbance when I was little...
I've always thought voice control in general was a cool thing, but I've also always thought that it wasn't necessarily the best idea for controlling audio equipment. Why you ask? Does anyone remember the clapper? Has anyone seen a TV controlled by one of these things suddenly go off when a commercial for the clapper comes on the air? It hilarious, let me tell you, but it makes a point--the potential for interference is incredible. To handle it well, you would need a system to filter out the interference--you could, for instance, dynamically filter out (with decent success, even) your output from your input, ie take what you are currently playing and subtract it from your microphone input. Feasible, but you have to be careful with your implementation. Once the kinks are out, however, I'm in.:)
I can't seem to remember exactly who this Patrick Warburton person is... I didn't get to watch as many episodes as I would have liked--could anyone post a link to a picture as a favor? Thanks.
Be warned--I also posted this same response on Freshmeat, so some of you may have already read it.
Very interesting read indeed. However, I feel I must play the devil's advocate (don't shoot me!) and point out a few things that aren't necessarily wrong, but I think should be clarified/explored.
1. One possibility that is mentioned is to change the way we raise our children, essentially, and help girls cast free some of the bonds of traditional social behavior. I believe *everyone* could use a little help with this, though I also agree the girls are undoubtedly constrained more by traditional views than boys. A little later on, however, Skud mentions that one of the reasons it would be desirable to have more "geek chicks" is that "they would bring a different perspective and generate new ideas." If, in the Nature vs. Nurture argument, you believe in 100% nurture, 0% nature, than how much different will the perspective of "geek chicks" be if they are brought up more like their mail brethen? Naturally, there would be a difference, and I think most people who have given it some thought will agree that it is definitely neither all Nature or all Nurture, but somewhere in between though we may vary on just where we stand in the middle.
Whoops, I got a little off of the train of thought I started on, but it does help set up the next point.:)
2. If there is a fundamental difference, even slight, in the way we think, and more importantly, our motivations, than isn't it to be expected that our interest in certain fields may be different? If we redefine our definition of "hacking" to include more women, just what have we accomplished? Nothing. It's nothing more than politically-correct jerrymandering. What we need to do, instead, is recognize where different people stand, both men and women, and give credit where credit is due. Yes, perhaps more "male" interests are predominant in "hard hacking" type communities, where each line of assembly code in that core library is a work of art, in it's own twisted way. I am not entirely convinced that this is the case, but if it is, is there anything wrong with that?
I think I had a third point, but I've forgotten it now. I was also gonna write a sappy conclusion, but I thought it was a little too thick about halfway through writing it, so I deleted it.
If you have any comments, please feel free to email me! I'd love to hear 'em. I actually think this is a pretty interesting topic... (and I've had an in-depth discussion or two w/ my girlfriend about it... so yes, i'm a dude)
Good point. I think most of us reboot primarily for new kernels--though I still stray to the dark side about once a week for a massive session of gaming...
Slashdot Mirror
I simply cannot keep up when I write notes by hand -- but I type very quickly. I too have had trouble with equations, and my solution works for me, but isn't the best. Here's my approach, fwiw.
Type notes on my Eee, it has a 7-8 hr (actual) battery, and a relatively quiet keyboard, so as not to be a distraction. I can watch the instructor and the board while typing, unlike handwriting. Using emacs under windows at the moment (better battery life pending some driver updates for linux)
I keep a notepad for any graphs, and I just number any figures I draw. I switch between keyboard and pen as rarely as possible.
Equations are important -- I'm a math major now! For some classes, equations will come as fast as the instructor can scrawl them on the board. I write in an abbreviated shorthand, basically supremely-lazy latex. I neglect anything that could be implicit, and write, for example, omg and Omg instead of \omega and \Omega. I only started a little while back, and I still adjust my abbreviations as I go. That means it's not really parsable yet, but I am doing a good job of figuring out the minimum number of key presses to say what I need to say. After writing it for a while, at least it's easy to read (much like latex, you'll start to see it without needing to render it before long).
I like the mention of cameras. I've started doing that for meetings with my advisor, just using my iPhone to capture the whiteboard after we've gone back and forth on a few ideas.
I've been through N (where N is large) years of school, but only in this last year have I switched to typing. I have a great deal of trouble with handwritten anything (random word and letter transpositions everywhere, HORRIBLE if you're trying to write a mathematical theorem). Switching to typed notes has been one of the best decisions I ever made wrt taking classes.
For different people, different things work. If I just listen, I follow well, but forget quickly. If I take notes, I struggle more to keep up, but I remember things well -- even if I throw my notes away.
Actually, that's really important, but it's talking more about the software than the hardware.
For most problems, it can be very difficult to find a way to write the program so that it efficiently utilizes many processors at once. Typically, a poorly-written MPI (or PVM, or whatever distributed computing model you use) program will leave many CPUs idling much of the time. For some problems the division of labor is fairly straightforward, but for most it's not.
Now, this comment implies that the code is well-written for a cluster. It could also just have CPUs spinning around on redundant calculations. If the size of sending a chunk of data outstrips the cost of computing it (for example), you might recompute it locally, even if that would be redundant work. Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that this is only related to parallel efficiency, not equivalent.
Anyway, I'm babbling, but sorry, I live and breath this stuff these days. In short, a point like "well above 90% of each processor core" is commonly taken to imply that the parallel efficiency is pretty damn good. To summarize even further, sexy!
Gotta give some sympathy to the Flems. For those of you who don't know, with the South Hovse rennovations going on, the cannon hasn't been located at its usual lockdown.
And just because Flemming happens to be the victim doesn't mean it's not game-on for all of Caltech. I'm looking forward to whatever comes next.
Loitering Old Lloydie ('02)
Well, not so much "experiments" as "crushing bouts of insomnia".
I have, in the past, maintained sleep schedules where I averaged just under 3 hours of sleep a night for well over a month at a time. I know precisely how much I was sleeping because I kept precise logs, as per my doctor's request. This wasn't by choice--I simply couldn't sleep.
You see, I've always struggled with insomnia, and twice in my life it's gotten this bad. As such, I've come to be aquainted with what affect sleep patterns can have on a person. I can say that a lot of what I'm reading in the "Uberman's Sleep Schedule" seems plausible, except the bit about not being tired. You're tired, damn tired, but you can't tell after a while.
Naturally, the circumstances for me were a bit... different, but I can't really recommend a schedule like this. When you don't get enough sleep, you're never really awake. Worse, you can't really tell how much it's affecting you while you're still suffering from sleep deprevation--it's a lot like being drunk in that regard. Only the incredibly foolish (or incredibly experienced) think they can tell how drunk they are.
What's the point of spending more time awake if you're only sort of awake?
On the other hand, it's only fair to mention that my curiosity is in fact piqued. I'm tempted to try it myself, and see what happens. Worst comes to worst, it could trigger another long-term disruption in my sleep schedule, but hey, at least that's a known evil!
I also have all sorts of 2D and 3D plotting requirements for work... The most complicated being the need to visualize scalar data associated with points on an arbitrary triangle (or square) mesh in 3D.
At the moment, I use a combination of Matlab and Maple, both commercial programs that we have licenses for. They get the job done, but I find them both to be woefully inadequate. First and foremost, they are horrifically slow (at least in terms of actually plotting the data) for otherwise simple tasks.
I don't want to get into a flamewar with any Matlab or Maple users out there, by the way, so I'm really only making a point about the responsiveness of the GUI and the speed of generating the plots.
If there is a good open source tool for this, I'd love to hear it. I've looked and found a few things, but nothing quite adequate.
There was a time, long ago, when Enlightenment was my WM of choice, and WindowMaker played backup, when I needed things to either be a bit more lightweight, or I was working over the network, or whatever.
Nowadays, I want a lot less visually from a WM--I want it to be as unobtrusive and thin as possible. I put up with Gnome/KDE (depends on what machine I'm working on) because of the nicer and nicer applications being built around them, but I dislike all of that extra overhead--"this app depends on *WHAT*?" This is, of course, my personal taste, and nothing more.
Enlightenment, how I used to long for you. I yearned for another release. I ached to spend long nights interfacing with you... but that was long ago. I've grown up, you've chnaged. We've moved apart. Can it ever really work again between us? Can't we just let the past stay the past, beautiful in what it is, but nothing more?
Call me.
I did it, just to see if I could. It worked fine for some movies, but couldn't quite keep up with some higher-res files. That, and I didn't have anything set up for sound at the time. This wasn't with LTSP, however, this was between my WinXP box (running the cygwin X server) and connecting to my Debian box with XDMCP.
I pose another question: When I tried to do the same thing, but run the X server on my laptop (G4 Titanium PowerBook, Mac OS 10.3) it completely failed to keep up. Any idea why this wouldn't work?
It seems ridiculous to me to send the uncompressed video over the ethernet, just seems like a complete and total waste of bandwidth. If you're opposed to including potentially large programs on the client side (ie mplayer or whatever), maybe it would make sense to set up some sort of on-demand-download system for certain programs that should be run locally?
Agreed. The actual content and presentation of a programming languages is, in my opinion, an important and useful distinction to make, especially after you've learned enough different languages. I always think of languages in terms of a) what they can easily express and b) how they express it. There have been a number of languages that I loved content wise, but couldn't stand presentation wise. Just as tabulation style, commenting style, naming conventions, and so on are usually up the to programmer, why not leave the *rest* up to them as well, assuming there was some underlying, unifying way of making it all cohesive?
I've been thinking about this for a while. What makes the most sense to me is some XML representation of the content, and then an editor would be required to interpret as { and }, for example. If the representation is chosen carefully, I imagine that many small code blocks could, potentially, be mostly language independent, or at least compatible with many different languages without changing a single "line" (of the XML representation).
I've considered on occasion putting in some work to get a small proof-of-concept project off of the ground, but don't really have the time. If anyone is actually interested in this, I'd be happy to help contribute to such a project.
I feel retarded for even brining this up, but since You mentioned the Cyrix P166+, and that's what I was running at the time, I feel compelled to nitpick. Yes, I'm being dumb, and doing nothing more than trying to show off (and failing) my knowledge of obscure, outdated and useless information, but...
The P166+ ran at 150MHz by default. It was the first CPU I had that was marketed to be "competetive with the equivilent speed Pentium" or some bull like that. Basically, all of the Cyrix 6x86 line chips ran one notch slower than their names implied. I felt ripped for a little bit, then I thought about how little I paid for the dang thing, and felt a little better.
I think I lost my MP3 virginity to EMF - Unbelievable. Nothing special about it, just the first download that succeeded. The file was full of those skips and bleep-blip sounds that plagued the early days of MP3s. And yes, after some testing of different players for about an hour or two, I settled on Winamp. Still use Winamp now, though I'm also enjoying iTunes.
:)
Now, so many years down the road, and surprisingly most of my music collection is legal. I think that's more a function of being employed as opposed to a poor college student, but it could be due to other factors as well.
Here's an interesting perspective for you, though... When you look at the technology we were using in 1997 (I got my first MP3 in September of '97, I think... maybe October), I for one had a 3G hard drive. It was huge, and I was so proud. Now, in 2004, my laptop has 10 times that, and my desktop 30 times that. Also, DVD+/-Rs are becoming more popular, and they have about 10x the space of an old CD-R (I'm talking 640megs). Furthermore, these days I'm typically wired to a 100baseT network instead of a 10baseT, not to mention I'm on DSL as opposed to dialup when I'm at home. What am I getting at? Today, if you wanted to share and store uncompressed 44kHz stereo wave files, at least relative to the technology available now they are SMALLER than MP3s were back then. I can fit more wave files on my computer now than I could fit mp3s then, and I can download waves faster now than I could download mp3s then... It's all about perspective.
Tell me that's not amusing, I dare ya.
I've been having problems with one hand lately, due to over-clicking while playing Morrowind (damn fine game though!).
I've found that I can't type for very long before it becomes very uncomfortable for my right hand. Presently I've taken to switching to typing entirely left-handed, but this is difficult. It also makes it impossible to use my favorite keyboard, one which I meticulously painted over with a sunset--the painting makes it impossible to see the lettering, and I need to look at the keyboard when I type one-handed.
I also have a Fingerworks keyboard, specifically for my 15" TiBook--I love it to death, and the gesture system is wonderful, but it is very slow to learn to type on (as some people have already mentioned).
Another option that I'm aware of lies in an old linux kernel patch to the keyboard driver--I only know of it because a friend of mine wrote it. The patch makes it so that if you hold down the spacebar, the keyboard is mirrored, so that you can continue to type one-handed, and allegedly learning the reflected keys is very fast, since you already sort of know where they are. In case this wasn't clear, if you wanted to type "type", you would type T-(hold space)-T-Q-(release space)-E. I'm not sure where the link is, but if people want I'll try and find it.
I make it to work on time every day, and I consider punctuality to be a matter of pride. That's just me though, of course.
If your workplace has strict timekeeping, which is not at all an unfair practice, you would expect your employer to name some time that would be considered "late". It's a simple necessity that a hard line be drawn somewhere. If you're only considered late if you're 15 minutes late or more, everyone will start showing up 10 minutes late.
If you're being paid to start working at a certain time, show some self respect and start working at that time, and don't whine about it.
Moreover, and this is just personal opinion, I also feel that if you're expected to be at work at 7:30, you're actually expected to be ready to start work at 7:30, not take 30 minutes to get coffee and "settle in." I'll probably be tarred and feathered for this one though.
I just figure my time is my business, and my boss's time is my boss's business. Simple.
Actually, there's more to this than that. I forget the actual numbers, but if you typed in "cookie", the prompt would go away from some number of days, I believe. If you typed in "oreo", it would go away for the same number of weeks.
Hackers was actually a really fun movie, and had some really cool/really obscure computer geek culture references hidden under piles of unbelievable but amusing crap.
Yeah, the movie was awesome. I loved it.
But...
Three hours of intense pleasure with no real climax results in the worst case of blue-balls I've had in years! I can't wait for the other two.
Perhaps I used too strong words to make my point. I'm only trying to point out that should slashdot ever get sued, this is the kind of thing that the opposition would bring up to "soil" the reputation of slashdot in the public eye. Look at the the things brought up in court cases regarding decss and 2600. It's just that there are a lot of sites out there that would be afraid to let something like this get posted. That's all.
Unfortunately, asking questions like these can actually endanger slashdot. Stuff like this would be the first things brought up if anyone tried to make a serious attack (legally or otherwise in the public eye) against slashdot.
At the same time, I'm glad we can still have this sort of discussion. I'm scared to think that the threat of net censorship could make things like this nonexistant, and I'm thankful that slashdot can cover this sort of material.
I realize that this is an "Ask Slashdot," and not actually material by the people who run slashdot. So what. Slashdot is run by CmdrTaco and company, but a very large portion of it is defined by the slashdot community.
In a nutshell, I think everyone should be thankful that we can still ask questions like this.
Cheers.
Nooooooooobody expects the spanish inquisition!
Hey, any chance I could get your email/ask you a few questions? I'm maintaining a box in a chem lab for a friend that is used for chem. simulations (I think quantum chem, since that's his bag, but I can't stand the subject myself). I'd be really interested in hearing anything you have to say on the matter. He's running a dual-xeon box and using gamma for most of his sims.
Thanx a bundle if you can get back to me--just despam my email address, or reply to this message. thx
Yes, Sheakespeare frequently stole stories. In fact, many of his best works were taken from other sources. His talent, however, was as a storyteller, not a story *writer*. He may not have come up with an original plot, but the words were his. His talent was expression, not creation.
As far as Teddy Ruxpin goes, I totally agree. Mine, however, had a busted eye and was missing part of his mouth, such that he looked demonic. Gave me no end of disturbance when I was little...
"I am Teddy Ruxpin. I have come for your SOUL!"
I've always thought voice control in general was a cool thing, but I've also always thought that it wasn't necessarily the best idea for controlling audio equipment. Why you ask? Does anyone remember the clapper? Has anyone seen a TV controlled by one of these things suddenly go off when a commercial for the clapper comes on the air? It hilarious, let me tell you, but it makes a point--the potential for interference is incredible. To handle it well, you would need a system to filter out the interference--you could, for instance, dynamically filter out (with decent success, even) your output from your input, ie take what you are currently playing and subtract it from your microphone input. Feasible, but you have to be careful with your implementation. Once the kinks are out, however, I'm in. :)
I can't seem to remember exactly who this Patrick Warburton person is... I didn't get to watch as many episodes as I would have liked--could anyone post a link to a picture as a favor? Thanks.
Be warned--I also posted this same response on Freshmeat, so some of you may have already read it.
:)
Very interesting read indeed. However, I feel I must play the devil's advocate (don't shoot me!) and point
out a few things that aren't necessarily wrong, but I think should be clarified/explored.
1. One possibility that is mentioned is to change the way we raise our children, essentially, and help girls
cast free some of the bonds of traditional social behavior. I believe *everyone* could use a little help with
this, though I also agree the girls are undoubtedly constrained more by traditional views than boys. A little
later on, however, Skud mentions that one of the reasons it would be desirable to have more "geek chicks" is
that "they would bring a different perspective and generate new ideas." If, in the Nature vs. Nurture
argument, you believe in 100% nurture, 0% nature, than how much different will the perspective of "geek
chicks" be if they are brought up more like their mail brethen? Naturally, there would be a difference, and I
think most people who have given it some thought will agree that it is definitely neither all Nature or all
Nurture, but somewhere in between though we may vary on just where we stand in the middle.
Whoops, I got a little off of the train of thought I started on, but it does help set up the next point.
2. If there is a fundamental difference, even slight, in the way we think, and more importantly, our
motivations, than isn't it to be expected that our interest in certain fields may be different? If we redefine
our definition of "hacking" to include more women, just what have we accomplished? Nothing. It's nothing
more than politically-correct jerrymandering. What we need to do, instead, is recognize where different
people stand, both men and women, and give credit where credit is due. Yes, perhaps more "male" interests
are predominant in "hard hacking" type communities, where each line of assembly code in that core library is
a work of art, in it's own twisted way. I am not entirely convinced that this is the case, but if it is, is there
anything wrong with that?
I think I had a third point, but I've forgotten it now. I was also gonna write a sappy conclusion, but I thought
it was a little too thick about halfway through writing it, so I deleted it.
If you have any comments, please feel free to email me! I'd love to hear 'em. I actually think this is a pretty
interesting topic... (and I've had an in-depth discussion or two w/ my girlfriend about it... so yes, i'm a dude)
Cheers.
Good point. I think most of us reboot primarily for new kernels--though I still stray to the dark side about once a week for a massive session of gaming...