Maybe if you were a little less dogmatic and a little more pragmatic about which technologies you're willing to learn, you wouldn't still be searching the jobs in your area. I'd love to write multiplayer game server code all day like I did in a previous job, but people are willing to pay me to do J2EE web applications, so J2EE code is what I'm doing nowadays. During the day, anyway.
I've written code for other people on enough systems over the years (everything from the Atari 400 to a Cray Y-MP) that I've come to realize it just doesn't matter in the end. Trying my best to find elegant, clean ways to solve the problem at hand no matter what the language or support technology is -- that's where the challenge and fun lies. If the technology base is primitive, the feeling of accomplishment is that much more complete. Whether I'm typing my code into an xterm or a Visual Studio window is way down the relevance list.
Of course, one could always do all that and supplements. It's not like the two are mutually exclusive. Not that I'd give my kids brain-altering substances without a lot more safety data, but the point is, if there's some supplement that's beneficial, it'll probably be beneficial to well-raised children as well as to fast-food-junkie latchkey kids.
And without spam filtering, you'd still have to check for small numbers of good messages buried in a mountain of bad ones, only you'd have to do it every single day rather than just occasionally. This to me is a step forward, not a reason to avoid filtering.
Re:As someone who actually has a Roomba ...
on
Roomba + Tablet PC = ?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I have a Roomba too and I've noticed the same thing -- but only when I go a while between cleanings. If I use it every couple of days, after a week or so it gets rid of enough accumulated dirt that subsequent runs don't fill up the compartment any more. If for whatever reason you can't use it that frequently, then yeah, it's probably not the right vacuum for you. I fire it up when I leave for the day, so it's no big deal to use it nearly daily.
but its just plain easier and quicker to use a real vacuum.
I suppose if you're doing your vacuuming on a tight schedule, but otherwise how is a real vacuum easier than "press a button, leave the room and go do something else"?
Having a Roomba means my floor gets vacuumed every couple of days, rather than every few weeks (and that's when I was feeling especially motivated.) I usually start it going right before I leave for work, so I really don't care how long it takes to cover the entire room.
The only extra work is having to pick stuff up off the floor first, but you have to do that with a regular vacuum too.
How about living in a way that our bodies were actually meant to. Exercising, working with our bodies, and communicating in person.
What about the idea that humans were "meant to" improve themselves technologically? Check out the book "Natural Born Cyborgs" by Andy Clark -- he makes a pretty convincing argument that things like cellphone implants or robotic limbs aren't a bizarre aberration. Rather, they're incremental steps on the long road of technological self-enhancements that started the first time someone used the technology of writing to remember a piece of abstract information the unaided brain would have forgotten.
Even if you reject that argument, you have to figure out where to draw the line, and the answer isn't at all obvious. Were humans meant to see fine details on objects miles away? Toss out those binoculars. Were we meant to instantly kill other creatures without laying a finger on them? Forget your rough-hewn spearheads and boar traps, if not. Were we meant to survive heart failure? (Careful that your reasoning doesn't also conclude that gene therapy to live for 1000 years is fine too, if you want to be traditional but still humane.) To travel halfway around the globe in a matter of hours? To walk on the moon? The list goes on.
Humans are naturally unnatural. It's what makes us what we are.
And it allows you to engage in guilty pleasures without feeling, well, guilty. I've been listening to Doctor Who audio dramas during my commutes for the last few weeks. Complete geek-out time, and nobody has to know about it but me. (Well, me and thousands of Slashdot readers, now.) And it's not like I've wasted otherwise useful time on it, so no pangs of guilt.
No, but you absorb more than you do if you're just doing housework and not listening to a book on tape. Kind of hard to read while you're doing the dishes.
The Directv Tivo cannot record(or even buffer) Directv's music channels.
"Cannot" is putting it a bit too strongly. I've had wish lists pick up special programs on the music channels from time to time, so the hardware is definitely capable of it. (Fast forwarding doesn't work on those recordings, though.) I imagine if you've hacked your TiVo to run a Web server or whatever, you could probably schedule recordings on the music channels.
The prices might have been ridiculously high, but those Aeron chairs are pretty comfortable. I got one as a gift way back when they first came out, before they were hot items -- benefits of having relatives in the interior design biz -- and I still use it every day. I can stay comfortably seated for marathon coding or gaming sessions with no backache or sore muscles afterwards, which isn't true of most other chairs I've had over the years. (Yes, I do take breaks ordinarily, but on occasion I'll be deep into something and not notice how much time has gone by, a feeling I'm sure is familiar to many Slashdotters.)
So by all means knock the fad surrounding it, but it's pretty silly to knock a perfectly good piece of furniture just because it became fashionable for a brief time.
Wasting countless hours on the couch is as much TV's fault as an open mail relay is the Sendmail team's fault. A tool is just a tool; whether or not it's used appropriately is up to its owner. It's possible to have both a TV and a bookcase and get plenty of enjoyment out of both.
I only keep my cable TV service (also Comcast) as an emergency backup in case my DirecTV receiver goes on the blink, and because I use a cable modem for my Internet access. The picture quality is much better on DirecTV than on my cable system, and I've never had reception drop out due to rain. The only thing that's knocked out my satellite reception has been a couple days of really strong winds, which knocked my dish out of alignment a few degrees. Five minutes on my rooftop afterwards fixed that.
I'll put it this way: my cable modem has had more downtime than my satellite TV over the last two years, and every time I've checked, the cable TV feed has also been messed up whenever the cable modem has had trouble.
Plus, if you get an integrated DirecTV/TiVo receiver, you get to time-shift your shows with zero quality loss. With a standalone TiVo there's an extra D/A conversion between the satellite receiver and the video cable, then an A/D conversion and a lossy compression step to get from the cable onto the TiVo's hard disk. I quite enjoy being able to make pristine archive DVDs of my favorite shows without any re-encoding at all.
Given the humility of the US government lately, you never know. Someone could say open relays are aiding terrorist attacks on the US cyber-infrastructure.
That high-pitched buzz you hear is an unmanned attack drone flying over to blow your server room to a pile of rubble.
(It scares me that that scenario isn't completely implausible.)
I disagree, depending on how the letter is presented. Getting a "your server is attracting the attention of our investigators" letter from a federal agency is probably enough to spur a lot of stressed, ignorant people into hiring someone who's able to tell them what it all means and/or fix it.
Not everyone, of course -- I agree that some relays are open on purpose, and some people will disregard any official notice short of a search warrant delivered by a squad of riot cops. But I think this can't hurt.
Guess it takes one to know one. When I was an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, CalPIRG was best known (at least in my social circle) for the fact that a "voluntary" donation to them was helpfully included as part of our tuition fees. To avoid giving money to them, one had to take the time to fill out an exemption form and turn it in to the university.
That always really annoyed me. I mean, I agreed with a lot of what they did, but the idea of the university acting as the bill collector for a lobbying group, and doing it in such a way that most students ended up giving money to these guys without knowing the first thing about them, always struck me as somewhere between rude and corrupt.
And now they're blowing the whistle on unnecessary costs for university students! Pot, kettle, black.
And you explain soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save the lives of their platoons how, exactly? They're all just "fucking idiots" in your book, apparently -- if they'd jumped the other direction they might have lived, but instead they sacrificed themselves for the sake of others.
The idea of sacrificing oneself for a greater good is hardly a new concept. Soldiers have volunteered for suicide missions since the beginning of history. Most major religions have some notion of virtuous martyrdom.
Maybe you don't see things that way. You're welcome to that view. Maybe you've never been wrong about anything in your life. But probably not, so at least consider the possibility that other points of view than yours might have some validity.
Or, put more simply: who the hell are you to tell me how I'm allowed to die?
Slashdot Mirror
I've written code for other people on enough systems over the years (everything from the Atari 400 to a Cray Y-MP) that I've come to realize it just doesn't matter in the end. Trying my best to find elegant, clean ways to solve the problem at hand no matter what the language or support technology is -- that's where the challenge and fun lies. If the technology base is primitive, the feeling of accomplishment is that much more complete. Whether I'm typing my code into an xterm or a Visual Studio window is way down the relevance list.
Adaptability is a good thing.
Of course, one could always do all that and supplements. It's not like the two are mutually exclusive. Not that I'd give my kids brain-altering substances without a lot more safety data, but the point is, if there's some supplement that's beneficial, it'll probably be beneficial to well-raised children as well as to fast-food-junkie latchkey kids.
And without spam filtering, you'd still have to check for small numbers of good messages buried in a mountain of bad ones, only you'd have to do it every single day rather than just occasionally. This to me is a step forward, not a reason to avoid filtering.
I have a Roomba too and I've noticed the same thing -- but only when I go a while between cleanings. If I use it every couple of days, after a week or so it gets rid of enough accumulated dirt that subsequent runs don't fill up the compartment any more. If for whatever reason you can't use it that frequently, then yeah, it's probably not the right vacuum for you. I fire it up when I leave for the day, so it's no big deal to use it nearly daily.
I suppose if you're doing your vacuuming on a tight schedule, but otherwise how is a real vacuum easier than "press a button, leave the room and go do something else"?
Having a Roomba means my floor gets vacuumed every couple of days, rather than every few weeks (and that's when I was feeling especially motivated.) I usually start it going right before I leave for work, so I really don't care how long it takes to cover the entire room.
The only extra work is having to pick stuff up off the floor first, but you have to do that with a regular vacuum too.
Yeah, heaven forbid someone should spend $2000 on a hobby. What a moron.
What about the idea that humans were "meant to" improve themselves technologically? Check out the book "Natural Born Cyborgs" by Andy Clark -- he makes a pretty convincing argument that things like cellphone implants or robotic limbs aren't a bizarre aberration. Rather, they're incremental steps on the long road of technological self-enhancements that started the first time someone used the technology of writing to remember a piece of abstract information the unaided brain would have forgotten.
Even if you reject that argument, you have to figure out where to draw the line, and the answer isn't at all obvious. Were humans meant to see fine details on objects miles away? Toss out those binoculars. Were we meant to instantly kill other creatures without laying a finger on them? Forget your rough-hewn spearheads and boar traps, if not. Were we meant to survive heart failure? (Careful that your reasoning doesn't also conclude that gene therapy to live for 1000 years is fine too, if you want to be traditional but still humane.) To travel halfway around the globe in a matter of hours? To walk on the moon? The list goes on.
Humans are naturally unnatural. It's what makes us what we are.
Hey, wait, you're right.
And it allows you to engage in guilty pleasures without feeling, well, guilty. I've been listening to Doctor Who audio dramas during my commutes for the last few weeks. Complete geek-out time, and nobody has to know about it but me. (Well, me and thousands of Slashdot readers, now.) And it's not like I've wasted otherwise useful time on it, so no pangs of guilt.
No, but you absorb more than you do if you're just doing housework and not listening to a book on tape. Kind of hard to read while you're doing the dishes.
So by all means knock the fad surrounding it, but it's pretty silly to knock a perfectly good piece of furniture just because it became fashionable for a brief time.
Well sure, because the computer is obviously hosed. Makes sense to me.
Check out the DealDatabase TiVo extraction forum.
Spoken like someone who's never had friends over to watch the Super Bowl.
Wasting countless hours on the couch is as much TV's fault as an open mail relay is the Sendmail team's fault. A tool is just a tool; whether or not it's used appropriately is up to its owner. It's possible to have both a TV and a bookcase and get plenty of enjoyment out of both.
I'll put it this way: my cable modem has had more downtime than my satellite TV over the last two years, and every time I've checked, the cable TV feed has also been messed up whenever the cable modem has had trouble.
Plus, if you get an integrated DirecTV/TiVo receiver, you get to time-shift your shows with zero quality loss. With a standalone TiVo there's an extra D/A conversion between the satellite receiver and the video cable, then an A/D conversion and a lossy compression step to get from the cable onto the TiVo's hard disk. I quite enjoy being able to make pristine archive DVDs of my favorite shows without any re-encoding at all.
That high-pitched buzz you hear is an unmanned attack drone flying over to blow your server room to a pile of rubble.
(It scares me that that scenario isn't completely implausible.)
Not everyone, of course -- I agree that some relays are open on purpose, and some people will disregard any official notice short of a search warrant delivered by a squad of riot cops. But I think this can't hurt.
That always really annoyed me. I mean, I agreed with a lot of what they did, but the idea of the university acting as the bill collector for a lobbying group, and doing it in such a way that most students ended up giving money to these guys without knowing the first thing about them, always struck me as somewhere between rude and corrupt.
And now they're blowing the whistle on unnecessary costs for university students! Pot, kettle, black.
Nah, that'd be news.news.com.com.com.
Apparently the editor of the New York Times Magazine thought so.
Hey, look! Over there! A terrorist!
What were you asking me again, you traitor?
Which, it should be noted, comes with a rather noisy fan. You just can't win...
The idea of sacrificing oneself for a greater good is hardly a new concept. Soldiers have volunteered for suicide missions since the beginning of history. Most major religions have some notion of virtuous martyrdom.
Maybe you don't see things that way. You're welcome to that view. Maybe you've never been wrong about anything in your life. But probably not, so at least consider the possibility that other points of view than yours might have some validity.
Or, put more simply: who the hell are you to tell me how I'm allowed to die?