I know what you mean about sketchy updates. I can view the exact hut I used to live in when I was a volunteer in Africa, but until last summer, the city where I live, near Toronto, had only low-res maps. It was difficult to even pick out where the streets and highways were!
There is a WISP in my area, but their service guy said that he couldn't get a clear enough signal from my roof. If I put up a 40-foot tower, I *might* be able to get it (people down the road do). Aside from the tower, that would be about $300 installation and $60/month, with a maximum speed of about 3Mbps download.
Turns out that I can get on the Rogers cell phone 3G network. The bandwidth is limited (1GB/month for $30, 3GB/month for $60), but I can live with that. There was no installation fee (wireless USB stick was free with 1-year contract) either.
Must be nice. I also live in Canada (Ontario), and my last electricity bill was about $30 for the electricity itself and $100 for delivery and "other" charges.
...is insurance. Without an insurance history in Canada (or, maybe, the U.S.), you are assessed as very high risk. When I returned to Canada after many years abroad, my $900/year car insurance would have been 2x or 3x that (I had never owned a car in Canada).
These "entertainers" are (certainly in the case of movie/tv production) controlled by financial concerns. They don't use product placement, tracking viewers or sponsorship to make sure they can make a living. They do it to maximize the profit they make. They would do so regardless of whether their ink was red or black. You are not going to stop the above techniques by buying their products.
What you should be arguing for is that if people aren't paid, they won't create at all.
I just had to throw out an entire wallet of CD-ROM games that my 6-year-old had been playing. The bottoms were scratched to hell, and in many cases I could see through the disk because he had scratched off the top coating (including the metal film that actually holds the data). These are pretty old games (some more than 10 years old), but he still loved them.
Too bad I didn't make backups.
Do you expect that he would treat DVDs any differently?
As one of the CodeGear people explained, it was intended to be part of some kind of 1-day on-line seminar. The seminar had to be cancelled, but they decided to make the demo available. They realize that a single day is "sub-optimal".
I guess I could have been clearer. Controls on the page can be linked to datasets on the server. The mechanism is AJAX from the browser to the server; then the server deals with the database; and a return to the browser. But all you have to do is define a dataset, and set properties on the control (list box, table, etc.) to point to the dataset.
I have a Japanese version of the Opera browser, and let me tell you, no one is seriously going to use the thing for surfing the web. It is dog slow. The front page of/. might take a minute, maybe two. Even though my connection is high speed, fetching and rendering takes you back to the days of 28.8K modems. It's cool that it can do it, but once you show off to your friends, it doesn't get used again.
Well, my experience with university grads has been all over the map. We had one person who graduated in CS from a reputable school (Queen's). She didn't know HTML, PHP, C, or more than a smidgen of Java. No database skills. No software lifecycle, UML, quality control, or even the basics of unit testing. She was a Chinese immigrant, and her oral and written English skills were atrocious.
One of my jobs was to babysit her and feed her small jobs that she was capable of doing, explaining things in small words and essentially giving her step-by-step checklists. Mercifully, she was let go after over a year, during which none of her skills had improved appreciably.
So yes, even in good schools some students sneak through. I'm convinced that she got people to help her pass the courses, because I can't see how she could have made it past first year otherwise.
It seems that you aren't familiar with the Dave Barry school of grammar, in which the purpose of an apostrophe is to alert the reader that an "s" is coming.
...at 4, many thousands of years worth of wars are fought over essentially the same thing I always wonder why people insist that religion is the root of most wars, when the evidence seems so obviously to indicate that it is a tool of warlike leaders.
How many wars can you name where the warriors and the religious were the same group? We seem to have this image of kind-of medieval times where armies followed a cross (or a crescent) to defeat the infidels because they are infidels.
Were the fighters in Northern Ireland the humble, faithful churchgoers, or thugs who found a pretext to exercise their brutality? Were the crusaders truly holy, humble men? Or were they bullies and adventurers who looted all around them, whether or not they were in "enemy" lands? Was the Holy Roman Empire built on a common worship of a saviour who allowed himself to be killed rather than to commit violence (as did his immediate followers), or on the use of superstition and ignorance to grab political power?
Looked at from another perspective, which 20th-century figures would you call holy? The King/Queen of England (in their roles as the heads of the C of E)? Jim Jones? Sun Myung Moon? Senator McCarthy?
Or Mother Theresa? Gandhi? The Dalai Lama? Jean Vanier? Albert Schweitzer?
Just because someone does something in the name of religion, it's not necessarily true. Obedience to religious authorities has always been used as a means of control by others.
where catholics and protestants extremes killed each other just based on religion This always perplexes me. Has there ever been a war (civil or otherwise) that was based on anything except power? If Northern Ireland really was a religious conflict, then those doing the most fighting would be the ones adhering most closely to their religion (in this case, going to church every day, becoming priests/religious, etc.). Instead, we see thugs, bullies and bastards.
Of course, that is aside from the point that no one who legitimately claims to follow the path of Jesus can avoid noticing that he and his immediate followers believed it better to suffer and be killed than to take up arms against the oppressors.
That said, the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have elements of religiosity (i.e. some of the Muslim fighters appear to be genuinely devout). That just makes it easier for cynical politicians and religious leaders to use them in their quest for power, though.
"their tools are more based on Asian design and logic"?
What a bizarre concept. When I worked for a software company in Japan, the only way that culture intruded into software development (aside from an organizational structure that makes Dilbert's seem positively effective) was the fact that programmers who could used English manuals. Japanese manuals and other reference/instructional materials were so vague and information-poor that the language barrier was easier for my co-workers to overcome than reading materials in their native tongue!
I will grant you that Asians (East Asians, at least) seem much more comfortable with interfaces that we find incredibly cluttered. But that's not programming as such.
Then apply to that company. Call them up and see if what they are doing fits what you are doing. Just offer to take their engineers out for a beer when they're in town, because you know their pain and they know yours.
But the feigned insouciance: "oh, I'm not interested..." seems a bit prima donna-ish
Indeed a timeless line. I sometimes use this on my 9-year-old son (who watched the movie with me), and as often as not, my nickname for him is "monkey boy".
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you mean about sketchy updates. I can view the exact hut I used to live in when I was a volunteer in Africa, but until last summer, the city where I live, near Toronto, had only low-res maps. It was difficult to even pick out where the streets and highways were!
There is a WISP in my area, but their service guy said that he couldn't get a clear enough signal from my roof. If I put up a 40-foot tower, I *might* be able to get it (people down the road do). Aside from the tower, that would be about $300 installation and $60/month, with a maximum speed of about 3Mbps download.
Turns out that I can get on the Rogers cell phone 3G network. The bandwidth is limited (1GB/month for $30, 3GB/month for $60), but I can live with that. There was no installation fee (wireless USB stick was free with 1-year contract) either.
Or Ohio Calvinist is female, and it should be alumna (plural alumnae).
Must be nice. I also live in Canada (Ontario), and my last electricity bill was about $30 for the electricity itself and $100 for delivery and "other" charges.
Oops. I forgot to mention that I was in Japan at the time.
I can confirm this. I taught high school kids who told me that after a while, they didn't need the physical abacus.
...is insurance. Without an insurance history in Canada (or, maybe, the U.S.), you are assessed as very high risk. When I returned to Canada after many years abroad, my $900/year car insurance would have been 2x or 3x that (I had never owned a car in Canada).
These "entertainers" are (certainly in the case of movie/tv production) controlled by financial concerns. They don't use product placement, tracking viewers or sponsorship to make sure they can make a living. They do it to maximize the profit they make. They would do so regardless of whether their ink was red or black. You are not going to stop the above techniques by buying their products.
What you should be arguing for is that if people aren't paid, they won't create at all.
A bit redundant, but a personal account:
I just had to throw out an entire wallet of CD-ROM games that my 6-year-old had been playing. The bottoms were scratched to hell, and in many cases I could see through the disk because he had scratched off the top coating (including the metal film that actually holds the data). These are pretty old games (some more than 10 years old), but he still loved them.
Too bad I didn't make backups.
Do you expect that he would treat DVDs any differently?
I had thought the article would be about a breakthrough in Slashdotter's wanking techniques...
Funny how the apostrophe in your post slipped from "wont" on the second line down to "right's" on the first line! :-)
And I'm sure that "Slaves" is jealous of "Customer's" having a gaudy, frivolous extra apostrophe.
As one of the CodeGear people explained, it was intended to be part of some kind of 1-day on-line seminar. The seminar had to be cancelled, but they decided to make the demo available. They realize that a single day is "sub-optimal".
I guess I could have been clearer. Controls on the page can be linked to datasets on the server. The mechanism is AJAX from the browser to the server; then the server deals with the database; and a return to the browser. But all you have to do is define a dataset, and set properties on the control (list box, table, etc.) to point to the dataset.
I have a Japanese version of the Opera browser, and let me tell you, no one is seriously going to use the thing for surfing the web. It is dog slow. The front page of /. might take a minute, maybe two. Even though my connection is high speed, fetching and rendering takes you back to the days of 28.8K modems. It's cool that it can do it, but once you show off to your friends, it doesn't get used again.
Well, my experience with university grads has been all over the map. We had one person who graduated in CS from a reputable school (Queen's). She didn't know HTML, PHP, C, or more than a smidgen of Java. No database skills. No software lifecycle, UML, quality control, or even the basics of unit testing. She was a Chinese immigrant, and her oral and written English skills were atrocious.
One of my jobs was to babysit her and feed her small jobs that she was capable of doing, explaining things in small words and essentially giving her step-by-step checklists. Mercifully, she was let go after over a year, during which none of her skills had improved appreciably.
So yes, even in good schools some students sneak through. I'm convinced that she got people to help her pass the courses, because I can't see how she could have made it past first year otherwise.
I hope that it hasn't been linked before, because your link has a superfluous "/" at the end. Try http://negativland.com/albini.html
It seems that you aren't familiar with the Dave Barry school of grammar, in which the purpose of an apostrophe is to alert the reader that an "s" is coming.
...at 4, many thousands of years worth of wars are fought over essentially the same thing I always wonder why people insist that religion is the root of most wars, when the evidence seems so obviously to indicate that it is a tool of warlike leaders.How many wars can you name where the warriors and the religious were the same group? We seem to have this image of kind-of medieval times where armies followed a cross (or a crescent) to defeat the infidels because they are infidels.
Were the fighters in Northern Ireland the humble, faithful churchgoers, or thugs who found a pretext to exercise their brutality? Were the crusaders truly holy, humble men? Or were they bullies and adventurers who looted all around them, whether or not they were in "enemy" lands? Was the Holy Roman Empire built on a common worship of a saviour who allowed himself to be killed rather than to commit violence (as did his immediate followers), or on the use of superstition and ignorance to grab political power?
Looked at from another perspective, which 20th-century figures would you call holy? The King/Queen of England (in their roles as the heads of the C of E)? Jim Jones? Sun Myung Moon? Senator McCarthy?
Or Mother Theresa? Gandhi? The Dalai Lama? Jean Vanier? Albert Schweitzer?
Just because someone does something in the name of religion, it's not necessarily true. Obedience to religious authorities has always been used as a means of control by others.
Of course, that is aside from the point that no one who legitimately claims to follow the path of Jesus can avoid noticing that he and his immediate followers believed it better to suffer and be killed than to take up arms against the oppressors.
That said, the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have elements of religiosity (i.e. some of the Muslim fighters appear to be genuinely devout). That just makes it easier for cynical politicians and religious leaders to use them in their quest for power, though.
"their tools are more based on Asian design and logic"?
What a bizarre concept. When I worked for a software company in Japan, the only way that culture intruded into software development (aside from an organizational structure that makes Dilbert's seem positively effective) was the fact that programmers who could used English manuals. Japanese manuals and other reference/instructional materials were so vague and information-poor that the language barrier was easier for my co-workers to overcome than reading materials in their native tongue!
I will grant you that Asians (East Asians, at least) seem much more comfortable with interfaces that we find incredibly cluttered. But that's not programming as such.
Then apply to that company. Call them up and see if what they are doing fits what you are doing. Just offer to take their engineers out for a beer when they're in town, because you know their pain and they know yours.
But the feigned insouciance: "oh, I'm not interested..." seems a bit prima donna-ish
So you don't want a job with them and it's entirely irrelevant, but you felt like telling us why you are such a hardware stud. Thanks for sharing.
"Laugh while you can, monkey boy!"
Indeed a timeless line. I sometimes use this on my 9-year-old son (who watched the movie with me), and as often as not, my nickname for him is "monkey boy".
Kind of like the infamous eyeglasses handle that made people cross-eyed. Boy did the bastard who invented that get sued!
What is this 127.0.0.0 place in your sig? I'm not familiar with it.