Really, don't try too hard 'cause more often than not things will turn out differently thant you imagine.
Limit the amount of TV? Sounds good, except when your kids wake up at 6:30 and you can turn the TV on to gain another 30 mins to 1 hour of much-needed shut-eye.
Don't let them use a computer until they are 6? Sure... unless you have a few computers at home, and they see you working on them (my 3 yo sits in front of the computer, clicks away and says she's "working").
That said, I thing setting an example and sharing activities with your kids is probably the best strategy.
For the geek crowd that says "Yuck! Pee water!" only smoking "ZeeWeed", etc.:
Just think: same situation, same filtration process, drinking (made from) pee water. The only difference is you are in a spaceship. Water and air must be recycled. Would you still drink it for the chance of being in a real spaceship, zooming through the galaxy?
I bet 99% of the geeks here (me included) would love to volunteer for that, pee water or no pee water.
Nvidia's latest drivers have a mode that displays a calibration screen for autoadjusting LCDs.
I'm using my Linux box right now, not the Windoze one at home with my Nvidia card, but/. readers should be able to dig it up -- just click on the nvidia taskbar icon.
...to pack the new multidimensional version of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams clearly explains this in one of the books ("Mostly Harmless", I think).
Since this comes from a guy who know the answer to the question of "Life the Universe and Everything", (spoiler) I don't see why anyone is wasting time with that.
I usually do a web search for coupons for any store I'm planning to buy from. Often I'll find something. There used to be more a couple of years ago, but it's still worth the effort.
I also find the information on gotapex very cool. They include codes, rebates, promotions, etc. for various sources and the exact instructions on how to get the best out of it.
Now, if someone is the first to OCR a book with this system, and forgetting about all the copyright violation crap, wouldn't it make sense to make the OCR'd digital version available somehow?
It seems ridiculous to me that copyright laws should prevent someone -- especially if they are Visually Impaired -- from having access to a book someone already has digitized once. Will they be forced to set it up for scanning, turn the pages, spend more energy (human and machine) re-doing something that could be close to instantaneous if it means just downloading a file?
Maybe some sort of authentication that only allows access to the file if you prove to the machine you are holding the physical book.
So instead of turning the pages they could just hold the book, which would have, for example, an RFID tag.
BTW, how can a VIP find a specific page in a printed book without counting pages? Can you imagine this for large books? With a pre-scanned complete file in, it would be easy to instruct the reader software to go there.
...since I started to just say "please put me on your do not call list". I also told my wife to do the same. I was actually very polite saying (the truth) "Hey, we have a newborn at home, please put me on your do not call list and don't call again, thanks." That never had even a hint of a negative reaction and was never ignored.
Now, I can't even remember the last time I got a telemarketing call.
Really, I guess people don't understand that there already is a law demanding that they do not call people who say the 8 magic words. If they do, you can already sue them. Moreover, often the do not call lists will be shared among different front ends who use the same telemarketing back end.
One has to remember these are businesses. They need to make a profit, and they won't make a profit from people that just get annoyed with their calls. There's no sense in calling them.
Telemarketing is now to me a non-issue, as opposed to spam.
I use paytrust too (since it was paymybills.com) and love it. I'm awful with managing my bills and mail, so it works out great for me. It also allows me to travel without worrying there's gonna be an unexpected bill in the mail, and it's also very easy to access the billing history, which has come in handy several times.
fans of Frank Herbert's Dune (or maybe only those who preferred House Atreides)
Gackkk... Cough... Hhharrgh...
I don't mean to troll (really) but is there such a thing as someone who preferred "House Atreides" over the originals?
Yeah, it was kind of fun to be able to peek at the Dune universe again a bit (without re-reading the originals, which I'm actually doing right now) but these newer books are not even close to the level of Frank Herbert's books. The writing is so so, the characters shallow. Really, even the idea of someone preferring them makes me want to puke and wonder about where humankind is going.
Yeah, everybody is entitled to their opinions... unfortunately sometimes.
A friend just mentioned that her 80yrs+ father got an implant.
I don't know enough about the subject, so I'm not sure if it is the cochlear implant you're talking about.
Anyhow, it was pretty impressive to hear hell tell that he was surprised to hear things like how loud the train is, or how there is wind noise when riding a car. He had never realized these things.
He's very happy with the results, even at his age.
Just my 2 cents.
BTW, I've given some programming lessons to a deaf girl, and there was no trouble communicating at all. It's amazing how people can adapt.
I've thought of teaching sign language to my (not deaf) baby daughter. Do you have an opinion on that?
While as others pointed out it was a vocoder effect, I agree with you that that is a good reference to help perceive the autotuner in action -- and it is there in pretty much all crap they play on the radio nowadays.
I can't believe how people don't even realize it. That tinny edge to the sound really annoys me.
I don't have perfect pitch, even my relative pitch is not that great (unless I've been practicing a lot), but having gone through some singing training, it makes me mad that (not all but most) popular singers nowadays can't sing at all. They don't even try, they don't know how to breathe, they have tons of awful habits... Hell, they go into a freaking studio where they can try several times and they can't get songs right!
Will someone please patent something like this before micro$oft:
"Method to prevent worm attacks by changing site hosting locations as many times as needed".
This way they'll either have to fix the damn holes or pay up.
I'm joking... but if someone wants to try and the USPO actually accepts it (not totally unlikely) just give me some credit, and some 10% of the profits will do.;-)
Could the next must-have computer input device be a morse key ?
Yes! absolutely! That's why I'm selling turbo charged morse-keyboards. You get your own morse keyboard with various sized morse keys, arranged in several rows. You get 108 keys with this baby! An unbelievable deal for only $49.95!
Please check my other auctions on eBay, like the fabulous Golden Gate bridge and Eiffel tower combo. Satisfaction guaranteed. I prefer PayPal.
Cookies are nothing but a little bit of text stored by your browser. They are domain specific - e.g. a cookie from a server at domain1.com cannot be accessed by a server at domain2.com.
The real problem is the media and some privacy loonies decided that cookies and the monsters underneath children's beds at night are on the same level.
Somehow this myth of cookies being bad was repeated so many times it became an accepted truth.
As a web developer, I say disabling cookies just gets in the way of letting users have a better experience at a site. You have to add sessions to the URLs, and have to have users log in to know who they are in a later session.
The only possible privacy problem is third party cookies. Mostly, advertising that tracks what ads you've seen or not, or what websites you've visited. That I don't love, and I can see privacy issues with.
However it's easy to disable thrid parties cookies with any decent browser. Only accept cookies from the site you're visiting, and nothing should break.
Isn't there a soul in the media who can see through the nonsense? Sheesh.
Yeah, I hate spam as much as the next geek. However most people don't stop to think about the black side of spam filters: false positives.
I use spamassassin and Mozilla's bayesian filters, they do get rid of a lot of spam, but they also do get some false positives. This means I have to check my spam folder every so often, which kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Moreover, email is not only a personal communication tool anymore. Do you buy on-line? Do you expect an order confirmation, or a shipping confirmation? Well, it's quite likely that those could be flagged as spam by spam filters. It just happened to me yesterday on an ebay winning bid notice, because the subject had an exclamation mark. Businesses -- you know, the kind of organization that usually pays the sallaries of us working geeks, or the sallaries of the parents of student geeks -- need to get through to comunicate with their customers. Spam and spam filters are both getting in the way.
How bad is that? IMHO pretty bad. Spam is killing half of the advantages of using email. Filters, with the pretty much unavoidable false positives in this cat and mouse game are killing another quarter, at least. I don't know what will happen, but it's a pretty sad situation.
Ever heard about text based browsing? Speech synthethizers? ALT tags?
Go to your linux box and fire up lynx, or try this.
I'm part of a list with several VIP (Visually Impaired People) and they do pretty well browsing the web, sending email and in lots of other things, probably even better than some of us non-VIPs.
Sheesh, does that mean it is illegal to even look at a competitor's software's interface or web site?
For example, suppose you have used Paypal and decide you can create a better service. If their EULA says you cannot reverse engineer their software, they can sue you? Just because you have used/ looked at their site?
The parent post meant to be funny, but I would seriously consider it. I pay $25 a month for one (semi-crippled) Brazilian channel on sattellite.
I would happily invest some time and money to get rid of the $25 monthly charge, especially if I could get the other broadcast channels and the image quality wasn't that crappy.
I live in the US, not Slovenia, but even though I didn't RTFA (slashdotted already?) I expect this technology will work anywhere?
Of course, the sattellite companies are probably sh1tt1ng their pants to lose customers (like me) who pay a premium for this relatively small service. What are the legal implications of this? They probably won't go after single users, but if a company is trying to capitalize on this, can we expect to see legal action?
What I mean is you, the teacher, should be able to see the monitors, and the students will have to turn around with their backs to the monitor to see the teacher, and turn around again to use the computer.
That way at least the teacher will have obvious control of when he wants the students to use the computers.
Moreover, in my teaching experience (some internal Unix company training plus some e-commerce courses for MBA students in a local University) I've found the best deterrent to random extraneous computer use is making sure students are interested in using the computers in the way you intend them to. "Just" make the computer usage interesting, challenging and fun.
What about a few summer books, as well as books for fall, winter and spring???
I don't mean to troll, but c'mon one book for the whole summer? I know schooling systems are getting worse everywhere, but I expected more of the/. crowd.
Reading is good for you. Books stimulate your brain, improve your writing skills, and good ones are fun as hell to read! (Even the not so good ones can be fun, sometimes).
On a final note, take some suggestions you find in this thread, spare a couple of hours and go to a local library or book store (used or new). Get a few books and enjoy. Oh, and please don't watch the movies (like these: RAH, FH, PJF) instead of the books. Only afterwards... maybe.
Having been working on a company that grew from a 1999 Internet startup with 5 employees (me being the only programmer to work along two consultants) to a profitable Internet company with 40 employees in 2003 (inlcuding the two former consultants), I've seen quite a bit of change in the IT procedures.
We have an 8 people tech team now (manager, programmers, support, QA). Whereas before we programmers would just use a development environment somewhat similar to the production (live) environment, test it a bit, deploy at will and monitor if anything went wrong, things have progressed a lot. Now we develop on a development environment as close to the production one as possible, then this is released to a test environment (also as close as possible to the production one) to be tested by QA, and that is finally released on the production (live) environment after it all tests ok (including regression testing).
Moreover, all the code changes are now under CVS, and we have automatic tools for monitoring the site, emailing errors, etc. QA is also done by separate people. IMHO it is conceptually flawed to allow the developers to do the final testing, by definition. (Though of course this is not always possible for cost reasons, it should be a goal).
The quality of our site is much better now. Problems almost always only arise when people want to bypass QA or force things through for emergencies.
IMHO, what is needed is: 1. Professionalism by the developers. 2. Testing, testing, and testing -- by the developers. 3. QA, QA and QA -- by someone other than the developers! 4. Managers must know the test/ QA process should never by bypassed -- this unfortunately is probably the hardest point.:-(
I taught a couple of ecommerce classes for MBA students and had them actually do hands on development (in a limited sense of course) so they could get an appreciation of this process. Hopefully if some of them are managers they will remember that and not try to shortcut the due process.
Slashdot Mirror
... young kids, here's my advice:
no expectations.
Really, don't try too hard 'cause more often than not things will turn out differently thant you imagine.
Limit the amount of TV? Sounds good, except when your kids wake up at 6:30 and you can turn the TV on to gain another 30 mins to 1 hour of much-needed shut-eye.
Don't let them use a computer until they are 6? Sure... unless you have a few computers at home, and they see you working on them (my 3 yo sits in front of the computer, clicks away and says she's "working").
That said, I thing setting an example and sharing activities with your kids is probably the best strategy.
... they just need to come up with an updated, portable, cone of silence.
I can't believe no one had hacked a cell phone to create a "shoe phone" yet. Has anyone seen one?
For the geek crowd that says "Yuck! Pee water!" only smoking "ZeeWeed", etc.:
Just think: same situation, same filtration process, drinking (made from) pee water. The only difference is you are in a spaceship. Water and air must be recycled. Would you still drink it for the chance of being in a real spaceship, zooming through the galaxy?
I bet 99% of the geeks here (me included) would love to volunteer for that, pee water or no pee water.
Changes your perception, heh?
Nvidia's latest drivers have a mode that displays a calibration screen for autoadjusting LCDs.
/. readers should be able to dig it up -- just click on the nvidia taskbar icon.
I'm using my Linux box right now, not the Windoze one at home with my Nvidia card, but
What was the question again?
The Incredibles, Schminpedibles.
That movie looks like it will suck. Now, if they did a movie about The Impossibles...
Am I feeling old?
...to pack the new multidimensional version of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams clearly explains this in one of the books ("Mostly Harmless", I think).
Since this comes from a guy who know the answer to the question of "Life the Universe and Everything", (spoiler) I don't see why anyone is wasting time with that.
Note: Googling brought up The Ultra-Complete Index to the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, pretty cool.
I usually do a web search for coupons for any store I'm planning to buy from. Often I'll find something. There used to be more a couple of years ago, but it's still worth the effort.
I also find the information on gotapex very cool. They include codes, rebates, promotions, etc. for various sources and the exact instructions on how to get the best out of it.
Now, if someone is the first to OCR a book with this system, and forgetting about all the copyright violation crap, wouldn't it make sense to make the OCR'd digital version available somehow?
It seems ridiculous to me that copyright laws should prevent someone -- especially if they are Visually Impaired -- from having access to a book someone already has digitized once. Will they be forced to set it up for scanning, turn the pages, spend more energy (human and machine) re-doing something that could be close to instantaneous if it means just downloading a file?
Maybe some sort of authentication that only allows access to the file if you prove to the machine you are holding the physical book.
So instead of turning the pages they could just hold the book, which would have, for example, an RFID tag.
BTW, how can a VIP find a specific page in a printed book without counting pages? Can you imagine this for large books? With a pre-scanned complete file in, it would be easy to instruct the reader software to go there.
Moreover companies like Amazon could lease this content to pay for the technology while they use it. Or Project Gutenberg could use it to add to their public books.
...since I started to just say "please put me on your do not call list". I also told my wife to do the same. I was actually very polite saying (the truth) "Hey, we have a newborn at home, please put me on your do not call list and don't call again, thanks." That never had even a hint of a negative reaction and was never ignored.
Now, I can't even remember the last time I got a telemarketing call.
Really, I guess people don't understand that there already is a law demanding that they do not call people who say the 8 magic words. If they do, you can already sue them. Moreover, often the do not call lists will be shared among different front ends who use the same telemarketing back end.
One has to remember these are businesses. They need to make a profit, and they won't make a profit from people that just get annoyed with their calls. There's no sense in calling them.
Telemarketing is now to me a non-issue, as opposed to spam.
I use paytrust too (since it was paymybills.com) and love it. I'm awful with managing my bills and mail, so it works out great for me. It also allows me to travel without worrying there's gonna be an unexpected bill in the mail, and it's also very easy to access the billing history, which has come in handy several times.
I hope so.
Thanks for helping me restore my faith in humankind.
Gackkk... Cough... Hhharrgh...
I don't mean to troll (really) but is there such a thing as someone who preferred "House Atreides" over the originals?
Yeah, it was kind of fun to be able to peek at the Dune universe again a bit (without re-reading the originals, which I'm actually doing right now) but these newer books are not even close to the level of Frank Herbert's books. The writing is so so, the characters shallow. Really, even the idea of someone preferring them makes me want to puke and wonder about where humankind is going.
Yeah, everybody is entitled to their opinions... unfortunately sometimes.
A friend just mentioned that her 80yrs+ father got an implant.
I don't know enough about the subject, so I'm not sure if it is the cochlear implant you're talking about.
Anyhow, it was pretty impressive to hear hell tell that he was surprised to hear things like how loud the train is, or how there is wind noise when riding a car. He had never realized these things.
He's very happy with the results, even at his age.
Just my 2 cents.
BTW, I've given some programming lessons to a deaf girl, and there was no trouble communicating at all. It's amazing how people can adapt.
I've thought of teaching sign language to my (not deaf) baby daughter. Do you have an opinion on that?
While as others pointed out it was a vocoder effect, I agree with you that that is a good reference to help perceive the autotuner in action -- and it is there in pretty much all crap they play on the radio nowadays.
I can't believe how people don't even realize it. That tinny edge to the sound really annoys me.
I don't have perfect pitch, even my relative pitch is not that great (unless I've been practicing a lot), but having gone through some singing training, it makes me mad that (not all but most) popular singers nowadays can't sing at all. They don't even try, they don't know how to breathe, they have tons of awful habits... Hell, they go into a freaking studio where they can try several times and they can't get songs right!
Go NPR!
Will someone please patent something like this before micro$oft:
;-)
"Method to prevent worm attacks by changing site hosting locations as many times as needed".
This way they'll either have to fix the damn holes or pay up.
I'm joking... but if someone wants to try and the USPO actually accepts it (not totally unlikely) just give me some credit, and some 10% of the profits will do.
Could the next must-have computer input device be a morse key ?
Yes! absolutely! That's why I'm selling turbo charged morse-keyboards. You get your own morse keyboard with various sized morse keys, arranged in several rows. You get 108 keys with this baby! An unbelievable deal for only $49.95!
Please check my other auctions on eBay, like the fabulous Golden Gate bridge and Eiffel tower combo. Satisfaction guaranteed. I prefer PayPal.
Cookies are nothing but a little bit of text stored by your browser. They are domain specific - e.g. a cookie from a server at domain1.com cannot be accessed by a server at domain2.com.
The real problem is the media and some privacy loonies decided that cookies and the monsters underneath children's beds at night are on the same level.
Somehow this myth of cookies being bad was repeated so many times it became an accepted truth.
As a web developer, I say disabling cookies just gets in the way of letting users have a better experience at a site. You have to add sessions to the URLs, and have to have users log in to know who they are in a later session.
The only possible privacy problem is third party cookies. Mostly, advertising that tracks what ads you've seen or not, or what websites you've visited. That I don't love, and I can see privacy issues with.
However it's easy to disable thrid parties cookies with any decent browser. Only accept cookies from the site you're visiting, and nothing should break.
Isn't there a soul in the media who can see through the nonsense? Sheesh.
Yeah, I hate spam as much as the next geek. However most people don't stop to think about the black side of spam filters: false positives.
I use spamassassin and Mozilla's bayesian filters, they do get rid of a lot of spam, but they also do get some false positives. This means I have to check my spam folder every so often, which kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Moreover, email is not only a personal communication tool anymore. Do you buy on-line? Do you expect an order confirmation, or a shipping confirmation? Well, it's quite likely that those could be flagged as spam by spam filters. It just happened to me yesterday on an ebay winning bid notice, because the subject had an exclamation mark. Businesses -- you know, the kind of organization that usually pays the sallaries of us working geeks, or the sallaries of the parents of student geeks -- need to get through to comunicate with their customers. Spam and spam filters are both getting in the way.
How bad is that? IMHO pretty bad. Spam is killing half of the advantages of using email. Filters, with the pretty much unavoidable false positives in this cat and mouse game are killing another quarter, at least. I don't know what will happen, but it's a pretty sad situation.
Not at all.
Ever heard about text based browsing? Speech synthethizers? ALT tags?
Go to your linux box and fire up lynx, or try this.
I'm part of a list with several VIP (Visually Impaired People) and they do pretty well browsing the web, sending email and in lots of other things, probably even better than some of us non-VIPs.
Sheesh, does that mean it is illegal to even look at a competitor's software's interface or web site?
For example, suppose you have used Paypal and decide you can create a better service. If their EULA says you cannot reverse engineer their software, they can sue you? Just because you have used/ looked at their site?
The parent post meant to be funny, but I would seriously consider it. I pay $25 a month for one (semi-crippled) Brazilian channel on sattellite.
I would happily invest some time and money to get rid of the $25 monthly charge, especially if I could get the other broadcast channels and the image quality wasn't that crappy.
I live in the US, not Slovenia, but even though I didn't RTFA (slashdotted already?) I expect this technology will work anywhere?
Of course, the sattellite companies are probably sh1tt1ng their pants to lose customers (like me) who pay a premium for this relatively small service. What are the legal implications of this? They probably won't go after single users, but if a company is trying to capitalize on this, can we expect to see legal action?
Turn the classroom around.
What I mean is you, the teacher, should be able to see the monitors, and the students will have to turn around with their backs to the monitor to see the teacher, and turn around again to use the computer.
That way at least the teacher will have obvious control of when he wants the students to use the computers.
Moreover, in my teaching experience (some internal Unix company training plus some e-commerce courses for MBA students in a local University) I've found the best deterrent to random extraneous computer use is making sure students are interested in using the computers in the way you intend them to. "Just" make the computer usage interesting, challenging and fun.
What about a few summer books, as well as books for fall, winter and spring???
/. crowd.
I don't mean to troll, but c'mon one book for the whole summer? I know schooling systems are getting worse everywhere, but I expected more of the
Reading is good for you. Books stimulate your brain, improve your writing skills, and good ones are fun as hell to read! (Even the not so good ones can be fun, sometimes).
My picks would be anything by Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov. Maybe also Phillip J. Farmer or Gordon Dickson. Don't want Sci-Fi, how about Umberto Eco? Feeling esoteric? Try Fritjof Capra. If you're also onto trippy stuff, how about Carlos Castaneda (he's just passed away, so let's pay him homage).
On a final note, take some suggestions you find in this thread, spare a couple of hours and go to a local library or book store (used or new). Get a few books and enjoy. Oh, and please don't watch the movies (like these: RAH, FH, PJF) instead of the books. Only afterwards... maybe.
Having been working on a company that grew from a 1999 Internet startup with 5 employees (me being the only programmer to work along two consultants) to a profitable Internet company with 40 employees in 2003 (inlcuding the two former consultants), I've seen quite a bit of change in the IT procedures.
:-(
We have an 8 people tech team now (manager, programmers, support, QA). Whereas before we programmers would just use a development environment somewhat similar to the production (live) environment, test it a bit, deploy at will and monitor if anything went wrong, things have progressed a lot. Now we develop on a development environment as close to the production one as possible, then this is released to a test environment (also as close as possible to the production one) to be tested by QA, and that is finally released on the production (live) environment after it all tests ok (including regression testing).
Moreover, all the code changes are now under CVS, and we have automatic tools for monitoring the site, emailing errors, etc. QA is also done by separate people. IMHO it is conceptually flawed to allow the developers to do the final testing, by definition. (Though of course this is not always possible for cost reasons, it should be a goal).
The quality of our site is much better now. Problems almost always only arise when people want to bypass QA or force things through for emergencies.
IMHO, what is needed is:
1. Professionalism by the developers.
2. Testing, testing, and testing -- by the developers.
3. QA, QA and QA -- by someone other than the developers!
4. Managers must know the test/ QA process should never by bypassed -- this unfortunately is probably the hardest point.
I taught a couple of ecommerce classes for MBA students and had them actually do hands on development (in a limited sense of course) so they could get an appreciation of this process. Hopefully if some of them are managers they will remember that and not try to shortcut the due process.