In the late 1980's there was the "Smart House" initiative that would allow you to remotly control your appliances from your PC
This idea was scrapped when it was discovered that spilling water on your keyboard caused the Smart House to gain sentience and try and steal your girlfriend by composing techno-ballads.
In his response to this article, Welch says, "No one is out saying, 'Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents.' They're just not doing it."
Clearly, Mr. Welch does not have a cell phone or cable TV.
It is what they have at work, and are thus...better able to copy all the software off it to run at home. Someone once told me that was why he only used Windows - all the software was free for him.
I like to use the Friend/Foe designations to highlight comments from some of those "extremely bright people." When I see a comment from someone who's knowledgeable in a field that interests me, such as computer animation, I mark them as a friend. In my preferences, friends' comments are automatically modded up +2. This lets me browse at +4 and see both the comments the moderators liked and any good comments from people I think are smart or interesting.
I'm glad to learn of this blog. The physics professor I work for currently has me working on a project to put his lectures online, so it's very useful to me to see how others do it. I knew about the MIT and Stanford web sites, but I see that this blog catalogues other less well-known math and science online lecture sites.
This is why I am thankful that I went to college before digital cameras were ubiquitous, and that of the early newsgroups I posted on, only alt.ascii-art seems to be in Google's cache.
By the time I started creating a traceable digital persona, most of my big mistakes had already been made and learned from. As a result, I'd like to think I'd be willing to be a little more lenient should I ever be in charge of hiring someone younger, whose stupid mistakes are digitally preserved.
Yikes, that designer sounds like a nightmare to work with.
I myself am a designer, and I often run into the opposite problem: developers inserting nasty old broken HTML into my carefully-laid-out templates. It's not that I can't work with their jsp and php files, it's not that I don't have the time to do whatever it is that needs doing. Usually, it's just that they're in a hurry and don't bother to ask me to change or add something. Then I see the final app running one day and wonder what the hell happened.
(To be fair, though, the guys I worked with who did this have moved on to other jobs now.)
I have often wondered if much of the difficulty which arises in written communcation (email, IM, etc.) is due to a general degredation in the vocabulary of the populous.
A few years back, I toured a waste treatment facility in Tennessee for a college class. They aerated their ponds with fish. The motion of the fish swimming around was sufficient, required no electricity, and the fish helped keep down the mosquito population. They also controlled the bugs around the ponds with bats at night and purple martins by day, then sprayed the nitrogen-rich water on a stand of trees when it left the last pond, letting the trees and soil do the last round of filtration before it went back into the groundwater. It was a pretty neat facility.
A former coworker used to give occasional computer help to an elderly gentleman he met through business contacts. One day, he asked me to help him with his tech support for this guy. The coworker has since left, so now I get all those tech support calls because the guy has my phone number and I'm too nice to not help him (in all fairness, he only calls a few times a year).
So, give your problem user the name of someone else who can help them. Then change your number, so he can never call you again. (Only half kidding)
Being autistic, for me, means having to analyze social situations and interactions on-the-fly.
Interesting. I am not autistic, but I do the same thing for structured social situations (e.g. parties, meetings). After learning the rules of such situations, learning what works and what doesn't, I've been able to do very well in those sort of situations. Spontaneous, non-structured situations, however, still give me trouble (e.g. calling up an acquaintance just to chat - I won't do it unless you hold a gun to my head).
I'm pretty excited to hear Santa Cruz might get WiFi coverage (though I've never thought of it as part of Silicon Valley). It's always been one of my favorite places on earth to visit, and now it's due to get even better. Now if they could just do something about the housing prices...
In their list of the 19 most popular elements, the font tag was #16. This element was deprecated when, back in 2000 or so?
Of course, there may have been a lot of old pages in the sample, or pages built with older versions of HTML. But I've seen first-hand people using font tags to make an error message red, for example, even in a page that's using XHTML 1.0. I try to explain to the developers I work with why they shouldn't use them. I remove the font tags when those same developers add them to pages I've laid out for them. Zombie-like, they refuse to die.
I can see the usefulness of having such a term in the context of studying sociology. The problem I have with it is that the term gets thrown around outside the academic community, in newspapers and such, used in such a way as to imply that minorities being racist towards non-minorities is somehow justified, or not as bad as "regular racism."
"Dominant culture" my hiney. If I said something racist to a black person in Orangeburg, SC I doubt they'd call it "reverse racism," even though as a white person from the west coast I'd be in the minority there. And no reason they should. It's a term used by people who think that the only kind of racism is white vs. [other]. What about Japanese vs. Korean? African-American vs. Hispanic? Indian vs. Pakistani?
I have had the exact same email address since 1990. I actually stopped using my oldest email address for anything a few years ago, even though it's way cool, just because it became such a spam magnet. My main address is only 8 years old but it still gets quite a bit of spam.
Any address that's been out and around for a good long time is probably more likely to have been harvested. I know a lot more about protecting my email addresses now than I did back then.
I agree. I have several blogs I visit regularly and I have them all bookmarked. When I want to see what's new I just go to that site, or use Safari's "open in tabs" feature to check several at once.
A major reason I don't like RSS is aesthetics: I want to see a site's posts in their original context and format. Viewing the stories in a sterile, stripped-down application just isn't the same. In an RSS reader, there's no individuality - a post from Slashdot looks identical to one from Wonkette.
What's keeping people away is not the difficulty but the ineptitude to be creative and explore other domains.
Definitely. On a large project I'm working on, we need physical oceanographers. The stuff they're doing is all fluid dynamics modeling - physics and engineering and computers. But I don't think it occurs to many physicists/engineers/CS people to look into oceanographic research. (Interestingly enough, the guys doing the modeling on our project are all from China.)
Bellsouth's 'cheap' plans are on the order of $40/mo with all the taxes and surcharges and crap you have no choice but to take. For us, their cheapest landline plan comes to $25 and change, including all the taxes and crap. When we bought cellphones a couple years ago, we wanted to keep our landline and that's BellSouth's minimum monthly charge for having a local number without long distance or any features.
Still doesn't change the fact that what they did in New Orleans is pretty awful.
Also, what's considered "appropriate" varies by workplace and location. What was fine in the office I worked at in Atlanta was too casual for the same company's Charlotte office. At my current job, my coworkers would probably look at me like I had two heads if I wore a suit but a nice t-shirt and jeans blends in.
Science fiction authors such as Alistair Reynolds speculate that this problem will be solved by interstellar space travel. Longer-lived people can travel the necessary distances and establish new societies. When you come right down to it, it's an overcrowding problem.
I'd love to see both longer lifespans and interplanetary space travel in my lifetime. Whether I will depends on, I suppose, how long I manage to live.
I've ended up using my Dell Axim X50 as an expensive desk clock. It will sometimes connect to the web wirelessly, if it's in a good mood and the planets are aligned and I haven't accidentally turned off the wireless card by picking it up or turning it on. So I just leave it stuck in its cradle, where it's marginally less troublesome.
It's nice to hear that it potentially has some useful, exciting features. Are you using the OS that came with it, or did you install something else that works better? The PocketPC OS makes troubleshooting the picky, picky wireless card or switching between hotspots or even connecting to a new hotspot very difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
In the late 1980's there was the "Smart House" initiative that would allow you to remotly control your appliances from your PC
This idea was scrapped when it was discovered that spilling water on your keyboard caused the Smart House to gain sentience and try and steal your girlfriend by composing techno-ballads.
In his response to this article, Welch says, "No one is out saying, 'Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents.' They're just not doing it."
Clearly, Mr. Welch does not have a cell phone or cable TV.
It is what they have at work, and are thus ...better able to copy all the software off it to run at home. Someone once told me that was why he only used Windows - all the software was free for him.
I like to use the Friend/Foe designations to highlight comments from some of those "extremely bright people." When I see a comment from someone who's knowledgeable in a field that interests me, such as computer animation, I mark them as a friend. In my preferences, friends' comments are automatically modded up +2. This lets me browse at +4 and see both the comments the moderators liked and any good comments from people I think are smart or interesting.
I'm glad to learn of this blog. The physics professor I work for currently has me working on a project to put his lectures online, so it's very useful to me to see how others do it. I knew about the MIT and Stanford web sites, but I see that this blog catalogues other less well-known math and science online lecture sites.
there is evidence that shows that growing up in "dirtier" environments leads to fewer allergies
That's my excuse from now on: I'm not a bad housekeeper, I'm just trying to keep my son from getting allergies!
This is why I am thankful that I went to college before digital cameras were ubiquitous, and that of the early newsgroups I posted on, only alt.ascii-art seems to be in Google's cache.
By the time I started creating a traceable digital persona, most of my big mistakes had already been made and learned from. As a result, I'd like to think I'd be willing to be a little more lenient should I ever be in charge of hiring someone younger, whose stupid mistakes are digitally preserved.
Yikes, that designer sounds like a nightmare to work with.
I myself am a designer, and I often run into the opposite problem: developers inserting nasty old broken HTML into my carefully-laid-out templates. It's not that I can't work with their jsp and php files, it's not that I don't have the time to do whatever it is that needs doing. Usually, it's just that they're in a hurry and don't bother to ask me to change or add something. Then I see the final app running one day and wonder what the hell happened.
(To be fair, though, the guys I worked with who did this have moved on to other jobs now.)
I have often wondered if much of the difficulty which arises in written communcation (email, IM, etc.) is due to a general degredation in the vocabulary of the populous.
Surely you meant populace?
A few years back, I toured a waste treatment facility in Tennessee for a college class. They aerated their ponds with fish. The motion of the fish swimming around was sufficient, required no electricity, and the fish helped keep down the mosquito population. They also controlled the bugs around the ponds with bats at night and purple martins by day, then sprayed the nitrogen-rich water on a stand of trees when it left the last pond, letting the trees and soil do the last round of filtration before it went back into the groundwater. It was a pretty neat facility.
A former coworker used to give occasional computer help to an elderly gentleman he met through business contacts. One day, he asked me to help him with his tech support for this guy. The coworker has since left, so now I get all those tech support calls because the guy has my phone number and I'm too nice to not help him (in all fairness, he only calls a few times a year).
So, give your problem user the name of someone else who can help them. Then change your number, so he can never call you again. (Only half kidding)
Being autistic, for me, means having to analyze social situations and interactions on-the-fly.
Interesting. I am not autistic, but I do the same thing for structured social situations (e.g. parties, meetings). After learning the rules of such situations, learning what works and what doesn't, I've been able to do very well in those sort of situations. Spontaneous, non-structured situations, however, still give me trouble (e.g. calling up an acquaintance just to chat - I won't do it unless you hold a gun to my head).
I'm pretty excited to hear Santa Cruz might get WiFi coverage (though I've never thought of it as part of Silicon Valley). It's always been one of my favorite places on earth to visit, and now it's due to get even better. Now if they could just do something about the housing prices...
In their list of the 19 most popular elements, the font tag was #16. This element was deprecated when, back in 2000 or so?
Of course, there may have been a lot of old pages in the sample, or pages built with older versions of HTML. But I've seen first-hand people using font tags to make an error message red, for example, even in a page that's using XHTML 1.0. I try to explain to the developers I work with why they shouldn't use them. I remove the font tags when those same developers add them to pages I've laid out for them. Zombie-like, they refuse to die.
I can see the usefulness of having such a term in the context of studying sociology. The problem I have with it is that the term gets thrown around outside the academic community, in newspapers and such, used in such a way as to imply that minorities being racist towards non-minorities is somehow justified, or not as bad as "regular racism."
Thank you. If I had mod points, they'd be yours.
"Dominant culture" my hiney. If I said something racist to a black person in Orangeburg, SC I doubt they'd call it "reverse racism," even though as a white person from the west coast I'd be in the minority there. And no reason they should. It's a term used by people who think that the only kind of racism is white vs. [other]. What about Japanese vs. Korean? African-American vs. Hispanic? Indian vs. Pakistani?
I have had the exact same email address since 1990.
I actually stopped using my oldest email address for anything a few years ago, even though it's way cool, just because it became such a spam magnet. My main address is only 8 years old but it still gets quite a bit of spam.
Any address that's been out and around for a good long time is probably more likely to have been harvested. I know a lot more about protecting my email addresses now than I did back then.
I agree. I have several blogs I visit regularly and I have them all bookmarked. When I want to see what's new I just go to that site, or use Safari's "open in tabs" feature to check several at once.
A major reason I don't like RSS is aesthetics: I want to see a site's posts in their original context and format. Viewing the stories in a sterile, stripped-down application just isn't the same. In an RSS reader, there's no individuality - a post from Slashdot looks identical to one from Wonkette.
What's keeping people away is not the difficulty but the ineptitude to be creative and explore other domains.
Definitely. On a large project I'm working on, we need physical oceanographers. The stuff they're doing is all fluid dynamics modeling - physics and engineering and computers. But I don't think it occurs to many physicists/engineers/CS people to look into oceanographic research. (Interestingly enough, the guys doing the modeling on our project are all from China.)
Bellsouth's 'cheap' plans are on the order of $40/mo with all the taxes and surcharges and crap you have no choice but to take.
For us, their cheapest landline plan comes to $25 and change, including all the taxes and crap. When we bought cellphones a couple years ago, we wanted to keep our landline and that's BellSouth's minimum monthly charge for having a local number without long distance or any features.
Still doesn't change the fact that what they did in New Orleans is pretty awful.
Also, what's considered "appropriate" varies by workplace and location. What was fine in the office I worked at in Atlanta was too casual for the same company's Charlotte office. At my current job, my coworkers would probably look at me like I had two heads if I wore a suit but a nice t-shirt and jeans blends in.
Science fiction authors such as Alistair Reynolds speculate that this problem will be solved by interstellar space travel. Longer-lived people can travel the necessary distances and establish new societies. When you come right down to it, it's an overcrowding problem.
I'd love to see both longer lifespans and interplanetary space travel in my lifetime. Whether I will depends on, I suppose, how long I manage to live.
I've ended up using my Dell Axim X50 as an expensive desk clock. It will sometimes connect to the web wirelessly, if it's in a good mood and the planets are aligned and I haven't accidentally turned off the wireless card by picking it up or turning it on. So I just leave it stuck in its cradle, where it's marginally less troublesome.
It's nice to hear that it potentially has some useful, exciting features. Are you using the OS that came with it, or did you install something else that works better? The PocketPC OS makes troubleshooting the picky, picky wireless card or switching between hotspots or even connecting to a new hotspot very difficult.
If you really want to see one first-hand, you can always order the developer kit.
I hate those things, too. That's why I have the zap plugins bookmarklet on my nav toolbar. I just click that and the most annoying ads disappear.