There is an outfit that picks from a variety of news sources, mainly in the Middle East. They produce a daily report of interesting articles.
Bluetooth Developer Kit?
on
Beer and Bluetooth
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Say, this makes me wonder. Have people used cheap Bluetooth developer kits that they like? I'm just looking for something simple like this USB kit. After all the talk about the Ambient Orb, I'd like to build some wireless toys.
When I mentioned this doodad to my girlfriend, she said that it would be neat to feed it data based on a woman's ovulatory cycle. She imagined it would be useful for couples trying to conceive. And it turns are already web sites where those of us who have them can track their periods, so adding an Ambient Orb interface would be easy.
Of course, my immediate thought was, "Sweet! A PMS meter! My own personal color-coded terror warning!"
It seems reasonable, but AFAIK nice only helps when the issue is CPU contention. When your problem is related to IO (e.g., seeking, caching, or transfer) then nice doesn't help.
Here's a howto for rsync snapshot backups. I keep daily backups for two weeks, weekly backups for two months, and monthly backups forever. I rolled my own wrappers for this stuff in a few hours.
It is about eight zillion times better than tapes. I have hot, random access to all versions of all my files. Thanks to the hard linking, space used is moderate. Since it backs up to a remote computer, backups are instantly off site. And if I want to verify my backups, I don't have to feed in eight million tapes; I just write a little perl script.
Note that people happily pay $30-50 for a little blinking light that tells them when they have voicemail. They'll pay a lot more than that for extra gauges on a car dash. And companies have paid millions for fancy "war room" conference rooms that continuously display important business data.
The basic prinicple is that people have to deal with a lot of invisible data, and if you can make it visible, it's easier for people to manage. Take a look, for example, at the many designs for in-house power meters. The idea is that if people have a better idea of how much electricity they're using, they'll waste less of it.
Personally, I would be tempted to hook it up so that it went slowly from green to red whenever I got behind on my email, a visible reminder of the people I'm ignoring when I get absorbed in a project. Or since I'm a freelancer, it'd be interesting to hook it up to a moving average of billable hours, so that I have a quick objective reference to check when I wonder whether a sunny day is better spent biking than coding.
Or at a company, I'd love to set it up so that it got redder and redder when people put in too much overtime on a project. Or you could hook it up so that it responded to an anonymous web poll on morale. And then perhaps another one tied to the number of open bugs. Or perhaps percentage of code covered by test suites.
I'd agree that $200 is too steep. But for $50, I could find a lot of uses for these!
there's a difference between rudimentary tool making and the social movement known as utilitarianism or capitalism. i believe the social movement can be traced back to Martin Luther and the protestant movement, whereas primitive tool making can traced back to a common ape-human ancestor.
True, but I don't see how that relates exactly. I'm saying the geek worldview exemplified by the poster, which includes an aesthetic preference for function over decoration, both predates and is not primarily driven by the social influences of capitalism.
Um. I think the underpinnings of transforming nature to serve man (utilitarianism) started before your daddy was born. Try going back to the dawn of western civilization.:P
It goes back much farther than that, really. Tool use has been a big factor through a lot of human evolution from our great ape ancestors, and it's pretty clear that geekiness has a genetic component. So I'd bet that the geek's utilitarian aesthetic has been around much longer than a few thousand years.
geeks are products of a utilitarian society. why do you think geeks get paid so much? it's our utility to society (which is mirrored in his desire to seek functionality in his jewelry).
Oh, please. My dad got into programming long before it was fashionable or lucrative. And I started young, spending far too much of my youth in my basement, hacking away, without thought of lucre.
I do well programming, but for me it's something I can't not to, like a musician and his music. If I had a day job waiting tables, I'd still be writing code at night. And I frequently choose jobs that are interesting over ones that pay better.
Many of the most geeky people I know are budding scientists who work 60 or 80 hours a week for wages so low that it's probably illegal. But they don't care, because they're doing what they love, and they think of themselves as lucky.
And many of the most money-driven people I know aren't utilitarian at all. They spend absurd sums of money on fancy cars, fancy clothes, and big houses that they don't use, but only after spending more money decorating the place in shockingly un-useful ways.
So the notion that socially clueless geeks are the ones most influenced by society doesn't strike me as a very plausible thesis.
Today, I was finally able to corner one of them and ask him what exactly his issue was with Linux. His answer: Indemnity.
Sounds like he was just looking for a pretext.
Maybe. Or he might really have made a calculated business decision about it. (To check, ask him the terms and sizes of indemnity protection that they require. If he knows, then he might be serious.)
But to my mind, the most likely explanation is typical large-company cover-your-ass behavior. Large companies typically punish for failure more strongly than the reward success. One way to deal with this is to always have somebody else available to blame in case of failure.
I'm a freelance consultant; last year I did some work for a fortune 50 company. They offered me a job, but I said, "No, I'd like to stick with my freelancing ways." To get me in, I had to be on the list of approved vendors; I ended up having to subcontract through one of them. When I asked why they couldn't just contract with me directly like everybody else, they said that their vendors had to have deep pockets, so that they could sue them if something went wrong.
This was, of course, ridiculous: they didn't require their employees to have deep pockets, and when they screwed up, they didn't sue them for millions. (If anything, they promoted them.) But they weren't budging, so I charged them enough extra to pay for the middleman and forgot about it.
The concept that everything must have a function is indicative that you live in a capitalist society, which assigns value to objects which provide utility.
Or it could be indicative of the fact that he is a geek, who are famous (or, more likely, infamous) for favoring function over form. Since we're on Slashdot, I'm guessing he's a geek.
practically 20 minutes out of each hour during prime time TV is dedicated to commercials.
I should point out that the ads pay for the programming, so there's some quid pro quo.
We cannot escape spam. We can delete it, and not look at it, in a similar way that we sometimes ignore TV ads by changing the channel. However, spam is here to stay.
I could say the same thing about, say, theft. Or drunk driving. Both of those are here to stay. But we have laws against those most people recognize it as wrong, and people go to jail for them. Spam can be the same.
The best way to protect yourself is to use a difficult-to-guess, 9+ character email, for which you never sign up for anything with, and only give to people you trust not to e-card you or have "sniffers" installed on their system which gives away the address book.
And then when you've driven off 98% of your potential correspondents by doing this, you can get rid of the other 2% by bending down and unplugging the ethernet cable.
And then what do we do what a company hires an untraceable spammer to send out a million messages with its competitors names?
As you go on to point out, this problem can happen in other realms and with current laws. The unfortunate victim can seek redress through the courts. It's not perfect, but it's no worse than the rest of the legal system.
There is a valid purpose for email marketing, and calling any mass email from a company Spam is ridiculous, if they have a method for opting out and/or unsubscribing.
So if I punch you in the nose, it's not really assault as long as I provide a method for opting out from future punches?
The answer, of course, depends on whether you asked me to punch you in the nose. If you did, then it's legal. An unsolicited punch in the nose, though, is both illegal and wrong.
I propose that outgoing mail on new accounts be throttled down with minor delays (a second or two per destination address up to the first hundred or so each day, increasing to 5-10 seconds per destination addresses after that).
This is an excellent idea. It'd be easy to implement; you could just drop a transparent proxy between your users and your mail server. It'd take minimal hardware, and be pretty quick to build. If an ISP is interested in something like this, drop me a line; a simple version would be quick to build. And I'll send Steve B a cut for thinking of it.
Now I know that you can write bad code in any language, but bad-code in Perl is what I call 'job-security encryption' as you will never be able to fire the person who wrote the code, no matter how bad it is, because no one else will be able to read it.
I've seen job-security code written in quite a number of languages. Even Java, which was clearly put together with the idea that a compiler could force conformance to 'proper' approaches.
If you are worried that somebody is writing crappy, unmaintainable code, the solution doesn't lie in tools. If you want to be sure that code can be maintained by other people, then you should have other people try to maintain it. Extreme Programming's practice of collective code ownership is one great way to do that. Other ways include mandatory rotations, code reviews done by people who will have to maintain the program, and code audits done by trained auditors.
There are also some automated design and code analysis tools that can help (like SmallWorlds or the handy copy/paste detector). But tools and audits are never a perfect substitute for the real thing.
Have you had this problem, and regardless of that answer, do you have any recommendations for flourescent torch lamps or wide area lamps?
Yep! When I first started buying CF bulbs, they just didn't seem to produce as much light as their claimed equivalent bulbs. So now I use the next size up for everything. This makes the room brighter than before, and I'm still saving plenty of power.
it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty,
Do you object to boycotts? They certainly punish the innocent 99% of a company's employees to get at the tiny percentage of malginant or clueless decision-makers, and they also can harm the company's other customers.
Personally, I think that it's bad to punish innocents, but it's also bad to allow innocents to suffer. In the case of a boycott like this, I think punishing the people who are, perhaps unintentionally, supporting a company whose actions harm innocents is an acceptable tradeoff. Not good, but less bad than any immediate alternatives.
I don't like children, I don't see any special need to care for children. [...] the whiny little shits who cry for more and haven't put a dime in
Quick reminder: You were once a child, and enjoyed the many protections and benefits that come with that state. To say that others shouldn't have them is a bit hypocritical.
Granted, a lot of people hide their agendas behind "save the children" rhetoric, when they really mean, "save me from thinking" or "save me from dealing with something that makes me feel uncomfortable". This is also hypocritical, and, as Mark Twain knew, it ends up being bad for the children.
The only thing we all have in common is an unbroken line, eons long, of ancestors who took the time to have children. Suggesting that having children is some sort of quirky personal choice ignores the last few hundred million years of history and the essential nature of life itself.
Slashdot Mirror
There is an outfit that picks from a variety of news sources, mainly in the Middle East. They produce a daily report of interesting articles.
Say, this makes me wonder. Have people used cheap Bluetooth developer kits that they like? I'm just looking for something simple like this USB kit. After all the talk about the Ambient Orb, I'd like to build some wireless toys.
When I mentioned this doodad to my girlfriend, she said that it would be neat to feed it data based on a woman's ovulatory cycle. She imagined it would be useful for couples trying to conceive. And it turns are already web sites where those of us who have them can track their periods, so adding an Ambient Orb interface would be easy.
Of course, my immediate thought was, "Sweet! A PMS meter! My own personal color-coded terror warning!"
It seems reasonable, but AFAIK nice only helps when the issue is CPU contention. When your problem is related to IO (e.g., seeking, caching, or transfer) then nice doesn't help.
Here's a howto for rsync snapshot backups. I keep daily backups for two weeks, weekly backups for two months, and monthly backups forever. I rolled my own wrappers for this stuff in a few hours.
It is about eight zillion times better than tapes. I have hot, random access to all versions of all my files. Thanks to the hard linking, space used is moderate. Since it backs up to a remote computer, backups are instantly off site. And if I want to verify my backups, I don't have to feed in eight million tapes; I just write a little perl script.
I recommend it highly!
There are a ton of uses for it.
Note that people happily pay $30-50 for a little blinking light that tells them when they have voicemail. They'll pay a lot more than that for extra gauges on a car dash. And companies have paid millions for fancy "war room" conference rooms that continuously display important business data.
The basic prinicple is that people have to deal with a lot of invisible data, and if you can make it visible, it's easier for people to manage. Take a look, for example, at the many designs for in-house power meters. The idea is that if people have a better idea of how much electricity they're using, they'll waste less of it.
Personally, I would be tempted to hook it up so that it went slowly from green to red whenever I got behind on my email, a visible reminder of the people I'm ignoring when I get absorbed in a project. Or since I'm a freelancer, it'd be interesting to hook it up to a moving average of billable hours, so that I have a quick objective reference to check when I wonder whether a sunny day is better spent biking than coding.
Or at a company, I'd love to set it up so that it got redder and redder when people put in too much overtime on a project. Or you could hook it up so that it responded to an anonymous web poll on morale. And then perhaps another one tied to the number of open bugs. Or perhaps percentage of code covered by test suites.
I'd agree that $200 is too steep. But for $50, I could find a lot of uses for these!
there's a difference between rudimentary tool making and the social movement known as utilitarianism or capitalism. i believe the social movement can be traced back to Martin Luther and the protestant movement, whereas primitive tool making can traced back to a common ape-human ancestor.
True, but I don't see how that relates exactly. I'm saying the geek worldview exemplified by the poster, which includes an aesthetic preference for function over decoration, both predates and is not primarily driven by the social influences of capitalism.
Um. I think the underpinnings of transforming nature to serve man (utilitarianism) started before your daddy was born. Try going back to the dawn of western civilization. :P
It goes back much farther than that, really. Tool use has been a big factor through a lot of human evolution from our great ape ancestors, and it's pretty clear that geekiness has a genetic component. So I'd bet that the geek's utilitarian aesthetic has been around much longer than a few thousand years.
geeks are products of a utilitarian society. why do you think geeks get paid so much? it's our utility to society (which is mirrored in his desire to seek functionality in his jewelry).
Oh, please. My dad got into programming long before it was fashionable or lucrative. And I started young, spending far too much of my youth in my basement, hacking away, without thought of lucre.
I do well programming, but for me it's something I can't not to, like a musician and his music. If I had a day job waiting tables, I'd still be writing code at night. And I frequently choose jobs that are interesting over ones that pay better.
Many of the most geeky people I know are budding scientists who work 60 or 80 hours a week for wages so low that it's probably illegal. But they don't care, because they're doing what they love, and they think of themselves as lucky.
And many of the most money-driven people I know aren't utilitarian at all. They spend absurd sums of money on fancy cars, fancy clothes, and big houses that they don't use, but only after spending more money decorating the place in shockingly un-useful ways.
So the notion that socially clueless geeks are the ones most influenced by society doesn't strike me as a very plausible thesis.
Maybe. Or he might really have made a calculated business decision about it. (To check, ask him the terms and sizes of indemnity protection that they require. If he knows, then he might be serious.)
But to my mind, the most likely explanation is typical large-company cover-your-ass behavior. Large companies typically punish for failure more strongly than the reward success. One way to deal with this is to always have somebody else available to blame in case of failure.
I'm a freelance consultant; last year I did some work for a fortune 50 company. They offered me a job, but I said, "No, I'd like to stick with my freelancing ways." To get me in, I had to be on the list of approved vendors; I ended up having to subcontract through one of them. When I asked why they couldn't just contract with me directly like everybody else, they said that their vendors had to have deep pockets, so that they could sue them if something went wrong.
This was, of course, ridiculous: they didn't require their employees to have deep pockets, and when they screwed up, they didn't sue them for millions. (If anything, they promoted them.) But they weren't budging, so I charged them enough extra to pay for the middleman and forgot about it.
The concept that everything must have a function is indicative that you live in a capitalist society, which assigns value to objects which provide utility.
Or it could be indicative of the fact that he is a geek, who are famous (or, more likely, infamous) for favoring function over form. Since we're on Slashdot, I'm guessing he's a geek.
Yeah I have to agree here, this is one of the gayest "ask slashdot" questions I've heard in a long time.
They sound pretty heterosexual to me. Or are you saying that the poster is a woman, too?
As for "Is this short for "I think it's just not going to work?" " -- No this was short for "Its just not going to work..."
It wasn't a hard sentence structure to follow, nor do I mean anything more than I said.
That was a gentle way of pointing out that you are stating your opinions as if they were facts. Sorry I wasn't more clear.
Plese Provide Evidance That You Gave Money To These Spammers And If You Can't, You Are Guilty.
Judges deal with this sort of ambiguity all the time. There's no reason they can't deal with this as well.
Its just not going to work...
Is this short for "I think it's just not going to work?" Or do you have some evidence that you'd like to share with us?
practically 20 minutes out of each hour during prime time TV is dedicated to commercials.
I should point out that the ads pay for the programming, so there's some quid pro quo.
We cannot escape spam. We can delete it, and not look at it, in a similar way that we sometimes ignore TV ads by changing the channel. However, spam is here to stay.
I could say the same thing about, say, theft. Or drunk driving. Both of those are here to stay. But we have laws against those most people recognize it as wrong, and people go to jail for them. Spam can be the same.
The best way to protect yourself is to use a difficult-to-guess, 9+ character email, for which you never sign up for anything with, and only give to people you trust not to e-card you or have "sniffers" installed on their system which gives away the address book.
And then when you've driven off 98% of your potential correspondents by doing this, you can get rid of the other 2% by bending down and unplugging the ethernet cable.
And then what do we do what a company hires an untraceable spammer to send out a million messages with its competitors names?
As you go on to point out, this problem can happen in other realms and with current laws. The unfortunate victim can seek redress through the courts. It's not perfect, but it's no worse than the rest of the legal system.
Corporate speech and individual speech are equally protected under the First Amendment.
Wrong.
The problem with filters at the ISP/Mail Server is that one persons spam is anothers desired mail. How do correct for this?
Those few people can type "enlarge my penis" into Google and click on a link that comes up.
There is a valid purpose for email marketing, and calling any mass email from a company Spam is ridiculous, if they have a method for opting out and/or unsubscribing.
So if I punch you in the nose, it's not really assault as long as I provide a method for opting out from future punches?
The answer, of course, depends on whether you asked me to punch you in the nose. If you did, then it's legal. An unsolicited punch in the nose, though, is both illegal and wrong.
I propose that outgoing mail on new accounts be throttled down with minor delays (a second or two per destination address up to the first hundred or so each day, increasing to 5-10 seconds per destination addresses after that).
This is an excellent idea. It'd be easy to implement; you could just drop a transparent proxy between your users and your mail server. It'd take minimal hardware, and be pretty quick to build. If an ISP is interested in something like this, drop me a line; a simple version would be quick to build. And I'll send Steve B a cut for thinking of it.
Now I know that you can write bad code in any language, but bad-code in Perl is what I call 'job-security encryption' as you will never be able to fire the person who wrote the code, no matter how bad it is, because no one else will be able to read it.
I've seen job-security code written in quite a number of languages. Even Java, which was clearly put together with the idea that a compiler could force conformance to 'proper' approaches.
If you are worried that somebody is writing crappy, unmaintainable code, the solution doesn't lie in tools. If you want to be sure that code can be maintained by other people, then you should have other people try to maintain it. Extreme Programming's practice of collective code ownership is one great way to do that. Other ways include mandatory rotations, code reviews done by people who will have to maintain the program, and code audits done by trained auditors.
There are also some automated design and code analysis tools that can help (like SmallWorlds or the handy copy/paste detector). But tools and audits are never a perfect substitute for the real thing.
Have you had this problem, and regardless of that answer, do you have any recommendations for flourescent torch lamps or wide area lamps?
Yep! When I first started buying CF bulbs, they just didn't seem to produce as much light as their claimed equivalent bulbs. So now I use the next size up for everything. This makes the room brighter than before, and I'm still saving plenty of power.
it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty,
Do you object to boycotts? They certainly punish the innocent 99% of a company's employees to get at the tiny percentage of malginant or clueless decision-makers, and they also can harm the company's other customers.
Personally, I think that it's bad to punish innocents, but it's also bad to allow innocents to suffer. In the case of a boycott like this, I think punishing the people who are, perhaps unintentionally, supporting a company whose actions harm innocents is an acceptable tradeoff. Not good, but less bad than any immediate alternatives.
I don't like children, I don't see any special need to care for children. [...] the whiny little shits who cry for more and haven't put a dime in
Quick reminder: You were once a child, and enjoyed the many protections and benefits that come with that state. To say that others shouldn't have them is a bit hypocritical.
Granted, a lot of people hide their agendas behind "save the children" rhetoric, when they really mean, "save me from thinking" or "save me from dealing with something that makes me feel uncomfortable". This is also hypocritical, and, as Mark Twain knew, it ends up being bad for the children.
The only thing we all have in common is an unbroken line, eons long, of ancestors who took the time to have children. Suggesting that having children is some sort of quirky personal choice ignores the last few hundred million years of history and the essential nature of life itself.