Having spend years reading newspaper(s) every morning for leads - like property purchases, planned construction, homes for sale ads in the classifieds, etc. - as a real estate broker I was pleasantly surprised when i got out of the business to find that reading the newspaper was an expensive, time-wasting, unnecessary, not-too productive habit. When news came online, nearly in real time, with enough details to satisfy any lingering curiosity, I stopped buying and reading them.
Having decided that watching TV - from the slanted, headline and brief sound-byte oriented talking-head news to the nearly unlimited and possibly entertaining shows that weren't scientifically truthful to hoards of stretched out, padded, unresolving, and questionable documentaries - was a waste of my time, was semi-addictive (you always want to channel surf to see what else is on during commercials or boring parts), was a distracting background noise that annoyed me, and was also forcing opinions and things I "should" be concerned about onto my already overloaded brain that was trying to think, I got rid of all my TVs. Besides, I've found most of the "news" is really only supposition and what-if and press releases and opinions or expert analyses anyway.
Having found that most magazines can be found online free and faster - and that usually the headlines were enough to get the gist of the story - i stopped reading things that were published months after the fact. Most magazines can be replaced, and even the glossy photography printed at home, by Google and web sites that focus on certain subjects.
The point is now that I don't have a lot of distractions clamoring for my visual and auditory attention I can concentrate on things that i want to do. Information overload is a real malady, getting worse all the time. I don't miss the old ways at all. And I have also discovered the key to filtering down all those inputs:
News that affects me will find me.
I have friends that tell me things, headlines alert me to news that might interest me, websites are constantly updated nearly real time enough to keep me on top of things, and if I happen to miss anything, somebody who thinks I owe them time or money or resources will contact me.
Good grief, just crash a $500 drone into a $500 drone.
But the Pentagon would rather spend 50 times that - $25,000 - to create a committee that spends $250,000 coming up with $2,500,000 ideas that take $25,000,000 in R&D dollars to demonstrate how cost in-effective a $500 drone is.
After all, when the drones are flying over us they don't want to give the local RC club any ideas...
How important is it to you? It's probably not that you're forgetting, you just need different or stronger triggers to that memory. Try the association tricks that memory experts recommend (ie, Google'em). Of course, the more you're passonate about something, the more you'll remember about it.
As a geek who started computering in '69, I've found I have to limit myself to practicing and learning the things that MOST interested me - my niches, my passions. The IT field has expanded, fragmented, forked, and repeated itself so many time I can't absorb the depth and breadth of it anymore. So I browse the headlines to stay generally current and then only concentrate on what is really important to me. At least, I try real hard not to follow every link...
Finally, it's very important to be healthy and well rested. Vitamins, diet, exercise, those are up to you and your body.
Let me add this: there are some medications that have helped me the last few years to concentrate, stay alert, remember, and be more productive. Just Google "brain enhancing drug", "modafinal", and "ADD or ADHD", but skip the steroids.
Look, in this age of enlightenment - where equality in gender, race, perks, consumerism, lifestyles, or healthcare is the apparent goal - does it really matter that there are is some ratio of men to women in some field of work...?
There are 2 ways to handle the inequality. 1, have government legislate or mandate some incentives for the designated minorities to want to get into that field of work; or 2, let human nature take its course as people make life choices for whatever reasons they find important and that field of work will achieve some balance on its own.
The only thing I know about incentives for any so-called minority program is that it creates a class of people who think they are owed something. And advancement is usually based on that minority designation instead of skill or knowledge or ability or accomplishment.
Any numbers about the ratio of some people in a field of work are maybe nice to know, but does it help that field...? What's the underlying agenda...? What was that proverb about truth, lies, and statistics...?
The "evident" reason people aren't retiring is NOT that "pensions are not enough for sufficient living"...!
The REAL reason is that those Baby Boomers aren't willing to reduce their standard of extravagance... er, I mean, living.
A single friend of mine was just offered retirement 10 years early. He'll probably keep working because he'd rather have a new car and a house in the suburbs. Downsizing is just is too much sacrifice...
I've been retired (real early) since 2000 because I am willing to stay out of debt, budget my income, move where I could live best, only concentrate on things I really enjoyed, and take advantage of what the government offered.
The quality of your life isn't based on how much you owe... I mean, own.
Unlike some/. articles that want to pit black hat against white hat, MS against the world, or geeks against the techie-muggles, real life is about EVOLUTION. Changes. Progress. Popularity. Seasons. Adapting.
If you want to look at life as a struggle or war - whether you're working, socializing, being healthly, improving your finances, whatever - a struggle is what you'll get.
Stop this stupid fighting attitude. All you're doing is making yourself upset (over something you have no control).
... you've got clouds and rain and much less than 12 hours of sunshine available on any given day year round.
Check out the wind instead. Generators can produce power in very low winds if you've got the right windmill (the ones that look like upright cylinders seem best, not the big blades).
Don't limit yourself to 110v, think about 12v and 24v DC lighting systems and battery storage and you'll be amazed at the inexpensive, 24/7, energy producing capabilities of the wind.
I'd toss a few links out except that you'll have more fun exploring on your own - you'll find exactly what you need the more you look around.
So here I was, speedreading through/., and the scientific suggestion of
"Using Maggots To Turn Off The Brain's Speech Center"
snatched my Sunday morning mind's attention like a zombie. Litereally. So, is there something here I'm missing? Like how does one direct those blood suckers to the speech center of a brain, assuming it's not major surgery to introduce them? And why...? Is DARPA going over to the dark side in the fight against terrorists?
Alas, after 15 second of grimacing and beweilderment I realized my sleep-hazed eyes were misreading.
Dang, I hope I didn't give some royalty fee collection company another bad idea to file a patent for...
question 2: Won't that kill off sequels? So no more sequels written by mediocre authors or relatives years after the original author's death... explain why this is a bad thing.
actually, it isn't.
question 4: As the body of copyright material grows and grows, doesn't that mean that creativity becomes more and more impossible? What? Are you saying that the only way to be "creative" is to blatantly plagiarize existing works?
no, what i'm saying is that as more and more work is copyright -- words, art, music, etc. -- the task to find something that doesn't infringe on prior work becomes harder and harder.
question 6: If perpetual motion is impossible, what makes anyone think that a perpetual copyright is? So anything with the word "perpetual" in it is a logical impossibility now?
How about copyright just lasts until the end of life on Earth? Hardly perpetual on the cosmological scale. Does that solve your conundrum?
i don't have a conundrum. i am merely suggesting that perpetual copyright is a nightmare, a hinderance to creativity, and a mess to enforce.
Do you really think that the tons of new car and used car dealers are going to stand for a wholesale replacement of all cars with "new, green" cars...?
Where will all those "old" cars go, to the 3rd world countries...?
Sheesh, where's common sense when you want it on/.?
. i seem to remember reading that there is a vertical polarization and a horizontal polarization to antennas -- an antenna point straight up is vertically polarized. and that is the default for antennas on any standard wireless i've seen.
[suggestion 1] so, why don't you try and change your antennas to horizontal? turn all of them parallel to the floor and see what happens. i do know that your wifi signal goes to crap if one antenna is vertical and one is horizontal.
most wireless equipment comes with omnidirectional antennas. and they usually aren't that great, either.
[suggestion 2] change your antennas to directional and point them at each other. there's tons on the market, but if you Google you'll find lots of antennas you can make yourself (like one out of a parabolic metal chinese stir-fry scoop on a bamboo handle) for next to nothing. if your router has 2 antennas, one could point east and the other south -- or towards the bedroom upstairs and the den downstairs.
i apologize if these have already been suggested, but you know how crazy it is searching through convoluted and cryptic Slashdot comments...
Obviously, there was a separation (a split). So while one spouse may think they can take stuff out of the other spouse's fridge, that spouse may have been saving that piece of pie for dessert. However, if it was a separation and not a divorce, they're still married and if one spouse won the lottery, in most states it would be split 50-50.
Possible things that could happen: the offended fork might put a poison pill in with its code; the fork that's taking ignores any protests until the projects are completed; the offended fork closes off any acces to the code; or the forks agree to spoonfeed each other.
My inclination is that both forks should share -- and if there's animosity, the problem runs deeper than just a fork in the code.
There are 2 things that immediatly come to mind:
"I'm surrounded by idiots".
to paraphrase 'into each life the rain must fall', "into each court a fool must fall".
and see what they use to get rid of smells like dead possums in the air conditioning ducts. They gave me some powerful one-drop-at-a-time stuff that worked.
. ..."every human creation in existence that can be expressed by a digital medium" has to include all the pornography, all the erotica, all the erotic pictures, all the works in private collections, all the usenet posts, and all the email written.
. In the '84-'87 or so range, Nissan made a 1.7 diesel and stuck it in their Sentra with a 4 speed manual. Had A/C too. I will never forgive the big Texas truck that killed my car.
I ran it about 5 years. If I didn't run the A/C then the milage was normally just over 40 mpg, mix of city and short interstate jaunts. But the nice thing was any long distance trip got 55 mpg. A/C cost me 5 mpg.
. ...every couple of months somebody on/. asks this question. RTF archives...!
I think the most common answers are
Network, network, network!
Be an intern
Spam your resume across the internet, somebody will notice
Take ANY job
Go back to school
Start your own coding/tech/consulting business
MOVE to where the jobs are
Marry rich
Hack into some corporate computers to find out WHERE the jobs are
Go be an "Army of one", if you dare
Concentrate on porn sites, they always need skillled workers
Of course, 20-20 hindsight tells me I should have gotten into medicine. People are always going to get sick.
. Last thing I would do is lay the wiring alongside the water pipes. Water is a service that is [1] always breaking/leaking somewhere, [2] always being upgraded for new homes, and [3] has workers tearing up the ground surrounding the pipes like they were digging for pirate gold.
My personal opinion here is wireless, there is equipment out there with good ranges. And if the community expands, slap in repeaters.
I remember my C=64 with fondness. I should, I paid $495 or so...
There was a guy I found who was building 1 meg of RAM expansion slots, I thought I was on top of the world. And when i got my 3.5" 1.44 Mb floppy drive I almost peed my pants.
I forget the program, but I set up my C=64 to be a BBS for the real estate office I worked in. You could NOT tell you weren't on a PC (286/386) of the period.
I wrote my first book on that machine, printed it out on a Star printer, and published it.
And there WERE a few BBSs around with more than one phone line, not to mention a national BBS I think called Q-Link(?). I took courses on that big BBS up in Virginia(?) with a dozen other peolple on line. And who could forget "Windy City BBS"?
Slashdot Mirror
Having spend years reading newspaper(s) every morning for leads - like property purchases, planned construction, homes for sale ads in the classifieds, etc. - as a real estate broker I was pleasantly surprised when i got out of the business to find that reading the newspaper was an expensive, time-wasting, unnecessary, not-too productive habit. When news came online, nearly in real time, with enough details to satisfy any lingering curiosity, I stopped buying and reading them.
Having decided that watching TV - from the slanted, headline and brief sound-byte oriented talking-head news to the nearly unlimited and possibly entertaining shows that weren't scientifically truthful to hoards of stretched out, padded, unresolving, and questionable documentaries - was a waste of my time, was semi-addictive (you always want to channel surf to see what else is on during commercials or boring parts), was a distracting background noise that annoyed me, and was also forcing opinions and things I "should" be concerned about onto my already overloaded brain that was trying to think, I got rid of all my TVs. Besides, I've found most of the "news" is really only supposition and what-if and press releases and opinions or expert analyses anyway.
Having found that most magazines can be found online free and faster - and that usually the headlines were enough to get the gist of the story - i stopped reading things that were published months after the fact. Most magazines can be replaced, and even the glossy photography printed at home, by Google and web sites that focus on certain subjects.
The point is now that I don't have a lot of distractions clamoring for my visual and auditory attention I can concentrate on things that i want to do. Information overload is a real malady, getting worse all the time. I don't miss the old ways at all. And I have also discovered the key to filtering down all those inputs:
News that affects me will find me.
I have friends that tell me things, headlines alert me to news that might interest me, websites are constantly updated nearly real time enough to keep me on top of things, and if I happen to miss anything, somebody who thinks I owe them time or money or resources will contact me.
Good grief, just crash a $500 drone into a $500 drone.
But the Pentagon would rather spend 50 times that - $25,000 - to create a committee that spends $250,000 coming up with $2,500,000 ideas that take $25,000,000 in R&D dollars to demonstrate how cost in-effective a $500 drone is.
After all, when the drones are flying over us they don't want to give the local RC club any ideas...
How important is it to you? It's probably not that you're forgetting, you just need different or stronger triggers to that memory. Try the association tricks that memory experts recommend (ie, Google'em). Of course, the more you're passonate about something, the more you'll remember about it.
As a geek who started computering in '69, I've found I have to limit myself to practicing and learning the things that MOST interested me - my niches, my passions. The IT field has expanded, fragmented, forked, and repeated itself so many time I can't absorb the depth and breadth of it anymore. So I browse the headlines to stay generally current and then only concentrate on what is really important to me. At least, I try real hard not to follow every link...
Finally, it's very important to be healthy and well rested. Vitamins, diet, exercise, those are up to you and your body.
Let me add this: there are some medications that have helped me the last few years to concentrate, stay alert, remember, and be more productive. Just Google "brain enhancing drug", "modafinal", and "ADD or ADHD", but skip the steroids.
Look, in this age of enlightenment - where equality in gender, race, perks, consumerism, lifestyles, or healthcare is the apparent goal - does it really matter that there are is some ratio of men to women in some field of work...?
There are 2 ways to handle the inequality. 1, have government legislate or mandate some incentives for the designated minorities to want to get into that field of work; or 2, let human nature take its course as people make life choices for whatever reasons they find important and that field of work will achieve some balance on its own.
The only thing I know about incentives for any so-called minority program is that it creates a class of people who think they are owed something. And advancement is usually based on that minority designation instead of skill or knowledge or ability or accomplishment.
Any numbers about the ratio of some people in a field of work are maybe nice to know, but does it help that field...? What's the underlying agenda...? What was that proverb about truth, lies, and statistics...?
The "evident" reason people aren't retiring is NOT that "pensions are not enough for sufficient living"...!
The REAL reason is that those Baby Boomers aren't willing to reduce their standard of extravagance... er, I mean, living.
A single friend of mine was just offered retirement 10 years early. He'll probably keep working because he'd rather have a new car and a house in the suburbs. Downsizing is just is too much sacrifice...
I've been retired (real early) since 2000 because I am willing to stay out of debt, budget my income, move where I could live best, only concentrate on things I really enjoyed, and take advantage of what the government offered.
The quality of your life isn't based on how much you owe... I mean, own.
Come on, there is NO war.
/. articles that want to pit black hat against white hat, MS against the world, or geeks against the techie-muggles, real life is about EVOLUTION. Changes. Progress. Popularity. Seasons. Adapting.
Unlike some
If you want to look at life as a struggle or war - whether you're working, socializing, being healthly, improving your finances, whatever - a struggle is what you'll get.
Stop this stupid fighting attitude. All you're doing is making yourself upset (over something you have no control).
... you've got clouds and rain and much less than 12 hours of sunshine available on any given day year round.
Check out the wind instead. Generators can produce power in very low winds if you've got the right windmill (the ones that look like upright cylinders seem best, not the big blades).
Don't limit yourself to 110v, think about 12v and 24v DC lighting systems and battery storage and you'll be amazed at the inexpensive, 24/7, energy producing capabilities of the wind.
I'd toss a few links out except that you'll have more fun exploring on your own - you'll find exactly what you need the more you look around.
I must have been busy with something really really important or I would have nominated
. . . . . the Sirius and XM satellite radio merger
. . . . . the United States Patent Office
. . . . . the border between the United States and Mexico
. . . . . Amtrak
Just because the media and political talking heads want to count delagates doesn't mean it's a done deal.
Never, never, NEVER, N*E*V*E*R count your delagates before they vote...!
Same principal (it ain't over 'til it's really over) applies to eggs, bug fixes, love, the Mars Rovers, and NASCAR races.
So here I was, speedreading through /., and the scientific suggestion of
"Using Maggots To Turn Off The Brain's Speech Center"
snatched my Sunday morning mind's attention like a zombie. Litereally. So, is there something here I'm missing? Like how does one direct those blood suckers to the speech center of a brain, assuming it's not major surgery to introduce them? And why...? Is DARPA going over to the dark side in the fight against terrorists?
Alas, after 15 second of grimacing and beweilderment I realized my sleep-hazed eyes were misreading.
Dang, I hope I didn't give some royalty fee collection company another bad idea to file a patent for...
"...Thieves should know that law enforcement can surf sites too in investigating crime," the FBI said."
Another great insight into the stupid criminal mind.
question 2: Won't that kill off sequels?
So no more sequels written by mediocre authors or relatives years after the original author's death... explain why this is a bad thing.
actually, it isn't.
question 4: As the body of copyright material grows and grows, doesn't that mean that creativity becomes more and more impossible?
What? Are you saying that the only way to be "creative" is to blatantly plagiarize existing works?
no, what i'm saying is that as more and more work is copyright -- words, art, music, etc. -- the task to find something that doesn't infringe on prior work becomes harder and harder.
question 6: If perpetual motion is impossible, what makes anyone think that a perpetual copyright is?
So anything with the word "perpetual" in it is a logical impossibility now?
How about copyright just lasts until the end of life on Earth? Hardly perpetual on the cosmological scale. Does that solve your conundrum?
i don't have a conundrum. i am merely suggesting that perpetual copyright is a nightmare, a hinderance to creativity, and a mess to enforce.
question 1: What if the copyright holder dies intestate?
question 2: Won't that kill off sequels?
question 3: Who's going to find offenders?
question 4: As the body of copyright material grows and grows, doesn't that mean that creativity becomes more and more impossible?
question 5: If creativity is stifled, then won't less and less people get involved in the arts?
question 6: If perpetual motion is impossible, what makes anyone think that a perpetual copyright is?
question 7: This kind of craziness is exactly why public flogging needs to return, right?
jon
Where will all those "old" cars go, to the 3rd world countries...?
Sheesh, where's common sense when you want it on /.?
.
i seem to remember reading that there is a vertical polarization and a horizontal polarization to antennas -- an antenna point straight up is vertically polarized. and that is the default for antennas on any standard wireless i've seen.
[suggestion 1] so, why don't you try and change your antennas to horizontal? turn all of them parallel to the floor and see what happens. i do know that your wifi signal goes to crap if one antenna is vertical and one is horizontal.
most wireless equipment comes with omnidirectional antennas. and they usually aren't that great, either.
[suggestion 2] change your antennas to directional and point them at each other. there's tons on the market, but if you Google you'll find lots of antennas you can make yourself (like one out of a parabolic metal chinese stir-fry scoop on a bamboo handle) for next to nothing. if your router has 2 antennas, one could point east and the other south -- or towards the bedroom upstairs and the den downstairs.
i apologize if these have already been suggested, but you know how crazy it is searching through convoluted and cryptic Slashdot comments...
--
jon
Obviously, there was a separation (a split). So while one spouse may think they can take stuff out of the other spouse's fridge, that spouse may have been saving that piece of pie for dessert. However, if it was a separation and not a divorce, they're still married and if one spouse won the lottery, in most states it would be split 50-50.
Possible things that could happen: the offended fork might put a poison pill in with its code; the fork that's taking ignores any protests until the projects are completed; the offended fork closes off any acces to the code; or the forks agree to spoonfeed each other.
My inclination is that both forks should share -- and if there's animosity, the problem runs deeper than just a fork in the code.
--
jon
There are 2 things that immediatly come to mind:
"I'm surrounded by idiots".
to paraphrase 'into each life the rain must fall', "into each court a fool must fall".
and see what they use to get rid of smells like dead possums in the air conditioning ducts. They gave me some powerful one-drop-at-a-time stuff that worked.
.
..."every human creation in existence that can be expressed by a digital medium" has to include all the pornography, all the erotica, all the erotic pictures, all the works in private collections, all the usenet posts, and all the email written.
Ain't gonna happen...
jon
.
In the '84-'87 or so range, Nissan made a 1.7 diesel and stuck it in their Sentra with a 4 speed manual. Had A/C too. I will never forgive the big Texas truck that killed my car.
I ran it about 5 years. If I didn't run the A/C then the milage was normally just over 40 mpg, mix of city and short interstate jaunts. But the nice thing was any long distance trip got 55 mpg. A/C cost me 5 mpg.
Oh, yeah, I loved that car.
jon
. /. asks this question. RTF archives...!
...every couple of months somebody on
I think the most common answers are
Network, network, network!
Be an intern
Spam your resume across the internet, somebody will notice
Take ANY job
Go back to school
Start your own coding/tech/consulting business
MOVE to where the jobs are
Marry rich
Hack into some corporate computers to find out WHERE the jobs are
Go be an "Army of one", if you dare
Concentrate on porn sites, they always need skillled workers
Of course, 20-20 hindsight tells me I should have gotten into medicine. People are always going to get sick.
.
actually had a Linux store about 2 years ago over in the Irving area. Went down faster than a Hollywood hooker.
When they closed, they left a nasty note on the door blaming the Linux community for not supporting the store.
jon
.
Last thing I would do is lay the wiring alongside the water pipes. Water is a service that is [1] always breaking/leaking somewhere, [2] always being upgraded for new homes, and [3] has workers tearing up the ground surrounding the pipes like they were digging for pirate gold.
My personal opinion here is wireless, there is equipment out there with good ranges. And if the community expands, slap in repeaters.
jon
try www.processor.com
since 1979. the best source of info is to subscribe to the hardcopy, it's about the size of a tabloid, maybe 60 pages.
I remember my C=64 with fondness. I should, I paid $495 or so...
There was a guy I found who was building 1 meg of RAM expansion slots, I thought I was on top of the world. And when i got my 3.5" 1.44 Mb floppy drive I almost peed my pants.
I forget the program, but I set up my C=64 to be a BBS for the real estate office I worked in. You could NOT tell you weren't on a PC (286/386) of the period.
I wrote my first book on that machine, printed it out on a Star printer, and published it.
And there WERE a few BBSs around with more than one phone line, not to mention a national BBS I think called Q-Link(?). I took courses on that big BBS up in Virginia(?) with a dozen other peolple on line. And who could forget "Windy City BBS"?