My kids have had computers at their disposal since they were 2. My computers of choice? OLD ONES!!!
Their first computer was a 800MHz cast-off which my office sold off at a cheap price. Perfect kids computer, plays most kids-oriented games, and best of all, I didn't have to worry when they used crayon on the screen or yanked hard on the CD tray or spilled chocolate milk all over it. It's since been "upgraded" to my wife's previous computer.
If this is the first time you've had a very young kid around a computer, then you can't imagine how tough he will be on technology. He may be gentle when you're around, but as a 2-to-4-year-old, he will test his environment and his surroundings (including the percussive durability of his surroundings), often when you're not around to stop him.
If you really really really want to buy new, then you may want to consider the OLPC, currently on a get-one-give-one deal at Amazon: One Laptop per Child XO Laptop (Give a Laptop, Get a Laptop). This is the legendary "durable-for-kids-in-third-world-countries" laptop, and when you buy one for your tyke, you're also buying one to get shipped overseas to a disadvantaged tyke somewhere else in the world. It may serve your needs, and helps out a good cause.
If you want to continue on Linux, try Prelinking the libraries (see 'man prelink' and Google for more information). It resolves a lot of the performance issues with dynamically linked libraries, without actually statically linking them. Not only does this resolve the GPL issues, it also removes problems with, for example, being able to update OS libraries independently of your application.
Of course, BSD is a fine OS as well, and I've had good experiences with both platforms. Good luck!
The author of this article criticizes viewing Yahoo email in its default email-list-at-top-preview-pane-at-bottom layout, using a small browser window size that was not up to the task of displaying all the information that he wanted to display. He gripes about not being able to open multiple tabs with several email messages like he used to be able to do with Firefox under the old email system.
Less than a minute after reading the so-called article, I had restored his favorite email-reading workflow in my Yahoo Mail Beta window. I was viewing a larger list of emails (by turning off the preview pane), and double-clicking several messages opened up several tabs within the Yahoo Mail window environment. In fact, I'd say that this is an improvement over the old feature set, as it provides his email-reading workflow for non-tabbed IE browsers. I think the author of the article was more in love with complaining than he was with exploring the features of Yahoo Mail.
He also criticises the ads displayed on the page. While it's definately more than before, it's not the 20% of screen real estate that he claims when using a reasonable browser window size. And anyway, most people's eyes have been trained to naturally flow away from advertizing.
To sum it all up... if Slashdot was Digg, this story would be buried under "OK, This is Lame".
I was happy to expose my son to technology at a very early age. He's always watched me on my computer, whether playing games or doing work.
He was banging on the keyboard when he was nearly one, and using the mouse a few months after that. (I highly highly recommend the "JumpStart School Time" CD, which only comes in a 3-pack with a couple of other useless titles, for starting mouse and keyboard skills. Make a backup. It will get scratched.)
He was picking out "Bear in the Big Blue House" on the Tivo by the time he was 1-and-a-half. Really! I he picked it out because of the long name. Not long after that, he also started picking out Sesame Street, perhaps becuase of the shape of the S's.
He was installing his own software, including accepting license agreements, at two. He was also able to pick out the Mozilla Firefox icon on a crowded desktop, double-click, and pick out his favorite web sites (sesamestreet.com, playhousedisney.com, and the like) from bookmarks. He also installed so much spyware that I had to reformat my wife's computer.
Not long after he turned 3, I finally broke down and gave him his own computer. I picked up a 800MHz/512MB/20GB computer for $20 used from a corporate computer sale, and tossed a spare copy of Windows on it. It's connected to the internet. He has his list of favorite bookmarks (set up by parents, of course), and a handful of cheap $9 kids games from Target, WalMart, etc. He installs his own software. In fact, he's currently playing a Clifford (think Big Red Dog) game.
He doesn't know anything about spelling, so I'm not too worried about porn sites, illicit chats or the darker side of myspace.com. I will be installing monitors before that happens.
Is that all he does? Of course not. He plays with legos, trains, his parents, and his little sister. But the next generation will not know a world without computers, just as our generation doesn't know a world without electricity. I see no reason to make them wait.
Does this have to do with how I was raised? Probably. My parents bought an Apple II+ for $3000 when I was 5, and they never prevented me from using it. I had my favorite games, and by early elementary school I was typing out silly programs in BASIC from a book, eventually writing my own Adventure-type games. I can only hope I can provide my children with the same opportunities I had.
So we can now make predictions about permanent peaks in vastly complex - and to a great extent, cyclical - industrial systems only two months after the peak? If we determine a peak after two years, I might believe it. Two decades, I'd certainly believe it. Two centuries, I'd say it was fact.
But two months?
In other news, according to my analysis of the decline of light since I awoke, peak brightness was 10 hours ago. In other news, I became increasingly agitated over the last 5 minutes, and I reached peak happiness 7 minutes ago.:(
The article on ZDNet.com, in which DoubleClick executives bemoan the use of ad-blocking web browsers, contains DoubleClick-driven advertizing.
(Thankfully, AdBlock caught it.:)
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the legal status of GPL'd code. Here is the proper answer:
Any code you write is owned (copyrighted) by you. You have the right to release it under the GPL, or any other license, or any combination thereof. (QT and MySQL, for example, are both released under both GPL and proprietary licenses.)
Any code you did not write, but rather received from a GPL'd product, is not owned (copyrighted) by you. It is the owner of the original author (unless there was a legal transfer of copyright), and you only have permission to use it under the terms of the GPL (unless an additional license was offered).
Because of the contract you signed, YOUR code can be used by your employer in any way they see fit. This includes bundling it with commercial non-GPL'd products. However, your employer does NOT have any rights to use the borrowed code. If your employer wants to use that in any way, they will need permission of the original authors or to release the finished product under the terms of the GPL.
In other words, you need to identify for your employer which code is legally theirs and which is not. Their legal team should understand that, very simply, you (and therefore they) are not copyright owners of every line of code. They will need to recreate - from scratch - those portions for which you/they are not copyright owners.
Regarding the patent, if they are trying to patent a portion of the borrowed code (not your code), then there is obviously prior art, and you should inform them as such.
TMobile Customers should let TMobile know that we care about security issues on their website, and that we consider this to be very important for our continued relationship with them!
Tips for management - Try not to manage!
on
Geeks in Management?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Think about what you like most in the managers you've had over the years. You probably did your best work under those who didn't "manage" you at all, who just tried to help you to remove hurdles.
My aunt and uncle have a satellite on their RV. Normally based in Texas, they came to visit me in the Seattle, WA area. They noticed that their service was poorer up here. They had more dropped packets and greater overall latency. I suspect the primary reason involved the angle at which the signal had to reach the satelite - the farther north you are, the more atmosphere the signal must pass through.
Does anyone have specific experience from around the same latitude as Ann Arbor (just guessing, from around the 40-45th parallel)?
I've been in the beta playing Savage for the past few weeks now on my Gentoo Linux box. It's actually a really good game. The combat is very different - it focuses heavily on melee weapons, so you can't just hit everybody from a distance - you eventually have to get into the chaos and get bloody. Performance and graphics are great.
I would recommend Savage to any gamers who run Linux - keep this one on your watch list.
"One possible reply to my question is 'Why do you care?' The problem here is that this guy is doing exactly what RMS originally designed copyleft to prevent..."
As with all GPL/CopyLeft violations, the lawsuit under US Copyright lay is a powerful and effective method that can be used to go after this guy. I know you don't want to sue (you said so in the article), but that seems to me the most effective method. If you care enough, file a small-claims lawsuit on behalf of the poeple he's ripped off.
I know that the DMCA is a rather questionable piece of legislation, but so long as it is here (for now), it is an effective tool that can be used.
Take a look at A Gift of Fire by Sara Baase, which explores social and ethical issues of computing technology. This was my textbook for my computer ethics class in school, and is a good read whether you need a textbook or not.
It discusses, for example, the Terac-25 incident, where a software probem in a radiation-therapy machine gave truly massive overdoses (over 100x intended) to cancer patients, causing severe injury and death. This was one of the first cases where poor programming (in conjunction with other design flaws) directly caused death and injury in the public sector.
It goes on to discuss both ethical benefits (such as revolutionizing business by providing information technology, reducing paper usage, etc) and hot ethical topics (privacy issues, safety issues, freedom of speech, computer crime, etc).
The first (in fact only) time I've ever seen a Segway was on the streets of San Francisco. I saw a Postal employee riding down the sidewalk with his USPS-branded saddlebags on the sides. I wonder if they have had bad experiences with Segway on their streets...
One of my favorites (that hasn't been mentioned already, AFAIK):
Get a beaker of Hydrochloric Acid and a beaker of Sodium Hydroxide. Using a dropper, show how caustic they are on various substances. Then, without warning, pour some of each into a new beaker and take a drink.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with drinking warm salty water.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdotted! Mirror here: http://www.spotlynx.com/node/2371
Slashdotted due to runaway nuclear reaction. Mirror here: Birth of the Moon: a Runaway Nuclear Reaction?
(Or should that be a runaway Slashdot reaction?)
My kids have had computers at their disposal since they were 2. My computers of choice? OLD ONES!!!
Their first computer was a 800MHz cast-off which my office sold off at a cheap price. Perfect kids computer, plays most kids-oriented games, and best of all, I didn't have to worry when they used crayon on the screen or yanked hard on the CD tray or spilled chocolate milk all over it. It's since been "upgraded" to my wife's previous computer.
If this is the first time you've had a very young kid around a computer, then you can't imagine how tough he will be on technology. He may be gentle when you're around, but as a 2-to-4-year-old, he will test his environment and his surroundings (including the percussive durability of his surroundings), often when you're not around to stop him.
If you really really really want to buy new, then you may want to consider the OLPC, currently on a get-one-give-one deal at Amazon: One Laptop per Child XO Laptop (Give a Laptop, Get a Laptop). This is the legendary "durable-for-kids-in-third-world-countries" laptop, and when you buy one for your tyke, you're also buying one to get shipped overseas to a disadvantaged tyke somewhere else in the world. It may serve your needs, and helps out a good cause.
Slashdotted... mirror here: Plasma Plants Will Vaporize Trash While Generating Energy
The story is mirrored here: Silencing a hard drive
(The pictures couldn't be salvaged from the original story.)
Mirror at http://www.spotlynx.com/node/1258
... the encryption of my customer records at Nevada's brothels.
I just hope they do more than password protecting the word docs...
I believe the quote you're looking for is "What a long, strange trip it's been". :)
http://lyrc.com.ar/en/tema1en.php?hash=ac9746e8eb452be1b0070ef3b31b44fd
If you want to continue on Linux, try Prelinking the libraries (see 'man prelink' and Google for more information). It resolves a lot of the performance issues with dynamically linked libraries, without actually statically linking them. Not only does this resolve the GPL issues, it also removes problems with, for example, being able to update OS libraries independently of your application.
Of course, BSD is a fine OS as well, and I've had good experiences with both platforms. Good luck!
The author of this article criticizes viewing Yahoo email in its default email-list-at-top-preview-pane-at-bottom layout, using a small browser window size that was not up to the task of displaying all the information that he wanted to display. He gripes about not being able to open multiple tabs with several email messages like he used to be able to do with Firefox under the old email system.
Less than a minute after reading the so-called article, I had restored his favorite email-reading workflow in my Yahoo Mail Beta window. I was viewing a larger list of emails (by turning off the preview pane), and double-clicking several messages opened up several tabs within the Yahoo Mail window environment. In fact, I'd say that this is an improvement over the old feature set, as it provides his email-reading workflow for non-tabbed IE browsers. I think the author of the article was more in love with complaining than he was with exploring the features of Yahoo Mail.
He also criticises the ads displayed on the page. While it's definately more than before, it's not the 20% of screen real estate that he claims when using a reasonable browser window size. And anyway, most people's eyes have been trained to naturally flow away from advertizing.
To sum it all up... if Slashdot was Digg, this story would be buried under "OK, This is Lame".
I was happy to expose my son to technology at a very early age. He's always watched me on my computer, whether playing games or doing work.
He was banging on the keyboard when he was nearly one, and using the mouse a few months after that. (I highly highly recommend the "JumpStart School Time" CD, which only comes in a 3-pack with a couple of other useless titles, for starting mouse and keyboard skills. Make a backup. It will get scratched.)
He was picking out "Bear in the Big Blue House" on the Tivo by the time he was 1-and-a-half. Really! I he picked it out because of the long name. Not long after that, he also started picking out Sesame Street, perhaps becuase of the shape of the S's.
He was installing his own software, including accepting license agreements, at two. He was also able to pick out the Mozilla Firefox icon on a crowded desktop, double-click, and pick out his favorite web sites (sesamestreet.com, playhousedisney.com, and the like) from bookmarks. He also installed so much spyware that I had to reformat my wife's computer.
Not long after he turned 3, I finally broke down and gave him his own computer. I picked up a 800MHz/512MB/20GB computer for $20 used from a corporate computer sale, and tossed a spare copy of Windows on it. It's connected to the internet. He has his list of favorite bookmarks (set up by parents, of course), and a handful of cheap $9 kids games from Target, WalMart, etc. He installs his own software. In fact, he's currently playing a Clifford (think Big Red Dog) game.
He doesn't know anything about spelling, so I'm not too worried about porn sites, illicit chats or the darker side of myspace.com. I will be installing monitors before that happens.
Is that all he does? Of course not. He plays with legos, trains, his parents, and his little sister. But the next generation will not know a world without computers, just as our generation doesn't know a world without electricity. I see no reason to make them wait.
Does this have to do with how I was raised? Probably. My parents bought an Apple II+ for $3000 when I was 5, and they never prevented me from using it. I had my favorite games, and by early elementary school I was typing out silly programs in BASIC from a book, eventually writing my own Adventure-type games. I can only hope I can provide my children with the same opportunities I had.
So we can now make predictions about permanent peaks in vastly complex - and to a great extent, cyclical - industrial systems only two months after the peak? If we determine a peak after two years, I might believe it. Two decades, I'd certainly believe it. Two centuries, I'd say it was fact.
:(
But two months?
In other news, according to my analysis of the decline of light since I awoke, peak brightness was 10 hours ago. In other news, I became increasingly agitated over the last 5 minutes, and I reached peak happiness 7 minutes ago.
The article on ZDNet.com, in which DoubleClick executives bemoan the use of ad-blocking web browsers, contains DoubleClick-driven advertizing. (Thankfully, AdBlock caught it. :)
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the legal status of GPL'd code. Here is the proper answer:
Any code you write is owned (copyrighted) by you. You have the right to release it under the GPL, or any other license, or any combination thereof. (QT and MySQL, for example, are both released under both GPL and proprietary licenses.)
Any code you did not write, but rather received from a GPL'd product, is not owned (copyrighted) by you. It is the owner of the original author (unless there was a legal transfer of copyright), and you only have permission to use it under the terms of the GPL (unless an additional license was offered).
Because of the contract you signed, YOUR code can be used by your employer in any way they see fit. This includes bundling it with commercial non-GPL'd products. However, your employer does NOT have any rights to use the borrowed code. If your employer wants to use that in any way, they will need permission of the original authors or to release the finished product under the terms of the GPL.
In other words, you need to identify for your employer which code is legally theirs and which is not. Their legal team should understand that, very simply, you (and therefore they) are not copyright owners of every line of code. They will need to recreate - from scratch - those portions for which you/they are not copyright owners.
Regarding the patent, if they are trying to patent a portion of the borrowed code (not your code), then there is obviously prior art, and you should inform them as such.
TMobile Customers should let TMobile know that we care about security issues on their website, and that we consider this to be very important for our continued relationship with them!
Think about what you like most in the managers you've had over the years. You probably did your best work under those who didn't "manage" you at all, who just tried to help you to remove hurdles.
Try to emulate that.
I think they did this on April Fools day one year - one particular story went up 5 or 6 times...
My aunt and uncle have a satellite on their RV. Normally based in Texas, they came to visit me in the Seattle, WA area. They noticed that their service was poorer up here. They had more dropped packets and greater overall latency. I suspect the primary reason involved the angle at which the signal had to reach the satelite - the farther north you are, the more atmosphere the signal must pass through. Does anyone have specific experience from around the same latitude as Ann Arbor (just guessing, from around the 40-45th parallel)?
I've been in the beta playing Savage for the past few weeks now on my Gentoo Linux box. It's actually a really good game. The combat is very different - it focuses heavily on melee weapons, so you can't just hit everybody from a distance - you eventually have to get into the chaos and get bloody. Performance and graphics are great.
I would recommend Savage to any gamers who run Linux - keep this one on your watch list.
The Lawsuit!
"One possible reply to my question is 'Why do you care?' The problem here is that this guy is doing exactly what RMS originally designed copyleft to prevent..."
As with all GPL/CopyLeft violations, the lawsuit under US Copyright lay is a powerful and effective method that can be used to go after this guy. I know you don't want to sue (you said so in the article), but that seems to me the most effective method. If you care enough, file a small-claims lawsuit on behalf of the poeple he's ripped off.
I know that the DMCA is a rather questionable piece of legislation, but so long as it is here (for now), it is an effective tool that can be used.
Take a look at A Gift of Fire by Sara Baase, which explores social and ethical issues of computing technology. This was my textbook for my computer ethics class in school, and is a good read whether you need a textbook or not. It discusses, for example, the Terac-25 incident, where a software probem in a radiation-therapy machine gave truly massive overdoses (over 100x intended) to cancer patients, causing severe injury and death. This was one of the first cases where poor programming (in conjunction with other design flaws) directly caused death and injury in the public sector. It goes on to discuss both ethical benefits (such as revolutionizing business by providing information technology, reducing paper usage, etc) and hot ethical topics (privacy issues, safety issues, freedom of speech, computer crime, etc).
The first (in fact only) time I've ever seen a Segway was on the streets of San Francisco. I saw a Postal employee riding down the sidewalk with his USPS-branded saddlebags on the sides. I wonder if they have had bad experiences with Segway on their streets...
It ain't gonna happen:
US Constitution, Article 1, Section 9:
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.
Link to US constitution at the Library of Congress
Nothing short of a constitutional ammendment can allow this tax.
When will the case modders start filling up thier cases with light-emitting silicon?
One of my favorites (that hasn't been mentioned already, AFAIK):
:)
Get a beaker of Hydrochloric Acid and a beaker of Sodium Hydroxide. Using a dropper, show how caustic they are on various substances. Then, without warning, pour some of each into a new beaker and take a drink.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with drinking warm salty water.