We as a human race have assembled a sizable amount knowledge regarding the cosmos, and would like to preserve that information for our "static" friends of the future. My question is, what media is the best for storing this information? I'm most familiar with tape backup, burnable dvd's, and network access storage units, but I fear they will not last required 100 billion years!
Any thoughts?
A more likely *correction* by Google will be to not list said website at all in any search. Let's see how long this ruling (and supporting law) lasts when companies that complain start getting delisted from Google.
How about letting people decide for themselves what charity they want to donate to, instead of forcing you choice upon them?
While I would agree with that if Craigslist were making money directly from "the people", however they would primary make that $500M from advertisers. So in this case, it's an indirect cost passed on to the customer from the business paying for the Internet advert (on craigslist), thus "the people" don't see it - the cost - and will be less likely to spend that "saved money" - free vs paid classified listings - on a charitable organization.
CL, on the other hand, could place "tiny little ads in real estate" (sorry had to get that in there), and donate much of it to worthy organizations.
Mark, I actually agree that the choice should be my own, but in this case, the choice lies deeper than myself.
Just this morning, as I was perusing through Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit, a thought occurred to me that even though there is far greater variety and features on the latter sites, I'm still a loyal fan of/. (mostly) for it's editors. Even for their shortcomings - bad grammer, duplicate posts - the quality of their filter is the reason why I continue coming here... until this post! Give me a break, slashdot. " Windows Media Player 11 and Urge", "Biggest Obstacle of Nuclear Fusion Overcome?", and "Wired Releases Full Text of AT&T NSA Document" are all quality article submissions, so when I thgouht I was going to get a great introduction to Python, being a PHP developer, I was intrigued and quite pleased to click the link. Now I'm frustrated just enough to take the 30 seconds to make this post.
I obey the law even though my car allows me to go 130mph and to be used as a getaway in a jewel heist - both of which are illegal in my state - so does this mean they'll next pass a bill requiring a device to log everywhere I go in my car just so police can use it to track me if necessary? What happened to this country? To its people? Or am I being naive and blind to the fact that it was as it always like this?
You loose all your napster music if you ever cancel.
I'm getting a little tired of this argument. I'm currently a yahoo music unlimited subscriber and quite frankly I love it. Sure, the program is not nearly as slick as iTunes, sure it's DRM'd, sure if I cancel my membership I lose all of my music, but I pay $60 for 12 months of unlimited legal downloads.
It breaks down like this:
Service (license)
$60/yr = $5/m = unlimited downloads
Purchase (own)
$5+.79x =.99x............ (yahoo price point = itunes price)
x = number of songs / month = 25
So, I need to purchase 25 songs per month through yahoo to make it price competitive with itunes. But wait, I also get to download as much music as I want (assuming it's available, and if not, just go to itunes, emusic, etc.), listen to jukebox radio stations, and share music with my friends using yahoo. All in all, that's not bad. Also, I have an Audiovox SMT5600 that syncs with a 512mb card, so I've got about 4 hours of music I can store that needs to be resynced once a month. (A phone and mp3 player in one device is awesome, btw.)
I'll be honest and say that I'm not some hard-core audiophile (obviously), so yahoo works great for me. I'm also flaky, so I'll listen to something for a month or so, decide I don't care much for it anymore, then listen to something else. Verses the old way of buying a cd, then throwing it in the bottom shelf of my entertainment center to die with all the old crap I'm embarrassed I bought or intend to never listen to anymore buy won't throw away or sell because no one wants it or I'm pissed that I spent $15 on it.
Leasing music to me makes perfect sense, so when I hear people say that you don't own your music, I say so what? I own my car, but I also really like cars, so the next one I get I may lease it just so I can get a new one every couple of years. Am I a crazy idiot supporting a drm'd "you can't drive over 14k miles a year" car company, or am I realistic with myself in that I don't drive that much anyway, but when I do I want it to be in a new car? You be the judge.
My suggestion is to change your current job to one that is more interesting in your current environment - don't take the other job. So "you only live once, take the other job" sounds great, but you've got a wonderful environment to work in now; don't change that, you're indeed living now. What you should do is tell your boss matter-of-factly that you are considering the change simply for the better (more interesting) work, *however* you love your co-workers, flexi-time, et al. Make the suggestion that you want some more interesting work with a percentage of your time, ala Google's 80/20. You'll likely find that the novelty of "doing what you wanna do" wears off and it's nice to just get some stuff done, stuff that directly adds value to the company via your job description. (Note, I've been self-employed for the past five years and there are days where it's nice when I have to just get what would otherwise be drudge-work done).
Peace of mind in your work environment is the most important thing as the job has the ability to change, but a person will likely always be a jerk/lazy/make bad coffee or whatever you find you dislike about co-workers.
I'm blessed to have good partners and work I mostly enjoy, but I don't make very good money. Would I change to your position? Nope, not a chance.... but that's because I put in five years and now make enough for a decent living with the potential for greater prosperity in the future. Ask me that 2-3 years ago and I would have jumped at your job.
One last factor I'd consider, since I don't know you, is to determine how ambitious you are. If your a real go-getter, then by all means, quit your job tomorrow morning, go home and start working and don't quit for the next two years (except for the occaisional bathroom/food breaks - sleep and free time is a no-no). You follow this and you will very likely not have to go through what I did, will create something viable that can be sold for an absurd amount of money, then you can retire and do WTF you wanna do.
Otherwise, be happy with your already enjoyable job and feel glad that you are producing to help the company. If you work it right, in your 20%, you'll be able create something of incredible value and reap the rewards due to you from the very company you would have left.
I read this article the other day off of reddit, though it was on another site (sorry, I couldn't find the link to post here), and it mentioned the real problem is that people turn the volume up so high to overcome external noise. With muff-style phones, noise escapes away from the ear canal, thus saving your hearing.
Earbuds are not the culpret, it's high volume. In the other article, the good doctor was mentioned as saying something like "purchase a pair of the old muff-style earphones or spend a little more and purchase noise cancelling earphones, that way you won't be as likely to turn the volume up so high [to compensate for the background noise of the environment]".. or something like that.
Either way, buy a set of good noise cancelling earbuds that fit comfortably in your ear, keep the volume down, and save your hearing.
The cold hard truth is that this has very little to do with MS or monopolies. The EU is just trying to hurt the US economy by hurting the largest American company. They fined them about a billion dollars already, XP N, and various other penalties.
IMHO, it's more a product of the EU being a more "socially conscious" consortium of govt's, unlike our (USA) more capitalist/libertarion (think respectively between continents, not fiscal/political adherance to a market ideology). This means the EU is going to, in general, enforce more rules on business and it's people - you must pay high taxes to receive free health care, you must open source code for greater compatability regardless of IP - all in the name of social and market prosperity. While it is true this hurts the US economy, I don't believe that is a primary or even secondary reason, merely a by-product of the EU's base economic policies.
MS should fight this most vigourously... for all of us.
Thank you, but $2.50 / song! Unbeleivable. I just bought a smart phone (on the FedEx truck for delivery today), of which I plan to put a 1GB mini-sd card into it, then simply download the music from my Yahoo Subscription onto it. All of that is gonna be pretty cool. Paying $2.50 for a song at my convenience is just dumb to me. I equate it to using the ATM your standing next to, and consequently getting charged a $2.00 fee, rather than walk you happy-ass across the street to use your bank's ATM at no cost. (obvious glaring errors in the analogy, but for the most part it boils down to what I already own and/or wanted to own anyway - cool phone and music subscription - and the time it takes to compensate for the convenience of dial-a-song whilst paying an arm and a leg, comparatively, for it.
Can someone please explain to me how this is any different than someone posting a bad review for a book on, say Amazon.com? Or is it that Amazon does in fact receive subpeonas to remove those reviews that can be categorized as libel or slanderous and we, the public, don't hear about it?
IMHO, that's not the point. IE is in fact broken, yes, broken. It doesn't work the way it should in many css instances as well as some specific header controls with ssl.
Seriously, with a new version of IE coming this summer, I would hope they decide to fix these problems.
And for the record, how many websites have you been to (or maybe you actualy use IE) only to be confronted with a "You must have IE to use this site"? Macros are nice,.Net is nice, but so is choice. (and don't tell me mSpace is not offering choice to IE users - they're standards compliant, so Opera, Firefox, Netscape, and others will work fine.)
I disagree. My dad, my cousin, and a friend of the family have all called me over the last 2 months to "fix their computer". The fact is they do care, but don't have the know-how or initiative to learn the ins-and-outs of computers.
The general public see computers as something they will never know enough about and are thus reserved to accepting what comes on their pc when they buy it - windows with IE - while accepting the virus, pop-ups, etc. as just a part of their computing life.
And do not go and say most people are lazy and they should get some initiative. That's crap. Most people know how to read, but most people haven't read good classics like Les Miserables or the Brothers Karamzov. It's not because they are not good books and people wouldn't enjoy them if they did, but because they *see them* as huge 1500 page, hard to read barriers, when in actuality it's no different than reading LOTR in 3 books.
...back to the issue: Help your friends and your family. When they have a problem, give them a free anti-vir, Firebird, Thunderbird, 7-zip, or whatever the problem calls for. For some it may very well mean installing Linux or convincing them to get a Mac.
"...but joe twelvepack doesn't use his computer for anything that he can't do without"
And yes, my dad get's really pissed when his Internet goes out. So it is something he can live without, but it's not something he likes going without when he expects it to "just work and paying [his isp] for it".
Give them a break. Give me a break. And stop being so damn harsh. Please;)
"Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing, it is less useful than it appears. In my research area (computational biology), the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason."
Forgive my ignorance, but am I to understand that the time it takes to (re)write a program to distribute certain data across multiple machines (via a supercomputer cluster or worldwide grid) exceeds the benefits of having one program run on a single "fast" machine, or something?
Again, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, but I am interested in why, for example, a $15 million grant couldn't go towards building a really fast supercomputer - ala Virginia Tech - hire a couple of scientists, a few talented programmers and systems engineers, and still have money to operate the machine for say, a year or two. All the while, a program could be running non-stop on the cluster to help "cure" my co-worker of his Type I diabetes.
Any further insight, web references, etc. would be great!
Re:Any good IDEs?
on
Learning PHP 5
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Zend Studio is excellent... well, it's better than anything else I've used over the last 5 years - pico, vi, emacs, Dreamweaver, Quanta, Jedit. It's well worth the money and runs on OS X. If you're on the cheap, go with JEdit and install the PHP plugin.
Slashdot Mirror
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/20/1320256 (i've been reading /. way too long.)
We as a human race have assembled a sizable amount knowledge regarding the cosmos, and would like to preserve that information for our "static" friends of the future. My question is, what media is the best for storing this information? I'm most familiar with tape backup, burnable dvd's, and network access storage units, but I fear they will not last required 100 billion years! Any thoughts?
A more likely *correction* by Google will be to not list said website at all in any search. Let's see how long this ruling (and supporting law) lasts when companies that complain start getting delisted from Google.
He did the real thing. Trust me, I was there.
He also rubbed his belly and patted his head the whole time! Truly amazing...
IBM has also applied for Patent #: BUL541T, titled "The Open Patent Policy".
CL, on the other hand, could place "tiny little ads in real estate" (sorry had to get that in there), and donate much of it to worthy organizations.
Mark, I actually agree that the choice should be my own, but in this case, the choice lies deeper than myself.
Just this morning, as I was perusing through Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit, a thought occurred to me that even though there is far greater variety and features on the latter sites, I'm still a loyal fan of /. (mostly) for it's editors. Even for their shortcomings - bad grammer, duplicate posts - the quality of their filter is the reason why I continue coming here... until this post! Give me a break, slashdot. " Windows Media Player 11 and Urge", "Biggest Obstacle of Nuclear Fusion Overcome?", and "Wired Releases Full Text of AT&T NSA Document" are all quality article submissions, so when I thgouht I was going to get a great introduction to Python, being a PHP developer, I was intrigued and quite pleased to click the link. Now I'm frustrated just enough to take the 30 seconds to make this post.
I obey the law even though my car allows me to go 130mph and to be used as a getaway in a jewel heist - both of which are illegal in my state - so does this mean they'll next pass a bill requiring a device to log everywhere I go in my car just so police can use it to track me if necessary? What happened to this country? To its people? Or am I being naive and blind to the fact that it was as it always like this?
I'm getting a little tired of this argument. I'm currently a yahoo music unlimited subscriber and quite frankly I love it. Sure, the program is not nearly as slick as iTunes, sure it's DRM'd, sure if I cancel my membership I lose all of my music, but I pay $60 for 12 months of unlimited legal downloads.
It breaks down like this: So, I need to purchase 25 songs per month through yahoo to make it price competitive with itunes. But wait, I also get to download as much music as I want (assuming it's available, and if not, just go to itunes, emusic, etc.), listen to jukebox radio stations, and share music with my friends using yahoo. All in all, that's not bad. Also, I have an Audiovox SMT5600 that syncs with a 512mb card, so I've got about 4 hours of music I can store that needs to be resynced once a month. (A phone and mp3 player in one device is awesome, btw.)
I'll be honest and say that I'm not some hard-core audiophile (obviously), so yahoo works great for me. I'm also flaky, so I'll listen to something for a month or so, decide I don't care much for it anymore, then listen to something else. Verses the old way of buying a cd, then throwing it in the bottom shelf of my entertainment center to die with all the old crap I'm embarrassed I bought or intend to never listen to anymore buy won't throw away or sell because no one wants it or I'm pissed that I spent $15 on it.
Leasing music to me makes perfect sense, so when I hear people say that you don't own your music, I say so what? I own my car, but I also really like cars, so the next one I get I may lease it just so I can get a new one every couple of years. Am I a crazy idiot supporting a drm'd "you can't drive over 14k miles a year" car company, or am I realistic with myself in that I don't drive that much anyway, but when I do I want it to be in a new car? You be the judge.
My suggestion is to change your current job to one that is more interesting in your current environment - don't take the other job. So "you only live once, take the other job" sounds great, but you've got a wonderful environment to work in now; don't change that, you're indeed living now. What you should do is tell your boss matter-of-factly that you are considering the change simply for the better (more interesting) work, *however* you love your co-workers, flexi-time, et al. Make the suggestion that you want some more interesting work with a percentage of your time, ala Google's 80/20. You'll likely find that the novelty of "doing what you wanna do" wears off and it's nice to just get some stuff done, stuff that directly adds value to the company via your job description. (Note, I've been self-employed for the past five years and there are days where it's nice when I have to just get what would otherwise be drudge-work done).
Peace of mind in your work environment is the most important thing as the job has the ability to change, but a person will likely always be a jerk/lazy/make bad coffee or whatever you find you dislike about co-workers.
I'm blessed to have good partners and work I mostly enjoy, but I don't make very good money. Would I change to your position? Nope, not a chance.... but that's because I put in five years and now make enough for a decent living with the potential for greater prosperity in the future. Ask me that 2-3 years ago and I would have jumped at your job.
One last factor I'd consider, since I don't know you, is to determine how ambitious you are. If your a real go-getter, then by all means, quit your job tomorrow morning, go home and start working and don't quit for the next two years (except for the occaisional bathroom/food breaks - sleep and free time is a no-no). You follow this and you will very likely not have to go through what I did, will create something viable that can be sold for an absurd amount of money, then you can retire and do WTF you wanna do.
Otherwise, be happy with your already enjoyable job and feel glad that you are producing to help the company. If you work it right, in your 20%, you'll be able create something of incredible value and reap the rewards due to you from the very company you would have left.
Good luck!
I read this article the other day off of reddit, though it was on another site (sorry, I couldn't find the link to post here), and it mentioned the real problem is that people turn the volume up so high to overcome external noise. With muff-style phones, noise escapes away from the ear canal, thus saving your hearing.
Earbuds are not the culpret, it's high volume. In the other article, the good doctor was mentioned as saying something like "purchase a pair of the old muff-style earphones or spend a little more and purchase noise cancelling earphones, that way you won't be as likely to turn the volume up so high [to compensate for the background noise of the environment]".. or something like that.
Either way, buy a set of good noise cancelling earbuds that fit comfortably in your ear, keep the volume down, and save your hearing.
MS should fight this most vigourously... for all of us.
Thank you, but $2.50 / song! Unbeleivable. I just bought a smart phone (on the FedEx truck for delivery today), of which I plan to put a 1GB mini-sd card into it, then simply download the music from my Yahoo Subscription onto it. All of that is gonna be pretty cool. Paying $2.50 for a song at my convenience is just dumb to me. I equate it to using the ATM your standing next to, and consequently getting charged a $2.00 fee, rather than walk you happy-ass across the street to use your bank's ATM at no cost. (obvious glaring errors in the analogy, but for the most part it boils down to what I already own and/or wanted to own anyway - cool phone and music subscription - and the time it takes to compensate for the convenience of dial-a-song whilst paying an arm and a leg, comparatively, for it.
Can someone please explain to me how this is any different than someone posting a bad review for a book on, say Amazon.com? Or is it that Amazon does in fact receive subpeonas to remove those reviews that can be categorized as libel or slanderous and we, the public, don't hear about it?
"...thank God this code isn't open sourced and linked to slashdot so that every geek can see what a horrible wretch of a coder I am!"
now, that's really useful!"
--Comic book guy, Simpsons
IMHO, that's not the point. IE is in fact broken, yes, broken. It doesn't work the way it should in many css instances as well as some specific header controls with ssl. Seriously, with a new version of IE coming this summer, I would hope they decide to fix these problems. And for the record, how many websites have you been to (or maybe you actualy use IE) only to be confronted with a "You must have IE to use this site"? Macros are nice, .Net is nice, but so is choice. (and don't tell me mSpace is not offering choice to IE users - they're standards compliant, so Opera, Firefox, Netscape, and others will work fine.)
They don't care
;)
I disagree. My dad, my cousin, and a friend of the family have all called me over the last 2 months to "fix their computer". The fact is they do care, but don't have the know-how or initiative to learn the ins-and-outs of computers.
The general public see computers as something they will never know enough about and are thus reserved to accepting what comes on their pc when they buy it - windows with IE - while accepting the virus, pop-ups, etc. as just a part of their computing life.
And do not go and say most people are lazy and they should get some initiative. That's crap. Most people know how to read, but most people haven't read good classics like Les Miserables or the Brothers Karamzov. It's not because they are not good books and people wouldn't enjoy them if they did, but because they *see them* as huge 1500 page, hard to read barriers, when in actuality it's no different than reading LOTR in 3 books.
...back to the issue: Help your friends and your family. When they have a problem, give them a free anti-vir, Firebird, Thunderbird, 7-zip, or whatever the problem calls for. For some it may very well mean installing Linux or convincing them to get a Mac.
"...but joe twelvepack doesn't use his computer for anything that he can't do without"
And yes, my dad get's really pissed when his Internet goes out. So it is something he can live without, but it's not something he likes going without when he expects it to "just work and paying [his isp] for it".
Give them a break. Give me a break. And stop being so damn harsh. Please
Again, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, but I am interested in why, for example, a $15 million grant couldn't go towards building a really fast supercomputer - ala Virginia Tech - hire a couple of scientists, a few talented programmers and systems engineers, and still have money to operate the machine for say, a year or two. All the while, a program could be running non-stop on the cluster to help "cure" my co-worker of his Type I diabetes.
Any further insight, web references, etc. would be great!
Zend Studio is excellent... well, it's better than anything else I've used over the last 5 years - pico, vi, emacs, Dreamweaver, Quanta, Jedit. It's well worth the money and runs on OS X. If you're on the cheap, go with JEdit and install the PHP plugin.
Read it: http://www.discover.com/sept_02/featice.html