I can see plenty of people who work around radiation buying one of these. Light, convenient, and unobtrusive... what's not to like.
People that work around radiation (at least in the US) are generally already required to carry radiation-warning equipment. The watch would be redundant.
I expect that this might become a standard addition to high-end (in the functional, not a "the brand name is Rolex" sense) watches, like altimeters.
They're just about the only worthwhile thing to see in West Virginia, but they're a treat. There are still people that sit down with a pole and a lump of glass and a furnace and stick the glass in the thing, and then work with a spinning, glowing, very hot mass of glass. Sparks, flames, glowing colors, and really nice looking finished work. They're realized how much people like watching them, and at one of the ones I've seen, they have an observation deck and a parking lot and a gift shop, simply because of all the people that come through.
What do techies think about the plethora of cell phone plans out there?
My honest opinion? They all suck. They're a huge number of deliberately convoluted systems designed to part you and your money in any way possible.
And the phones themselves are a pain, too. Toss your cell phone in the trash and be free of people being able to bother you at any time of the day.
The biggest social problem today is stress. Studies show that stress *plummets* when people know that they can't possibly get hit with communications. If they aren't getting 50 emails a day, they're much more comfortable. Same goes for phones.
I mean, there are a couple jobs where you're just screwed and have to be on call, with a pager or cell. Some doctors, sysadmins, some emergency workers.
But why harness yourself with more worries and obligations if you don't have to? And *paying* a phone company for the privilege of people being able to bother you at any time is just silly.
The primary problem in systems like Freenet is a reliable way of obtaining an index of all the information available. e.g. *this* SHAsum is *this* mp3.
What if players could share playlists, which contained SHAsums of each file (or series of chunks in the file, whatever). This data is lightweight, and free and clear to distribute. Fine to put on an out-in-the-open sharing mechanism. Then the actual audio files are shared via Freenet, looked up using the SHAsums.
Second, there's a great quote from the article:
The protocol used here (WHSP), similar to HTTP for requests, and using XML data for responses, is light and efficient.
I didn't think I'd ever see "XML" and "light and efficient" in the same sentence.
you lost me at the suit. no human being should be forced to wear a suit daily
You know, in a world of people starving to death, of a lack of clean water, of sanitation, of housing, and of power over much of the world, this comment comes across as marvelously out-of-touch.
There's a reason the AFL-CIO wants tech unions. It's not because they give a damn about tech workers. It's because they represent lots more potential money to the AFL-CIO.
The AFL-CIO is *frantic* to get more and more workers to form unions. Every worker pays union dues. And, you know, the top people in the AFL-CIO have a hell of a lot of money coming in -- they aren't your "average workers". They're just like the overpaid CEOs of corporations.
The AFL-CIO, just like large corporations, is another self-interested large organization out to grab money from people however it can. I'd say that the AFL-CIO is somewhat worse, however -- they engage in more propoganda than typical companies, they do things that a corporation could not do because of antitrust laws, and they have special protection under federal law.
So before people become so eager to become fodder for the AFL-CIO, it's a good idea to think things over.
No visas required to travel, a common currency, the members traded with each other, and the money "made" inside this common market remained mostly inside, thereby getting spent and respent and respent and respenty.
That, of course, ignores the fact that a major reason that we could have this kind of economy was the centralization of production. Which depended on cheap transportation, which was only possible because of cheap oil. Which we import, after keeping the Middle East under serious military threat and keeping things as divisive as possible to avoid a coalition raising prices.
Except that said immigrants are the greatest threat, currently.
Britain went through an I-hate-damn-wogs phase too, because Indian immigrants were outcompeting lots of British workers. Same for Germany. It went away eventually.
People dangerous to another will always breed hatred.
only speaking from my personal experience with the ones I've worked with....This is also the response I've gotten from many of the other people I've worked with at other jobs/contracts, and on a number of IT related email lists I've been on.
As it happens, I've found that some of the best CS students at Carngie Mellon University are Indians. I spent last summer living with a bunch of Indians (I'm not Indian).
Aside from a peculiar affinity for a particularly awful game called cricket (:-) ) and a love for boy-meets-girl, family-of-girl-doesn't-like-boy, boy-gets-girl movies, I've been pretty impressed with Indian techies.
America belongs to Americans, and Bangladesh belongs to the people of Bangladesh.
However, Afghanistan apparently belongs to Americans, as well as Saudi Arabia. There was apparently some misunderstanding between the citizens of Vietnam over who their country belonged to, but after some violent discussion, America decided that Vietnam belonged, in fact, to Vietnamese.
H1B's are NOT immigrants. They are indentured servants. This issue has NOTHING whatsoever to do with immigration.
REAL immigrants are at no handicap when it comes to negotiating raises and fleeing abusive employers.
Agreed. If the AFL-CIO really wanted to stand behind their rhetoric about how H1Bs abuse *foreign* workers, they'd be demanding that Congress grant H1Bs citizenship.
Of course, that will happen when hell freezes over...
This is the same organization that likes to paint awful pictures of poor exploited workers in sweatshops ("Oh, no! Sure is worse than starving!"), and then has the balls to suggest that, based on moral grounds, US citizens should *buy from US-based companies* instead, thereby reducing said worker's wages from a dollar a day to nothing a day, and producing higher priced goods produced by an American worker being paid a hundred times as much.
The AFL-CIO had a point back when mining companies had inter-company agreements to screw over workers. I submit that the only legitimate use of a union in a capitalist society is to prevent companies in an industry from acting as a monopoly, since a union effectively makes workers act as a monopoly. And monopolies are a bad thing for just about everyone...
AFL/CIO is the one doing the whistleblowing rather than, oh, say, the current executive branch
Yeah, when I saw "AFL-CIO Proposed Reforms..." I thought "Well, finally they're going to have to stop running a massive propaganda-spewing organization that is federally backed and, incredibly enough, can negotiate to *require* that companies hire only union workers." Then I realized that instead of reforms *for* the AFL-CIO, it was a series of reforms proposed *by* the AFL-CIO.
I'll say. "Hookers for parapalegics" simply has a ring to it that some boring Los Alamos fund mismanagement fails to excite.
Re:This will interfere with the Black Helicopters
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 2
A few of those missles can sure clear up a traffic jam caused by those the administration have determined to be so obviously guilty that no trial is necessary. So don't even ask about it.
I was always wondering why the destruction of a car containing one person that we suspected of being linked to a group that we suspect of being linked to the WTC destruction and the resultant deaths of all of the other occupants of the car in another country's borders, performed without permission of that country, was simply overlooked by most Americans.
I mean, hell, these little robot drones are *great*. You can knock anyone you want off, you don't have to worry about the actor *talking* about it (like those pesky people with the napalm tell-all stories from Vietnam), you can wipe records, you're hard as hell to stop, and you can intimidate almost anyone very quickly by moving forces around.
I mean, we wanted a "more mobile military" for the 90s, so we dumped everything onto ships and zip it around to attack and threaten countries that are annoying us. But killer robot drones...now *those* go *waaay* beyond this. You can just say "Piss me off and I'll have an unmanned drone over your house tomorrow dropping a missile into your house".
I'm not going to say anything about the domestic use of them. That has so much potential for abuse that it isn't even funny.
I don't suppose Bush also proposed public oversight of all units and use of those units? No? They're to be "secret" and under the Office of Homeland Security?
Damn, but things sound more and more like Soviet Russia every day.
I predict a stunning lack of impact in the Java using world -- people will continue using insecure storage and protocols and plaintext all over the place.
Developers *like* features. They have to have security *forced* upon them.
If you get down to where it's conveniently stuffed waaay at the bottom (wow, seems the NYT likes being sensationalist as well), it says that all but $141,000 have been resolved after the investigation.
Now, that's certainly not pocket change, and it could be abuse of funds, but it sure as hell isn't in the millions of dollars range. Unless the people in charge were the ones actually doing the charging, I don't see why they'd get canned for this. This is not the amount of funds that you'd have to be willfully ignoring to have slip through the cracks to dishonest workers at the lab.
At least from what I've read so far, this smells a *lot* more like internal politicking. Someone screwed someone over or someone wanted to give someone a favor, or someone was blocking someone else's ideas.
I distinctly remember Bush hammering a number of DoE affiliants and top people about a year ago. Given the fact that Bush has tons of Big Energy ties, it's a lot more likely that he's just repaying favors. Perhaps someone would have lost a lot of money if nuclear power become more economic, or perhaps someone wanted to discover something privately and get the patents on it. [shrug] Who knows?
Microsoft.com is a really good example. It looks "professional" to designers, and it's absolutely impossible to find what you want on there. mfc42.dll? Nope. How about information on a security problem? You come up with five other similar issues, but not that one. Whenever I find a page that I'm looking for on there, I bookmark it, because it'll take at least half an hour to find it again.
MSDN is even worse. They have a format that is *unbelivably* painfully slow to render, and have things indexed so that if you're looking for an Win32 function reference page, the Windows CE version comes up first (which all of, oh, 1% of developers remotely care about).
The windowing system consists of many different modules, the function of which is incomprehensible to all but the most advanced users
Umm...and this is different from Explorer *how* again?
Five years ago, that mattered. Today, things are autoconfigured and detected. The internals don't matter.
Configuration files are differently structured and found in different locations.
What have you had to mess with other than XF86Config? XftConfig is gone, and stuff belonging to xfs is for a separate program -- most people on a single user system do not use xfs. And more importantly, *why* are you? There are (granted, at long last) excellent graphical config utilities now. If you don't like the config files, you don't have to interact with them.
Trivial stuff like font installation has long been a horrible mess and is only slowly getting fixed (fontconfig etc.) - the defaults are still atrocious to anyone with a basic understanding of font usability
True.
Just look at their gopher-era homepage [xfree86.org] to get an impression about their professionality.
Looks damn professional to me, i.e. looks like someone who actually understands the design behind HTML made it.
Yeah, I know, HTML 2.0 should have been the end of web technology, but I am not only criticizing the looks here but also the lack of structure and meaningful information.
I've always had good success finding what I wanted on there.
Aside from the fact that no one has made a good enlarged bitmap set (I'm using some seriously pixellated ones that I scaled up), I'm not sure what you're looking for.
They're black rather than white, which I've always found a lot better looking, rather like the Mac OS. I suppose someone could prefer the Windows coloration.
They don't have a 2k-style drop shadow. I *hate* the drop shadow. It looks *ugly*, IMHO. Sorta like dirt on the screen. Gives a bulbous appearance to the angular cursor.
XFree86 doesn't support pixmap (colored) cursors. I read about this once, and apparently it would be very trivial to add support for this, but no one's bothered to do it. I've always considered this more of a novelty item than anything else -- few people that I know of use colored cursors on Windows because it's distracting and not as easy to see as a pure black or white cursor.
screwy anti-aliasing
Huh? I've had no problems with antialiasing.
You might be referring to the *hack* that gdkxft was. At the time, gtk wasn't designed to do antialiasing, and you could get some cosmetic issues, but you'd have to go out and install gdkxft yourself to get it anyway.
Antialiasing looks fine to me in gtk 2.
shitty fonts
I also never understood this one. It's true that Verdana is a really beautiful font (I'd say that the sorely underused Espy Sans from Apple and Verdana from Microsoft and "fixed" from XFree86 are the best screen fonts around). So I do use Verdana, but I don't really see anything that atrocious about the other fonts. You can use Windows TrueType fonts, so you have all the non-MS fonts available, and aside from Verdana and maybe Comic Sans, MS's fonts aren't that great. Impact is an atrocity against mankind in readability, Trebucht is annoying as hell to select letters with, since they're often only one pixel thick), Courier New and Times New Roman are just variants of already done fonts...
Slashdot Mirror
I can see plenty of people who work around radiation buying one of these. Light, convenient, and unobtrusive... what's not to like.
People that work around radiation (at least in the US) are generally already required to carry radiation-warning equipment. The watch would be redundant.
I expect that this might become a standard addition to high-end (in the functional, not a "the brand name is Rolex" sense) watches, like altimeters.
when you would rather just not know... Like just how many rads that 19" monitor is blasting into your little soldiers...
I guess it all depends on where you wear your radiation-detecting-watch...for eleven hundred dollars, I think I'd keep it highly visible on my wrist.
They're just about the only worthwhile thing to see in West Virginia, but they're a treat. There are still people that sit down with a pole and a lump of glass and a furnace and stick the glass in the thing, and then work with a spinning, glowing, very hot mass of glass. Sparks, flames, glowing colors, and really nice looking finished work. They're realized how much people like watching them, and at one of the ones I've seen, they have an observation deck and a parking lot and a gift shop, simply because of all the people that come through.
What do techies think about the plethora of cell phone plans out there?
My honest opinion? They all suck. They're a huge number of deliberately convoluted systems designed to part you and your money in any way possible.
And the phones themselves are a pain, too. Toss your cell phone in the trash and be free of people being able to bother you at any time of the day.
The biggest social problem today is stress. Studies show that stress *plummets* when people know that they can't possibly get hit with communications. If they aren't getting 50 emails a day, they're much more comfortable. Same goes for phones.
I mean, there are a couple jobs where you're just screwed and have to be on call, with a pager or cell. Some doctors, sysadmins, some emergency workers.
But why harness yourself with more worries and obligations if you don't have to? And *paying* a phone company for the privilege of people being able to bother you at any time is just silly.
Guns, tanks, death, amphetamine, heroin, Wagner, Sousa. Violent revolution, real drugs, and real music.
So...Lockheed-Martin is going to collapse, resulting in Wagner becoming popular. I'm dubious.
What literature are you basing this on, anyway?
This gave me an idea.
The primary problem in systems like Freenet is a reliable way of obtaining an index of all the information available. e.g. *this* SHAsum is *this* mp3.
What if players could share playlists, which contained SHAsums of each file (or series of chunks in the file, whatever). This data is lightweight, and free and clear to distribute. Fine to put on an out-in-the-open sharing mechanism. Then the actual audio files are shared via Freenet, looked up using the SHAsums.
Second, there's a great quote from the article:
The protocol used here (WHSP), similar to HTTP for requests, and using XML data for responses, is light and efficient.
I didn't think I'd ever see "XML" and "light and efficient" in the same sentence.
There are now lots of people who really have no reason to exist and nothing to offer society. They are a liability, rather than an asset.
Why is it that people that say things like this never place themselves in this group?
you lost me at the suit. no human being should be forced to wear a suit daily
You know, in a world of people starving to death, of a lack of clean water, of sanitation, of housing, and of power over much of the world, this comment comes across as marvelously out-of-touch.
The very thought of a "tech union" is disgusting.
There's a reason the AFL-CIO wants tech unions. It's not because they give a damn about tech workers. It's because they represent lots more potential money to the AFL-CIO.
The AFL-CIO is *frantic* to get more and more workers to form unions. Every worker pays union dues. And, you know, the top people in the AFL-CIO have a hell of a lot of money coming in -- they aren't your "average workers". They're just like the overpaid CEOs of corporations.
The AFL-CIO, just like large corporations, is another self-interested large organization out to grab money from people however it can. I'd say that the AFL-CIO is somewhat worse, however -- they engage in more propoganda than typical companies, they do things that a corporation could not do because of antitrust laws, and they have special protection under federal law.
So before people become so eager to become fodder for the AFL-CIO, it's a good idea to think things over.
No visas required to travel, a common currency, the members traded with each other, and the money "made" inside this common market remained mostly inside, thereby getting spent and respent and respent and respenty.
That, of course, ignores the fact that a major reason that we could have this kind of economy was the centralization of production. Which depended on cheap transportation, which was only possible because of cheap oil. Which we import, after keeping the Middle East under serious military threat and keeping things as divisive as possible to avoid a coalition raising prices.
Not quite Camelot.
On the same site, look at the just-out-of-school salaries for undergrads in computer science. How's *that* for a pay range.
Except that said immigrants are the greatest threat, currently.
Britain went through an I-hate-damn-wogs phase too, because Indian immigrants were outcompeting lots of British workers. Same for Germany. It went away eventually.
People dangerous to another will always breed hatred.
only speaking from my personal experience with the ones I've worked with....This is also the response I've gotten from many of the other people I've worked with at other jobs/contracts, and on a number of IT related email lists I've been on.
:-) ) and a love for boy-meets-girl, family-of-girl-doesn't-like-boy, boy-gets-girl movies, I've been pretty impressed with Indian techies.
As it happens, I've found that some of the best CS students at Carngie Mellon University are Indians. I spent last summer living with a bunch of Indians (I'm not Indian).
Aside from a peculiar affinity for a particularly awful game called cricket (
America belongs to Americans, and Bangladesh belongs to the people of Bangladesh.
However, Afghanistan apparently belongs to Americans, as well as Saudi Arabia. There was apparently some misunderstanding between the citizens of Vietnam over who their country belonged to, but after some violent discussion, America decided that Vietnam belonged, in fact, to Vietnamese.
H1B's are NOT immigrants. They are indentured servants. This issue has NOTHING whatsoever to do with immigration.
REAL immigrants are at no handicap when it comes to negotiating raises and fleeing abusive employers.
Agreed. If the AFL-CIO really wanted to stand behind their rhetoric about how H1Bs abuse *foreign* workers, they'd be demanding that Congress grant H1Bs citizenship.
Of course, that will happen when hell freezes over...
This is the same organization that likes to paint awful pictures of poor exploited workers in sweatshops ("Oh, no! Sure is worse than starving!"), and then has the balls to suggest that, based on moral grounds, US citizens should *buy from US-based companies* instead, thereby reducing said worker's wages from a dollar a day to nothing a day, and producing higher priced goods produced by an American worker being paid a hundred times as much.
The AFL-CIO had a point back when mining companies had inter-company agreements to screw over workers. I submit that the only legitimate use of a union in a capitalist society is to prevent companies in an industry from acting as a monopoly, since a union effectively makes workers act as a monopoly. And monopolies are a bad thing for just about everyone...
AFL/CIO is the one doing the whistleblowing rather than, oh, say, the current executive branch
Yeah, when I saw "AFL-CIO Proposed Reforms..." I thought "Well, finally they're going to have to stop running a massive propaganda-spewing organization that is federally backed and, incredibly enough, can negotiate to *require* that companies hire only union workers." Then I realized that instead of reforms *for* the AFL-CIO, it was a series of reforms proposed *by* the AFL-CIO.
That would be an interesting grant proposal...
I'll say. "Hookers for parapalegics" simply has a ring to it that some boring Los Alamos fund mismanagement fails to excite.
A few of those missles can sure clear up a traffic jam caused by those the administration have determined to be so obviously guilty that no trial is necessary. So don't even ask about it.
I was always wondering why the destruction of a car containing one person that we suspected of being linked to a group that we suspect of being linked to the WTC destruction and the resultant deaths of all of the other occupants of the car in another country's borders, performed without permission of that country, was simply overlooked by most Americans.
I mean, hell, these little robot drones are *great*. You can knock anyone you want off, you don't have to worry about the actor *talking* about it (like those pesky people with the napalm tell-all stories from Vietnam), you can wipe records, you're hard as hell to stop, and you can intimidate almost anyone very quickly by moving forces around.
I mean, we wanted a "more mobile military" for the 90s, so we dumped everything onto ships and zip it around to attack and threaten countries that are annoying us. But killer robot drones...now *those* go *waaay* beyond this. You can just say "Piss me off and I'll have an unmanned drone over your house tomorrow dropping a missile into your house".
I'm not going to say anything about the domestic use of them. That has so much potential for abuse that it isn't even funny.
I don't suppose Bush also proposed public oversight of all units and use of those units? No? They're to be "secret" and under the Office of Homeland Security?
Damn, but things sound more and more like Soviet Russia every day.
I predict a stunning lack of impact in the Java using world -- people will continue using insecure storage and protocols and plaintext all over the place.
Developers *like* features. They have to have security *forced* upon them.
If you get down to where it's conveniently stuffed waaay at the bottom (wow, seems the NYT likes being sensationalist as well), it says that all but $141,000 have been resolved after the investigation.
Now, that's certainly not pocket change, and it could be abuse of funds, but it sure as hell isn't in the millions of dollars range. Unless the people in charge were the ones actually doing the charging, I don't see why they'd get canned for this. This is not the amount of funds that you'd have to be willfully ignoring to have slip through the cracks to dishonest workers at the lab.
At least from what I've read so far, this smells a *lot* more like internal politicking. Someone screwed someone over or someone wanted to give someone a favor, or someone was blocking someone else's ideas.
I distinctly remember Bush hammering a number of DoE affiliants and top people about a year ago. Given the fact that Bush has tons of Big Energy ties, it's a lot more likely that he's just repaying favors. Perhaps someone would have lost a lot of money if nuclear power become more economic, or perhaps someone wanted to discover something privately and get the patents on it. [shrug] Who knows?
Yeah, as apple.com base major decisions on 'oooh look what I read on slashdot'.
It's gotta be more useful information than whatever Jobs's current whim is.
Microsoft.com is a really good example. It looks "professional" to designers, and it's absolutely impossible to find what you want on there. mfc42.dll? Nope. How about information on a security problem? You come up with five other similar issues, but not that one. Whenever I find a page that I'm looking for on there, I bookmark it, because it'll take at least half an hour to find it again.
MSDN is even worse. They have a format that is *unbelivably* painfully slow to render, and have things indexed so that if you're looking for an Win32 function reference page, the Windows CE version comes up first (which all of, oh, 1% of developers remotely care about).
The windowing system consists of many different modules, the function of which is incomprehensible to all but the most advanced users
Umm...and this is different from Explorer *how* again?
Five years ago, that mattered. Today, things are autoconfigured and detected. The internals don't matter.
Configuration files are differently structured and found in different locations.
What have you had to mess with other than XF86Config? XftConfig is gone, and stuff belonging to xfs is for a separate program -- most people on a single user system do not use xfs. And more importantly, *why* are you? There are (granted, at long last) excellent graphical config utilities now. If you don't like the config files, you don't have to interact with them.
Trivial stuff like font installation has long been a horrible mess and is only slowly getting fixed (fontconfig etc.) - the defaults are still atrocious to anyone with a basic understanding of font usability
True.
Just look at their gopher-era homepage [xfree86.org] to get an impression about their professionality.
Looks damn professional to me, i.e. looks like someone who actually understands the design behind HTML made it.
Yeah, I know, HTML 2.0 should have been the end of web technology, but I am not only criticizing the looks here but also the lack of structure and meaningful information.
I've always had good success finding what I wanted on there.
sucky mouse cursors
Aside from the fact that no one has made a good enlarged bitmap set (I'm using some seriously pixellated ones that I scaled up), I'm not sure what you're looking for.
They're black rather than white, which I've always found a lot better looking, rather like the Mac OS. I suppose someone could prefer the Windows coloration.
They don't have a 2k-style drop shadow. I *hate* the drop shadow. It looks *ugly*, IMHO. Sorta like dirt on the screen. Gives a bulbous appearance to the angular cursor.
XFree86 doesn't support pixmap (colored) cursors. I read about this once, and apparently it would be very trivial to add support for this, but no one's bothered to do it. I've always considered this more of a novelty item than anything else -- few people that I know of use colored cursors on Windows because it's distracting and not as easy to see as a pure black or white cursor.
screwy anti-aliasing
Huh? I've had no problems with antialiasing.
You might be referring to the *hack* that gdkxft was. At the time, gtk wasn't designed to do antialiasing, and you could get some cosmetic issues, but you'd have to go out and install gdkxft yourself to get it anyway.
Antialiasing looks fine to me in gtk 2.
shitty fonts
I also never understood this one. It's true that Verdana is a really beautiful font (I'd say that the sorely underused Espy Sans from Apple and Verdana from Microsoft and "fixed" from XFree86 are the best screen fonts around). So I do use Verdana, but I don't really see anything that atrocious about the other fonts. You can use Windows TrueType fonts, so you have all the non-MS fonts available, and aside from Verdana and maybe Comic Sans, MS's fonts aren't that great. Impact is an atrocity against mankind in readability, Trebucht is annoying as hell to select letters with, since they're often only one pixel thick), Courier New and Times New Roman are just variants of already done fonts...
buggy alpha channels
Huh? What are you talking about?
In other news, pocket protectors and thick glasses have become the new "must have" items among the "in" crowd here at Riverside High... :-)