I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the 3M Privacy Filters for laptops. You can read the screen perfectly when you're sitting right in front of it, but the image rapidly goes to black as you move off to either side.
I've used these on most of my laptops (all except Apple, with the extra-wide screens) for years and it does a great job of killing shoulder-surfing, even when the surfer is a nosy jerk in the next seat in coach class. (I was glad to have one when I was taking a break on an internatiopnal flight back and the attempted shoulder surfer was a teenager with a "What Would Jesus Do" wristband. -- I was writing erotica and didn't want to cope with the potential hassles.)
I would get the funniest looks from people at conferences too -- these do such a good job of blanking the screen that other people would ask why I was typing into a machine that wasn't even turned on.
ve heard no hardware crap out stories so far about Apple, but what they DO need to make their offering rock solid is on-site support contracts like Dell has
It's called "AppleCare". From the packaging: "The Applecare Protection Plan includes up to three years of onsite service for desktop computers. The plan also provides global repair coverage for portable computers"
It runs about $350 for a high-end machine, which turns the 1 year warranty into 3 years with onsite service.
have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?
Why stop at either feeling guilty of running Linux? You could have the best of both worlds -- license your copy of Linux from SCO. See, you really can have your guilt and your Linux too!
LOGO is old news -- there's far more interesting work being done in Squeak these days -- the re-vivified form of Smalltalk with a nice building-block (date I say "LEGO-like") approach to programming.
(As long as we're speculating, it should be possible to put a stripped-down Smalltalk kernel on the RCX.)
The teachers at my son's school are looking at it as a way to teach programming. At the same time, they have the students using Moose Crossing a kid-friendly MUD/MOO environment.
re: "urine control" -- yes, but whose face to put on the screen? (Bill Gates, Dubya, SCO execs,... the list is endless)
Re:The inspiration for Honda's "Cog" ad
on
10 Ads The US Won't See
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· Score: 2, Informative
The best thing about the Honda "Cogs" advert, is the fact that absolutely none of it is CG
I doubted this was true (the quality of the light is almost "too perfect") so I did a bit of looking around and found a little more about the production. Wow. (And it only took 606 takes.)
As someone else noted, there's one bit of CG work. Quoting the Daily Record Just one second of computer generation is used to link the two halves - when an exhaust pipe rolls across the floor.
OTOH, "The Way Things Go" is a single 30 minute take.
iPod's aren't being discounted because they're still in high demand. Even the refurbished iPods on Apple's site are sold out.
On the other hand, shopping.com lists a range of prices on iPods including $352-$489 for a 30GB model.
the first three books focus on key scientists from the early Greeks to today's contemporaries, explaining how scientific thought has changed.
Painting with a broad brush, there are two major camps of educators -- those who take an objectivist approach and those who take a constructivist approach. The objectives focus on learning objectives -- where you can say that all learning results in a specific behavior you can test (e.g. using a standardized test) -- while the constructivists believe that you can't standardize the outcomes because groups collectively negotiate and construct their belief systems. So the constructivists encourage learners to look at multiple viewpoints, become investigators, and draw their own conclusions about the underlying reality.
(From the article) [Hakim] wrote an 11-volume series, "A History of US"
Constructivism is popular in teaching the social sciences, where students can be given multiple viewpoints and encouraged to seek out diverse views. It doesn't find much of a home in learning the 3R's, nor in science education -- basic skills education is driven largely these days by the inststance that students pass standardized tests (Textbooks today are hugely accountable to individual state standards defined for that particular course," said Wendy Spiegel, head of communications for Pearson Education) and by the sense that science describes a world in precise, irreducable, and unambiguous terms. Neither of these leave room for the "social construction of meaning" that's so dear to the constructivists.
That's not likely. Office:Mac is already a cash cow for Microsoft; MS had the single largest share of the Macintosh software market in the 90s and probably still does. There's no profit in tossing the mature cross-development system they're using and probably ticking-off the installed base of Mac users.
Really, there'd be no money in it for MS to try and move Office:Mac users to Office on Windows.
Rockets. It's a problem of shipping the propellant. If you carry the boosters yourself, you're okay. You just can't ship them.
That depends on where you live and how you're travelling. You can't take the morors on an airplane, for example (this has been true for years), but driving is OK. Also, there are small composite motors that are below the 62.5 gram limit but have not been certified in all states (e.g. California) and thus are not legal to posess in those states.
It's a shame -- I'd love to use some of the mini-composite motors -- they have serious lift for their weight.
The space.com article cited was posted March 6; this posting from the National Association of Rocketry points out the BATF hasn't made it clear whether the regulations will apply to materials already on hand.
Also, this is part of a dispute that's been going on for years then be BATF decided to designate Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant (the same fuel used in the Space Shuttle's SRBs) as an "explosive". The 62.5 gram limit was proposed as a compromise measure by the NAR to a flat-out banning of all APCP engines. This way, people could still enter into the higher-power forms of rocketry without dealing with the BATF's arcane regulations and uneven enforcement.
Then came the Homeland Security act and black powder (gunpowder, a/k/a "BP") engines were added to that list of "explosives", causing FedEx and UPS to ultimately refuse to carry them. There's still a bill pending in Congress to make a "technical correction" to remove black powder motors from that list. It's the subject of a phone and FAX compaign to garner support.
Would removing black powder from the 62.5 gram limit mean we see huge BP motors? Not likely, as the thrust/weight efficiency of BP is low enough not to make that a viable trade-off.
This won't have any impact on the vocal minority who want to impose content filtering on public access points (e.g. libraries), since they want to "protect the innocent" by all means, including force.
Speaking of libraries, there's already a peer-pressure effect. My wife works as a librarian and reports she doesnt't have trouble with people surfing "objectionable" sites because all of the machines are well in the open with plenty of patrons passing by. (She works in the Children's room, but also sits on Adult Reference and has a clear line of sight to most machines.)
For the purposes of the contest, they're not required to write to any media: In computing the amount of data transferred, only data transferred from user-process-space buffer(s) in the data-source network application to user-process-space buffer(s) in the data-sink network application may be counted.
What the article doesn't mention (and it's a virtual clone of SLAC's press release) is this is part of the Internet2 Land Speed Record competition. SLAC (working with a few others) holds both the previous record and the new one.
From the article: If the musicians strike, the producers say they'll substitute "virtual orchestras" without any live players. They believe audiences won't be able to tell the difference.
This might apply for some Broadway shows, but the majority of productions depend on the interaction between the conductor and the performers. I perform in a renaissance dance troupe, and not only will our musicians adjust their playing for what we're doing, but there's a palpable energy in our interactions with the band. Actors and dancers aren't machines; performing to recorded music can be unforgiving.
I also noticed this watching Cirque du Soleil's new production Dralion -- one of the acrobats in a "solo" took a misstep needed and a moment longer to get back into position; the musicians slowed minutely to give him time to recover.
From the interview: War or no war, this man needs killing like a rabid dog. And Iraq needs to be free.
Free?! What version of GPL should I use for a country>?
Wait 'til the anti-Globalization crowd gets this..
on
NYT on RFID Tags
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· Score: 1
Cordless phones, two-way radios, local wireless networks and other communications devices that are widely deployed in factories, warehouses and stores can interfere with the signals.
I can see it now -- they stripped in Seattle to protest the Gap's use of sweatshops, now it'll be "ooooh, let's jam the store!"
Sugle (soo-gil) v. To litigate against anyone else who uses the name of your product or service as a verb. (Alt. form: "Sooooooogle")
Re:Was there ever an engine that used reg. express
on
Overture Buys Fast Search
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· Score: 4, Informative
I vaguely remember a web search engine that allowed the use of regular expressions
Regular expressions are available in a few kinds of web searching today:
Site-level searches (e.g. as provided by Microsoft IIS) often support regular expressions.
Search engines may allow filtering of result filenames by regular expressions (e.g. alltheweb.com).
It's unlikely you'd find regular expressions for searching content in search engines due to the way they build their indexes. (Here's an overly simplistic example, but it gets the idea across: a simple engine might split a page into words then maintain a list of all pages that contain that word. Using hashing, it's fast to look up a particular word in the table, but to search for "w\w+d" {all words beginning with w and ending with d} could take so much longer as to be impractical; it might even be impossible depending on how they've built their lookup tables.)
Sorry 'bout that...I meant "small" as an amusing irony, but I forgot that tone of voice doesn't come over as well in ASCII.
Still, look at the great many companies -- of all sizes -- who subcontract to ClearCommerce and a handful of other centralized e-Commerce services.
Amazon claims "it would be too burdensome to collect and dispense them on behalf of so many different jurisdictions", but the major e-commerce engines (e.g ClearCommerce's engine) have a tax table broken down by zip code. This table is updated whenever the tax regulations change.
Little companies such as Apple Computer, who is required to charge sales tax on online purchases, depend on this to keep the billing straight. It's all handled in the software, and has been for a looooong time.
Why do I have this sudden fantasy of techies finding the dormant shell of and seeing if it could be bought up? Who hasn't thought even I could run this place better than they could...?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the 3M Privacy Filters for laptops. You can read the screen perfectly when you're sitting right in front of it, but the image rapidly goes to black as you move off to either side.
I've used these on most of my laptops (all except Apple, with the extra-wide screens) for years and it does a great job of killing shoulder-surfing, even when the surfer is a nosy jerk in the next seat in coach class. (I was glad to have one when I was taking a break on an internatiopnal flight back and the attempted shoulder surfer was a teenager with a "What Would Jesus Do" wristband. -- I was writing erotica and didn't want to cope with the potential hassles.)
I would get the funniest looks from people at conferences too -- these do such a good job of blanking the screen that other people would ask why I was typing into a machine that wasn't even turned on.
It's called "AppleCare". From the packaging: "The Applecare Protection Plan includes up to three years of onsite service for desktop computers. The plan also provides global repair coverage for portable computers"
It runs about $350 for a high-end machine, which turns the 1 year warranty into 3 years with onsite service.
Why stop at either feeling guilty of running Linux? You could have the best of both worlds -- license your copy of Linux from SCO. See, you really can have your guilt and your Linux too!
(As long as we're speculating, it should be possible to put a stripped-down Smalltalk kernel on the RCX.)
The teachers at my son's school are looking at it as a way to teach programming. At the same time, they have the students using Moose Crossing a kid-friendly MUD/MOO environment.
re: "urine control" -- yes, but whose face to put on the screen? (Bill Gates, Dubya, SCO execs, ... the list is endless)
I doubted this was true (the quality of the light is almost "too perfect") so I did a bit of looking around and found a little more about the production. Wow. (And it only took 606 takes.)
As someone else noted, there's one bit of CG work. Quoting the Daily Record Just one second of computer generation is used to link the two halves - when an exhaust pipe rolls across the floor.
OTOH, "The Way Things Go" is a single 30 minute take.
Honda's "Cog" ad is a direct homage to The Way Things Go, a 30 minute film of an amazing kinetic art installation (here's a video clip.)
You have to see this at least once in your life -- it's the most amazing "Rube Goldberg" contraption you'll ever see.
As a cost-cutting measure (and considering that Blur was one of the sponsors), they must have built the lander around an iPod.
iPod's aren't being discounted because they're still in high demand. Even the refurbished iPods on Apple's site are sold out. On the other hand, shopping.com lists a range of prices on iPods including $352-$489 for a 30GB model.
Researcher David Wiley, who's built most of his reputation on Learning Objects, seems to agree. He's promoting Slashdot and K5 as Online Self-Organizing Social Systems that do a better job of gathering and organizing content than most course developers.
Apparently, he's received a NSF grant to study this.
Painting with a broad brush, there are two major camps of educators -- those who take an objectivist approach and those who take a constructivist approach. The objectives focus on learning objectives -- where you can say that all learning results in a specific behavior you can test (e.g. using a standardized test) -- while the constructivists believe that you can't standardize the outcomes because groups collectively negotiate and construct their belief systems. So the constructivists encourage learners to look at multiple viewpoints, become investigators, and draw their own conclusions about the underlying reality.
(From the article) [Hakim] wrote an 11-volume series, "A History of US"
Constructivism is popular in teaching the social sciences, where students can be given multiple viewpoints and encouraged to seek out diverse views. It doesn't find much of a home in learning the 3R's, nor in science education -- basic skills education is driven largely these days by the inststance that students pass standardized tests (Textbooks today are hugely accountable to individual state standards defined for that particular course," said Wendy Spiegel, head of communications for Pearson Education) and by the sense that science describes a world in precise, irreducable, and unambiguous terms. Neither of these leave room for the "social construction of meaning" that's so dear to the constructivists.
That's not likely. Office:Mac is already a cash cow for Microsoft; MS had the single largest share of the Macintosh software market in the 90s and probably still does. There's no profit in tossing the mature cross-development system they're using and probably ticking-off the installed base of Mac users.
Really, there'd be no money in it for MS to try and move Office:Mac users to Office on Windows.
That depends on where you live and how you're travelling. You can't take the morors on an airplane, for example (this has been true for years), but driving is OK. Also, there are small composite motors that are below the 62.5 gram limit but have not been certified in all states (e.g. California) and thus are not legal to posess in those states.
It's a shame -- I'd love to use some of the mini-composite motors -- they have serious lift for their weight.
The space.com article cited was posted March 6; this posting from the National Association of Rocketry points out the BATF hasn't made it clear whether the regulations will apply to materials already on hand.
Also, this is part of a dispute that's been going on for years then be BATF decided to designate Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant (the same fuel used in the Space Shuttle's SRBs) as an "explosive". The 62.5 gram limit was proposed as a compromise measure by the NAR to a flat-out banning of all APCP engines. This way, people could still enter into the higher-power forms of rocketry without dealing with the BATF's arcane regulations and uneven enforcement.
Then came the Homeland Security act and black powder (gunpowder, a/k/a "BP") engines were added to that list of "explosives", causing FedEx and UPS to ultimately refuse to carry them. There's still a bill pending in Congress to make a "technical correction" to remove black powder motors from that list. It's the subject of a phone and FAX compaign to garner support.
Would removing black powder from the 62.5 gram limit mean we see huge BP motors? Not likely, as the thrust/weight efficiency of BP is low enough not to make that a viable trade-off.
This won't have any impact on the vocal minority who want to impose content filtering on public access points (e.g. libraries), since they want to "protect the innocent" by all means, including force.
Speaking of libraries, there's already a peer-pressure effect. My wife works as a librarian and reports she doesnt't have trouble with people surfing "objectionable" sites because all of the machines are well in the open with plenty of patrons passing by. (She works in the Children's room, but also sits on Adult Reference and has a clear line of sight to most machines.)
For the purposes of the contest, they're not required to write to any media:
In computing the amount of data transferred, only data transferred from user-process-space buffer(s) in the data-source network application to user-process-space buffer(s) in the data-sink network application may be counted.
What the article doesn't mention (and it's a virtual clone of SLAC's press release) is this is part of the Internet2 Land Speed Record competition. SLAC (working with a few others) holds both the previous record and the new one.
If the musicians strike, the producers say they'll substitute "virtual orchestras" without any live players. They believe audiences won't be able to tell the difference.
This might apply for some Broadway shows, but the majority of productions depend on the interaction between the conductor and the performers. I perform in a renaissance dance troupe, and not only will our musicians adjust their playing for what we're doing, but there's a palpable energy in our interactions with the band. Actors and dancers aren't machines; performing to recorded music can be unforgiving.
I also noticed this watching Cirque du Soleil's new production Dralion -- one of the acrobats in a "solo" took a misstep needed and a moment longer to get back into position; the musicians slowed minutely to give him time to recover.
War or no war, this man needs killing like a rabid dog. And Iraq needs to be free.
Free?! What version of GPL should I use for a country>?
I can see it now -- they stripped in Seattle to protest the Gap's use of sweatshops, now it'll be "ooooh, let's jam the store!"
Sugle (soo-gil) v. To litigate against anyone else who uses the name of your product or service as a verb. (Alt. form: "Sooooooogle")
Regular expressions are available in a few kinds of web searching today:
It's unlikely you'd find regular expressions for searching content in search engines due to the way they build their indexes. (Here's an overly simplistic example, but it gets the idea across: a simple engine might split a page into words then maintain a list of all pages that contain that word. Using hashing, it's fast to look up a particular word in the table, but to search for "w\w+d" {all words beginning with w and ending with d} could take so much longer as to be impractical; it might even be impossible depending on how they've built their lookup tables.)
Sorry 'bout that...I meant "small" as an amusing irony, but I forgot that tone of voice doesn't come over as well in ASCII. Still, look at the great many companies -- of all sizes -- who subcontract to ClearCommerce and a handful of other centralized e-Commerce services.
Amazon claims "it would be too burdensome to collect and dispense them on behalf of so many different jurisdictions", but the major e-commerce engines (e.g ClearCommerce's engine) have a tax table broken down by zip code. This table is updated whenever the tax regulations change. Little companies such as Apple Computer, who is required to charge sales tax on online purchases, depend on this to keep the billing straight. It's all handled in the software, and has been for a looooong time.
Why do I have this sudden fantasy of techies finding the dormant shell of and seeing if it could be bought up? Who hasn't thought even I could run this place better than they could...?