The bailout plan is a bad idea on so many levels; we should let the market work through this - there is cash on the sidelines that will come in and solve the liquidity problem if government stops changing the rules of the game. Government intervention will just delay resolution of the problems.
Just Say No to the Bailout Plan
But seriously, this is chilling. You'd think someone in Washington would understand the constitution. When we wake up someday in a police state, wondering how we lost the most important thing, the essence of our democracy, we'll look back and understand that all these seemingly minor bits of legislation gave up our essential liberty for a whole lot of nothing.
Love Sacs
No, it's not a damn bean bag (tm). (Shredded foam I think)
Really comfortable; there is some risk that you'll fall asleep in it though. If you get one big enough your kid can sit in it and do homework too.
Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy where people mindlessly irrigated their crops with electrolytes because they had learned through advertising that electrolytes were good for you. There aren't any user visible quality filters separating good results from respected scientific journals from bad content from some bozo and his blog who has figured out how to game the search algorithms to get traffic to his high CPC keywords.
It's kind of a Gresham's Law applied to search results - bad search results overwhelm the good results.
You can't really put the blame on Google, how do you cost effectively assess the reputations of the millions of content sources out there? This is a democracy, messy but open to everyone.
I like to think that the principles of Wisdom of Crowds will kick in; that someone will come up with a feedback mechanism that can detect from how we interact with search results, on a mass scale, whether we're finding junk or the good stuff.
I was where you were at the end of last year, after 15+ years developing apps. So I gave notice after New Year's and I was out of there in 2 weeks. Now I'm working on a dozen different projects that I haven't had time to work on before between work and the kids. Most of the jobs I had were with cutting edge technology when I started, but a couple of years into it and it was legacy code; management never bought our arguments to rewrite the codebase to keep it current. And obviously, it is a lot more fun to write new apps than do maintenance on legacy apps.
Now I'm working with the latest technologies. All of the projects are simple enough that I can deploy them pretty quickly; I can get them to market in weeks or months, not years. So what's the downside? I've got pretty low expenses - paid off our cars years ago; mainly just have the mortgage and health insurance; I take the kids to Costco for samples when they get hungry (kidding!). If I don't make a dime from any of these projects I'm back on the job market - with a lot of relevant new technology experience on my resume; technology I can show to a prospective employer - who should appreciate the effort and initiative I put into the projects.
When I read of people reminiscing on their lives, they regret mostly that they didn't try things they wanted to try - much more so than things they tried and failed at.
Orange County should have been a contender; lots of tech companies here from the boring but stable big companies to the white knuckle startups.
You don't have to live in Irvine to work there; live in North County where you have great hiking/mountain biking and you can get to the beaches or the ski slopes in less than an hour; and there are plenty of parks for the kids to play team sports or exercise the dog.
Upgrade your Series 2 DirecTivo to the 4.x OS and you'll get most of what you'd want or need on your $99 Tivo box without having to shell out for a new system.
There's excellent documentation on how to do this over at
Weethet Tivo 4.x for DirecTivo. It'll cost you about $25 for the OS and toolkit.
This hack will open up the Home Media Option functionality which allows you to serve up music, images, movie listings, webcam images, podcasts and more through your Tivo from other servers on your network. Why dedicate a much more expensive server to be a media center when you can just stream it through your Tivo box? To get output to your TV you have to buy pricy tuner cards / video cards to replicate the basic Tivo functionality. Then you have to muck around configuring it all to make that Tivo equivalent functionality family friendly. Your time is better spent adding functionality to the open source JavaHMO app you'll run on other boxes on your network to serve up all those extra goodies. A side benefit of the hack is that now you can put on TivoWeb(plus) and other apps on the box to allow you to control it over the web; and you can even stream out recorded shows to PCs.
The only drawbacks I've found so far are that 1) the channel locking functionality appears to be broken so I can't lock the kids out of Nickelodeon, and 2) JavaHMO is a little buggy so it intermittently isn't able to retrieve some images and web pages.
But the menuing system into my 1000+ songs works great and we've been using that a lot since the hack. Plus the USB 2 driver update allows me to pull down shows 4-5x faster than before.
I bought a bunch of domains and forward the catchalls to an email I monitor; I've had them for years and haven't had any problems with randomized user names (other than the ever popular info@domain.com) but have had problems with specific user emails getting burned. If your email pops up in a google search, there's a pretty good chance a spammer has it on a disk somewhere. If I started getting randomized user names, I'd probably alias the catchall to me@privacy.net so that legitimate users would know that their email didn't get through.
"Most people I talked to believe government is the only hope; that egovernment and other government projects are the only way to develop a sustainable local IT sector." That explains why there is no sustainable local IT sector...everyone's waiting around for government to start it up. Come on!!! Commercial IT in the US happened despite government, not because of it. There are plenty of very successful Indian-born entrepreneurs in the US. I want to know why their entrepreneurial success isn't happening in their homeland. My guess is that it is the dark legacy of socialism and the bureacratic obstacles to innovation that is holding back growth in India
Vonnegut predicted this! There was a pretty good movie years ago called "Between Time and Timbuktu", a Vonnegut screenplay where the winner of a Tang contest (Tang is a powdered orange drink from ancient times) gets a ride to the moon. There is a rounding error (or maybe they used metric instead of English or vice versa - no wait, that really happened - he predicted that too!), the trajectory is miscalculated, they miss the moon and go off into uncharted territory. Most of the movie is about the planets they visit on their journey, civilizations much like ours but where say political correctness has been taken to a logical absurdity.
hardware hackers! Necessity is the mother of invention. And when they get into it they might find that they enjoy it. Law of unintended consequences....
Hmm...they are getting "600 lines of data that detail the signal availability, clarity and speed of connection as well as which cell tower is being used to complete a call." And they are doing stats on competitor calls also. Wonder if you could do pull that back with a homebrew rig?(for less $$s)
Seems like the hard way to accomplish what they're trying to do. Wouldn't it be cheaper to stick a GPS IC in a random sampling of customers' phones (giving them a discount on their monthly plans for the privilege) and just have the phone report in stats (in the background) for dropped connections when it reestablished service.
Slashdot Mirror
See the documentary "Idiocracy" for ample evidence our civilization is declining.
Plenty of blame to go around:
Pressured to Take More Risk, Fannie Reached a Tipping Point
SEC's 2004 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt
The Roots of the Crisis
And after all the fear mongering to push the bailout plan, which caused the stock market to crater, the plan probably won't work anyway; what's happening is a natural correction to the credit bubble:
Can the bailout work? Fat chance
Are we headed for an epic bear market?
The debate over the bailout is missing the big picture - we risk destroying the credibility of our currency, and when that happens, China and other countries with trade surpluses will stop taking our debt and things will really get tough:
The Chinese have been ready to treat U.S. Treasuries as a rock-hard store of value and loan us the dollars they accumulate at a very low interest rate. But what if they start to doubt the U.S. government will repay its debt?
"We are getting closer to a tipping-point," said Benn Steil, an economist. "People are asking: can we really trust the dollar as a store of value?"
The bailout plan is a bad idea on so many levels; we should let the market work through this - there is cash on the sidelines that will come in and solve the liquidity problem if government stops changing the rules of the game. Government intervention will just delay resolution of the problems. Just Say No to the Bailout Plan
But seriously, this is chilling. You'd think someone in Washington would understand the constitution. When we wake up someday in a police state, wondering how we lost the most important thing, the essence of our democracy, we'll look back and understand that all these seemingly minor bits of legislation gave up our essential liberty for a whole lot of nothing.
A domain ready for service to the cause - post your ideas.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
Love Sacs
No, it's not a damn bean bag (tm). (Shredded foam I think)
Really comfortable; there is some risk that you'll fall asleep in it though. If you get one big enough your kid can sit in it and do homework too.
Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy where people mindlessly irrigated their crops with electrolytes because they had learned through advertising that electrolytes were good for you. There aren't any user visible quality filters separating good results from respected scientific journals from bad content from some bozo and his blog who has figured out how to game the search algorithms to get traffic to his high CPC keywords.
It's kind of a Gresham's Law applied to search results - bad search results overwhelm the good results.
You can't really put the blame on Google, how do you cost effectively assess the reputations of the millions of content sources out there? This is a democracy, messy but open to everyone.
I like to think that the principles of Wisdom of Crowds will kick in; that someone will come up with a feedback mechanism that can detect from how we interact with search results, on a mass scale, whether we're finding junk or the good stuff.
My mtDNA is T2 so I guess that means mom was descended from Vikings... The Vikings were raiding Ireland before AD 1000 and carrying out the most winsome lasses so I'd guess that's where some of the mtDNA came from. Ancient Celtic Warriors: Vikings and Irish at War Viking Settlemnent in Ireland
I was where you were at the end of last year, after 15+ years developing apps. So I gave notice after New Year's and I was out of there in 2 weeks. Now I'm working on a dozen different projects that I haven't had time to work on before between work and the kids. Most of the jobs I had were with cutting edge technology when I started, but a couple of years into it and it was legacy code; management never bought our arguments to rewrite the codebase to keep it current. And obviously, it is a lot more fun to write new apps than do maintenance on legacy apps.
Now I'm working with the latest technologies. All of the projects are simple enough that I can deploy them pretty quickly; I can get them to market in weeks or months, not years. So what's the downside? I've got pretty low expenses - paid off our cars years ago; mainly just have the mortgage and health insurance; I take the kids to Costco for samples when they get hungry (kidding!). If I don't make a dime from any of these projects I'm back on the job market - with a lot of relevant new technology experience on my resume; technology I can show to a prospective employer - who should appreciate the effort and initiative I put into the projects.
When I read of people reminiscing on their lives, they regret mostly that they didn't try things they wanted to try - much more so than things they tried and failed at.
Orange County should have been a contender; lots of tech companies here from the boring but stable big companies to the white knuckle startups. You don't have to live in Irvine to work there; live in North County where you have great hiking/mountain biking and you can get to the beaches or the ski slopes in less than an hour; and there are plenty of parks for the kids to play team sports or exercise the dog.
http://exhippie.com/files/Alfred-3.gif
Upgrade your Series 2 DirecTivo to the 4.x OS and you'll get most of what you'd want or need on your $99 Tivo box without having to shell out for a new system.
There's excellent documentation on how to do this over at Weethet Tivo 4.x for DirecTivo. It'll cost you about $25 for the OS and toolkit.
This hack will open up the Home Media Option functionality which allows you to serve up music, images, movie listings, webcam images, podcasts and more through your Tivo from other servers on your network. Why dedicate a much more expensive server to be a media center when you can just stream it through your Tivo box? To get output to your TV you have to buy pricy tuner cards / video cards to replicate the basic Tivo functionality. Then you have to muck around configuring it all to make that Tivo equivalent functionality family friendly. Your time is better spent adding functionality to the open source JavaHMO app you'll run on other boxes on your network to serve up all those extra goodies. A side benefit of the hack is that now you can put on TivoWeb(plus) and other apps on the box to allow you to control it over the web; and you can even stream out recorded shows to PCs.
The only drawbacks I've found so far are that 1) the channel locking functionality appears to be broken so I can't lock the kids out of Nickelodeon, and 2) JavaHMO is a little buggy so it intermittently isn't able to retrieve some images and web pages.
But the menuing system into my 1000+ songs works great and we've been using that a lot since the hack. Plus the USB 2 driver update allows me to pull down shows 4-5x faster than before.
They're all just Common People; Shatner's singing about them in his new CD
Has Been
I bought a bunch of domains and forward the catchalls to an email I monitor; I've had them for years and haven't had any problems with randomized user names (other than the ever popular info@domain.com) but have had problems with specific user emails getting burned. If your email pops up in a google search, there's a pretty good chance a spammer has it on a disk somewhere.
If I started getting randomized user names, I'd probably alias the catchall to me@privacy.net so that legitimate users would know that their email didn't get through.
"Most people I talked to believe government is the only hope; that egovernment and other government projects are the only way to develop a sustainable local IT sector."
That explains why there is no sustainable local IT sector...everyone's waiting around for government to start it up. Come on!!! Commercial IT in the US happened despite government, not because of it. There are plenty of very successful Indian-born entrepreneurs in the US. I want to know why their entrepreneurial success isn't happening in their homeland. My guess is that it is the dark legacy of socialism and the bureacratic obstacles to innovation that is holding back growth in India
Vonnegut predicted this! There was a pretty good movie years ago called "Between Time and Timbuktu", a Vonnegut screenplay where the winner of a Tang contest (Tang is a powdered orange drink from ancient times) gets a ride to the moon. There is a rounding error (or maybe they used metric instead of English or vice versa - no wait, that really happened - he predicted that too!), the trajectory is miscalculated, they miss the moon and go off into uncharted territory. Most of the movie is about the planets they visit on their journey, civilizations much like ours but where say political correctness has been taken to a logical absurdity.
hardware hackers!
Necessity is the mother of invention. And when they get into it they might find that they enjoy it.
Law of unintended consequences....
Hmm...they are getting "600 lines of data that detail the signal availability, clarity and speed of connection as well as which cell tower is being used to complete a call." And they are doing stats on competitor calls also. Wonder if you could do pull that back with a homebrew rig?(for less $$s) Seems like the hard way to accomplish what they're trying to do. Wouldn't it be cheaper to stick a GPS IC in a random sampling of customers' phones (giving them a discount on their monthly plans for the privilege) and just have the phone report in stats (in the background) for dropped connections when it reestablished service.