I'm using it now - it's not quite as good as adblock, but it's pretty effective. If you want to use the new Chrome Beta, you can use the new extension framework. If you want to stick to the stable chrome distribution, you can use the user script version.
I've been happy enough with it that I've switched from Firefox to Chrome as my primary browser.
The thing I miss most about adblock was giving me the option to selectively allow certain sites to serve me ads. Some sites I visit serve non-intrusive ads, and I'd like them to be able to make a little money off of my clicks.
Unlike the rollermouse, I think the price would be pretty marginal to add to a regular keyboard, but I've only ever seen one external keyboard design that incorporated a pointing stick. (Lenovo/IBM design.)
Personally, having a trackpoint was a deciding factor in choosing my laptop.
I have a similar situation as you - I have a netbook with data I'd prefer to keep to myself. My solution, as many others have suggested, is to use Truecrypt. My particular configuration is to encrypt a secondary partition where most of my more sensitive data resides.
My email, instant messengers, and even Firefox & firefox profile are installed on this partition, so my cookies and saved passwords are safe.
My netbook has basically two modes, "insecure" mode where the sensitive data's not mounted, and "secure" mode for whenever the computer is physically close by.
What this allows me to do is to not even bother with a login screen. This comes in handy because I can boot it and start using it without having to fuss with the tiny keyboard. Secondly, I can loan it out to friends who want to borrow it, even for a day or two.
I think sexual assault is terrible, and it disgusts me that people want to play games that simulate such things.
But I disagree with this law. I think freedom of expression is a valuable personal liberty. The legal system should be concerned with protecting the welfare and safety of the citizens it governs, not guiding what kind of intellectual content can be distributed among adults.
On a more personal level, I find it ridiculous that rape simulation should be outlawed, but murder simulation is not. We as a society accept that murder is a worse crime than sexual assault. This is why murder charges have more severe punishment than rape.
The only argument that would make this kind of legislation rational would be if someone could establish that sexual assault in video games encourages acts of real world sexual assault. I'd be surprised if it were true. Most studies conclude that violence in movies and video games does not encourage real-world violence. I can't imagine any reason why rape would be so different than any other violent crime in this aspect.
I have to say, this article didn't sufficiently emphasize the importance of the introduction of the GeForce and the GeForce 3. Almost every other graphics card was just "more" and "faster", but not the huge game-changing revolution that these two graphics cards represented.
Before GeForce, everything was all about accelerating rasterization - the act of filling in triangles.
With the first GeForce, lighting and transform was put into silicon. This was *huge* - this means that real math processing units were put into hardware. Scene complexity went up drastically, since we were finally able to push a lot of the more expensive operations into hardware.
With the GeForce 3, we had the introduction of the *programmable* graphics pipeline. This was a huge game changer - for the first time, the developer was limited only by their own intellect and creativity what kinds of things could go into the hardware. This was the beginning of what could be considered the first mass produced commercial stream processing unit. The graphics card has become a general purpose computational unit, a blazingly fast computational unit with applications into fields that have absolutely nothing to do with computer graphics.
I'm not sure what the ultimate evolution of the stream processor will be, but it still has the potential to really change the fundamental architecture of how future computers will be designed. Stream processors might eventually displace CPUs as the main computational workhorse in a computer.
I have to admit, I'm not sure how to make a netbook more macho but I did customize my netbook.
My EEE 900HA came with a really glossy finish on the cover which made it a fingerprint magnet. I tried to get around this with a can of spray paint, which surprisingly gives a fairly professional thinkpad-like finish.
I figured while I was at it, I'd decorate it with a painted pearljam-alive figure. It wasn't really my intention, but occasionally I do get a comment about Pearljam which is a bit of a conversation starter.
It's unfortunate that CPUs have gotten so complex, but clock speed is not a particularly good indicator of performance, even on seemingly similar CPUs.
Once upon a time I was curious to do a rough benchmarking of the various CPUs I have access to, just to get a sense of which ones were faster. What I did was to write a simple single threaded traveling salesman solver (http://morbo.cs.pdx.edu/traveling_salesman.c) and run it on all the machines and see how long it took. (Extra detail: The main part of the TSP solver uses less than 4KB of memory, so it should all fit in the CPU cache.)
I got one of my most surprising results when I compared my laptop to my desktop.
Desktop machine: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.00GHz Laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53GHz
Both are dual core "Core 2 Duo" CPUs. Intuitively, I would have guessed that the desktop machine would have been faster because the desktop is not designed to be as power-conscious, and it has the faster clock speed. I was wrong.
For this particular test, it turns out that the laptop was about 50% faster than the desktop, even though they're both Core2Duos and the desktop has almost 20% "more GHz".
*Disclaimer: I work for Intel *Disclaimer 2: I actually do software research for Intel, and I haven't a clue about anything to do with hardware or business
I have a little EEE pc with an Atom 1.6GHz - I'm actually find it does have enough compute for most of what I do.
I did a stopwatch test on my computer - it takes less than 45 seconds from pushing the power button to getting on the network and rendering a web page. I'm running WinXP, but people have reported significantly better numbers with Linux.
The only time where I find I'm wishing for more compute power is when I'm watching HD flash video. (like Hulu or Youtube in HD mode - I get dropped frames)
I believe this is because Flash is written really quite poorly, and the video rendering code isn't very good. If I download the video and play it with VLC or something, it plays smoothly.
This is really the only reason I want more compute power on my eee pc. I'm actually hoping silverlight takes off so I don't have this problem anymore.
As far as I can tell, this hasn't been mentioned in the comments so far.
This is completely moronic - the measure of a programmer is not how fast their code runs. More talented programmers make fewer errors, and better design decisions.
There's a saying that cheaper programmers are more expensive. Finding and fixing bugs is an immensely expensive undertaking, and cheaper programmers make more of them. Bugs cannot be fixed regardless of how much hardware we throw at the problem, and software quality cannot be recovered no matter how many cheap programmers you use.
Better programmers also make better design decisions - more elegant, maintainable and extensible code. Software version 2 is a much easier undertaking when most of the development time is not squandered understanding, rewriting and fixing version 1 code.
That is not to say that throwing more hardware at the problem is a bad idea. We already do - all these managed languages with automatic garbage collection and so on - they free the programmer from worrying about memory management so they can spend more time developing the functionality. This comes at a cost of creating a more compute and memory intensive application.
There's one major difference this analysis doesn't cover. If you're patient, you can get a dell for up to 40% off, and although it's not quite as drastic with Lenovo, the same is true. This macbook will ALWAYS be expensive.
That's a really good point. At this very moment, Dell's running a sale on the Inspiron 13, and you can buy an Inspiron 13 that is slightly better configured than the one in the article for $696.57 shipped. The author of the article referenced theirs at $819.
The reference macs were $1299 or $999.
For the difference ($300 to $500) you can get a whole lot more kit - even an entire notebook if you're a careful shopper.
I was actually thinking of trying out a mac as my new laptop last year. What really did stop me was the price - not just of the box itself, but when I factored in the cost of having to buy all my software again, the cost of switching became prohibitively expensive.
My car has a big 4.6L V8. It's a lot of fun, but not terribly effective for good mileage, so I did a little bit of experimenting on what driving style is most efficient.
It varies from car to car, but mine is most efficient between 45 and 55mph.
The most interesting thing I discovered is that ignoring traffic laws approximately returned me a 20% improvement in fuel economy - ignoring stoplights, stopsigns and speed limits. This isn't to say that you should do this recklessly - for example, sometimes when you're at a 4-way intersection and you have good visibility you can safely (but illegally) run a red light or stop sign.
Coming to a full stop is also bad for mileage. You burn more gas every time you accelerate so the less you accelerate, the more efficiently you're using your car.
For the record, I only did this for 1 tank of gas, and I follow the rules when I drive now. This was just an experiment just to see how much following the rules was costing me:)
As a non-american who's done a few internships in the US, I would have to say it is an absolutely worthwhile experience to do this kind of thing.
In my experience, companies have never discriminated against me in terms of salary - I always felt I had competitive compensation in each of my internships. I could live comfortably and work without worrying where about my finances. (At least, after the first paycheck, which depending on your hire date and company policy could be over a month.)
One recommendation I would strongly make is to try and find an internship in a large company in the US, and to do it in the summer. A large, well-known company can easily lend credibility to your CV. In the future, when applying for jobs, the first person to scan your resume will often be someone with a non-technical background. If they can recognize "Microsoft" or "Intel" or whatever, that will help you.
I also think it's a tremendously good idea to do it at a large company in the summer, because a large company will have a lot of other interns in the summer. Your peers come from all over the US, and all over the world. It's a great opportunity to meet people like you from different background, and see how things are done all over the world.
If you're not familiar, Second Life is a virtual world you can log into and play around with, for free. In this world, you can create things, such as virtual houses, cars, spaceships, whatever you can imagine. The key thing is that it has its own embedded toy programming language called LSL.
I recently taught an undergrad course, targetted at non-comp sci students, to teach them programming.
Our thinking was that a lot of us got interested in computers, and then programming, is because we liked video games. We're trying to motivate learning by having people go through the basics of Second Life content creation. I think it's a bit more rewarding when you can say "Hey mom, look I made this game" as opposed to learning the formalities of typing and writing maintainable code. These things can come later.
It scales out a little bit too - you can make a few dollars in Second Life in various ways, one is by selling and creating new content. Possibly your teen can earn a bit of a summer income from what they learn in SL - a great way to develop their entrepreneurship skills.
And hey, if you're not familiar with Second Life, maybe you and your son can explore and learn it together. Of course, there are drawbacks to letting them explore - For instance you will no doubt encounter objectionable/pornographic content eventually.
On a completely different note, another fun way to learn the basics might be to play around with Flash or Phrogram.
I own a Wii, it's tremendous fun but the accuracy of the wiimote seems to be lacking. For example, when playing Wii Sports boxing, the motion understanding can be quite erratic. I've never been able to figure out which motion corresponds to which punch your avatar performs, and its actions don't seem to be very repeatable.
Does everyone else have this sort of experience?
Regardless, I think this add-on might be very good for all future wii games if they can have more accurate controllers.
Most people drive SUVs because they like the way they look, and then they rationalize it by coming up with other reasons.
That's just human nature - people rationalize. You could say exactly the same thing about people who hate SUVs.
Take this thread for instance, this guy says he likes to see over the traffic ahead of him and there's 30 replies suggesting this is stupid, he's compensating for a small penis, how he's a menace to everyone around him, etc etc.
We already have larger vehicles (like buses, 18-wheel-trucks) that we accept on the road and are perfectly safe and practical if driven intelligently.
But this poor guy is essentially getting flamed because he dare suggest that he likes some aspect of having an SUV.
(No, I don't own and SUV, I don't even like them. I think they're ugly, too big, inefficient and they handle poorly - but I don't mind if you have one.)
I have friends who go to The U of Waterloo, and not one has EVER called that school "the MIT of the North"
when asked, "how's your University", most of them just shrug and say "meh, it's alright, its a University." You're right on the first point, noone ever calls UW the "MIT of the North". As far as being just another university though, I'd have to disagree. I think UW is one of the strongest technical universities in the world. One of the things they like to brag about at UW is their results in the world ACM programming contest. (For reference, UW placed ahead of MIT 10 years in the last 15.) More anecdotally, having worked with graduates from all around the world, I'd really have to say that UW tends to produce more effective software engineers than other schools.
I can see how your friends might have mixed feelings about the place though - the administration can treat people quite poorly, and life as an undergrad can be stressful. As an alumni, I'm glad to have gone through it, and I'm glad not to be there:)
As for the original story, I'm glad to see UW doing something like this. Developing UW spinoff companies wasn't something that most of us considered, but this could really encourage that sort of thing. I think that's good for the school and the economy in the long term.
I'm on Comcast, in Portland OR. I pay for 6Mb down/384Kb up. (Lowercase "b" for "bits")
Speed tests with 3 of the popular ones, all sites in San Francisco: dslreports.com: (bandwidth provided by Megapath Networks) 8126 Kb down / 1582 Kb up
Speedtest.net (bandwidth provided by Unwired) 6823 Kb down / 781 Kb up
Speakeasy.net 8944 Kb down / 1195 Kb up
I also have my own Linux box at local University. I did a wget from both ends, watched the output. (No fancy TCP overhead calculations or anything) For the first little bit I get: 8400 Kb down / 1544 Kb up And then the Comcast traffic shaper kicks in and I get: 6176 Kb down / 356 Kb up
Which is more or less what Comcast advertises. For the most part, I'm a happy Comcast customer, although it's not like I haven't had my share of troubles. After complaining about a flaky connection a few times last year, they finally sent in a technician. He measured my signal quality, laughed and said, "I can't believe this works." Apparently the last cable guy Comcast sent over installed a splitter and cable that was never intended to carry a broadband signal.
So this guy is complaining about competition? As long as the sex toys are not exactly the same, then I see nothing wrong.
From what I can tell in the article, I think he's suing because someone copied his work, and is selling it. (ie. Piracy for profit)
If it was me, other people reselling my work, for profit, without my permission, would drive me nuts too. More power to him.
Myself, I use the Corel Draw suite. It comes with Photopaint (A photoshop equivalent) and Draw (Illustrator equivalent)
I only tend to use the bitmap/photoediting stuff. I've used Photopaint, Photoshop and GIMP, and I think they're all about equally powerful, but I hate Photoshop's and Gimp's user interface. I think it's poorly designed, and completely unintuitive for novice users.
Also, it's a fraction of the price to boot. I bought my software with an educational discount, but for regular users, according to amazon, Adobe Photoshop+Illustrator = $1,234.98, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 = $312.99.
For my PDF solution, I use JAWS PDF Creator, $64. My experience with it was better than with the Acrobat Pro which we used to have a site license for - some of my documents had some weird formatting which confused Acrobat, but handled fine with JAWS.
A little while ago, I saw this story about Cingular trying to collect a $31,000 bill from some guy that was clearly the victim of network error. Things like 4 roaming calls/minute from Nicaragua. I got worried enough this might happen to me, so I went to my cellphone provider to ask to put a cap on my account. Something like, "If my bill ever reaches $300 just turn off my phone."
They can't. As far as I can figure, the only reason for this policy is to try and screw people who didn't intend to spend so much money, or were mistakenly billed.
Incidentally, while I'm here, I might as well mention I'm on Cingular/AT&T. ("Fewest dropped calls!") My experience with this network has been absolute garbage, with frequent dropped calls regardless of how many bars I have. As far as I can tell, they can make this claim because they don't have a way of differentiating regular hang-ups from a dropped call. (I asked a Cingular tech how I could tell which side of the conversation was dropping, and he said there's no way for me to differentiate me dropping the call, the other side dropping the call, and someone just hanging up.)
It's kind of interesting, in Second Life, the client's camera can float around, and isn't constrained very rigidly by avatar location/orientation. But the important observation is that avatar positioning helps determine a social context.
Something I've noticed in Second Life - when gathering in small groups, people tend to congregate in a circle, avatars all facing inwards. There's no need for this, especially with a free-floating camera. To compound it, your screen might often be covered with browsers, various chat windows, etc. The observation that real-world social conventions carry over into virtual spaces, even though it serves no practical purpose.
(You know, you could've just asked - to let everyone in on the joke, Jim's desk is about 10 feet from mine in the lab:)
A PhD signifies that you have an understanding of the field, and that you have made a novel contribution, and are, therefore, capable of research.
If your thesis is based on forged results, the merit of your contribution may be nothing, or even negative. Moreover, it casts doubt on your ability to carry out research. Honesty is a necessary requisite of doing research, and your reputation counts for a lot in academia.
Your highschool diploma means that you have completed all your highschool courses. If someone were to find that you passed all your courses by shoulder-surfing or bribing the teachers or whatever, I fully expect that the institution should be able to revoke your degree.
Some things in life aren't about pure functionality. I'm a mechanical watch hobbiest, and I get the asked "why" a lot. I have a longer explanation on my webpage if you would like a more poetic answer.
Part of the appreciation of a fine mechanical timepiece is purely artistic. If you've ever seen the inside of a Patek Philippe watch, you might understand the appeal. Or you might not. Art is funny that way.
Some of the appeal comes from the marvel of mechanical automations. Ever take a look at how an automatic transmission works? It's pretty fascinating. The same applies to mechanical watches. It's quite wonderful to understand how a swiss lever escapement keeps accurate time.
There's also the sentimental value. I have a nice mechanical that I received as a graduation present. One day, I hope it will be a graduation gift for my children, and the beginning of a new tradition.
If you can't find any value in art and sentiment, well, it may comfort you to know that some of them can be considered an investment. Over the last year, I've had some watches appreciate in value. I believe this trend will continue.
But I am certain that in 10 years, your timex will still be worthless.
In the SL world, everything works on Linden$ (L$). Everything you build costs money. For instance, if I want to build a cube (or other type of primitive) it costs me $10. If I destroy that cube, I get my $10 back. If I decide to keep the cube in the game at all times, even when I'm not logged in, I get taxed on it. This is to encourage people not to leave stuff just lying around, cluttering up the landscape, and more importantly, the game server with processing your junk.
Every week you get a stipend, of roughly L$1000, which will never increase your account balance beyond $3500. To gain more money than that, you have to earn it. One way of earning L$ is to sell things, such as clothes, models, or scripts.
Unless you figure out an exploit, you cannot steal anyone's things. Every note, script and object you create has a list of permissions, such as copyable, modifiable, moveable, buyable.
In most of the SL world, you cannot hurt anyone. In the areas where you can be hurt, if you die, all that happens is you get teleported home. That's it.
You don't have to worry about someone beating you up and robbing you:)
My favorite thing about SL is the scripting language. Like Hiro in snow crash. You can literally click an object in the game, and bring up the scripting code in a window, and start futzing with it. This is a really good toy version of the metaverse:)
Slashdot Mirror
There is an adblock alternative for Chrome though - http://www.adsweep.org/
I'm using it now - it's not quite as good as adblock, but it's pretty effective. If you want to use the new Chrome Beta, you can use the new extension framework. If you want to stick to the stable chrome distribution, you can use the user script version.
I've been happy enough with it that I've switched from Firefox to Chrome as my primary browser.
The thing I miss most about adblock was giving me the option to selectively allow certain sites to serve me ads. Some sites I visit serve non-intrusive ads, and I'd like them to be able to make a little money off of my clicks.
You know, that's what I've always thought about pointing sticks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick
Unlike the rollermouse, I think the price would be pretty marginal to add to a regular keyboard, but I've only ever seen one external keyboard design that incorporated a pointing stick. (Lenovo/IBM design.)
Personally, having a trackpoint was a deciding factor in choosing my laptop.
Hi there :)
I have a similar situation as you - I have a netbook with data I'd prefer to keep to myself. My solution, as many others have suggested, is to use Truecrypt. My particular configuration is to encrypt a secondary partition where most of my more sensitive data resides.
My email, instant messengers, and even Firefox & firefox profile are installed on this partition, so my cookies and saved passwords are safe.
My netbook has basically two modes, "insecure" mode where the sensitive data's not mounted, and "secure" mode for whenever the computer is physically close by.
What this allows me to do is to not even bother with a login screen. This comes in handy because I can boot it and start using it without having to fuss with the tiny keyboard. Secondly, I can loan it out to friends who want to borrow it, even for a day or two.
I think sexual assault is terrible, and it disgusts me that people want to play games that simulate such things.
But I disagree with this law. I think freedom of expression is a valuable personal liberty. The legal system should be concerned with protecting the welfare and safety of the citizens it governs, not guiding what kind of intellectual content can be distributed among adults.
On a more personal level, I find it ridiculous that rape simulation should be outlawed, but murder simulation is not. We as a society accept that murder is a worse crime than sexual assault. This is why murder charges have more severe punishment than rape.
The only argument that would make this kind of legislation rational would be if someone could establish that sexual assault in video games encourages acts of real world sexual assault. I'd be surprised if it were true. Most studies conclude that violence in movies and video games does not encourage real-world violence. I can't imagine any reason why rape would be so different than any other violent crime in this aspect.
I have to say, this article didn't sufficiently emphasize the importance of the introduction of the GeForce and the GeForce 3. Almost every other graphics card was just "more" and "faster", but not the huge game-changing revolution that these two graphics cards represented.
Before GeForce, everything was all about accelerating rasterization - the act of filling in triangles.
With the first GeForce, lighting and transform was put into silicon. This was *huge* - this means that real math processing units were put into hardware. Scene complexity went up drastically, since we were finally able to push a lot of the more expensive operations into hardware.
With the GeForce 3, we had the introduction of the *programmable* graphics pipeline. This was a huge game changer - for the first time, the developer was limited only by their own intellect and creativity what kinds of things could go into the hardware. This was the beginning of what could be considered the first mass produced commercial stream processing unit. The graphics card has become a general purpose computational unit, a blazingly fast computational unit with applications into fields that have absolutely nothing to do with computer graphics.
I'm not sure what the ultimate evolution of the stream processor will be, but it still has the potential to really change the fundamental architecture of how future computers will be designed. Stream processors might eventually displace CPUs as the main computational workhorse in a computer.
I have to admit, I'm not sure how to make a netbook more macho but I did customize my netbook.
My EEE 900HA came with a really glossy finish on the cover which made it a fingerprint magnet. I tried to get around this with a can of spray paint, which surprisingly gives a fairly professional thinkpad-like finish.
I figured while I was at it, I'd decorate it with a painted pearljam-alive figure. It wasn't really my intention, but occasionally I do get a comment about Pearljam which is a bit of a conversation starter.
Pic here:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=51953
But if you're looking for something manlier still, maybe you can glue a gun to your netbook or something ;)
It's unfortunate that CPUs have gotten so complex, but clock speed is not a particularly good indicator of performance, even on seemingly similar CPUs.
Once upon a time I was curious to do a rough benchmarking of the various CPUs I have access to, just to get a sense of which ones were faster. What I did was to write a simple single threaded traveling salesman solver (http://morbo.cs.pdx.edu/traveling_salesman.c) and run it on all the machines and see how long it took. (Extra detail: The main part of the TSP solver uses less than 4KB of memory, so it should all fit in the CPU cache.)
I got one of my most surprising results when I compared my laptop to my desktop.
Desktop machine: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.00GHz
Laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53GHz
Both are dual core "Core 2 Duo" CPUs. Intuitively, I would have guessed that the desktop machine would have been faster because the desktop is not designed to be as power-conscious, and it has the faster clock speed. I was wrong.
For this particular test, it turns out that the laptop was about 50% faster than the desktop, even though they're both Core2Duos and the desktop has almost 20% "more GHz".
*Disclaimer: I work for Intel
*Disclaimer 2: I actually do software research for Intel, and I haven't a clue about anything to do with hardware or business
I have a little EEE pc with an Atom 1.6GHz - I'm actually find it does have enough compute for most of what I do.
I did a stopwatch test on my computer - it takes less than 45 seconds from pushing the power button to getting on the network and rendering a web page. I'm running WinXP, but people have reported significantly better numbers with Linux.
The only time where I find I'm wishing for more compute power is when I'm watching HD flash video. (like Hulu or Youtube in HD mode - I get dropped frames)
I believe this is because Flash is written really quite poorly, and the video rendering code isn't very good. If I download the video and play it with VLC or something, it plays smoothly.
This is really the only reason I want more compute power on my eee pc. I'm actually hoping silverlight takes off so I don't have this problem anymore.
As far as I can tell, this hasn't been mentioned in the comments so far.
This is completely moronic - the measure of a programmer is not how fast their code runs. More talented programmers make fewer errors, and better design decisions.
There's a saying that cheaper programmers are more expensive. Finding and fixing bugs is an immensely expensive undertaking, and cheaper programmers make more of them. Bugs cannot be fixed regardless of how much hardware we throw at the problem, and software quality cannot be recovered no matter how many cheap programmers you use.
Better programmers also make better design decisions - more elegant, maintainable and extensible code. Software version 2 is a much easier undertaking when most of the development time is not squandered understanding, rewriting and fixing version 1 code.
That is not to say that throwing more hardware at the problem is a bad idea. We already do - all these managed languages with automatic garbage collection and so on - they free the programmer from worrying about memory management so they can spend more time developing the functionality. This comes at a cost of creating a more compute and memory intensive application.
Don't forget irrational thinking, -2i!
That would be complex thinking. Irrational thinking would be -pi :)
There's one major difference this analysis doesn't cover. If you're patient, you can get a dell for up to 40% off, and although it's not quite as drastic with Lenovo, the same is true. This macbook will ALWAYS be expensive.
That's a really good point. At this very moment, Dell's running a sale on the Inspiron 13, and you can buy an Inspiron 13 that is slightly better configured than the one in the article for $696.57 shipped. The author of the article referenced theirs at $819.
The reference macs were $1299 or $999.
For the difference ($300 to $500) you can get a whole lot more kit - even an entire notebook if you're a careful shopper.
I was actually thinking of trying out a mac as my new laptop last year. What really did stop me was the price - not just of the box itself, but when I factored in the cost of having to buy all my software again, the cost of switching became prohibitively expensive.
My car has a big 4.6L V8. It's a lot of fun, but not terribly effective for good mileage, so I did a little bit of experimenting on what driving style is most efficient.
It varies from car to car, but mine is most efficient between 45 and 55mph.
The most interesting thing I discovered is that ignoring traffic laws approximately returned me a 20% improvement in fuel economy - ignoring stoplights, stopsigns and speed limits. This isn't to say that you should do this recklessly - for example, sometimes when you're at a 4-way intersection and you have good visibility you can safely (but illegally) run a red light or stop sign.
Coming to a full stop is also bad for mileage. You burn more gas every time you accelerate so the less you accelerate, the more efficiently you're using your car.
For the record, I only did this for 1 tank of gas, and I follow the rules when I drive now. This was just an experiment just to see how much following the rules was costing me :)
As a non-american who's done a few internships in the US, I would have to say it is an absolutely worthwhile experience to do this kind of thing.
In my experience, companies have never discriminated against me in terms of salary - I always felt I had competitive compensation in each of my internships. I could live comfortably and work without worrying where about my finances. (At least, after the first paycheck, which depending on your hire date and company policy could be over a month.)
One recommendation I would strongly make is to try and find an internship in a large company in the US, and to do it in the summer. A large, well-known company can easily lend credibility to your CV. In the future, when applying for jobs, the first person to scan your resume will often be someone with a non-technical background. If they can recognize "Microsoft" or "Intel" or whatever, that will help you.
I also think it's a tremendously good idea to do it at a large company in the summer, because a large company will have a lot of other interns in the summer. Your peers come from all over the US, and all over the world. It's a great opportunity to meet people like you from different background, and see how things are done all over the world.
Good luck :)
If you're not familiar, Second Life is a virtual world you can log into and play around with, for free. In this world, you can create things, such as virtual houses, cars, spaceships, whatever you can imagine. The key thing is that it has its own embedded toy programming language called LSL.
I recently taught an undergrad course, targetted at non-comp sci students, to teach them programming.
http://www.francischang.com/professional/games/
Our thinking was that a lot of us got interested in computers, and then programming, is because we liked video games. We're trying to motivate learning by having people go through the basics of Second Life content creation. I think it's a bit more rewarding when you can say "Hey mom, look I made this game" as opposed to learning the formalities of typing and writing maintainable code. These things can come later.
It scales out a little bit too - you can make a few dollars in Second Life in various ways, one is by selling and creating new content. Possibly your teen can earn a bit of a summer income from what they learn in SL - a great way to develop their entrepreneurship skills.
And hey, if you're not familiar with Second Life, maybe you and your son can explore and learn it together. Of course, there are drawbacks to letting them explore - For instance you will no doubt encounter objectionable/pornographic content eventually.
On a completely different note, another fun way to learn the basics might be to play around with Flash or Phrogram.
I own a Wii, it's tremendous fun but the accuracy of the wiimote seems to be lacking. For example, when playing Wii Sports boxing, the motion understanding can be quite erratic. I've never been able to figure out which motion corresponds to which punch your avatar performs, and its actions don't seem to be very repeatable.
Does everyone else have this sort of experience?
Regardless, I think this add-on might be very good for all future wii games if they can have more accurate controllers.
Most people drive SUVs because they like the way they look, and then they rationalize it by coming up with other reasons.
That's just human nature - people rationalize. You could say exactly the same thing about people who hate SUVs.
Take this thread for instance, this guy says he likes to see over the traffic ahead of him and there's 30 replies suggesting this is stupid, he's compensating for a small penis, how he's a menace to everyone around him, etc etc.
We already have larger vehicles (like buses, 18-wheel-trucks) that we accept on the road and are perfectly safe and practical if driven intelligently.
But this poor guy is essentially getting flamed because he dare suggest that he likes some aspect of having an SUV.
(No, I don't own and SUV, I don't even like them. I think they're ugly, too big, inefficient and they handle poorly - but I don't mind if you have one.)
when asked, "how's your University", most of them just shrug and say "meh, it's alright, its a University." You're right on the first point, noone ever calls UW the "MIT of the North". As far as being just another university though, I'd have to disagree. I think UW is one of the strongest technical universities in the world. One of the things they like to brag about at UW is their results in the world ACM programming contest. (For reference, UW placed ahead of MIT 10 years in the last 15.) More anecdotally, having worked with graduates from all around the world, I'd really have to say that UW tends to produce more effective software engineers than other schools.
I can see how your friends might have mixed feelings about the place though - the administration can treat people quite poorly, and life as an undergrad can be stressful. As an alumni, I'm glad to have gone through it, and I'm glad not to be there
As for the original story, I'm glad to see UW doing something like this. Developing UW spinoff companies wasn't something that most of us considered, but this could really encourage that sort of thing. I think that's good for the school and the economy in the long term.
I'm on Comcast, in Portland OR. I pay for 6Mb down/384Kb up. (Lowercase "b" for "bits")
Speed tests with 3 of the popular ones, all sites in San Francisco:
dslreports.com: (bandwidth provided by Megapath Networks)
8126 Kb down / 1582 Kb up
Speedtest.net (bandwidth provided by Unwired)
6823 Kb down / 781 Kb up
Speakeasy.net
8944 Kb down / 1195 Kb up
I also have my own Linux box at local University. I did a wget from both ends, watched the output. (No fancy TCP overhead calculations or anything)
For the first little bit I get:
8400 Kb down / 1544 Kb up
And then the Comcast traffic shaper kicks in and I get:
6176 Kb down / 356 Kb up
Which is more or less what Comcast advertises. For the most part, I'm a happy Comcast customer, although it's not like I haven't had my share of troubles. After complaining about a flaky connection a few times last year, they finally sent in a technician. He measured my signal quality, laughed and said, "I can't believe this works." Apparently the last cable guy Comcast sent over installed a splitter and cable that was never intended to carry a broadband signal.
Myself, I use the Corel Draw suite. It comes with Photopaint (A photoshop equivalent) and Draw (Illustrator equivalent)
I only tend to use the bitmap/photoediting stuff. I've used Photopaint, Photoshop and GIMP, and I think they're all about equally powerful, but I hate Photoshop's and Gimp's user interface. I think it's poorly designed, and completely unintuitive for novice users.
Also, it's a fraction of the price to boot. I bought my software with an educational discount, but for regular users, according to amazon, Adobe Photoshop+Illustrator = $1,234.98, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 = $312.99.
For my PDF solution, I use JAWS PDF Creator, $64. My experience with it was better than with the Acrobat Pro which we used to have a site license for - some of my documents had some weird formatting which confused Acrobat, but handled fine with JAWS.
A little while ago, I saw this story about Cingular trying to collect a $31,000 bill from some guy that was clearly the victim of network error. Things like 4 roaming calls/minute from Nicaragua. I got worried enough this might happen to me, so I went to my cellphone provider to ask to put a cap on my account. Something like, "If my bill ever reaches $300 just turn off my phone."
They can't. As far as I can figure, the only reason for this policy is to try and screw people who didn't intend to spend so much money, or were mistakenly billed.
Incidentally, while I'm here, I might as well mention I'm on Cingular/AT&T. ("Fewest dropped calls!") My experience with this network has been absolute garbage, with frequent dropped calls regardless of how many bars I have. As far as I can tell, they can make this claim because they don't have a way of differentiating regular hang-ups from a dropped call. (I asked a Cingular tech how I could tell which side of the conversation was dropping, and he said there's no way for me to differentiate me dropping the call, the other side dropping the call, and someone just hanging up.)
Oh well. Only 19 months left on my contract...
It's kind of interesting, in Second Life, the client's camera can float around, and isn't constrained very rigidly by avatar location/orientation. But the important observation is that avatar positioning helps determine a social context.
:)
Something I've noticed in Second Life - when gathering in small groups, people tend to congregate in a circle, avatars all facing inwards. There's no need for this, especially with a free-floating camera. To compound it, your screen might often be covered with browsers, various chat windows, etc. The observation that real-world social conventions carry over into virtual spaces, even though it serves no practical purpose.
(You know, you could've just asked - to let everyone in on the joke, Jim's desk is about 10 feet from mine in the lab
A PhD signifies that you have an understanding of the field, and that you have made a novel contribution, and are, therefore, capable of research.
If your thesis is based on forged results, the merit of your contribution may be nothing, or even negative. Moreover, it casts doubt on your ability to carry out research. Honesty is a necessary requisite of doing research, and your reputation counts for a lot in academia.
Your highschool diploma means that you have completed all your highschool courses. If someone were to find that you passed all your courses by shoulder-surfing or bribing the teachers or whatever, I fully expect that the institution should be able to revoke your degree.
Some things in life aren't about pure functionality. I'm a mechanical watch hobbiest, and I get the asked "why" a lot. I have a longer explanation on my webpage if you would like a more poetic answer.
Part of the appreciation of a fine mechanical timepiece is purely artistic. If you've ever seen the inside of a Patek Philippe watch, you might understand the appeal. Or you might not. Art is funny that way.
Some of the appeal comes from the marvel of mechanical automations. Ever take a look at how an automatic transmission works? It's pretty fascinating. The same applies to mechanical watches. It's quite wonderful to understand how a swiss lever escapement keeps accurate time.
There's also the sentimental value. I have a nice mechanical that I received as a graduation present. One day, I hope it will be a graduation gift for my children, and the beginning of a new tradition.
If you can't find any value in art and sentiment, well, it may comfort you to know that some of them can be considered an investment. Over the last year, I've had some watches appreciate in value. I believe this trend will continue.
But I am certain that in 10 years, your timex will still be worthless.
In the SL world, everything works on Linden$ (L$). Everything you build costs money. For instance, if I want to build a cube (or other type of primitive) it costs me $10. If I destroy that cube, I get my $10 back. If I decide to keep the cube in the game at all times, even when I'm not logged in, I get taxed on it. This is to encourage people not to leave stuff just lying around, cluttering up the landscape, and more importantly, the game server with processing your junk.
:)
:)
Every week you get a stipend, of roughly L$1000, which will never increase your account balance beyond $3500. To gain more money than that, you have to earn it. One way of earning L$ is to sell things, such as clothes, models, or scripts.
Unless you figure out an exploit, you cannot steal anyone's things. Every note, script and object you create has a list of permissions, such as copyable, modifiable, moveable, buyable.
In most of the SL world, you cannot hurt anyone. In the areas where you can be hurt, if you die, all that happens is you get teleported home. That's it.
You don't have to worry about someone beating you up and robbing you
My favorite thing about SL is the scripting language. Like Hiro in snow crash. You can literally click an object in the game, and bring up the scripting code in a window, and start futzing with it. This is a really good toy version of the metaverse