While more "gear head" than "techy", the new hi-tech LED flashlights (Fenix) can probably fit in anyone's home arsenal of tools and toys--whether it's one to 'always carry' or 'store at home for emergency'. These AFAICT are "police grade"--well engineered tools
I've read that some of the models are effective in temporarily blinding intruders
I highly recommend listening to WFMT classical radio station (streaming, or in Chicago 98.7) while coding.
WFMT is the only station in the country that has announcer-read ads (i.e no jingles or pre-recorded commercials. Thus their commercials are non-intrusive.). Their announcers are excellent. The programming is accessible but a good mix. It's really great around Christmas.
Classical music for me helps me concentrate and, unlike my rock/rap doesn't distract me from intense concentration. (As a rule, I put on rock only when I'm doing work that doesn't require much concentration).
Don't like classical? It's actually good stuff if you develop a taste for it.
The poster seems hostile to everything the RIAA says. I too distrust them. That said, I think "teaching children to respect intellectual property" deserves some attention --more so now because the technology changes make copying easier than ever.
I personally think it's flat-out wrong to download/watch a pirated movie while it's still in the theaters. Is it as wrong to download an out-of-print video on Bit Torrent?
If it's wrong to copy music from a struggling artist, why is it less wrong to copy The Blueprint #3?
Fwiw, Johannes Brahms made his money by selling rights to music publishers : he would transcribe his string works (e.g. string quartets) for piano..people bought the sheet music to play in their own home for their own entertainment. To clarify: most homes people had musical skill to read and play Brahms on the piano. And that's how Austrian folks entertained themselves.
I have recently read several classic books on a treo centro with plucker. While not perfect, the application is handy and the screen bright and readable. I prefer a paper book, but recommend the combination for reading "free classics".
For example, I just read a novel by Sir Walter Scott (Waverley). I checked out the print from the library. I also downloaded the e-text from gutenberg.org. I'd switch back and forth between them depending on the situatino.
Overall if I had a prolonged period of reading in a well-lit place, I'd prefer the print book. But I have found plucker very handy due to the fact that I always have my cell phone. Also, plucker resumes exactly where I left off.
Times I found plucker/centro handy: * in the hospital waiting room * waiting for my wife in the store. * on the train ("El" ) into work.
You may see a theme here: anytime I find myself "waiting", the centro/plucker gives me opportunity to read, if only for a few minutes
Pretty much any author from the 1800's is available for free (Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Bronte, Walter Scott, Wodehouse, Gibbon) on Gutenberg. /
As an extravert, I'm pretty aware that the people I've worked with who are very good programmers are all introverts--ability to focus on hard problems, enjoying working by themselves, etc.
I've concluded that while society values salesmen and take-charge-folks, the the lone author/scientist/programmer/inventor, etc. tends to make the lasting works society in the long run values.
> With Linux Zaurses becoming popular...Not on this side of the pond. Sharp stopped selling the zaurus here (in the US) a few years ago. A concession to the inability to crack the PDA market. Great machine, however.
I'm using firefox 1.0.6 on Gentoo and the fonts for the *article bodies* on the slashcode/css look very bad compared to the ones on slashdot. (grainy, not smooth, etc).
i.e. the stuff in these two tags:
I know linux decently, but don't know (and dont' care to know) about fonts and font configuration. I would prefer slashdot to look good with minimal fuss in the realm of font configuration.
IMO Wired is the "popular science for a new generation." Now that it's recovered from its New Economy religious fervor (circa 1999), it's quality has IMHO dramatically improved: the articles are (mostly) sensible and high quality and they've upped the gagdetry reporting. It's the place to go to see "what's new." ("what's new" is a longstanding feature of Popular Science).
Yes, the "Tired vs. Wired" tastemaking stuff is passe, but for.80 US dollars an issue, it's very cheap. (And the $10 NextFest admission included a 12 month subscription). I think it's a lot of fun per buck.
The naysayers are wrong. NextFest was a lot of fun. It was like a science museum on steroids--with real live engineers and scientists there to answer your questions. The Nasa exhibit rocked--especially since the mars-rover programmers were there. Yes, it was subsidized by and represented the military-industrial complex, but that subsidy allowed the art-and-design institutes, the grad students, and even high schoolers to participate.
Here's a copy of my original post from last weekend. I don't think people fully appreciated the wealth of talent that was present:
I spent yesterday at NextFest and had really interesting conversations with the scientists and engineers behind the technologies. Whereas most trade shows have marketing-folk, NextFest had the "real deal" folks there. Conversing with them about their projects was quite easy:
Example interesting conversations: * Electrical Engineers from Sweden working on innovative devices for monitoring power use * Doctoral CS candidates preseting their thesis projects. * Art/Design professors from Tokyo and Vienna working on interactive media projects.
* Undergrads from Dublin working on a video game (controlled by breath) which they found equally popular with boys and girls. * The Mars Rover programmers were there. (I didn't get a chance to talk w/ them, however, but could have). * The La Vida Robot guys and their teacher (who bested MIT in the underwater bot contest).
Loads of Interesting Conversations
on
NextFest 2005
·
· Score: 1
I spent yesterday at NextFest and had really interesting conversations with the scientists and engineers behind the technologies. Whereas most trade shows have marketing-folk, NextFest had the "real deal" folks there. Conversing with them about their projects was quite easy:
Example interesting conversations: * Electrical Engineers from Sweden working on innovative devices for monitoring power use * Doctoral CS candidates preseting their thesis projects. * Art/Design professors from Tokyo and Vienna working on multimedia/communication projects synthesizing technology with * Undergrads from Dublin working on a video game (controlled by breath) which they found equally popular with boys and girls. * The Mars Rover programmers were there. (I didn't get a chance to talk w/ them, however, but could have). * The La Vida Robot guys and their teacher (who bested MIT in the underwater bot contest).
fwiw, I had one of these about a year ago from Los Altos Computers (same machine, same manufacturer, different vendor). I had to return it as it developed the nasty habit of locking up after I used it for a 15-20 minutes or so--regardless of the OS. I never found the underlying reason, but both I and the techs at LAC suspected heat problems.
From what they said, a small, but definite percentage of machines had problems when maxed w/ a fast cpu and lots of RAM (mine had 2gb).
I was extremely happy with how LAC linux gave me a full refund. Gentlemen and scholars indeed!
For best results, if you get a such a machine, run it long and hard initially to see if you have any heat issues. Return it immediately if you do.
The basic idea: use solid state ram drives (with separate power supply) for your busy tablespaces and your redo logs.
This leverages 'cheap ram' technology with existing (and proven and scalable) db architecture.
For ebay, for example, they might store 'active items' in 'ram-drive-backed' tablespace and 'old items' in the 'hard-drive-backed tablespace'.
These solid-state drives are expensive, but additional Oracle licenses (or moving from 'standard' to 'enterprise' or to 'clustered') are very very expensive.
bill m
Nice to see industy appeal to 'positive' emotions
on
Instant Concert CDs?
·
· Score: 1
Concert merchandise is an important source of revenue for most bands--especially smallish indie bands (e.g. Sleater-Kinney).
For emotional reasons, people spend more money at concerts than they would elsewhere because they want 'authentic' mementoes. (Remember how in high school you'd nonchalantly, but with secret pride, wear your shirt the next day to show your coolnes.) Last concerts I've been to, the t-shirts and cd's seemed overpriced, but folks still lined up for them.
From a 'purely rational' standpoint, it might not make sense to get the recording. i.e. it might not be technically/acoustically poor, a better concert might occur a few days later and you could probably download that...but hey you'd have immediately own a 'rare' cover (it seems like most concerts have one of these) and maybe hear yourself cough in the background.
It's nice to see the music industry think of new products which appeal to emotions... I'd like to see them continue in this line and bring back cover art, picture discs, and limited edition cd's....
The team has one or two really excellent people who share their knowledge.
Everyone gets $250/year for books and magazines
Formal training class/conference every other year or when you're shifting technologies or see a deficiency in the project...with the understanding that you'll put what you learnred into practice. bring the other people on the team up to speed immediatly
(Some) tuition reimbursement for technical classes at the local university.
Comments:
1) You really learn a lot from working on projects with good people.
2) a $40 book goes a long way on giving a project skills. Companies should incent employees to buy books that they'll read on their own time. It's a pittance compared to salary and benefits and seminar fees.
3) Formal training really has its place. I worked on a java project where we were switching from jsp/servlet's to j2ee/ejb's and two of us tried to come up to speed from nothing very quickly. In hindsight a week each of a quality training would have
a) helped us discern the hype from the reality.
b) helped us make good architectural decisions.
There's a lot to say for periodically getting out of every day busy-ness and retooling your brain a bit.
And if you don't want to travel or take class, you should be able to take a day off every so often to read up on one of the books you read.
4) While 'Mastering VB n+1' might make for good 'training', there's a lot to say for academic learning--i.e. with emphasis on design and theory--especially for people who lack formal backgrounds.
Lawrence Rosen wrote a about a similar subject in March 2002 issue of Linux Journal..
Basically he says 'be wary of looking at MSFT code (i.e if they do 'open' it up a bit), because you may become IP tainted...i.e. if you solve a problem similarly to the way they solve it, they may be able to claim that you copied their ideas and thus violated their IP rights.
The people dissing this question don't understand the subtlety of it. IMHO the poster posits a legitimate question.
I ripped it and had it on my machine at work. I also lent the cd to a coworker.
No one really dug on it too much. Including me (except for the first track...sorry, moby). I've removed it because of hard disk limitations and no one's complained. (and no one has copied it AFAIK.)
On another note, moby's comment ultimately revolves about how artists are judged. Movie and musicians now are totally judged on what they deliver financially..if someone has a 'miss' (i.e. low-selling album) they're immediately candidate for the 'has been' bin.
Slashdot Mirror
While more "gear head" than "techy", the new hi-tech LED flashlights (Fenix) can probably fit in anyone's home arsenal of tools and toys--whether it's one to 'always carry' or 'store at home for emergency'. These AFAICT are "police grade"--well engineered tools
I've read that some of the models are effective in temporarily blinding intruders
http://www.fenixlight.com/newping.asp
Mod this one up.
Pre-teen boys work to understand and undermine alien race controlling the planet
I found it a great read is a kid.
As a developer, I need more vertical screen space: looking at code, looking at debuggers, editing long files.
I have two monitors at work: an ld 19" and 23". The 23" has less vertical screen space than the 19".
More vetical screen real estate would make a laptop more dev friendly
two cents: both The Economist and Consumer Reports have reasonable effective paywalls.
Economist: print subscription plus online is $70-100 per year
Consumer reports: $26/year
The difference: the price.
NY Times should drop the price.
I highly recommend listening to WFMT classical radio station (streaming, or in Chicago 98.7) while coding.
WFMT is the only station in the country that has announcer-read ads (i.e no jingles or pre-recorded commercials. Thus their commercials are non-intrusive.). Their announcers are excellent. The programming is accessible but a good mix. It's really great around Christmas.
Classical music for me helps me concentrate and, unlike my rock/rap doesn't distract me from intense concentration. (As a rule, I put on rock only when I'm doing work that doesn't require much concentration).
Don't like classical? It's actually good stuff if you develop a taste for it.
The poster seems hostile to everything the RIAA says. I too distrust them. That said, I think "teaching children to respect intellectual property" deserves some attention --more so now because the technology changes make copying easier than ever.
I personally think it's flat-out wrong to download/watch a pirated movie while it's still in the theaters. Is it as wrong to download an out-of-print video on Bit Torrent?
If it's wrong to copy music from a struggling artist, why is it less wrong to copy The Blueprint #3?
Fwiw, Johannes Brahms made his money by selling rights to music publishers : he would transcribe his string works (e.g. string quartets) for piano ..people bought the sheet music to play in their own home for their own entertainment. To clarify: most homes people had musical skill to read and play Brahms on the piano. And that's how Austrian folks entertained themselves.
Times have changed indeed.
I have recently read several classic books on a treo centro with plucker. While not perfect, the application is handy and the screen bright and readable. I prefer a paper book, but recommend the combination for reading "free classics".
For example, I just read a novel by Sir Walter Scott (Waverley). I checked out the print from the library. I also downloaded the e-text from gutenberg.org. I'd switch back and forth between them depending on the situatino.
Overall if I had a prolonged period of reading in a well-lit place, I'd prefer the print book. But I have found plucker very handy due to the fact that I always have my cell phone. Also, plucker resumes exactly where I left off.
Times I found plucker/centro handy:
* in the hospital waiting room
* waiting for my wife in the store.
* on the train ("El" ) into work.
You may see a theme here: anytime I find myself "waiting", the centro/plucker gives me opportunity to read, if only for a few minutes
Pretty much any author from the 1800's is available for free (Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Bronte, Walter Scott, Wodehouse, Gibbon) on Gutenberg.
/
I don't understand why MSFT has treated the "command line crowd" with such a crappy product for the last 20 years.
They clearly did not want people to use the dos window: thus it's pretty much the same as in 1985 and lacks bash' niceties.
Only recently have they added auto-complete.
They clearly should have added an easier-to-use command line and made windows less of pain to administer from the command line.
As an extravert, I'm pretty aware that the people I've worked with who are very good programmers are all introverts--ability to focus on hard problems, enjoying working by themselves, etc.
I've concluded that while society values salesmen and take-charge-folks, the the lone author/scientist/programmer/inventor, etc. tends to make the lasting works society in the long run values.
> With Linux Zaurses becoming popular ...Not on this side of the pond. Sharp stopped selling the zaurus here (in the US) a few years ago. A concession to the inability to crack the PDA market. Great machine, however.
Mod this one down. It's "P. Diddy." not "P. Ditty"
I'm using firefox 1.0.6 on Gentoo and the fonts for the *article bodies* on the slashcode/css look very bad compared to the ones on slashdot. (grainy, not smooth, etc).
i.e. the stuff in these two tags:
I know linux decently, but don't know (and dont' care to know) about fonts and font configuration. I would prefer slashdot to look good with minimal fuss in the realm of font configuration.
IMO Wired is the "popular science for a new generation." Now that it's recovered from its New Economy religious fervor (circa 1999), it's quality has IMHO dramatically improved: the articles are (mostly) sensible and high quality and they've upped the gagdetry reporting. It's the place to go to see "what's new." ("what's new" is a longstanding feature of Popular Science).
.80 US dollars an issue, it's very cheap. (And the $10 NextFest admission included a 12 month subscription). I think it's a lot of fun per buck.
Yes, the "Tired vs. Wired" tastemaking stuff is passe, but for
The naysayers are wrong. NextFest was a lot of fun. It was like a science museum on steroids--with real live engineers and scientists there to answer your questions. The Nasa exhibit rocked--especially since the mars-rover programmers were there. Yes, it was subsidized by and represented the military-industrial complex, but that subsidy allowed the art-and-design institutes, the grad students, and even high schoolers to participate.
Here's a copy of my original post from last weekend. I don't think people fully appreciated the wealth of talent that was present:
I spent yesterday at NextFest and had really interesting conversations with the scientists and engineers behind the technologies. Whereas most trade shows have marketing-folk, NextFest had the "real deal" folks there. Conversing with them about their projects was quite easy:
Example interesting conversations:
* Electrical Engineers from Sweden working on innovative devices for monitoring power use
* Doctoral CS candidates preseting their thesis projects.
* Art/Design professors from Tokyo and Vienna working on interactive media projects.
* Undergrads from Dublin working on a video game (controlled by breath) which they found equally popular with boys and girls.
* The Mars Rover programmers were there. (I didn't get a chance to talk w/ them, however, but could have).
* The La Vida Robot guys and their teacher (who bested MIT in the underwater bot contest).
I spent yesterday at NextFest and had really interesting conversations with the scientists and engineers behind the technologies. Whereas most trade shows have marketing-folk, NextFest had the "real deal" folks there. Conversing with them about their projects was quite easy:
Example interesting conversations:
* Electrical Engineers from Sweden working on innovative devices for monitoring power use
* Doctoral CS candidates preseting their thesis projects.
* Art/Design professors from Tokyo and Vienna working on multimedia/communication projects synthesizing technology with
* Undergrads from Dublin working on a video game (controlled by breath) which they found equally popular with boys and girls.
* The Mars Rover programmers were there. (I didn't get a chance to talk w/ them, however, but could have).
* The La Vida Robot guys and their teacher (who bested MIT in the underwater bot contest).
fwiw, I had one of these about a year ago from Los Altos Computers (same machine, same manufacturer, different vendor). I had to return it as it developed the nasty habit of locking up after I used it for a 15-20 minutes or so--regardless of the OS. I never found the underlying reason, but both I and the techs at LAC suspected heat problems.
From what they said, a small, but definite percentage of machines had problems when maxed w/ a fast cpu and lots of RAM (mine had 2gb).
I was extremely happy with how LAC linux gave me a full refund. Gentlemen and scholars indeed!
For best results, if you get a such a machine, run it long and hard initially to see if you have any heat issues. Return it immediately if you do.
At first this idea annoyed me, as I've found some wonderful books at the Oak-Park Library book sale these last few years.
Yet I did see several dealers scouring for valuable books and hoarding them under the tables. I'm all for cutting these middle men out.
i agree. I'd like separate 'search mailing list' feature so as to distinguish between 'primary documents' and 'newsgroup-like' stuff
http://www.imperialtech.com/success_ebay.htm
The basic idea: use solid state ram drives (with separate power supply) for your busy tablespaces and your redo logs.
This leverages 'cheap ram' technology with existing (and proven and scalable) db architecture.
For ebay, for example, they might store 'active items' in 'ram-drive-backed' tablespace and 'old items' in the 'hard-drive-backed tablespace'.
These solid-state drives are expensive, but additional Oracle licenses (or moving from 'standard' to 'enterprise' or to 'clustered') are very very expensive.
bill m
Concert merchandise is an important source of revenue for most bands--especially smallish indie bands (e.g. Sleater-Kinney).
....
For emotional reasons, people spend more money at concerts than they would elsewhere because they want 'authentic' mementoes. (Remember how in high school you'd nonchalantly, but with secret pride, wear your shirt the next day to show your coolnes.) Last concerts I've been to, the t-shirts and cd's seemed overpriced,
but folks still lined up for them.
From a 'purely rational' standpoint, it might not make sense to get the recording. i.e. it might not be technically/acoustically poor, a better concert might occur a few days later and you could probably download that...but hey you'd have immediately own a 'rare' cover (it seems like most concerts have one of these) and maybe hear yourself cough in the background.
It's nice to see the music industry think of new products which appeal to emotions... I'd like to see them continue in this line and bring back cover art, picture discs, and limited edition cd's
This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm looking for a new phone/pda combo and can't find diddly about the price/availability of the P800.
Another poster said, 'sometime next year'...but what about price info?
He means the fine dystopic retro-futuristic Sci-Fi movie by Terry Gilliam, Brazil
Comments:
1) You really learn a lot from working on projects with good people.
2) a $40 book goes a long way on giving a project skills. Companies should incent employees to buy books that they'll read on their own time. It's a pittance compared to salary and benefits and seminar fees.
3) Formal training really has its place. I worked on a java project where we were switching from jsp/servlet's to j2ee/ejb's and two of us tried to come up to speed from nothing very quickly. In hindsight a week each of a quality training would have
a) helped us discern the hype from the reality.
b) helped us make good architectural decisions.
There's a lot to say for periodically getting out of every day busy-ness and retooling your brain a bit.
And if you don't want to travel or take class, you should be able to take a day off every so often to read up on one of the books you read.
4) While 'Mastering VB n+1' might make for good 'training', there's a lot to say for academic learning--i.e. with emphasis on design and theory--especially for people who lack formal backgrounds.
Lawrence Rosen wrote a about a similar subject in March 2002 issue of Linux Journal..
J 95 / 670.html
Basically he says 'be wary of looking at MSFT code (i.e if they do 'open' it up a bit), because you may become IP tainted...i.e. if you solve a problem similarly to the way they solve it, they may be able to claim that you copied their ideas and thus violated their IP rights.
The people dissing this question don't understand the subtlety of it. IMHO the poster posits a legitimate question.
http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/Magazines/L
(must be a subscriber)
OK. I actually bought 18 because I dug play.
I ripped it and had it on my machine at work. I also lent the cd to a coworker.
No one really dug on it too much. Including me (except for the first track...sorry, moby). I've removed it because of hard disk limitations and no one's complained. (and no one has copied it AFAIK.)
On another note, moby's comment ultimately revolves about how artists are judged. Movie and musicians now are totally judged on what they deliver financially..if someone has a 'miss' (i.e. low-selling album) they're immediately candidate for the 'has been' bin.