While I agree with you that cyclists should follow the rules of the road, not looking both ways when crossing the street is your own damn fault. I don't care if it is a one way, it only takes a second and should be a habit that is firmly rooted in your mind--before you step off the curb, look both ways. I have seen cars go the wrong way down one ways (in downtown chicago no less) as well as bikers and while they are clearly out of line in going the wrong direction, the fact that they were wrong isn't going to be much consolation after you get run over for forgetting advice we give two year olds.
As to following traffic rules on a bike, it can be hard. If I am approaching a stop sign with cars in the vicinity, I will try to stop and go in the order prescribed by stop sign rules. This only works out about half the time. The other half the cars will stop and wait and then wave (even if they were fully stopped before I got to the intersection) and continue to wait until I go out of order (or continue without coming to a full stop). Of course this is probably due to peoples experiances with cyclists who would just blow through the stop even with traffic present (of course I see cars not stopping or coming to half-assed stops all the time where I live and it scares the shit out of me to think whether or not they would see a cyclist)
Just beware, the old style TI graphing calculators feel bombproof. I have seen countless ancient 83's as well as my well used 83+ and my newer 89 (the old style) and they just keep chugging along.
The new style ones (84, 89ti) all feel cheap andthe buttons are not as nice to use.
What interests me in this development is that Hasbro barely even seems to think that board games are relevant. Scrabulous seems to have proven that the board game itself could be exciting--it was a simple no-nonsense application. It had the board, some rules checking, some player interaction and a few handy features to make online play more fluid (like a notepad since it could often be days between moves and you might forget some ideas you had).
Hasbro seems to be rejecting the idea that anyone would want to just play the damn game. Clearly people would rather see 3d tiles float around than be able to place them quickly and easily in order to enjoy the game itself.
Where are you driving that you need over an hour (almost two if you are going 55) to think about getting gas?
When the gas light comes on you should still have over a gallon left in a small car(look in your manual, it is usually called reserve) which should be enough to get you to a gas station on any interstate in the US
Maybe you need a new battery? My razr is good for days on end (granted I don't use a lot of talk time). It was starting to feel low...would have to charge *almost* every other day or risk going too far into low battery sudden-death territory so I replaced it with some battery I got almost free off of slickdeals. After the phone figured out the calculations on the new battery (the first few charges it would stay at max until it went red) it has been lasting long long periods of time like a phone should.
When I needed to find the area under a curve...I got a TI-89 and let it do all of the hard work;)
Was a lovely machine...always thought it was a shame I didnt do more coding on it. Once I got the 89 I had already moved to where I had better uses of my time in math class and access to more useful programming outside of it (also the 89 would probably be easier to write for on a 92 with qwerty)
Ooh I forgot to mention that in my post above (where I talked about learning basic on TI-graphing calculators)...
mIRC scripting was a very early attempt at coding for me. The code is interpreted so no worries about compiling and it is very easy to pick up. I had gathered some collection of mirc scripts and at some point I didnt like how one behaved so I started to change it.
Testing thigns like triggered responses is very easy but still develops a way to code things. My scripts/bots never got too complex..probably the most complex thing I got use of was a bot that listened in its channels for the password to a private channel (for a planetarion alliance). If someone said the password (such as a typoed/join), the bot would immediately change to a randomly generated password, log the occurance and who was at fault, and FTP a text file containing that password to a server so that our internal website would always display the current password... Of course that was all useless as soon as the chan/nickserv type bot on the network started supporting a viable user-level management system to autoinvite members.
No offence as I know there are people who love it but getting some kid into programming in this day should probably not involve too much assembly.
x86 isn't the prettiest architechture to write for and it certainly doesn't have the easily available resources that a higher level language has available (or even 68k/z80). My experiance with assembly comes after C (so I already had an understanding of pointers) and I can say with a reasonable ammount of certainty that if somebody had tried to make me start off with machine instructions, I would not have been interested. It was much more engaging to see how code is translated into assembly once you already know about the mechanics of programming...gives you a better reference to what the jump instructions or the comparisons are actually accomplishing in the greater scheme of the program.
For me it was TI basic on a TI-83+ graphing calculator. It has a nice, functional language and can be used anywhere--like when bored in class (better he learns to program in a too-easy math class than absolutely nothing). It may help that I got the calculator before I got a link cable (so no easy loading of games from a computer) and I was on vacation for christmas. This made me go through the manual and I still remember following the instructions in the book to enter in the sierpinsky triangle program (as an aside, remembering the mess of a program this became was what made me admire the beauty of scheme the first time I saw a recursive object style implementation). There were probably some other good programs in the book along with great programming reference (and nowdays they have an App I think that gives you help/syntax for every function).
The language is somewhat limited but there are some fun things you can do...here are some I tried:
-Simple menu/input interaction: "Enter your name" "[name] SUCKS!" to simple menu driven adventures/stories (or you may remeber the DrugWars trading game...subject matter might not be appealing but it is a good example")
-Input gathering: This is where you start to need to learn loops and conditionals. Once you can loop a getkey and respond to the arrow keys, it is trivial to make an X move around the screen with output(). From there you could make a tunnel sort of game (slow of course in basic and ugly compared to the ASM games but still fun to make). Due to the volatility of non-archive memory on these calculators, I reprogrammed little snippets like this quite often for different uses.
-Display manipulation: My personal favorite program I ever wrote on the calculator (and rewrote as with above) was a text-enlarger. It would take two inputs, a string of up to 4 chars and then a single char (to be used as the "pixel" for the large word). The graph display would then have to be initialized and cleared (save the state of the functions but turn them off, turn off axis, etc) and then I would use the text function to write the word onto the screen (the text on the graph screen is smaller than the calculator screen). The pixel test function would then loop throug the rectangle containing those four letters and store the result (on/off) into a matrix. Upon completion, I would clear home and then use output to map the matrix to the text-grid of the home screen--printing the chosen character for every pixel that was on and a space for every pixel that was off, giving a word that takes up the whole screen. The idea wasn't mine but the implementation was all self-taught during some sort of class. Also on the topic of display manipulation, I always made a lot of little programs that made random writes to the graph screen sort of like a screen saver (random dots appearing, random lines being drawn, etc).
It's not a perfect platform but it can be easily carried around and allow for quick programming (I even wrote programs in math class when it would be faster than doing repetetive work).
I don't think you understand what I mean by connectivity.
For your suggestion to make any sense at all it would mean that when you are in middle of nowhere iowa with no 3G service, you just pull out your G-Office Appliance from your backpack, set your laptop on top of the nice big rackmount case, and start working. Still doesnt solve the no-connectivity issue in terms of all documents being stored remotely on the office suite server.
Of course you could just have a local copy of the apps, but then why not just have a local copy of Office (or OO.o which is still way more featured than the web-based ones) that you can run no matter the status of the internet.
hey...I've got a few gmail accounts...but when they make the system invite-only you are going to want to feel all exclusive and get in on it.
I'm not saying it is a bad system--it's the best webmail out there--but give me my imap accounts and thunderbird any day. I would use it as an on-the-go system for checking my accounts but a lot of its great benefits are lost (the whole label/tag paradigm doesn't really jive with thunderbird although it would be a nice future direction).
The huge issue is still connectivity. Internet may seem overly prevalent with wifi/3g/ethernet available all over corporate offices and big city settings but try getting work done somewhere rural where it is hard to get even a usable voice connection (forget 3g outside of a intermediate city and its nearby suburbs). Add to that the amount of work done on flights and you will see where google docs is just not right for reliable business use.
An installed desktop version would be great but it is going to need to come a long way to compete with office. Even if *you* don't use some particular feature, as long as somebody in some department needs it to do their job, it makes more sense to standardize everyone on the tool that works (you'll be paying for the volume license anyways and maybe you will need to deal with someone elses document that uses an extra feature).
Torrents are what have always locked up my routers or at least made them unusable. It seems to be the connection count rather than bandwidth that matters so I usually capped connection totals.
Now I have a Buffalo G125 with dd-wrt and is AMAZING (good luck finding one of them these days in the states after their legal troubles though). The last time I had a necessary reboot was when I upgraded the firmware (to enable cool things like bandwidth graphs). Sometimes I will reboot it when it is not necessary--such as when comcast has some sort of unknown network issue so my first thought is to start powercycling things until I remember the cable modem's IP and see that there are connection errors in the log. Other than that, rock solid stable with 5 active users and a good deal of game/torrent traffic.
I seem to remember mandrake/mandriva offering choices at install that would allow me to select the Dev tools. Now the first thing I install on ubuntu is build-essential or whatever the meta-package that gets make, gcc, etc (I think build-essential might actually be the kernel header meta-package but it invokes dependencies on all the dev tools I need)
I gave up on mandriva about when it made the name change (I switched sometime late 2005/early 2006) mainly because I wanted to give the new ubuntu thing a try. I don't remember what it was, but it stuck (even gradually pulled me from kubuntu to ubuntu)
I find it odd that you should have to reboot so often. Kernel updates are rare and about the only thing that apt-get updates will do to force a reboot.
As to having "more" updates, I think you are missing out the fact that windows update only patches core windows components (and does so on a regular schedule). apt-get updates almost every piece of software on your system and can do so as soon as an update becomes available. I know that I don't have the most current versions of all of my software on windows--programs that don't get used often wont get a chance to check for updates and even when they do, I usually choose to wait since I want to start using the program as fast as possible. When I update in ubuntu with apt-get (or urpmi when I used to use mandrake), it will catch all of those programs and perform the update at a time which won't interfere with my use of the program.
I bet I would be a lot more prone to updating acrobat or winamp if it asked me as I closed it rather than when I was opening it (as long as it just went ahead and did the update silently after that and didn't try to reopen the program or prompt me a bunch of times)
It used to be really bad in high school. Some (most) of the library/computer lab systems were on 60hz despite all hardware involved definately supporting at least 85hz. To my eyes, the flicker was horrendous and I would get headaches just trying to work (bad if you are doing something like writing a timed essay). Of course on those systems they don't even let you have display properties because god forbid you might set the background to a notepad drawing of a penis, and the person working in the lab would just look at me like I was crazy. Nowdays this is probably less of an issue...systems may default higher and LCDs have probably replaced CRTs even in high schools
As an aside, another poster mentioned playing lots of FPSs as being a factor. At that time I was certainly playing a reasonable amount of CS or something so it might be true. I have noticed I often have a fairly acute sense of the flicker. I can see the flicker in flourescant lights with the cheap ballasts and I can see it in movie theaters when a scene is white/bright (was a pleasant surprise the first time I realized I was watching a digital projection...no flicker)
Not quite the same as seeing the refresh rate but still interesting is using your CRT as a sort of scientific strobe:
If you have a sonicare toothbrush or other similarly high speed object, take it and hold it in front of a white area on a CRT. This should slow the motion similar to the effect of a strobe light. Because of the high refresh, you should be able to see a very smooth but slowed down rendition of the movement pattern that is actually occuring in the bristles of the toothbrush. I don't have a CRT anymore so I can't check but if I remember correctly, it will work better in a dark room (and you have to have the brush between you and the monitor, you can't see it from the glow of the screen alone)
Almost...but I think you got it backwards (and skipped EU).
"The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)..."
It is awkward to and incorrect to use the abbreviation first followed by an explanation. You should instead write out the first instance and then provide the reader a note to the effect of "hereafter to be referred to as XYX"
I'd be wary of any 2006 housing figures...the data is 2 years old (which when you are talking about a 4-year change is pretty old) and we all know those homes were overvalued. Considering that bubble burst, I wouldn't be surprised if the prices started to fall back in line.
and diablo has historically been developed by the team at the former blizzard north while the warcraft series was maintained by the core blizzard group.
Slashdot Mirror
As to following traffic rules on a bike, it can be hard. If I am approaching a stop sign with cars in the vicinity, I will try to stop and go in the order prescribed by stop sign rules. This only works out about half the time. The other half the cars will stop and wait and then wave (even if they were fully stopped before I got to the intersection) and continue to wait until I go out of order (or continue without coming to a full stop). Of course this is probably due to peoples experiances with cyclists who would just blow through the stop even with traffic present (of course I see cars not stopping or coming to half-assed stops all the time where I live and it scares the shit out of me to think whether or not they would see a cyclist)
The new style ones (84, 89ti) all feel cheap andthe buttons are not as nice to use.
Hasbro seems to be rejecting the idea that anyone would want to just play the damn game. Clearly people would rather see 3d tiles float around than be able to place them quickly and easily in order to enjoy the game itself.
When the gas light comes on you should still have over a gallon left in a small car(look in your manual, it is usually called reserve) which should be enough to get you to a gas station on any interstate in the US
Maybe you need a new battery? My razr is good for days on end (granted I don't use a lot of talk time). It was starting to feel low...would have to charge *almost* every other day or risk going too far into low battery sudden-death territory so I replaced it with some battery I got almost free off of slickdeals. After the phone figured out the calculations on the new battery (the first few charges it would stay at max until it went red) it has been lasting long long periods of time like a phone should.
Exactly. And that that has worked for all of these years as a business model just shows how stupid and lazy people are.
Was a lovely machine...always thought it was a shame I didnt do more coding on it. Once I got the 89 I had already moved to where I had better uses of my time in math class and access to more useful programming outside of it (also the 89 would probably be easier to write for on a 92 with qwerty)
mIRC scripting was a very early attempt at coding for me. The code is interpreted so no worries about compiling and it is very easy to pick up. I had gathered some collection of mirc scripts and at some point I didnt like how one behaved so I started to change it. Testing thigns like triggered responses is very easy but still develops a way to code things. My scripts/bots never got too complex..probably the most complex thing I got use of was a bot that listened in its channels for the password to a private channel (for a planetarion alliance). If someone said the password (such as a typoed /join), the bot would immediately change to a randomly generated password, log the occurance and who was at fault, and FTP a text file containing that password to a server so that our internal website would always display the current password... Of course that was all useless as soon as the chan/nickserv type bot on the network started supporting a viable user-level management system to autoinvite members.
x86 isn't the prettiest architechture to write for and it certainly doesn't have the easily available resources that a higher level language has available (or even 68k/z80). My experiance with assembly comes after C (so I already had an understanding of pointers) and I can say with a reasonable ammount of certainty that if somebody had tried to make me start off with machine instructions, I would not have been interested. It was much more engaging to see how code is translated into assembly once you already know about the mechanics of programming...gives you a better reference to what the jump instructions or the comparisons are actually accomplishing in the greater scheme of the program.
The language is somewhat limited but there are some fun things you can do...here are some I tried:
-Simple menu/input interaction: "Enter your name" "[name] SUCKS!" to simple menu driven adventures/stories (or you may remeber the DrugWars trading game...subject matter might not be appealing but it is a good example")
-Input gathering: This is where you start to need to learn loops and conditionals. Once you can loop a getkey and respond to the arrow keys, it is trivial to make an X move around the screen with output(). From there you could make a tunnel sort of game (slow of course in basic and ugly compared to the ASM games but still fun to make). Due to the volatility of non-archive memory on these calculators, I reprogrammed little snippets like this quite often for different uses.
-Display manipulation: My personal favorite program I ever wrote on the calculator (and rewrote as with above) was a text-enlarger. It would take two inputs, a string of up to 4 chars and then a single char (to be used as the "pixel" for the large word). The graph display would then have to be initialized and cleared (save the state of the functions but turn them off, turn off axis, etc) and then I would use the text function to write the word onto the screen (the text on the graph screen is smaller than the calculator screen). The pixel test function would then loop throug the rectangle containing those four letters and store the result (on/off) into a matrix. Upon completion, I would clear home and then use output to map the matrix to the text-grid of the home screen--printing the chosen character for every pixel that was on and a space for every pixel that was off, giving a word that takes up the whole screen. The idea wasn't mine but the implementation was all self-taught during some sort of class. Also on the topic of display manipulation, I always made a lot of little programs that made random writes to the graph screen sort of like a screen saver (random dots appearing, random lines being drawn, etc).
It's not a perfect platform but it can be easily carried around and allow for quick programming (I even wrote programs in math class when it would be faster than doing repetetive work).
For your suggestion to make any sense at all it would mean that when you are in middle of nowhere iowa with no 3G service, you just pull out your G-Office Appliance from your backpack, set your laptop on top of the nice big rackmount case, and start working. Still doesnt solve the no-connectivity issue in terms of all documents being stored remotely on the office suite server.
Of course you could just have a local copy of the apps, but then why not just have a local copy of Office (or OO.o which is still way more featured than the web-based ones) that you can run no matter the status of the internet.
I'm not saying it is a bad system--it's the best webmail out there--but give me my imap accounts and thunderbird any day. I would use it as an on-the-go system for checking my accounts but a lot of its great benefits are lost (the whole label/tag paradigm doesn't really jive with thunderbird although it would be a nice future direction).
An installed desktop version would be great but it is going to need to come a long way to compete with office. Even if *you* don't use some particular feature, as long as somebody in some department needs it to do their job, it makes more sense to standardize everyone on the tool that works (you'll be paying for the volume license anyways and maybe you will need to deal with someone elses document that uses an extra feature).
It would add to the conversation if he included pictures
If you dont need those extra functions, it might be worth a shot to try standard and see if it fixes the problems.
Perhaps the non-router specific version has issues?
Now I have a Buffalo G125 with dd-wrt and is AMAZING (good luck finding one of them these days in the states after their legal troubles though). The last time I had a necessary reboot was when I upgraded the firmware (to enable cool things like bandwidth graphs). Sometimes I will reboot it when it is not necessary--such as when comcast has some sort of unknown network issue so my first thought is to start powercycling things until I remember the cable modem's IP and see that there are connection errors in the log. Other than that, rock solid stable with 5 active users and a good deal of game/torrent traffic.
I gave up on mandriva about when it made the name change (I switched sometime late 2005/early 2006) mainly because I wanted to give the new ubuntu thing a try. I don't remember what it was, but it stuck (even gradually pulled me from kubuntu to ubuntu)
As to having "more" updates, I think you are missing out the fact that windows update only patches core windows components (and does so on a regular schedule). apt-get updates almost every piece of software on your system and can do so as soon as an update becomes available. I know that I don't have the most current versions of all of my software on windows--programs that don't get used often wont get a chance to check for updates and even when they do, I usually choose to wait since I want to start using the program as fast as possible. When I update in ubuntu with apt-get (or urpmi when I used to use mandrake), it will catch all of those programs and perform the update at a time which won't interfere with my use of the program.
I bet I would be a lot more prone to updating acrobat or winamp if it asked me as I closed it rather than when I was opening it (as long as it just went ahead and did the update silently after that and didn't try to reopen the program or prompt me a bunch of times)
It used to be really bad in high school. Some (most) of the library/computer lab systems were on 60hz despite all hardware involved definately supporting at least 85hz. To my eyes, the flicker was horrendous and I would get headaches just trying to work (bad if you are doing something like writing a timed essay). Of course on those systems they don't even let you have display properties because god forbid you might set the background to a notepad drawing of a penis, and the person working in the lab would just look at me like I was crazy. Nowdays this is probably less of an issue...systems may default higher and LCDs have probably replaced CRTs even in high schools As an aside, another poster mentioned playing lots of FPSs as being a factor. At that time I was certainly playing a reasonable amount of CS or something so it might be true. I have noticed I often have a fairly acute sense of the flicker. I can see the flicker in flourescant lights with the cheap ballasts and I can see it in movie theaters when a scene is white/bright (was a pleasant surprise the first time I realized I was watching a digital projection...no flicker)
If you have a sonicare toothbrush or other similarly high speed object, take it and hold it in front of a white area on a CRT. This should slow the motion similar to the effect of a strobe light. Because of the high refresh, you should be able to see a very smooth but slowed down rendition of the movement pattern that is actually occuring in the bristles of the toothbrush. I don't have a CRT anymore so I can't check but if I remember correctly, it will work better in a dark room (and you have to have the brush between you and the monitor, you can't see it from the glow of the screen alone)
Thinking about either avast or avira
"The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)..."
It is awkward to and incorrect to use the abbreviation first followed by an explanation. You should instead write out the first instance and then provide the reader a note to the effect of "hereafter to be referred to as XYX"
I'd be wary of any 2006 housing figures...the data is 2 years old (which when you are talking about a 4-year change is pretty old) and we all know those homes were overvalued. Considering that bubble burst, I wouldn't be surprised if the prices started to fall back in line.
and diablo has historically been developed by the team at the former blizzard north while the warcraft series was maintained by the core blizzard group.