your right, I got my names and terminologies screwed up. Basically, one problem I've had in the past is two different applications each trying to open a different sound server, and then one of them doesn't work.
Sometimes you can't really figgure out a way to change an application to a different sound server, but you can always kill one at the command line.
I've run into the problem quite a bit, in my experience it's generally caused by having to pieces of software configured to use different sound drivers. When you start on peice of software it fires up that sound driver (for example ALSA) and then when you when you try to use some other software with a different sound driver (for example ARTs) then it can't access the audio device because the driver from the first software is running.
Stop Gap solution is to kill the previous driver process - best solution is to just make sure everything that plays sound is using the same driver.
The specs on the card look nice, though I have to wonder why it only has 128mb of memory for a "mid-range" card. Most other mid-range cards tend to have at least 256mb of ram, and nearly all of the high end cards have at least 512 megs of ram (the card I've been eyeing, though can't really justify the cost of right now has 640mb of memory). Of course, it's been quite a while since I've used either a FireGL or a Quatro, last I remember neither of the cards offered much bang for the buck or could really compete with cards from some of the manufacturers who just make workstation cards.
Perhaps I've just had the benefit of being sheltered and never seeing some dark underbelly, but it's always seemed to me that IT was one of the most equal opportunity fields. I've always noticed that there was a lot of diversity among people who worked in IT, of all the people I know, there seems to be an equal divide of men and women, younger and older people, etc.
Ofcourse, I've always thought that events that "encourage group X to Y" really does more harm than good, because it just re-enforces that "group X" is different.
The question that needs to be asked is, what useful purpose would a repository of presentations on F/OSS serve. You seem to be working under the idea that a good presentation would be useful in more venues than it was originally present in, but I'm not quite sure that this is really the case.
A good presentation is specifically targetted at the audience, and no two audiences are completely alike, and I'm not sure that the audiences would be similar enough for a good presentation given to one audience to be effective when given to another.
Audiences aside, a presentation should also play on the strengths of the presenter, and presenters probably vary even more widely than audiences.
One thing that could be useful however is a repository of information that could be used in creating presentations, if such a beast doesn't exist. This probably wouldn't have to be much more than a collection of links to other sites anyway, I'm sure the majority of the information is out there.
Of course, all that said, I'm all for promoting F/OSS, and it's good that we have new ideas on how to do this, and even if some of them don't pan out, it's always good that people are thinking of new things to help out F/OSS.
Seems to me that the easiest solution would be to higher someone, say a student, to work checking stuff out. Any sort of authentication system that's based on the id cards is suseptible to theft if someone steals someone else's id card. Having a system where someone can email a request for equipment might be workable, but I suspect that it would end up costing quite a bit of money just for that many safes, plus the hassle of resetting the combination every time someone checks something out. One thing you might consider is just putting a card reader on the door that's tied to the lock, and then putting a security camera in the room. Even if you don't have the time to actually go through all the tapes, being on camera can be somewhat of a deturrent.
Also remember that any system you implement to check out equipment also has to make it easy to return equipment. This means that automated solutions need to not rest combinations or whatever until the equipment is returned.
Also, if you choose to go with a technology solution, remember that even if it seems expensive, think of the cost of the equipment that could be stolen, or the cost of paying someone to man the desk.
It'll be interesting to see how this turns the tides of next generation consoles. There seems to be a correlation where the system with the largest number of decent RPGs tends to take the lead in the console wars for any given generation of consoles (the SNES seems to be the first real example of this, with it's large library of RPGs it continued to dominate even against the Saturn, and held on for a long while until the Playstation started to get good RPGs, something the N64 never really had, and the PS2 continued the tradition by being THE RPG console).
I'm not really sure why this correlation exists, perhaps it's because RPGs tend to start comming out after the console wars have pretty much been won, or maybe it's because hardcore gamers tend to go with consols that have lots of RPGs, and they make the recommendations to other buyers.
Even if it brings one really good RPG to the XBox2 then I'll probably buy it, if the XBox2 gets a lot of good RPGs, then it could win the next console war.
KStars is a pretty decent program, though I've found that Celestia is a bit better all around, it's demo mode is really neat, a reminds me a bit of the space part of he powers of 10 video. The nice thing about Celestia is that your not bound to earth, and can fly around the universe.
Hmm, this looks farily nice, when it finds the movie that you are looking for.I particularly like that it works well for searching for the name of a particular actor. The biggest problem I've found when playing around with it is that it doesn't seem to offer spelling suggestions,for example if you type "movie:Shawn of the Dead" it returns no results, but simply running a google search for "Shawn of the Dead" the first result is for the actual title "Shaun of the Dead". There also doesn't seem to be any sort of spell checking, so for example you get lots of results for "movie:Vin Diesel" but no results or spelling suggestions for "movie:Vin Diesal". (you may now engage in making fun of my taste in movies and actors).
The sort by rating function is nice, I tried typing "movie:2005" and sorted by rating to get a list of top rated movies of 2005.
Another example of strangeness I've found is that for current movies, it gives you a chance to search for show times, but does not show the results for the movie until after you search for show times, for example, I entered "movie:Hitch" and had to enter my zip code to search for show times, and on THAT results page it gave me the reviews results.
Overall, good idea google, but it does still need some work, I think I'll stick with imdb for now.
This seems interesting, though given intels track record I wonder if it will really be as useful as they are speculating, as the article has no real technical information.
Granted, I've never administered a server that was under anywhere remotely near the types of loads we are talking about for this to be useful, but I have a hard time imagining that dealing with the TCP/IP stack would be more intensive than running applications (as the article claims).
So, far all you people out there much more qualified to discuss this than I am, will having some part of the processor dedicated to handling TCP/IP really speed things up, or is this primarily a marketing technology?
Like many of the posters, I'm a student, not a teacher (well, actually I do teach, but not anything applicable to the problem domain).
anyway, here are a list of pet peeves I have with a lot of my text books.
A lot of text books focus on a particular application (e.g. programming javascript with Dreamweaver and Internet Explorer). Try to avoid these and focus on books that teach the subject in a bit more general terms.
Look for books that give lots of code examples. Theory is a good thing, but some books that say they are teaching a specific language seem to instead focus on trying to books on programming theory.
As above, but in reverse. Try to find books that do offer some theory, and don't just focus on having students memorize what a given block of code does.
That aside, whatever text book you pick, remember that all books have flaws, and be willing to deviate from the book when you feel that it doesn't offer up the best approach. I would also recommend NOT using book assignments, they tend to be extremely trivial, uninteresting, and will not get students excited about the project at all.
hmm, I've heard from a couple of people that there were some stability problems with 9.2 that hadn't been resolved yet involving X. 9.1 has been working pretty well for me anyway, so I haven't really had much in the way of motivation to upgrade anyway. Might grab 9.2 from ftp in the next couple of days and give it a try on my testing box.
It seems to me that redhat has already screwed the pooch in terms of it's desktop niche among the true geeks.
Although I can only speak from personal experience, I've heard a lot of other people echo my sentiments.
I used redhat almost exclusively since somewhere around version 4. I used redhat up until the end (though I stuck with 7.3 and never upgraded to 8 or 9, and I think 8 signaled the beginning of the end). I bought basically ever release, and always recommended RedHat about any other distribution, because it was the distribution I knew best.
When redhat basically abandon their customers, and with the negative things I heard about Fedora, I started looking around for another distribution.
Eventually I switched over to Suse, which is IMHO a much better distribution than RedHat ever thought about being. Now, my money goes to Suse (well, I guess to novell now), when people ask about a distribution, I recommend Suse, and whenever I'm working with a company trying to decide what to run on their servers, I recommend Suse. (Of course, I've heard some nasty things about 9.2, so I'm going to wait around with 9.1 and see if things get better with 9.3, or switch to another distro, probably gentoo).
The thing is, as much as redhat wants Linux to be enterprise driven, it's still the geeks that seem to have a lot of influence in the tides of Linux.
I think you have much more faith in humanity than I, and perhaps more than is deserved. I would guess that for every one person lie you or I who will remember an annoying advertisment and not purchace a product, there are 10 who will buy the product, and another 40 who won't buy the product, but for some reason other than the advertisment.
I don't work in advertising, but I would like to venture a guess.
People on average are stupid bumbling idiots that want life to be as easy as possible, even if it means sacrificing their ideals.
The end result of this is that most people see a popup for, say, brand X of a digital camera. Later, when they are trying to decide on a digital camera, they remember brand X, they don't remember where they remember it from, but because they've seen the popup so many times, they remember it, and are therefore more likely to buy Brand X of digital camera.
Compounding this is the fact that even if they remember seing a popup for brand X of digital camera, if they want a digital camera, they aren't going to be thinking, or care about "if I buy brand X of camera, that means I'm supporting popups".
Same with websites that have popups, most people hate them, but when it comes down to it, it's easier for them to put up with the popups than to deny themselves of free flash greeting cards to spam their friends with or whateve else they may happen to be browsing.
Speakeasy.net will allow you to sublet your DSL connection (not sure of any other providers that officially support this). You might look into just making back some of your cost by subleting out connections to a few neighbors over wireless. Offer a wireless connection and maybe a few other services and price according to how many subscribers you have (maybe divide the cost of the connection evenly?)
I have a friend who does this, and has had some pretty good luck. Biggest thing to watch out for if you do that is to have some sort of document outlining what exactly you offer (especially that you have no uptime garuntee, and what, if any, tech support you offer, and when).
I'm going to second this, I have a number of shows on DVD (Buffy seasons 1-7, Angel seasons 1-5, M*A*S*H Seasons 1-8, Charmed season 1), and it is really nice to have an entire season there in one boxed set. A standard season of a TV show seems to run between $40 and $60 for 22 episodes, so that works out to between $1.82 and $2.73 per episode. Even if they were offering the shows for download at say $0.50 or $1 per episode it would probably be encumbered with DRM, which would probably mean that it could only be viewed on Windows PCs, and probably couldn't be burned to DVD.
I'v never been much for commentary tracks, but I've really grown fond of them from watching Buffy (gotta love Joss Whedon's commentaries, just go to re-enforce what a genius the guy is). I suspect that a lot of people would miss the commentary track, along with the featurettes, behind the scenes, scripts, etc. that are included on the DVDs.
Fruthermore, even with broadband, downloading an entire season of a show, even at a lower resolution, will take a while (anyone else want to do the math? 22 episodes at 20 or 45 minutes). I, like most people, enjoy the instant gratification I get by going to the video store, buying a season of a show, and having the whole thing to watch as soon as I get home.
If they did offer this, it would probably be through some service like the music download services anyway, but I don't think that would work because a lot of people will buy 1 or 2 songs off a bunch of different albums, but most people want either 1 episode of a particular show, or the entire season (for which, due to the reaons above, they would probably buy the DVD set), and I don't think that a bunch of people buying a very occasional episode would be enough to justify running the service.
The only way I could see it really working is through some sort of PVR service, probably something like not allowing the PVRs to save shows after a certain time period, or not allowing them to be burned to DVD, but for an additional fee you can download the commentary tracks in the background and burn the shows to DVDs at the end of a season (which also would be unlikely because of the money lost off syndication during the buffer period between when a show airs
Although I've never worked in a cube or office, I do have a home office which ideally functions similarly to a work office, that is to be asthetically pleasing while not being distracting. Here are a few ideas for decorating that I've come up with.
First of all, if possible go with static decorations, as neat as those little moving doohickies and thingamuhwatzitz may seem, they tend to be distracting, often catching the corner of your eye. Along these lines, think color scheme, if you tend to just pick things willy nilly then you can end up with major clashage.
I prefer a deep somewhat victorian color scheme, deep reds and browns, golds, things of that nature. If your stuck in an office then a more modern look might be appropriate, white and black with chrome.
Light level is also important, Most people have an optimal light level that they like to work in, I prefer a low light environment, too much light makes me sick and gives me headaches. A lot of people have the opposite problem, be sure to know what sort of light level works best for you and go with that.
Carpet is also important, along with adding a bit of style to the room, a good carpet can cut down on noise, especially if you have a lot of people walking through your area.
When working with limited space, it's also important to think multifunctional, for example shelves can break up the monotony of a wall space, as well as providing much needed horizontle surfaces.
I've found there to be quite a few advantages to ordering pizza online. The biggest advantage I've found is that you never have to keep track of paper cupons. With pizza hut it's easy to just go online and click on a list of cupons, see what the best deal is, then order the pizza.
It's also nice to be able to see the full list of ingrediants if your like me and like to try different topings instead of just sticking to a certain favortie.
All that said, although I think pizza hut has the best online ordering system, they also have the crappiest pizza of just about anywhere (except for maybe those frozen pizzas), I personally prefer Papa Johns pizza.
Most C++ books will cover C++ in a way that should be applicable to Window or Linux, so long as you don't go for one that specifically mentions VC++ in the tittle. I've been partial to "C++ The Complete Reference", since in my experience, if you already know how to program, a reference style book is more useful in the long term for a particular language. Another book I've been particularly partial to is C++ GUI Programming with Qt.
While I am certainly much to lazy to actually look at the recent 78 patches for Suse, based on my memory, most of the patches as of late have been for some pretty obscure bugs with no known exploits.
The other big thing about the difference in the number of patches is that a windows patch may actually patch a number of libraries, where as with Linux each would be a different patch.
I do agree that overall Linux distributions do tend to have more patches than windows, but that's largely because Linux distributions tend to have a lot more packages. I'd like to see the actual patch:package ratio for windows vs linux.
All that said, as others have mentioned before, a system is really only as secure as the administrator. I have a friend with a WinXP system that's been running like a champ with no virus/malware/crapware for a couple years now. On the other hand, one of my Linux using friends was rooted not too long ago (though it wasn't because of a security vunrability as much as his complete lack of sense, his home directory was world-writable, and he'd put./ in his path, plus he had an anonymous ftp server running), someone was apparently using his machine to download warez off bittorrent then using FTP to pull them off his machine.
In the end the reason MS is less secure than Linux on average is because humans are the weakest link in the seurity chain, and the weakest links tend toward windows, and while having an OS designed with security in mind can help to mitigate some problems, in the end people will always find a way to get themselves pwned.
you know, one thing that's bothered me for a long time is how people say that words that are similar to common curse words are offensive, such as in your example of "b1tch" or "sh1t", which is to say that it must be the meaning of the word which is offensive, and not the word itself, however the same people would say that "darn" or "fudge" or "gosh dang" are ok, when they obviously also have the same intent as the "offensive" words.
people can be so fucking ridiculous.
I think a year and a half for something like this is a huge deal. When you think about what the kid - and remember he is just a kid - he used a keylogger to try to get answers to a test, not nearly as bad IMHO as breaking into the teachers office and trying to find a hardcopy of the test, and was providing the answers to other students. Now, for one mistake, something that the kid probably thought about for all of a day or two, and not very intently, he's going to spend a year and a half of his life locked up in a cage with other kids who are probably in there because they are really bad, who will eat him alive.
It's really easy for us, on the outside to say "oh, a year and a half isn't bad" or even "oh, 6 months, what an easy sentence", but think about what it would really be like to spend even 6 months locked in a cage with a bunch of other delinquents. Nothing to do but sit in a cage and stare at the wall for 16 hours a day, no chance to socialize with peers, at least with peers who would be a good example, and then after getting out having the stigma of someone who was in juvy placed on him.
Maybe it would be a good idea instead to give him community service, instead of locking a kid in a cage for 1/4 of his teenage years, between 16 and 18, have him learn to give back to the community, spend time with people who will help to have him grow as a productive and giving member of society.
I speak from experience, I have two cousins who have both been in some trouble with the law, at the same age one of them was locked up for over a year, the other was given community service. My cousin who was locked up ended up dropping out of school, and having a really bad life for the next several years before finally getting back on her feet, my other cousin however, who was given community service, ended up turning around completely, stayed in school, and to this day continues to do community service for a number of organizations not because she is bound to do so by law, but because she learned to feel good about giving back to the community, and formed friendships with other people who like to give back.
I agree that it's important to have open source programmers be people who really love the technology and want to innovate and contribute to the project. The thing about the article that confused me though was that it gives the impression that there are hoards of programmers jumping on the OSS bandwagon hoping to make a quick buck, but I don't really see that in my experience.
Still being in school, I see a LOT of people who went into computers just to make a quick buck, all of them are very strong microsoft advocates.
Are there people who go into OSS just to make a buck? from what I've seen, people who are primarily interested in money are also huge proprietary software supporters, sort of like if the only thing you care about is money, you can't imagine anyone else coding for the love of it, and therefore can't imagine F/OSS being any good at all.
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your right, I got my names and terminologies screwed up. Basically, one problem I've had in the past is two different applications each trying to open a different sound server, and then one of them doesn't work.
Sometimes you can't really figgure out a way to change an application to a different sound server, but you can always kill one at the command line.
I've run into the problem quite a bit, in my experience it's generally caused by having to pieces of software configured to use different sound drivers. When you start on peice of software it fires up that sound driver (for example ALSA) and then when you when you try to use some other software with a different sound driver (for example ARTs) then it can't access the audio device because the driver from the first software is running.
Stop Gap solution is to kill the previous driver process - best solution is to just make sure everything that plays sound is using the same driver.
The specs on the card look nice, though I have to wonder why it only has 128mb of memory for a "mid-range" card. Most other mid-range cards tend to have at least 256mb of ram, and nearly all of the high end cards have at least 512 megs of ram (the card I've been eyeing, though can't really justify the cost of right now has 640mb of memory). Of course, it's been quite a while since I've used either a FireGL or a Quatro, last I remember neither of the cards offered much bang for the buck or could really compete with cards from some of the manufacturers who just make workstation cards.
Perhaps I've just had the benefit of being sheltered and never seeing some dark underbelly, but it's always seemed to me that IT was one of the most equal opportunity fields. I've always noticed that there was a lot of diversity among people who worked in IT, of all the people I know, there seems to be an equal divide of men and women, younger and older people, etc.
Ofcourse, I've always thought that events that "encourage group X to Y" really does more harm than good, because it just re-enforces that "group X" is different.
The question that needs to be asked is, what useful purpose would a repository of presentations on F/OSS serve. You seem to be working under the idea that a good presentation would be useful in more venues than it was originally present in, but I'm not quite sure that this is really the case.
A good presentation is specifically targetted at the audience, and no two audiences are completely alike, and I'm not sure that the audiences would be similar enough for a good presentation given to one audience to be effective when given to another.
Audiences aside, a presentation should also play on the strengths of the presenter, and presenters probably vary even more widely than audiences.
One thing that could be useful however is a repository of information that could be used in creating presentations, if such a beast doesn't exist. This probably wouldn't have to be much more than a collection of links to other sites anyway, I'm sure the majority of the information is out there.
Of course, all that said, I'm all for promoting F/OSS, and it's good that we have new ideas on how to do this, and even if some of them don't pan out, it's always good that people are thinking of new things to help out F/OSS.
Seems to me that the easiest solution would be to higher someone, say a student, to work checking stuff out. Any sort of authentication system that's based on the id cards is suseptible to theft if someone steals someone else's id card. Having a system where someone can email a request for equipment might be workable, but I suspect that it would end up costing quite a bit of money just for that many safes, plus the hassle of resetting the combination every time someone checks something out. One thing you might consider is just putting a card reader on the door that's tied to the lock, and then putting a security camera in the room. Even if you don't have the time to actually go through all the tapes, being on camera can be somewhat of a deturrent.
Also remember that any system you implement to check out equipment also has to make it easy to return equipment. This means that automated solutions need to not rest combinations or whatever until the equipment is returned.
Also, if you choose to go with a technology solution, remember that even if it seems expensive, think of the cost of the equipment that could be stolen, or the cost of paying someone to man the desk.
It'll be interesting to see how this turns the tides of next generation consoles. There seems to be a correlation where the system with the largest number of decent RPGs tends to take the lead in the console wars for any given generation of consoles (the SNES seems to be the first real example of this, with it's large library of RPGs it continued to dominate even against the Saturn, and held on for a long while until the Playstation started to get good RPGs, something the N64 never really had, and the PS2 continued the tradition by being THE RPG console).
I'm not really sure why this correlation exists, perhaps it's because RPGs tend to start comming out after the console wars have pretty much been won, or maybe it's because hardcore gamers tend to go with consols that have lots of RPGs, and they make the recommendations to other buyers.
Even if it brings one really good RPG to the XBox2 then I'll probably buy it, if the XBox2 gets a lot of good RPGs, then it could win the next console war.
KStars is a pretty decent program, though I've found that Celestia is a bit better all around, it's demo mode is really neat, a reminds me a bit of the space part of he powers of 10 video. The nice thing about Celestia is that your not bound to earth, and can fly around the universe.
Hmm, this looks farily nice, when it finds the movie that you are looking for.I particularly like that it works well for searching for the name of a particular actor. The biggest problem I've found when playing around with it is that it doesn't seem to offer spelling suggestions,for example if you type "movie:Shawn of the Dead" it returns no results, but simply running a google search for "Shawn of the Dead" the first result is for the actual title "Shaun of the Dead". There also doesn't seem to be any sort of spell checking, so for example you get lots of results for "movie:Vin Diesel" but no results or spelling suggestions for "movie:Vin Diesal". (you may now engage in making fun of my taste in movies and actors).
The sort by rating function is nice, I tried typing "movie:2005" and sorted by rating to get a list of top rated movies of 2005.
Another example of strangeness I've found is that for current movies, it gives you a chance to search for show times, but does not show the results for the movie until after you search for show times, for example, I entered "movie:Hitch" and had to enter my zip code to search for show times, and on THAT results page it gave me the reviews results.
Overall, good idea google, but it does still need some work, I think I'll stick with imdb for now.
This seems interesting, though given intels track record I wonder if it will really be as useful as they are speculating, as the article has no real technical information.
Granted, I've never administered a server that was under anywhere remotely near the types of loads we are talking about for this to be useful, but I have a hard time imagining that dealing with the TCP/IP stack would be more intensive than running applications (as the article claims).
So, far all you people out there much more qualified to discuss this than I am, will having some part of the processor dedicated to handling TCP/IP really speed things up, or is this primarily a marketing technology?
anyway, here are a list of pet peeves I have with a lot of my text books.
- A lot of text books focus on a particular application (e.g. programming javascript with Dreamweaver and Internet Explorer). Try to avoid these and focus on books that teach the subject in a bit more general terms.
- Look for books that give lots of code examples. Theory is a good thing, but some books that say they are teaching a specific language seem to instead focus on trying to books on programming theory.
- As above, but in reverse. Try to find books that do offer some theory, and don't just focus on having students memorize what a given block of code does.
That aside, whatever text book you pick, remember that all books have flaws, and be willing to deviate from the book when you feel that it doesn't offer up the best approach. I would also recommend NOT using book assignments, they tend to be extremely trivial, uninteresting, and will not get students excited about the project at all.hmm, I've heard from a couple of people that there were some stability problems with 9.2 that hadn't been resolved yet involving X. 9.1 has been working pretty well for me anyway, so I haven't really had much in the way of motivation to upgrade anyway. Might grab 9.2 from ftp in the next couple of days and give it a try on my testing box.
It seems to me that redhat has already screwed the pooch in terms of it's desktop niche among the true geeks.
Although I can only speak from personal experience, I've heard a lot of other people echo my sentiments.
I used redhat almost exclusively since somewhere around version 4. I used redhat up until the end (though I stuck with 7.3 and never upgraded to 8 or 9, and I think 8 signaled the beginning of the end). I bought basically ever release, and always recommended RedHat about any other distribution, because it was the distribution I knew best.
When redhat basically abandon their customers, and with the negative things I heard about Fedora, I started looking around for another distribution.
Eventually I switched over to Suse, which is IMHO a much better distribution than RedHat ever thought about being. Now, my money goes to Suse (well, I guess to novell now), when people ask about a distribution, I recommend Suse, and whenever I'm working with a company trying to decide what to run on their servers, I recommend Suse. (Of course, I've heard some nasty things about 9.2, so I'm going to wait around with 9.1 and see if things get better with 9.3, or switch to another distro, probably gentoo).
The thing is, as much as redhat wants Linux to be enterprise driven, it's still the geeks that seem to have a lot of influence in the tides of Linux.
I think you have much more faith in humanity than I, and perhaps more than is deserved. I would guess that for every one person lie you or I who will remember an annoying advertisment and not purchace a product, there are 10 who will buy the product, and another 40 who won't buy the product, but for some reason other than the advertisment.
I don't work in advertising, but I would like to venture a guess.
People on average are stupid bumbling idiots that want life to be as easy as possible, even if it means sacrificing their ideals.
The end result of this is that most people see a popup for, say, brand X of a digital camera. Later, when they are trying to decide on a digital camera, they remember brand X, they don't remember where they remember it from, but because they've seen the popup so many times, they remember it, and are therefore more likely to buy Brand X of digital camera.
Compounding this is the fact that even if they remember seing a popup for brand X of digital camera, if they want a digital camera, they aren't going to be thinking, or care about "if I buy brand X of camera, that means I'm supporting popups".
Same with websites that have popups, most people hate them, but when it comes down to it, it's easier for them to put up with the popups than to deny themselves of free flash greeting cards to spam their friends with or whateve else they may happen to be browsing.
Speakeasy.net will allow you to sublet your DSL connection (not sure of any other providers that officially support this). You might look into just making back some of your cost by subleting out connections to a few neighbors over wireless. Offer a wireless connection and maybe a few other services and price according to how many subscribers you have (maybe divide the cost of the connection evenly?)
I have a friend who does this, and has had some pretty good luck. Biggest thing to watch out for if you do that is to have some sort of document outlining what exactly you offer (especially that you have no uptime garuntee, and what, if any, tech support you offer, and when).
I'm going to second this, I have a number of shows on DVD (Buffy seasons 1-7, Angel seasons 1-5, M*A*S*H Seasons 1-8, Charmed season 1), and it is really nice to have an entire season there in one boxed set. A standard season of a TV show seems to run between $40 and $60 for 22 episodes, so that works out to between $1.82 and $2.73 per episode. Even if they were offering the shows for download at say $0.50 or $1 per episode it would probably be encumbered with DRM, which would probably mean that it could only be viewed on Windows PCs, and probably couldn't be burned to DVD.
I'v never been much for commentary tracks, but I've really grown fond of them from watching Buffy (gotta love Joss Whedon's commentaries, just go to re-enforce what a genius the guy is). I suspect that a lot of people would miss the commentary track, along with the featurettes, behind the scenes, scripts, etc. that are included on the DVDs.
Fruthermore, even with broadband, downloading an entire season of a show, even at a lower resolution, will take a while (anyone else want to do the math? 22 episodes at 20 or 45 minutes). I, like most people, enjoy the instant gratification I get by going to the video store, buying a season of a show, and having the whole thing to watch as soon as I get home.
If they did offer this, it would probably be through some service like the music download services anyway, but I don't think that would work because a lot of people will buy 1 or 2 songs off a bunch of different albums, but most people want either 1 episode of a particular show, or the entire season (for which, due to the reaons above, they would probably buy the DVD set), and I don't think that a bunch of people buying a very occasional episode would be enough to justify running the service.
The only way I could see it really working is through some sort of PVR service, probably something like not allowing the PVRs to save shows after a certain time period, or not allowing them to be burned to DVD, but for an additional fee you can download the commentary tracks in the background and burn the shows to DVDs at the end of a season (which also would be unlikely because of the money lost off syndication during the buffer period between when a show airs
10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts in Pentium 4's = 0.997
Although I've never worked in a cube or office, I do have a home office which ideally functions similarly to a work office, that is to be asthetically pleasing while not being distracting. Here are a few ideas for decorating that I've come up with.
First of all, if possible go with static decorations, as neat as those little moving doohickies and thingamuhwatzitz may seem, they tend to be distracting, often catching the corner of your eye. Along these lines, think color scheme, if you tend to just pick things willy nilly then you can end up with major clashage.
I prefer a deep somewhat victorian color scheme, deep reds and browns, golds, things of that nature. If your stuck in an office then a more modern look might be appropriate, white and black with chrome.
Light level is also important, Most people have an optimal light level that they like to work in, I prefer a low light environment, too much light makes me sick and gives me headaches. A lot of people have the opposite problem, be sure to know what sort of light level works best for you and go with that.
Carpet is also important, along with adding a bit of style to the room, a good carpet can cut down on noise, especially if you have a lot of people walking through your area.
When working with limited space, it's also important to think multifunctional, for example shelves can break up the monotony of a wall space, as well as providing much needed horizontle surfaces.
I've found there to be quite a few advantages to ordering pizza online. The biggest advantage I've found is that you never have to keep track of paper cupons. With pizza hut it's easy to just go online and click on a list of cupons, see what the best deal is, then order the pizza.
It's also nice to be able to see the full list of ingrediants if your like me and like to try different topings instead of just sticking to a certain favortie.
All that said, although I think pizza hut has the best online ordering system, they also have the crappiest pizza of just about anywhere (except for maybe those frozen pizzas), I personally prefer Papa Johns pizza.
Most C++ books will cover C++ in a way that should be applicable to Window or Linux, so long as you don't go for one that specifically mentions VC++ in the tittle. I've been partial to "C++ The Complete Reference", since in my experience, if you already know how to program, a reference style book is more useful in the long term for a particular language. Another book I've been particularly partial to is C++ GUI Programming with Qt.
While I am certainly much to lazy to actually look at the recent 78 patches for Suse, based on my memory, most of the patches as of late have been for some pretty obscure bugs with no known exploits. ./ in his path, plus he had an anonymous ftp server running), someone was apparently using his machine to download warez off bittorrent then using FTP to pull them off his machine.
The other big thing about the difference in the number of patches is that a windows patch may actually patch a number of libraries, where as with Linux each would be a different patch.
I do agree that overall Linux distributions do tend to have more patches than windows, but that's largely because Linux distributions tend to have a lot more packages. I'd like to see the actual patch:package ratio for windows vs linux.
All that said, as others have mentioned before, a system is really only as secure as the administrator. I have a friend with a WinXP system that's been running like a champ with no virus/malware/crapware for a couple years now. On the other hand, one of my Linux using friends was rooted not too long ago (though it wasn't because of a security vunrability as much as his complete lack of sense, his home directory was world-writable, and he'd put
In the end the reason MS is less secure than Linux on average is because humans are the weakest link in the seurity chain, and the weakest links tend toward windows, and while having an OS designed with security in mind can help to mitigate some problems, in the end people will always find a way to get themselves pwned.
you know, one thing that's bothered me for a long time is how people say that words that are similar to common curse words are offensive, such as in your example of "b1tch" or "sh1t", which is to say that it must be the meaning of the word which is offensive, and not the word itself, however the same people would say that "darn" or "fudge" or "gosh dang" are ok, when they obviously also have the same intent as the "offensive" words.
people can be so fucking ridiculous.
I think a year and a half for something like this is a huge deal. When you think about what the kid - and remember he is just a kid - he used a keylogger to try to get answers to a test, not nearly as bad IMHO as breaking into the teachers office and trying to find a hardcopy of the test, and was providing the answers to other students. Now, for one mistake, something that the kid probably thought about for all of a day or two, and not very intently, he's going to spend a year and a half of his life locked up in a cage with other kids who are probably in there because they are really bad, who will eat him alive.
It's really easy for us, on the outside to say "oh, a year and a half isn't bad" or even "oh, 6 months, what an easy sentence", but think about what it would really be like to spend even 6 months locked in a cage with a bunch of other delinquents. Nothing to do but sit in a cage and stare at the wall for 16 hours a day, no chance to socialize with peers, at least with peers who would be a good example, and then after getting out having the stigma of someone who was in juvy placed on him.
Maybe it would be a good idea instead to give him community service, instead of locking a kid in a cage for 1/4 of his teenage years, between 16 and 18, have him learn to give back to the community, spend time with people who will help to have him grow as a productive and giving member of society.
I speak from experience, I have two cousins who have both been in some trouble with the law, at the same age one of them was locked up for over a year, the other was given community service. My cousin who was locked up ended up dropping out of school, and having a really bad life for the next several years before finally getting back on her feet, my other cousin however, who was given community service, ended up turning around completely, stayed in school, and to this day continues to do community service for a number of organizations not because she is bound to do so by law, but because she learned to feel good about giving back to the community, and formed friendships with other people who like to give back.
I agree that it's important to have open source programmers be people who really love the technology and want to innovate and contribute to the project. The thing about the article that confused me though was that it gives the impression that there are hoards of programmers jumping on the OSS bandwagon hoping to make a quick buck, but I don't really see that in my experience.
Still being in school, I see a LOT of people who went into computers just to make a quick buck, all of them are very strong microsoft advocates.
Are there people who go into OSS just to make a buck? from what I've seen, people who are primarily interested in money are also huge proprietary software supporters, sort of like if the only thing you care about is money, you can't imagine anyone else coding for the love of it, and therefore can't imagine F/OSS being any good at all.