My side job is studying new things that will make me better at my primary job. If you don't learn new skills, then eventually you will be replaced like any piece of outdated equipment. So, if you have a career that you like and want to advance in it, then do something that will give you a reason for advancement.
3 day work weeks huh? Not quite. Try more like 5 long work days and 2 more "on-call" days. I am currently a contractor and I work harder than I ever did as a full-time employee. Since you are only contracted for a set period of time, an employer wants to make sure they get every last penny's-worth of work out of you before that contract is up. The money is good with overtime and such, but it's hardly a cushy gig (but I guess that also depends on who you are contracted by).
Just keep this in mind. If you are a contractor you are pretty much self-employed. Pick up a book on tax benefits for the self-employed to learn the tricks of the trade since that's where the real benifits come into play. Also, now-a-days the only difference between a full-time employee and a contractor is that the contractor knows when he/she will be fired. Good luck!
Tivo has name recognition in the DVR market (so much so that many people don't know what a DVR is, but certainly know what a Tivo is). Tivo's been in the market for years and has a large installed userbase.
Substitute Netscape for TiVo and Internet for DVR and that statement looks very familiar. And we all know what happened there.
It was in the BetaMax case. Very simply, a company cannot be held responsible for illegal activity if the product has legal purposes. I think going after the individual file swappers made a lot more sense (although I have issues with the shotgun approach they are using). In any court case, someone doesn't get their way. The RIAA and MPAA have to decide... are the users at fault or are the tools at fault? They can't have it both ways!
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I try to download something from a bit torrent source, it takes several hours over a DSL modem. This even happens on torrents that have a lot of seeds and a lot of downloaders. So how feasible is it to have P2P, on-demand television? Even if you could stream them, the download rates are far from constant so you would have to pause a lot to accumulate a buffer.
I can only imagine how this got to the Supreme Court to begin with. I think it went something like this:
[Ring, ring]
Clerk: "Hello, Supreme Court clerk's office, Daron speaking"
Operator: "Hello sir, please don't hang up, but I would like to offer you a court case with a lot of free speach implications"
Clerk: "Uh, no than"
Operator: [Cutting him off] "This is a once-in-a-lifetime case that will only be valid for a limited time only. We will even though in an RIAA copyright case, absolutely free! That's two Supreme Court cases for the price of one."
Clerk: "No thank you, we already have enough court cases here. We don't need another."
[Click]
I have intentionally not bought any of the extended editions until all three of them are out. Now, for those of you in the know, are there plans to bundle all three extended editions into one boxed set to have some sort of definitive edition, or will owning the three extended editions individually give me the same content? I can't imagine that there is possibly anything more that can be put into the DVD's, but I want to know what Jackson's plans are. I can't wait to own all three standard editions, but I just want to make sure that I don't buy the three individually only to learn that a super-duper boxed set is around the corner. I know we can't fortell the future, but has anyone read or heard what the plans are?
Wow, jugding from everyone's posts, I would have thought that slashdot already is a political forum. I find it so funny that on any given topic, people find ways to slide in a little political commentary for or against particular politicians. We could be talking about the latest PDA hardware and somehow someone thinks it's insightful to talk about the failed state of U.N. regulation of fuzzy, white bunny expectors in Tazmania. Well, I guess now that we have a forum for politcal discussion on/. I will now see twice as many posts as to why G.W. is evil for signing the DMCA into law (BTW, I know Bush didn't sign the DMCA into law... I'm making a point).
Ok, you're a slashdotter... we get that and we're happy. However, when you first move into your dorm in college, you don't have to immediately hook up your computer, be the first one to hook into the T1 line on your floor, and send an invite for a Doom3 tourney. In fact, for your first day or two, I wouldn't deal with computer-related issues at all. Go and hang out with the people you will be living with for the rest of the year.
Later, once classes start to kick in you can start to distinguish yourself as the alpha-male of the technology realm. But if the first impression people have of you is a computer geek, then they won't bother to get to know you and you won't have an opportunity to know them.
It's funny, but a lot of the movies on the worst of the worst list probably have cult followings. If a movie is so horrific, you can count on people talking about how bad it is, creating drinking games from it, and just watching 5 minutes of it when it's on TV at 3pm some Saturday afternoon on TBS or FX because they recall, "Oh, yeah... this movie was soooo bad". Viewing a horrible movie is like driving past a car accident... you know you shouldn't slow down and look, but you do anyways. I feel sorry for those movies that suck, but don't suck quite enough to be remembered. For example, who will be talking about "The Alamo" (the movie, not the actual event) in 5 years?
I help out with some of the college recruiting things and you wouldn't believe the number of people who want to come to a CS degree for game programming.
I would say that a good half of the CS people I knew in college my freshmen year got into CS because they wanted to be game programmers. They sat down in front of a Playstation or Nintendo 64 (Playstation 2 and Xbox weren't around yet) and thought, "I want to make this". However, most of them got out of CS entirely after taking the intro courses. The rest of us learned that being a game programmer meant that you would have to be one of the best programmers on the planet. I had an internship at a game company and it is a tough world that combines physics, math, logic, and of course, knowing every single caveat of C++. You have to be both a "jack of all trades" and an expert in multiple domains. If you've ever read "Game Developer" magazine, a lot of programmers, even good ones, don't know what these articles are talking about.
I don't know about you, but after two years of my CS education, I was nowhere close to ready for the real world. Now, I was one of those people who had never programmed anything before my freshman year of college, but still how do you expect to learn anything meaningful after two years? Are they going to breeze through C and c++ in the first quarter only to have you write an OS or compiler the next? Most people can't ramp up that quickly. There is a lot more to programming than just learning how to code... you have to learn how to think. And sometimes you just need time to mature a little and build up your knowledge base of tips, tricks, and troubleshooting practices.
Good to see a replayTV plug as the first real post. I have been enjoying the ability to archive shows on my PC from my ReplayTV and being able to stream between the two for well over a year now. I was using a friend's TiVo a little while ago and the whole setup seemed a little bare. Where was the ethernet connection? Where was the free software to archive, edit, and stream shows? I'm not bashing TiVo (I think it has a great interface and some other capabilities that ReplayTV doesn't have... yet), but I do find it funny that there is an article mentioning something that ReplayTV owners have been enjoying for a long time. I guess there are advantages to owning something that isn't the poster child for a particular type of technology since the big dogs won't attack you first.
The main problem I have with computer recycling is that is costs you a lot of money. A lot of the places I see advertised cost as much as $20 per item. So, if I have 10 old cpus, 3 monitors, and 2 printers that I want to get rid of, that will run my upwards of $300. I like doing my part for the environment, but that's a lot of money. So it's great that this promotion is being run, but what do I do after it runs out? I don't want to spend time trying to sell them on Ebay and I don't want to take the time to try to find a good home for everything. I want to be able to either load up my car and drop them off somewhere or call someone to pick them up with minimal cost to me. Do these services exist?
If these services do not exist, then I'll just take a hammer and saw to my old equipment and pack them into my garbage, piece by piece. I figure that over a few pickups my equipment problem will be gone. Sure, it's not environmentally friendly, but what choices do I have if I can't take advantage of a limited-time deal?
If they made their own, using the GPL, then other universities could adopt it as well, and contribute to its development.
Unfortunately, universities aren't software companies that work on application development. Professors don't have time to develop things like this since they are researching new technology, attending conferences, writing papers, and occasionally teaching. Grad students have their own research to worry about and don't have time to invest in application development. Undergrads are too busy getting drunk and doing just enough work to graduate.
I do have some friends who got jobs after graduation being software developers for the university. However, they were a very small group mostly writing tools that helped keep the school's computing infrastructure up and going. The people who could write an university-specific applications usually get jobs elsewhere that pay a whole hell of a lot more.
Didn't some M.I.T. students do this for a their Phd thesis already? In my opinion, the only secure way to erase your data before reselling a computer is with a hammer, baseball bat, or hockey stick. It's fun taking apart of harddrive and seeing just how intricate those devices really are.
Some of us prefer to write out our sigs manually each time we post
Wasn't Star Wars, Episode I entirely CG? I mean, look at the stiff, flat performances given by all the characters. They looked like they had almost no acting direction so I just assumed that some computer geek created them. Can anyone actually confirm that Jake Loyd is a real human and not something invented by ILM?
There is one thing that frustrates me when getting directions from sites such as mapquest or mapblast. While I get the directions, it can be very confusing once you're actually in the car and trying to make snap decions on the fly. Has anyone had the problem where you're looking for the street sign only to pass it because it was hidden from view? Now what if this photo van could be used to map out certain sections of a large, metro area like New York, LA, or San Francisco? Wouldn't it be nice to go online and actually see some pictures of intersections so you know what to look for? Even cooler would be a virtual drive of the route you will take using the information taken from these photo vans. How cool would that be?
There were literally 20+ patches, security roll-ups and service packs to applications (Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, etc.) that had to be downloaded from Windows Update. If I wouldn't have had a broadband connection I would have been online forever downloading it all
What a coincidence, I just got a copy of Red Hat 9.0 and had to leave my computer on overnight to download and install all the suggested patches and upgrades for various components. Let's face it, minutes after a gold copy of a CD is printed, it is outdated and needs patching. The longer that gold copy has been out, the longer it will take to patch the system after a fresh install. This isn't specific to MS, but applies to nearly any commercial OS that offers patches, upgrades, service packs, etc. A Linux system that hasn't been upgraded is no better than an outdated MS system, except it is a little less of a target since Linux isn't the "bad guy".
I heard of this Russian-based mp3 online store called allofmp3.com (You can go to the English version by selecting the link in the upper left-hand corner). It seems pretty cool and it's licensed under ROMS, which is Russia's equivilent of the RIAA. It looks really cheap since you pay by the megabyte. It's $5 for 500 megs of CD-quality music. I don't know how legit it is, but the reviews I've seen have been pretty positive. It almost seems to good to be true, but if the recording industry here doesn't give people what they want, then why not go elsewhere and get the goods? Afterall, what's wrong with shopping for the best price? I feel like the RIAA is like the designer department store that charges too much for products you can find elswhere for a lot cheaper. They can't get upset when people refuse to shop at their stores if there are other legit stores selling the same products for much less. Now the question is, is allofmp3.com a legit outfit? Does anyone use it and want to comment?
Ok, is there any way that Lucas could dig out of the hole he created from Ep. I/II? Suppose that Ep. III was good... we're talking LOTR:ROTK good. We get epic battle sequences, a moving story, a somewhat coherent plot, and really developed characters. Would he find any redemption from his fans, or is this movie destined to fail despite anyone's best efforts? Will people ultimately see the prequels as a success if this last movie is really well done and ties up all the lose ends, or has that boat sailed already and there is no point of return? I am really looking forward to this movie since going to a Star Wars opening night is not like going to any other movie... it's an event. Even if the movie is mediocore, I like the energy and enthusiasm that people bring with them.
I have had two really boring jobs, both for large, international companies. My first job was to create an web-based tutorial for people new to the department. At the interview they wanted to make sure I was fluent in Java and other programming languages because they wanted someone flexible who could fit into several roles. What a crock. All I did all day was convert Open Office documents into HTML by basically specifying HTML in the "Save As" field. The highlight of my day was when the save did something funky to the formatting and I got to edit the HTML by hand! So I didn't do any programming or web design although that was what I thought I was hired to do.
So, I didn't learn my lesson the first time around so I got another job at a large, international software company. Of course, by this time I had a lot more education and experience (even a fancy degree in Computer Science). So I thought I would be doing really cool stuff since again, they needed someone with Java experience. Instead they put me in charge of builds and managing the code repository. So that meant that every week I got to type in a command that would create the weekly build of our software. When I wasn't pushing the button, I got to write guidelines on programming practices and write proposals for new ideas that ultimately got turned down. Oh, and I also could easily burn 5 hours of the day browsing the web.
So, the lesson of the day is, "Don't work for Large, International Software Companies because they will break you down and destroy any real creative skills you possess!"
everytime it tries to sync to i-Tunes, it checks a global database or something...
So radio tags are bad because they track peoples' habits. Product activation is bad because it ties a product to a specific user. Global databases are bad because it's a violation of your privacy. However, when we are talking about your $300 iPod, then it's all good? You wouldn't mind having your device registered and activated and your usage tracked because Apple is the mighty and benevolent company? Now, if this was proposed in connection with a Microsoft product, how many "Big Brother" posts would we see?
Slashdot Mirror
My side job is studying new things that will make me better at my primary job. If you don't learn new skills, then eventually you will be replaced like any piece of outdated equipment. So, if you have a career that you like and want to advance in it, then do something that will give you a reason for advancement.
Just keep this in mind. If you are a contractor you are pretty much self-employed. Pick up a book on tax benefits for the self-employed to learn the tricks of the trade since that's where the real benifits come into play. Also, now-a-days the only difference between a full-time employee and a contractor is that the contractor knows when he/she will be fired. Good luck!
Substitute Netscape for TiVo and Internet for DVR and that statement looks very familiar. And we all know what happened there.
It was in the BetaMax case. Very simply, a company cannot be held responsible for illegal activity if the product has legal purposes. I think going after the individual file swappers made a lot more sense (although I have issues with the shotgun approach they are using). In any court case, someone doesn't get their way. The RIAA and MPAA have to decide... are the users at fault or are the tools at fault? They can't have it both ways!
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I try to download something from a bit torrent source, it takes several hours over a DSL modem. This even happens on torrents that have a lot of seeds and a lot of downloaders. So how feasible is it to have P2P, on-demand television? Even if you could stream them, the download rates are far from constant so you would have to pause a lot to accumulate a buffer.
[Ring, ring]
Clerk: "Hello, Supreme Court clerk's office, Daron speaking"
Operator: "Hello sir, please don't hang up, but I would like to offer you a court case with a lot of free speach implications"
Clerk: "Uh, no than"
Operator: [Cutting him off] "This is a once-in-a-lifetime case that will only be valid for a limited time only. We will even though in an RIAA copyright case, absolutely free! That's two Supreme Court cases for the price of one."
Clerk: "No thank you, we already have enough court cases here. We don't need another."
[Click]
I have intentionally not bought any of the extended editions until all three of them are out. Now, for those of you in the know, are there plans to bundle all three extended editions into one boxed set to have some sort of definitive edition, or will owning the three extended editions individually give me the same content? I can't imagine that there is possibly anything more that can be put into the DVD's, but I want to know what Jackson's plans are. I can't wait to own all three standard editions, but I just want to make sure that I don't buy the three individually only to learn that a super-duper boxed set is around the corner. I know we can't fortell the future, but has anyone read or heard what the plans are?
Wow, jugding from everyone's posts, I would have thought that slashdot already is a political forum. I find it so funny that on any given topic, people find ways to slide in a little political commentary for or against particular politicians. We could be talking about the latest PDA hardware and somehow someone thinks it's insightful to talk about the failed state of U.N. regulation of fuzzy, white bunny expectors in Tazmania. Well, I guess now that we have a forum for politcal discussion on /. I will now see twice as many posts as to why G.W. is evil for signing the DMCA into law (BTW, I know Bush didn't sign the DMCA into law... I'm making a point).
Later, once classes start to kick in you can start to distinguish yourself as the alpha-male of the technology realm. But if the first impression people have of you is a computer geek, then they won't bother to get to know you and you won't have an opportunity to know them.
It's funny, but a lot of the movies on the worst of the worst list probably have cult followings. If a movie is so horrific, you can count on people talking about how bad it is, creating drinking games from it, and just watching 5 minutes of it when it's on TV at 3pm some Saturday afternoon on TBS or FX because they recall, "Oh, yeah... this movie was soooo bad". Viewing a horrible movie is like driving past a car accident... you know you shouldn't slow down and look, but you do anyways. I feel sorry for those movies that suck, but don't suck quite enough to be remembered. For example, who will be talking about "The Alamo" (the movie, not the actual event) in 5 years?
I would say that a good half of the CS people I knew in college my freshmen year got into CS because they wanted to be game programmers. They sat down in front of a Playstation or Nintendo 64 (Playstation 2 and Xbox weren't around yet) and thought, "I want to make this". However, most of them got out of CS entirely after taking the intro courses. The rest of us learned that being a game programmer meant that you would have to be one of the best programmers on the planet. I had an internship at a game company and it is a tough world that combines physics, math, logic, and of course, knowing every single caveat of C++. You have to be both a "jack of all trades" and an expert in multiple domains. If you've ever read "Game Developer" magazine, a lot of programmers, even good ones, don't know what these articles are talking about.
I don't know about you, but after two years of my CS education, I was nowhere close to ready for the real world. Now, I was one of those people who had never programmed anything before my freshman year of college, but still how do you expect to learn anything meaningful after two years? Are they going to breeze through C and c++ in the first quarter only to have you write an OS or compiler the next? Most people can't ramp up that quickly. There is a lot more to programming than just learning how to code... you have to learn how to think. And sometimes you just need time to mature a little and build up your knowledge base of tips, tricks, and troubleshooting practices.
Three words: "Physics for Dummies".
Good to see a replayTV plug as the first real post. I have been enjoying the ability to archive shows on my PC from my ReplayTV and being able to stream between the two for well over a year now. I was using a friend's TiVo a little while ago and the whole setup seemed a little bare. Where was the ethernet connection? Where was the free software to archive, edit, and stream shows? I'm not bashing TiVo (I think it has a great interface and some other capabilities that ReplayTV doesn't have... yet), but I do find it funny that there is an article mentioning something that ReplayTV owners have been enjoying for a long time. I guess there are advantages to owning something that isn't the poster child for a particular type of technology since the big dogs won't attack you first.
If these services do not exist, then I'll just take a hammer and saw to my old equipment and pack them into my garbage, piece by piece. I figure that over a few pickups my equipment problem will be gone. Sure, it's not environmentally friendly, but what choices do I have if I can't take advantage of a limited-time deal?
Unfortunately, universities aren't software companies that work on application development. Professors don't have time to develop things like this since they are researching new technology, attending conferences, writing papers, and occasionally teaching. Grad students have their own research to worry about and don't have time to invest in application development. Undergrads are too busy getting drunk and doing just enough work to graduate.
I do have some friends who got jobs after graduation being software developers for the university. However, they were a very small group mostly writing tools that helped keep the school's computing infrastructure up and going. The people who could write an university-specific applications usually get jobs elsewhere that pay a whole hell of a lot more.
Some of us prefer to write out our sigs manually each time we post
Wasn't Star Wars, Episode I entirely CG? I mean, look at the stiff, flat performances given by all the characters. They looked like they had almost no acting direction so I just assumed that some computer geek created them. Can anyone actually confirm that Jake Loyd is a real human and not something invented by ILM?
There is one thing that frustrates me when getting directions from sites such as mapquest or mapblast. While I get the directions, it can be very confusing once you're actually in the car and trying to make snap decions on the fly. Has anyone had the problem where you're looking for the street sign only to pass it because it was hidden from view? Now what if this photo van could be used to map out certain sections of a large, metro area like New York, LA, or San Francisco? Wouldn't it be nice to go online and actually see some pictures of intersections so you know what to look for? Even cooler would be a virtual drive of the route you will take using the information taken from these photo vans. How cool would that be?
And who was "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M."? And how did he manage to write his name in solid cement?
I know! Let's use technology to bring him back.
Wow! What's normal to him amazes us.
He is a lot smarter than his sister "M.V.V.A.V.S.O.U.O.D" of whom we no nothing.
He will be our new god.
What a coincidence, I just got a copy of Red Hat 9.0 and had to leave my computer on overnight to download and install all the suggested patches and upgrades for various components. Let's face it, minutes after a gold copy of a CD is printed, it is outdated and needs patching. The longer that gold copy has been out, the longer it will take to patch the system after a fresh install. This isn't specific to MS, but applies to nearly any commercial OS that offers patches, upgrades, service packs, etc. A Linux system that hasn't been upgraded is no better than an outdated MS system, except it is a little less of a target since Linux isn't the "bad guy".
I heard of this Russian-based mp3 online store called allofmp3.com (You can go to the English version by selecting the link in the upper left-hand corner). It seems pretty cool and it's licensed under ROMS, which is Russia's equivilent of the RIAA. It looks really cheap since you pay by the megabyte. It's $5 for 500 megs of CD-quality music. I don't know how legit it is, but the reviews I've seen have been pretty positive. It almost seems to good to be true, but if the recording industry here doesn't give people what they want, then why not go elsewhere and get the goods? Afterall, what's wrong with shopping for the best price? I feel like the RIAA is like the designer department store that charges too much for products you can find elswhere for a lot cheaper. They can't get upset when people refuse to shop at their stores if there are other legit stores selling the same products for much less. Now the question is, is allofmp3.com a legit outfit? Does anyone use it and want to comment?
Ok, is there any way that Lucas could dig out of the hole he created from Ep. I/II? Suppose that Ep. III was good... we're talking LOTR:ROTK good. We get epic battle sequences, a moving story, a somewhat coherent plot, and really developed characters. Would he find any redemption from his fans, or is this movie destined to fail despite anyone's best efforts? Will people ultimately see the prequels as a success if this last movie is really well done and ties up all the lose ends, or has that boat sailed already and there is no point of return? I am really looking forward to this movie since going to a Star Wars opening night is not like going to any other movie... it's an event. Even if the movie is mediocore, I like the energy and enthusiasm that people bring with them.
So, I didn't learn my lesson the first time around so I got another job at a large, international software company. Of course, by this time I had a lot more education and experience (even a fancy degree in Computer Science). So I thought I would be doing really cool stuff since again, they needed someone with Java experience. Instead they put me in charge of builds and managing the code repository. So that meant that every week I got to type in a command that would create the weekly build of our software. When I wasn't pushing the button, I got to write guidelines on programming practices and write proposals for new ideas that ultimately got turned down. Oh, and I also could easily burn 5 hours of the day browsing the web.
So, the lesson of the day is, "Don't work for Large, International Software Companies because they will break you down and destroy any real creative skills you possess!"
So radio tags are bad because they track peoples' habits. Product activation is bad because it ties a product to a specific user. Global databases are bad because it's a violation of your privacy. However, when we are talking about your $300 iPod, then it's all good? You wouldn't mind having your device registered and activated and your usage tracked because Apple is the mighty and benevolent company? Now, if this was proposed in connection with a Microsoft product, how many "Big Brother" posts would we see?
That's the sound of my karma dropping