I have used Tynker with my son. Block code language with lots of teaching exercises. Also includes a Minecraft modding course which is what really sold it to him.
That's an awfully big bribe - which makes me think I smell desperation... But I don't live in the US so I don't know. Is Verizon really doing that badly? Are they on the brink of some sort of collapse? Or is there some sort of fishook in the deal (like only applying to $100 / month plans or such) that would make this run-of-the-mill and more of an advertisement than news of import.
I'm an Architect. Also with a long technical background. Similar size organisations. It's not normal to have admin access. Largely because that level of detail can overwhelm you. It's also easy to get dragged back into your old job if you can be dragged back. In one org I worked in where the Architects did have access (before I was one...) one of our vendors develops the habit of finger pointing when mysterious issues occurred that looked like unauthorised change. We stopped that with some config monitoring software that notified us of any settings change - but I mention it to show what can happen.
One of the hard concepts to grasp is what is Architecturally significant. Mostly that's big block level stuff, but sometimes certain details can be significant too. Working out which without looking at every detail is where your experience comes in.
Most of the time the team members doing the design and implementation work can show you the detail when you need to see it - and by asking them you can discuss what you're looking for and why. This builds up trust that your solutions aren't just ivory tower creations from some distant figure but things they're connected with.
If you must have some ability to see every little detail you could always try asking for read-only access. It might be a reasonable compromise.
This has been a bit of a rambling post, but I hope it has something useful....
extension of Australia's current Goods and Services Tax to include digital services, adding 10% to virtual items and services purchased online
Not quite. Digital services are already taxed. The tax is being extended to digital services provided from offshore, because Netflix have discovered they can skirt the current tax provisions by having no footprint in Australia and hosting entirely offshore. As the monthly fee falls below the threshold at which personal goods are normally exempt from taxation on import (as it's not worthwhile to collect it) they can charge no tax. However the existing rivals (eg Quickflix) do have an on-shore presence and so have to charge their customers tax, creating a distinctly unlevel playing field.
I expect New Zealand to follow suit shortly as the same issue is present there.
The Agilent name is now used on their chemical/life sciences stuff (chromatographs, NMR, etc.).
Not NMR anymore - they've shuttered that part (formerly Varian), thereby giving Bruker an almost open field... well, JEOL was well in 3rd place and the upstarts like Magritek (with their benchtop, non-cryogenic NMRs) are almost a separate market.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that a competing utility has to have separate lines. Here in New Zealand the power companies are not allowed to own lines - those are a highly regulated monopoly (The national grid is owned by the government, local grids by local lines companies.) Generating companies sell power wholesale via a trading system, Retailing companies buy the wholesale power (priced at grid-exit points) and deal with the consumer and local lines company. You can be a Generator and a Retailer, but not own transmission as well.
Interestingly the same model is being taken with the national fibre rollout - the fibre owning company will wholesale services to various ISPs and comms providers but will not be allowed to be an ISP itself. This avoids some of the effects you see where several providers build out fibre in the most populous areas, but you end up with monopolies covering less-dense areas and no-one covers the rural areas.
As a pedant, I'd like to note that aspirin did not become a generic as a result of its mass usage nor as the result of a court case, but was part of war reparations with Germany. See here for more detail, or just google it:-)
I wonder how much advantage of the medium a PC version of a TV series will be able to take... I''ve been homeschooling my kids whilst we've been travelling so I've tried a number of these online reading tools. Some are just a mess of unindexed content, or just libraries to wonder in and pick out books to read or subject videos to watch. The best for my 5 yr old has been ReadingEggs which has heaps of interactive mini games joined together into an overall programme that the child can follow through themselves going right from pre-literate to reading age 7 or so.
Has anyone used the iPad app of this Reading Rainbow program? What's it like ? And how much teacher support is needed?
If you knew how the old game controllers worked and what the driver had to do to read from them you would be glad they're gone. See my earlier post for some hideous detail.... You can buy adapters to USB which are likely to provide much better stability (and not need calibration constantly) and will work with windows 7, though I haven't tested with the Cyberman.
Drifting off topic, but if we're talking the gaming ports, they weren't serial. They were much, much worse. The joystick potentiometers were connected across pairs of pins in the connector, but then, instead of just making them an input to a DAC or something simple they were basically hooked up as the variable resistance on a 555 microtimer so that the position could be read by triggering the timer and counting how long it took to drop back to it's base state. I know DACs were expensive at the time it was designed, but this choice led to some programs having to busy wait to measure, endless issues with different processor speeds needing to be compensated for, and the requirement to regularly "calibrate" the joystick in each game. I suspect the chances of that precision timing working well on a multi core, variable speed CPU with a real (preemptive) OS and possibly a VM in the mix too, is small.
A USB device that works as a DAC and pretends to be a modern joystick interface would probably improve the controller no end.
And yes, I bought a joystick just to play Descent too. But a simpler one than the GP.
Their best proposed solution is to ban Yahoo email users from mailing lists and encourage them to switch to other ISPs
What the #%^+? Since when is Yahoo an ISP?
Several ISPs outsource their customer email service to Yahoo. If you're with one of those, and especially if you use your ISP provided email address, then moving would fix it (or just move to gmail/outlook.com/whatever, you're mail is in the cloud now anyway, since your ISP moved it there)
A good example of this is Xero (accounting software company) who recently had to stop using their own software because they got too big - way, way too big - but they hung in for a long time because they didn't want to be a company that didn't use it's own software.
They put 8 (or more) access points into a single unit, each with a directional antenna covering a segment of the room or venue. I looked at their product at a trade show or conference once (don't remember which) but it was way overkill for the spaces we had at the time which were separated with heavy reinforced concrete walls and floors, so needed an access point for each area.
Sorry, the DVD region code for NZ is 4. The UK and Europe is 2 (see wikipedia ). Fortunately enforcing the suppliers use of region locking on DVD players was ruled a breach of our competition legislation (which explicitly makes parallel importing legal) and our copyright act explicitly excludes region locking as a proctection measure See here So almost all DVD players are sold unlocked.
I think it's the consistant dock connector. Since the iPod G3 in 2003 the connector hasn't changed (though the charge voltage has). This means the car manufacturers have something to target....
Even if that were the case, they'd just put advertising directly in the show (more than they already do). It would feel worse than watching an infomercial.
The system in the UK also includes a ban on Product placement and other advertising in-show. I think they've eased up a bit now, but when I was a kid the cartoon "Top Cat" was retitled to "Boss Cat" because there was a local brand of cat food called "Top Cat". (Yes, they actually edited the title sequence, badly). The gang still called him TC though, which would have been confusing if I had actually thought about it.
Anyone know how to turn off the ones that pop up on slashdot? I can't moderate from my iPad since they came along - as they pop up when finger touches screen and steal the focus from the moderation drop down box.
I can't find any option in slashdot options, and there's no noscript for safari for iOS...
Most utilities, if you ring them with your own meter read after receiving an inaccurate estimate, will issue you with a new bill based on your read.
I had a lot of random estimates in my old house because it had one of those old dial meters in which every pointer turns in the opposite direction to the one before it - I gather some incorrect readings had been taken (before I owned the house) which created an incorrect usage pattern to base estimates on.
OTOH I guess you haven't lived in an earthquake zone. Brick and concrete houses tend to fall down without rediculous amounts of reinforcement. Wood flexes and springs back.
Having owned and lived in both 100 year old brick and 100 year old wooden houses, I would say the maintenance level required is fairly similar.
Slashdot Mirror
My current car has sonar. That’s what feeds the beeps to tell me I’m about to back into a lamppost. :-).
I have used Tynker with my son. Block code language with lots of teaching exercises. Also includes a Minecraft modding course which is what really sold it to him.
That's an awfully big bribe - which makes me think I smell desperation... But I don't live in the US so I don't know. Is Verizon really doing that badly? Are they on the brink of some sort of collapse? Or is there some sort of fishook in the deal (like only applying to $100 / month plans or such) that would make this run-of-the-mill and more of an advertisement than news of import.
I'm an Architect. Also with a long technical background. Similar size organisations. It's not normal to have admin access. Largely because that level of detail can overwhelm you. It's also easy to get dragged back into your old job if you can be dragged back. In one org I worked in where the Architects did have access (before I was one...) one of our vendors develops the habit of finger pointing when mysterious issues occurred that looked like unauthorised change. We stopped that with some config monitoring software that notified us of any settings change - but I mention it to show what can happen.
One of the hard concepts to grasp is what is Architecturally significant. Mostly that's big block level stuff, but sometimes certain details can be significant too. Working out which without looking at every detail is where your experience comes in.
Most of the time the team members doing the design and implementation work can show you the detail when you need to see it - and by asking them you can discuss what you're looking for and why. This builds up trust that your solutions aren't just ivory tower creations from some distant figure but things they're connected with.
If you must have some ability to see every little detail you could always try asking for read-only access. It might be a reasonable compromise.
This has been a bit of a rambling post, but I hope it has something useful....
Not quite. Digital services are already taxed. The tax is being extended to digital services provided from offshore, because Netflix have discovered they can skirt the current tax provisions by having no footprint in Australia and hosting entirely offshore. As the monthly fee falls below the threshold at which personal goods are normally exempt from taxation on import (as it's not worthwhile to collect it) they can charge no tax. However the existing rivals
(eg Quickflix) do have an on-shore presence and so have to charge their customers tax, creating a distinctly unlevel playing field.
I expect New Zealand to follow suit shortly as the same issue is present there.
The Agilent name is now used on their chemical/life sciences stuff (chromatographs, NMR, etc.).
Not NMR anymore - they've shuttered that part (formerly Varian), thereby giving Bruker an almost open field... well, JEOL was well in 3rd place and the upstarts like Magritek (with their benchtop, non-cryogenic NMRs) are almost a separate market.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that a competing utility has to have separate lines. Here in New Zealand the power companies are not allowed to own lines - those are a highly regulated monopoly (The national grid is owned by the government, local grids by local lines companies.) Generating companies sell power wholesale via a trading system, Retailing companies buy the wholesale power (priced at grid-exit points) and deal with the consumer and local lines company. You can be a Generator and a Retailer, but not own transmission as well.
Interestingly the same model is being taken with the national fibre rollout - the fibre owning company will wholesale services to various ISPs and comms providers but will not be allowed to be an ISP itself. This avoids some of the effects you see where several providers build out fibre in the most populous areas, but you end up with monopolies covering less-dense areas and no-one covers the rural areas.
As a pedant, I'd like to note that aspirin did not become a generic as a result of its mass usage nor as the result of a court case, but was part of war reparations with Germany. See here for more detail, or just google it :-)
I wonder how much advantage of the medium a PC version of a TV series will be able to take... I''ve been homeschooling my kids whilst we've been travelling so I've tried a number of these online reading tools. Some are just a mess of unindexed content, or just libraries to wonder in and pick out books to read or subject videos to watch. The best for my 5 yr old has been ReadingEggs which has heaps of interactive mini games joined together into an overall programme that the child can follow through themselves going right from pre-literate to reading age 7 or so.
Has anyone used the iPad app of this Reading Rainbow program? What's it like ? And how much teacher support is needed?
If you knew how the old game controllers worked and what the driver had to do to read from them you would be glad they're gone. See my earlier post for some hideous detail.... You can buy adapters to USB which are likely to provide much better stability (and not need calibration constantly) and will work with windows 7, though I haven't tested with the Cyberman.
Drifting off topic, but if we're talking the gaming ports, they weren't serial. They were much, much worse. The joystick potentiometers were connected across pairs of pins in the connector, but then, instead of just making them an input to a DAC or something simple they were basically hooked up as the variable resistance on a 555 microtimer so that the position could be read by triggering the timer and counting how long it took to drop back to it's base state. I know DACs were expensive at the time it was designed, but this choice led to some programs having to busy wait to measure, endless issues with different processor speeds needing to be compensated for, and the requirement to regularly "calibrate" the joystick in each game. I suspect the chances of that precision timing working well on a multi core, variable speed CPU with a real (preemptive) OS and possibly a VM in the mix too, is small.
A USB device that works as a DAC and pretends to be a modern joystick interface would probably improve the controller no end.
And yes, I bought a joystick just to play Descent too. But a simpler one than the GP.
What the #%^+? Since when is Yahoo an ISP?
Several ISPs outsource their customer email service to Yahoo. If you're with one of those, and especially if you use your ISP provided email address, then moving would fix it (or just move to gmail/outlook.com/whatever, you're mail is in the cloud now anyway, since your ISP moved it there)
A good example of this is Xero (accounting software company) who recently had to stop using their own software because they got too big - way, way too big - but they hung in for a long time because they didn't want to be a company that didn't use it's own software.
Xirrus have been doing this for years - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xirrus or http://www.xirrus.com/
They put 8 (or more) access points into a single unit, each with a directional antenna covering a segment of the room or venue. I looked at their product at a trade show or conference once (don't remember which) but it was way overkill for the spaces we had at the time which were separated with heavy reinforced concrete walls and floors, so needed an access point for each area.
I haven't been following closely enough to know what the "crazy Nikon tech" is - anyone care to enlighten me? Google doesn't give relevant info...
999 was originally chosen as a number that required some intent to dial, as it was the longest dial on a rotary phone.
Actually second longest. 000 would have been longer. But 0 already was used for the operator.
Bah! Old days indeed. New Zealand still uses 111.
And it can't be dialed easily because NZ pulse dialing is backwards (10 pulses for 0, 9 pulses for 1 8 for 2, etc)
I think you meant www.eternal-september.org
Where I live 1080 is a poison they use to control invasive species.... What does it mean in your context?
Sorry, the DVD region code for NZ is 4. The UK and Europe is 2 (see wikipedia ). Fortunately enforcing the suppliers use of region locking on DVD players was ruled a breach of our competition legislation (which explicitly makes parallel importing legal) and our copyright act explicitly excludes region locking as a proctection measure See here So almost all DVD players are sold unlocked.
I think it's the consistant dock connector. Since the iPod G3 in 2003 the connector hasn't changed (though the charge voltage has). This means the car manufacturers have something to target....
Even if that were the case, they'd just put advertising directly in the show (more than they already do). It would feel worse than watching an infomercial.
The system in the UK also includes a ban on Product placement and other advertising in-show. I think they've eased up a bit now, but when I was a kid the cartoon "Top Cat" was retitled to "Boss Cat" because there was a local brand of cat food called "Top Cat". (Yes, they actually edited the title sequence, badly). The gang still called him TC though, which would have been confusing if I had actually thought about it.
Anyone know how to turn off the ones that pop up on slashdot? I can't moderate from my iPad since they came along - as they pop up when finger touches screen and steal the focus from the moderation drop down box.
I can't find any option in slashdot options, and there's no noscript for safari for iOS...
Most utilities, if you ring them with your own meter read after receiving an inaccurate estimate, will issue you with a new bill based on your read.
I had a lot of random estimates in my old house because it had one of those old dial meters in which every pointer turns in the opposite direction to the one before it - I gather some incorrect readings had been taken (before I owned the house) which created an incorrect usage pattern to base estimates on.
OTOH I guess you haven't lived in an earthquake zone. Brick and concrete houses tend to fall down without rediculous amounts of reinforcement. Wood flexes and springs back.
Having owned and lived in both 100 year old brick and 100 year old wooden houses, I would say the maintenance level required is fairly similar.