I had a first date planned with someone (this was about 349 days ago, before she became my girlfriend, then fiance); I was supposed to go to an area of town I've not often frequented; worse, the directions were confusing (lots of cloverleaf intersections and the like).
I put it into Google Earth, had it show me the directions AND what the streets actually look like, and this really helped me understand the directions. Does that count?
You scoff at speaker drives that store up all the sound before spitting it out, but this sort of buffering system is actually very useful if your ears fall behind and can't process all the sound, or if there's some latency along the audio cable (as can happen when multiple signals are competing for bandwidth).
I have to admit I find the Airport Express far more interesting and relevant to my needs. 802.11b/g, wired ethernet, ability to act as bridge, ability to serve USB printers, digital and analog out, doesn't take up any space in my AV rack, and iTunes integration is, needless to say, perfect. Oh, and it's $129:).
Mind you, it's a different paradigm -- you control this box via the remote, whereas with the AE you tell iTunes what music to stream to it -- but it works pretty darn well for me.
okcupid.com is pretty close to what you may think of when you say 'openmatch.com.' It's free, and while they don't go out of their way to advertise their algorithm, it's pretty obvious how they do it -- they have a potentially infinite number of questions, and they match on answers and how much people care about the answers. The cool thing is that once you've answered 500 questions, you get to submit your own questions too -- so it's a self-perpetuating information-gathering system. Quite cute. I got two dates from them -- one great, one horrible. Amusingly, the best luck I've had with all the sites is with eHarmony.com, potentially the most closed-source of them all. Go figure...
That's the problem with Americans! We bitch and moan that the Chinese or Indian are taking our jobs, but when someone gives us -- HANDS US ON A PLATE -- an opportunity to make some money, we scoff at it because "you couldn't possibly live on that," or "that's under minimum wage," or "I could make more money being a sperm donor," or "it's stupid to work that hard just so I can buy a tall latte at Starbucks once an hour."
It's a free market. If a programmer can negotiate some sort of royalty/residuals deal, I'm sure we'd applaud her (especially if the software's good). That programmers don't get terms that are as favorable is about as relevant to actors as it should be to us that your average hourly janitor doesn't get health benefits -- it's unfortunate, maybe, but shouldn't mean we should give up our own benefits.
Plus, in the end, actors' names do have an obvious impact on the financial success of movies (please, lets assume that a horde of geeks have responded to this and said "I don't care who's in a movie as long as it's good" or "I boycott mass-market movies" and move on). Who knows the programmers responsible for a title? Are their names on the box? Does their name recognition add any actual financial value to the producers?
That's already a reality for some hand-held devices -- you can get Python for your Symbian-based phone. In fact, I can (with great pain, due to the keyboard issue) type "print 'hello, world!'" on my Nokia 7610 with the expected results.
I watched Mirrormask with my girlfriend* and two friends last weekend. The visual design was fantastic -- truly beautiful and inventive.
On the other hand, Gaiman's responsible for the plot, and the plot... sucked. It was basically a regurgitation of a bunch of ideas that have been done elsewhere, better. Child has problems with parent; child goes into dreamworld where their parent is represented by some significant figure; child resolves their issues with parent. Happy ending.
It might do as an OK children's movie, but as much as I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter books, I think the latter books' plots beat it.
Might also be useful to have some canned smokeless powder, topped off with some lead. I suspect that if you have firearms it's easier to get food, water, and medicine than it is to get firearms if you have food, water, and medicine:)
I'm sure you'd like a fleet of these, but helicopters are intensely expensive in terms of maintenace-per-flying-hour and these guys can only carry about 18 tons each (36K pounds). If the Walrus can do 500 tons, that's the equivalent of 27 helicopters and for many cases that do not involve threat of enemy activity (e.g. ferrying troops from VA to Germany)... it's probably good enough, and much more economical.
I work in Redwood City now, making low six-digits, in a job I cannot imagine loving more. My boss supports me, my peers are phenomenally smart, and the people working for me are talented, smart, and funny.
Details:
Company was tight-fisted financial services company;
Job was developing apps in Python, either stand-alone or in Zope; Integration with various MS apps (this was a Windows-only shop);
I was attractive because I've done 14 years of experience in all things IT and was a jack-of-all-trades;
I got paid $75K to start, and was raised to $80K when I started managing three engineers and had my title changed from 'Software Engineer 2' to 'Senior Software Engineer'. I considered myself underpaid, and at my next job started at $93K. As both jobs came after about 4-6 months of unemployment, I didn't really negotiate salary too much:)
who knows? I work at a company that makes server products and sometimes it seems like some of our engineers think the only people we should sell our products to are the people smart enough and with a deep enough protocol understanding to write their own.
I don't think you're paranoid -- I think you're ignorant.
Last I looked, the ratio of support personnel to fighting personnel was something like 7:1 in the modern military. That means that for every person whose primary job is actually killing people, there are seven people whose primary job involves support functions. One of the big support functions is "get this stuff from point A to point B."
While sometimes "get supplies from point A to point B" can be rather hazardous -- our supply units in Iraq can talk about that -- it can also quite often be boring, repetitive, and relatively safe. Being able to send supplies to the front lines without having to equip a truck with people will help alleviate this need.
The DoD spends many billions of dollars on research every year. The really sexy research -- "how do we kill people better, faster, and in more bulk?" -- gets the most coverage, but a very significant chunk of their research is around things that are not directly related to the whole "kill or be kill" thing -- for example, the internet.
I agree. Amusingly, here's a comment in one of my scripts recently:
# Oh, but here's fun:
# Due to some sort of gmtime thing, if you specify the last day
# of the quarter as the expiration for kelpie, you'll end up
# with 5pm on the day before as the expiration date. We'll
# tolerate this because... well, it's the easiest thing to deal
# with and,well, one day won't make a big difference. some
# day, I suspect someone will read this comment and want to
# shoot me.
Technically speaking, you could say Obi-wan outsmarted Vader because he figured out where Vader _wouldn't_ look. And we know that's the case because, of course, in Episode IV we see that in fact... he didn't look.
I mean, this kinda falls apart at some point -- you've got to figure that with Vader's uberpowers, he'd have figured out Leia was his daughter when he captured her -- but if you look at it the right (or maybe wrong) way, it all... seems to make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Well ...
I had a first date planned with someone (this was about 349 days ago, before she became my girlfriend, then fiance); I was supposed to go to an area of town I've not often frequented; worse, the directions were confusing (lots of cloverleaf intersections and the like).
I put it into Google Earth, had it show me the directions AND what the streets actually look like, and this really helped me understand the directions. Does that count?
I look forward to my MP3 player glowing blue every time I read comments on slashdot.
You scoff at speaker drives that store up all the sound before spitting it out, but this sort of buffering system is actually very useful if your ears fall behind and can't process all the sound, or if there's some latency along the audio cable (as can happen when multiple signals are competing for bandwidth).
I think you've watched your last show.
GoldenEye: BMW Z3
Tomorrow Never Dies: BMW 750iL
The World Is Not Enough: BMW Z8
Now, the Z8 _is_ around $120K or so, but it's hardly unattainable. The Z3 MSRP is rather less than $40K.
I have to admit I find the Airport Express far more interesting and relevant to my needs. 802.11b/g, wired ethernet, ability to act as bridge, ability to serve USB printers, digital and analog out, doesn't take up any space in my AV rack, and iTunes integration is, needless to say, perfect. Oh, and it's $129 :).
Mind you, it's a different paradigm -- you control this box via the remote, whereas with the AE you tell iTunes what music to stream to it -- but it works pretty darn well for me.
okcupid.com is pretty close to what you may think of when you say 'openmatch.com.' It's free, and while they don't go out of their way to advertise their algorithm, it's pretty obvious how they do it -- they have a potentially infinite number of questions, and they match on answers and how much people care about the answers. The cool thing is that once you've answered 500 questions, you get to submit your own questions too -- so it's a self-perpetuating information-gathering system. Quite cute. I got two dates from them -- one great, one horrible. Amusingly, the best luck I've had with all the sites is with eHarmony.com, potentially the most closed-source of them all. Go figure ...
That's the problem with Americans! We bitch and moan that the Chinese or Indian are taking our jobs, but when someone gives us -- HANDS US ON A PLATE -- an opportunity to make some money, we scoff at it because "you couldn't possibly live on that," or "that's under minimum wage," or "I could make more money being a sperm donor," or "it's stupid to work that hard just so I can buy a tall latte at Starbucks once an hour."
Carly was right!
It's a free market. If a programmer can negotiate some sort of royalty/residuals deal, I'm sure we'd applaud her (especially if the software's good). That programmers don't get terms that are as favorable is about as relevant to actors as it should be to us that your average hourly janitor doesn't get health benefits -- it's unfortunate, maybe, but shouldn't mean we should give up our own benefits.
Plus, in the end, actors' names do have an obvious impact on the financial success of movies (please, lets assume that a horde of geeks have responded to this and said "I don't care who's in a movie as long as it's good" or "I boycott mass-market movies" and move on). Who knows the programmers responsible for a title? Are their names on the box? Does their name recognition add any actual financial value to the producers?
That's what we need. Instead of my MUA having only 'send' and 'cancel' buttons, it needs also an 'I'm feeling lucky' button.
That's already a reality for some hand-held devices -- you can get Python for your Symbian-based phone. In fact, I can (with great pain, due to the keyboard issue) type "print 'hello, world!'" on my Nokia 7610 with the expected results.
I watched Mirrormask with my girlfriend* and two friends last weekend. The visual design was fantastic -- truly beautiful and inventive.
... sucked. It was basically a regurgitation of a bunch of ideas that have been done elsewhere, better. Child has problems with parent; child goes into dreamworld where their parent is represented by some significant figure; child resolves their issues with parent. Happy ending.
...
On the other hand, Gaiman's responsible for the plot, and the plot
It might do as an OK children's movie, but as much as I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter books, I think the latter books' plots beat it.
But man, the visuals
*I'm not making this up.
Hello! My name is indigo montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!
Might also be useful to have some canned smokeless powder, topped off with some lead. I suspect that if you have firearms it's easier to get food, water, and medicine than it is to get firearms if you have food, water, and medicine :)
My grandpa's dead, you insensitive clod!
I'm sure you'd like a fleet of these, but helicopters are intensely expensive in terms of maintenace-per-flying-hour and these guys can only carry about 18 tons each (36K pounds). If the Walrus can do 500 tons, that's the equivalent of 27 helicopters and for many cases that do not involve threat of enemy activity (e.g. ferrying troops from VA to Germany) ... it's probably good enough, and much more economical.
Bitch, moan, complain :)
:)
I work in Redwood City now, making low six-digits, in a job I cannot imagine loving more. My boss supports me, my peers are phenomenally smart, and the people working for me are talented, smart, and funny.
Oh, and parking's free
I'm doing just fine.
Details: :)
Company was tight-fisted financial services company;
Job was developing apps in Python, either stand-alone or in Zope; Integration with various MS apps (this was a Windows-only shop);
I was attractive because I've done 14 years of experience in all things IT and was a jack-of-all-trades;
I got paid $75K to start, and was raised to $80K when I started managing three engineers and had my title changed from 'Software Engineer 2' to 'Senior Software Engineer'. I considered myself underpaid, and at my next job started at $93K. As both jobs came after about 4-6 months of unemployment, I didn't really negotiate salary too much
That's OK. They're going to use XML.
who knows? I work at a company that makes server products and sometimes it seems like some of our engineers think the only people we should sell our products to are the people smart enough and with a deep enough protocol understanding to write their own.
Women voting _was_ the end of civilization. It's just taking a while to coredump. :)
I don't think you're paranoid -- I think you're ignorant.
Last I looked, the ratio of support personnel to fighting personnel was something like 7:1 in the modern military. That means that for every person whose primary job is actually killing people, there are seven people whose primary job involves support functions. One of the big support functions is "get this stuff from point A to point B."
While sometimes "get supplies from point A to point B" can be rather hazardous -- our supply units in Iraq can talk about that -- it can also quite often be boring, repetitive, and relatively safe. Being able to send supplies to the front lines without having to equip a truck with people will help alleviate this need.
The DoD spends many billions of dollars on research every year. The really sexy research -- "how do we kill people better, faster, and in more bulk?" -- gets the most coverage, but a very significant chunk of their research is around things that are not directly related to the whole "kill or be kill" thing -- for example, the internet.
If your computer's defeating the DRM, the end result of that is rather decidedly *NOT* 'legal' content.
It's OK. The Steve promised us 3Gb capacity by next year.
I agree. Amusingly, here's a comment in one of my scripts recently: ... well, it's the easiest thing to deal ,well, one day won't make a big difference. some
# Oh, but here's fun:
# Due to some sort of gmtime thing, if you specify the last day
# of the quarter as the expiration for kelpie, you'll end up
# with 5pm on the day before as the expiration date. We'll
# tolerate this because
# with and
# day, I suspect someone will read this comment and want to
# shoot me.
Technically speaking, you could say Obi-wan outsmarted Vader because he figured out where Vader _wouldn't_ look. And we know that's the case because, of course, in Episode IV we see that in fact ... he didn't look.
... seems to make sense.
I mean, this kinda falls apart at some point -- you've got to figure that with Vader's uberpowers, he'd have figured out Leia was his daughter when he captured her -- but if you look at it the right (or maybe wrong) way, it all