I know people who let their kids work in a sweatshop for 4 hours a day... Just because people do it, that doesn't make it good.
Some kids are ready to read at age 6, some aren't. Simple as that. Saying it is important that they should be able to read at age 6 is nonsense. Yes, it is time to start learning how to read. But learning how to read is absolutely not the same as being able to read.
We actually have no problems with the wiimotes in the minigames; the fact that our 4 year old sometimes even beats me on the snowboarding minigame (both without falling once) is a testament to that!
Some games are a bit harder to play (like whack a mole), but after a few minutes of trying they are also very playable.
We got a Wii before Christmas (we live in the Netherlands) and my kids (4 and 6 year old) and me & my wife enjoy it very much. We have a lot of games (including raymond raving rabbits, wario ware) but the absolute best so far is Super Monkey Ball. The main game, but also the 50 party games (if you have 4 wiimotes and 4 nunchucks...)
So if you have kids, super monkey ball is a must buy. And leave happy feet (crap), cars (not crap but not good either) and ice age (ok but too expensive for what you get) at the stores!
Once I had the idea to cool my computer with water from my tropical aquarium. Or, to put it the other way, heat my tropical aquarium with the heat generated by the computer.
I didn't implement the project because the aquarium was nowhere near the computer, moving them closer together wasn't feasible, and I didn't feel like putting a hose through the living room just for this project. So this project is filed with the dozen of other cool projects to do later in life.
Re:Recommended for new *nix users?
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 1
Yes, if I think they have to edit some config files, I recommend vi (which in practice is vim)
Vim is not hard to learn. Sure, it takes a few minutes, and a little cheat sheet of commands, but once you get the hang of it I am very very positive that it is still the fastest editor around.
Also for programming. At the company I work now, most people use MS visual studio. Looking how awfully slow those people navigate through text, have to move the mouse to search and replace, slowly jump to a function declaration, it's a pitty.
The power of regular expressions in vim to search and replace, the ease and speed in which you can move blocks of text around, how fast you can look for text, etc.
Also, vi (and X windows in general) seem to use up much less of precious screen real estate. In X windows I always have 4 xterms open (on my main virtual window). Having four windows open in MS Windows, while still being practical, you need a 26" screen, which will introduce another kind of lag: having to move your head to be able to see the corners of the screen.
So VI(m) is King, and if something better comes along I'll use it, but I don't think we'll see anything better sometime soon.
I couldn't agree more.
More important, it is stupid to think that children enjoy it more when they think Santa Claus is real.
We live in the Netherlands, so Sinterklaas is celebrated here more than Santa Clause. While most of the little children think Sinterklaas is real, I always told my kids that Sinterklaas isn't real. Yes, there was a bishop several hundred years ago that did good things, so we are celebrating his birthday, but Sinterklaas doesn't exist anymore now. Do they sing Sinterklaas songs less loud than other kids? No!
Do they enjoy Sinterklaas less than other kids? No, I think the opposite. A lot of kids are afraid of Sinterklaas, my kids aren't, because they know it is just a guy in a costume.
They also don't believe in the tooth fairy or easter bunny, like they also don't think little red riding hood is actually running around in the forest, and they know that if you kiss a frog, it won't turn into a prince or princess.
I have no desire whatsoever to spend my time and resources to download and test software from Microsoft, to help them make it better.
First I don't want Vista to be any good. Let them release it and then crash and burn.
Second, if they want it to be good, let them test it themselves. They have enough money, and they keep stealing enough money by leveraging their monopoly; they should be able to afford good testers.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I really don't see the point in helping Microsoft for free. The earlier they get Vista out the of the door the sooner you'll hurt, for example by more DRM, more 'trusted computing' which means you pay more but can do less.
So can anyone explain why, other than reasons cult members typically use, I should help Microsoft in getting Vista ready?
SPAM must be fought by all legal means possible. Spammers cause losses on an immense scale; all the time lost by people having to discard their SPAM, all the bandwidth, processing power on mailservers, etc.
Spammers are thieves of the worst kind; it's like causing $100,000 worth of damage in a house to steal $1.
In addition they write virusses to harvest email adresses. They operate large zombie networks to attack companies who try to fight spam. They try to hack every webserver to use as a spamhost. They're far more than just a nuisance, they're like the plague, and should be stopped at all cost.
I rate them worse than drug dealers. Drug dealers at least see the people whom they destroy. Spammers are all the more despicable, thinking they can pull all this crap totaly anonymous.
So yeah, let AOL do EVERYTHING they can to collect the millions the spammer illegally made. Go AOL, GO!
I receive (no kidding) around 600 spam mails per day, versus approximayely 30 real e-mails.
I've been using dspam for over a year now (with very faithful training), and there is maybe 1 false positive every few weeks (less than 1 in 10.000) and every few days a few (usually "new") spam mails get through, which I ofcourse immediately train, to never see those kind again.
So I am very very positive about dspam.
What I do miss though is something like a good and reliable service (better than the RBL's I know) that can block SMTP clients on the fly (like DSL home users and such) to reduce the immense load on our mailservers (I work for an ISP) caused by all the spam (that also has to go through a virus scanner, clamav).
Google is frantically trying to reach into a lot of markets.
And (almost) everybody is cheering them on. Go Google, Go Google!
Maybe I am paranoid by nature, but any company that wishes to expand rapidly like this, is on my "watch out" list.
I (and no doubt thousands of other people) had similar ideas.
My idea was actually a bit better; how about a phone that can scan menus and read them out loud? How about when you're on vacation and you don't speak the language. Wouldn't it be nice to scan a menu at a restaurant, to have the contents translated to your native language, so you know that you'll be ordering monkey brains?
Use it as your mp3 player, and we might also add GPS functionality to it, with mapping software. Small effort to add a tiny DVB receiver so you can watch TV as well.
I believe that killer devices like that will soon become possible; the only thing holding them back is power; usually almost half the volume and more than half the weight of portable devices is being used by the battery pack. Once fuel cell technology is efficient and reduced in size enough, you'll see those very usable devices come to the market.
Completely OT, but it is much much much cheaper to use wind energy instead of solar energy.
If the local laws let you, put a 30 feet pole in you yard and put a small windmill on top of it. There are currently very efficient and very silent, very durable windmills on the market.
I must disagree. I work at a bank, and there is a lot, really A LOT of proprietary code at banks. Banks don't have relatively large IT departments just to dust of servers.
You might be mistaken.
Europe is real! I think alot of companies see this as a good way to strengthen their european presence. It is now yet again a little bit easier for, say, a Belgian company to trade with customers all over Europe.
He doesn't get it?
I think YOU don't get it. Why on earth would there else be such a massive amount of copying of copyright protected works? Because people don't want freedom? Because people are happy to pay inflated prices????
Please, please, explain that to me.
How on earth can this be rated insightful?
I live in this world and for me Nordic (for Americans: Nordic is part of the country of Scandinavia) is synonym to educated and civilised.
(Except for their stance on whale hunting, but alas there are lobby groups everywhere)
I truely don't understand geeks who claim microsoft sucks but still for example have an xbox at home.
If you don't want to buy a car with Microsoft software on some device, tell the salesperson that you won;t buy like the car because it uses Microsoft software. It's that simple, really.
Re:At first i thought this post was stupid
on
Our Friend, The Meter
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· Score: 2, Funny
.... > * 40 inches, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
and 120 inches according to all the viagra spam I get!
It is quite simple; child pornography is illegal. So there is nothing wrong with blocking access to illegal material. I'd even say it is their duty.
Pornography in itself is not illegal, hence when they will block access to pornography or other things they deem inappropriate they will get sued and they lose.
So I really don't see a slippery slope.
Asterisk anywhere...
First, place an asterisk server (with 1 FXO) at your employers office. Then place an asterisk server at home (with one FXS). Let the asterisk servers communicate using the inter asterisk protocol. Then you can connect your plain phone to your asterisk server, while having a phone number of your employers office. The receptionist at the office can transfer calls to your phone like she'd transfer to any other employee in the office.
If you call customers using that phone, your employers gets billed. Customers won't even know your not in the office (except for the crying kid in the background).
recently saw a documentary on North Korea. Children there are also forced to recite, as part of the ongoing indoctrination. Ofcourse I know USA is not the land of the free, it is too bad however that alot of Americans can't think for themself anymore due to successful indoctrination. Enforced reciting of the pledge plays an important part in that indoctrination.
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I know people who let their kids work in a sweatshop for 4 hours a day...
Just because people do it, that doesn't make it good.
Some kids are ready to read at age 6, some aren't. Simple as that. Saying it is important that they should be able to read at age 6 is nonsense. Yes, it is time to start learning how to read. But learning how to read is absolutely not the same as being able to read.
We actually have no problems with the wiimotes in the minigames; the fact that our 4 year old sometimes even beats me on the snowboarding minigame (both without falling once) is a testament to that! Some games are a bit harder to play (like whack a mole), but after a few minutes of trying they are also very playable.
We got a Wii before Christmas (we live in the Netherlands) and my kids (4 and 6 year old) and me & my wife enjoy it very much.
We have a lot of games (including raymond raving rabbits, wario ware) but the absolute best so far is Super Monkey Ball. The main game, but also the 50 party games (if you have 4 wiimotes and 4 nunchucks...)
So if you have kids, super monkey ball is a must buy.
And leave happy feet (crap), cars (not crap but not good either) and ice age (ok but too expensive for what you get) at the stores!
Once I had the idea to cool my computer with water from my tropical aquarium. Or, to put it the other way, heat my tropical aquarium with the heat generated by the computer. I didn't implement the project because the aquarium was nowhere near the computer, moving them closer together wasn't feasible, and I didn't feel like putting a hose through the living room just for this project. So this project is filed with the dozen of other cool projects to do later in life.
Yes, if I think they have to edit some config files, I recommend vi (which in practice is vim) Vim is not hard to learn. Sure, it takes a few minutes, and a little cheat sheet of commands, but once you get the hang of it I am very very positive that it is still the fastest editor around. Also for programming. At the company I work now, most people use MS visual studio. Looking how awfully slow those people navigate through text, have to move the mouse to search and replace, slowly jump to a function declaration, it's a pitty. The power of regular expressions in vim to search and replace, the ease and speed in which you can move blocks of text around, how fast you can look for text, etc. Also, vi (and X windows in general) seem to use up much less of precious screen real estate. In X windows I always have 4 xterms open (on my main virtual window). Having four windows open in MS Windows, while still being practical, you need a 26" screen, which will introduce another kind of lag: having to move your head to be able to see the corners of the screen. So VI(m) is King, and if something better comes along I'll use it, but I don't think we'll see anything better sometime soon.
I couldn't agree more. More important, it is stupid to think that children enjoy it more when they think Santa Claus is real. We live in the Netherlands, so Sinterklaas is celebrated here more than Santa Clause. While most of the little children think Sinterklaas is real, I always told my kids that Sinterklaas isn't real. Yes, there was a bishop several hundred years ago that did good things, so we are celebrating his birthday, but Sinterklaas doesn't exist anymore now. Do they sing Sinterklaas songs less loud than other kids? No! Do they enjoy Sinterklaas less than other kids? No, I think the opposite. A lot of kids are afraid of Sinterklaas, my kids aren't, because they know it is just a guy in a costume. They also don't believe in the tooth fairy or easter bunny, like they also don't think little red riding hood is actually running around in the forest, and they know that if you kiss a frog, it won't turn into a prince or princess.
Yes, but they don't care, and I certainly don't either!
I have no desire whatsoever to spend my time and resources to download and test software from Microsoft, to help them make it better. First I don't want Vista to be any good. Let them release it and then crash and burn. Second, if they want it to be good, let them test it themselves. They have enough money, and they keep stealing enough money by leveraging their monopoly; they should be able to afford good testers. Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I really don't see the point in helping Microsoft for free. The earlier they get Vista out the of the door the sooner you'll hurt, for example by more DRM, more 'trusted computing' which means you pay more but can do less. So can anyone explain why, other than reasons cult members typically use, I should help Microsoft in getting Vista ready?
You're describing a cartel. At least where I come from that's illegal.
This got modded insightful? OMG
SPAM must be fought by all legal means possible. Spammers cause losses on an immense scale; all the time lost by people having to discard their SPAM, all the bandwidth, processing power on mailservers, etc. Spammers are thieves of the worst kind; it's like causing $100,000 worth of damage in a house to steal $1. In addition they write virusses to harvest email adresses. They operate large zombie networks to attack companies who try to fight spam. They try to hack every webserver to use as a spamhost. They're far more than just a nuisance, they're like the plague, and should be stopped at all cost. I rate them worse than drug dealers. Drug dealers at least see the people whom they destroy. Spammers are all the more despicable, thinking they can pull all this crap totaly anonymous. So yeah, let AOL do EVERYTHING they can to collect the millions the spammer illegally made. Go AOL, GO!
I receive (no kidding) around 600 spam mails per day, versus approximayely 30 real e-mails. I've been using dspam for over a year now (with very faithful training), and there is maybe 1 false positive every few weeks (less than 1 in 10.000) and every few days a few (usually "new") spam mails get through, which I ofcourse immediately train, to never see those kind again. So I am very very positive about dspam. What I do miss though is something like a good and reliable service (better than the RBL's I know) that can block SMTP clients on the fly (like DSL home users and such) to reduce the immense load on our mailservers (I work for an ISP) caused by all the spam (that also has to go through a virus scanner, clamav).
Google is frantically trying to reach into a lot of markets. And (almost) everybody is cheering them on. Go Google, Go Google! Maybe I am paranoid by nature, but any company that wishes to expand rapidly like this, is on my "watch out" list.
I (and no doubt thousands of other people) had similar ideas. My idea was actually a bit better; how about a phone that can scan menus and read them out loud? How about when you're on vacation and you don't speak the language. Wouldn't it be nice to scan a menu at a restaurant, to have the contents translated to your native language, so you know that you'll be ordering monkey brains? Use it as your mp3 player, and we might also add GPS functionality to it, with mapping software. Small effort to add a tiny DVB receiver so you can watch TV as well. I believe that killer devices like that will soon become possible; the only thing holding them back is power; usually almost half the volume and more than half the weight of portable devices is being used by the battery pack. Once fuel cell technology is efficient and reduced in size enough, you'll see those very usable devices come to the market.
Completely OT, but it is much much much cheaper to use wind energy instead of solar energy. If the local laws let you, put a 30 feet pole in you yard and put a small windmill on top of it. There are currently very efficient and very silent, very durable windmills on the market.
Brilliant guys who create a .NET application? Somehow that does not compute.
I must disagree. I work at a bank, and there is a lot, really A LOT of proprietary code at banks. Banks don't have relatively large IT departments just to dust of servers.
You might be mistaken. Europe is real! I think alot of companies see this as a good way to strengthen their european presence. It is now yet again a little bit easier for, say, a Belgian company to trade with customers all over Europe.
He doesn't get it? I think YOU don't get it. Why on earth would there else be such a massive amount of copying of copyright protected works? Because people don't want freedom? Because people are happy to pay inflated prices???? Please, please, explain that to me.
How on earth can this be rated insightful? I live in this world and for me Nordic (for Americans: Nordic is part of the country of Scandinavia) is synonym to educated and civilised. (Except for their stance on whale hunting, but alas there are lobby groups everywhere)
I truely don't understand geeks who claim microsoft sucks but still for example have an xbox at home. If you don't want to buy a car with Microsoft software on some device, tell the salesperson that you won;t buy like the car because it uses Microsoft software. It's that simple, really.
....
> * 40 inches, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
and 120 inches according to all the viagra spam I get!
It is quite simple; child pornography is illegal. So there is nothing wrong with blocking access to illegal material. I'd even say it is their duty. Pornography in itself is not illegal, hence when they will block access to pornography or other things they deem inappropriate they will get sued and they lose. So I really don't see a slippery slope.
Asterisk anywhere... First, place an asterisk server (with 1 FXO) at your employers office. Then place an asterisk server at home (with one FXS). Let the asterisk servers communicate using the inter asterisk protocol. Then you can connect your plain phone to your asterisk server, while having a phone number of your employers office. The receptionist at the office can transfer calls to your phone like she'd transfer to any other employee in the office. If you call customers using that phone, your employers gets billed. Customers won't even know your not in the office (except for the crying kid in the background).
recently saw a documentary on North Korea. Children there are also forced to recite, as part of the ongoing indoctrination.
Ofcourse I know USA is not the land of the free, it is too bad however that alot of Americans can't think for themself anymore due to successful indoctrination. Enforced reciting of the pledge plays an important part in that indoctrination.