I spent many hours trying to hunt down an XML source for weather data before I gave up and wrote code to decipher those damn files they were providing.
NOAA servers contain much more weather info than just US states and territories; my program was pulling down everything from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Which was good for me - the site was designed for world travelers.
They're not required to release your credit scores for free. In fact, they are allowed to advertise their products - including full reports with your scores - as long as they don't mislead the visitor or make it hard to get the free info.
NPR ran a story on this a couple of days ago, I think. I was surprised that it didn't hit Slashdot until today.
I was approached a while ago about building a small module for a website to pull in temperature and humidity (factors which affect concrete drying times, apparently). My geek nature kicked in and I hunted down a means for obtaining all the weather info without having to rip off a weather.com or similar site.
I was able to FTP to NOAA servers for free/anonymous, download the most recent file (once an hour is all I bothered with), and parse it into a database. Part of the difficulty was lining up the ICAO codes with the location, but since I have place names (city, state, country) it wasn't that bad. I ended up integrating it into a project of my own. The concrete site project never solidified.
So yeah - you could do that yourself. You'd want a server to handle the load, though - not relying on the NOAA servers for each client connection/update. So it would be free to the clients but it would cost you something. That's probably why it hasn't been done without spyware/registration/crapware.
Management types aren't likely to admit that they know what BDSM even means... or that they spent nearly three and a half hours last night trying to download the latest installment of "Pain in the Ass."
It sounds like a loaded question of sorts. Seriously - there are folks that can code (or do other kinds of work) for 80 hours in a week. I've done 30 hour coding sessions, and it feels great when you finish the project. But if you can't rest for the next 18 hours or so, it's going to hurt. Not just you and your sleep rhythm (I didn't think that programmers ever really got a "sleep rhythm") but your project as well.
No cavities. I had scheduled for a filling, but it turned out to be worn enamel - apparently I grind my teeth. Saved me a few hundred dollars, too. Since I haven't gone in so long, I figured that I should at least do my best to brush regularly, use mouthwash, etc. The dentist commented on how well my teeth were doing after all that time away.
The dental hygienist was really cute and kept flirting with me. She stopped flirting so much once she saw my wedding ring.
Maybe I should submit my tale to Slashdot for front-page posting.
These kinds of things are posted on Collegehumor.com all the time. As a recent college graduate myself, I have seen a good number of AOL CD sculptures.
Since we're so interested in slow news, it started snowing today. And I went to the dentist for the first time in four years.
He sure did. An anonymous company paid him an unknown amount of money to not mention their company, their product, or even his name.
I agree with him. Google's Toolbar has the ability to transmit your info back to Google. They openly admit it and offer you the opportunity to turn it off. Plus, you can uninstall it easily.
That doesn't stop idiots from claiming that Google Toolbar is Spyware or that the entire company is evil. Come on - you're not losing anything by letting someone know where you surf, but you can gain the ability to use their software.
"Prevailing wage" means different things in different situations. Fresh-faced college kid salary: $26k. Experienced (and more qualified) expert salary: $80k.
Maybe they have to take other things into account, such as location and experience, but I rarely see a job listing with a pay rate that isn't a wide range.
Here in Indiana, mass transit is a bad idea. You can't run public transportation routes (subways, trains, even a bus) to every place you need to go. And you certainly don't want to walk five miles to your house (which may or may not be surrounded by corn fields) because the bus stop is so far away.
Self-navigating cars will be wonderful. I wouldn't expect 20-30 years, though. I'd say they're 50 years off. Right around the time we've finished weaning ourselves off of gasoline.
"It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."
As a developer myself, I know very well that what I think is usable is not always end-user usable. As close as I get to a project, knowing the code inside and out, I tend to miss the big picture stuff. It may sound logical and intuitive in my mind, but it usually takes some testing from non-geeks before I let anyone - especially a client - start using it.
Since you're already working with a compressed, lossy format copy of the song, you probably don't care about the fidelity or quality that much. So my suggestion would be to use another program to rip the song from your burned CD. There may be software out there to remove DRM restrictions on music from your specific service, but iTunes has shown that they can and will change the DRM to make it harder to get around (with that method).
So what I'm saying is that you can burn it via Napster's software, but then rip it from the CD into whatever format/software you want. Personally, I've been using iTunes for ripping CDs because it's fast enough for me and it's extremely easy/mindless.
If that fails you, you can always run your CD player into your microphone jack and record it that way. There's nothing they can do to stop that kind of copying.
Such as finding kidnapped students? Or tracking down students that were committing crimes? Or preventing non-students/staff/approved folks from entering the school?
I was in high school when the Columbine thing happened. After I graduated HS, there was a student that ran off with a teacher. While I was in college, at least a few students "disappeared," only to turn up dead a few weeks later.
I don't know enough about RFID, the technical limits, or how they'll implement the tags/readers to say how these cases could have been resolved. But it's usually someone who's doing something wrong that makes a complaint about police officers having "something better to do."
None of the spellings -- encyclopedia, encyclopaedia, or encyclopædia -- are formally misspellings. Historically, however, the latter two represent a very old spelling mistake. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling with the ae or æ is "pseudo-Greek" and "an erroneous form (said to be a false reading) occurring in MSS. of Quintilian, Pliny, and Galen". The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the æ is not found in the original Greek enkyklios paideia for "encyclical education", described as "the circle of arts and sciences considered by the Greeks as essential to a liberal education".
Offtopic? Thank you for getting the joke. If there was ever an appropriate time to use the "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" line it would be in this story. You know, the one about robotic cockroaches infiltrating the dark places of the world to rid us of the live cockroaches? So inserting a "robotic" into that line would also be appropriate.
This has been discussed many times. Biometrics are not a reliable way of handling security. Once compromised (and they can be compromised!) you're left with a "password" you cannot change.
When used in conjunction with other security mechanisms, such as hardware smartcards, passwords, etc. then you've got a much better chance. For the basic user, biometric identification is probably OK. But you wouldn't want to rely on that for anything "secure."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have the latest one up right now, but here's a cached version that I was pulling down and interpreting:
Posted on: 2004/05/28 10:00
From location: FVHA (Harare Kutsaga,Zimbabwe)
Temperature: 69.8F | 21C
Wind: S 6.9 mph
Conditions: N/A
Wx: None available
Latitude: 17-55S
Longitude: 031-08E
Elevation: 1479 meters above sea level
I spent many hours trying to hunt down an XML source for weather data before I gave up and wrote code to decipher those damn files they were providing.
NOAA servers contain much more weather info than just US states and territories; my program was pulling down everything from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Which was good for me - the site was designed for world travelers.
We've been using snapfish.com for years and love it.
In fact, I just ordered photo Christmas cards from them.
They're not required to release your credit scores for free. In fact, they are allowed to advertise their products - including full reports with your scores - as long as they don't mislead the visitor or make it hard to get the free info.
NPR ran a story on this a couple of days ago, I think. I was surprised that it didn't hit Slashdot until today.
Dude - I've written something like that already.
I was approached a while ago about building a small module for a website to pull in temperature and humidity (factors which affect concrete drying times, apparently). My geek nature kicked in and I hunted down a means for obtaining all the weather info without having to rip off a weather.com or similar site.
I was able to FTP to NOAA servers for free/anonymous, download the most recent file (once an hour is all I bothered with), and parse it into a database. Part of the difficulty was lining up the ICAO codes with the location, but since I have place names (city, state, country) it wasn't that bad. I ended up integrating it into a project of my own. The concrete site project never solidified.
So yeah - you could do that yourself. You'd want a server to handle the load, though - not relying on the NOAA servers for each client connection/update. So it would be free to the clients but it would cost you something. That's probably why it hasn't been done without spyware/registration/crapware.
Management types aren't likely to admit that they know what BDSM even means... or that they spent nearly three and a half hours last night trying to download the latest installment of "Pain in the Ass."
It sounds like a loaded question of sorts. Seriously - there are folks that can code (or do other kinds of work) for 80 hours in a week. I've done 30 hour coding sessions, and it feels great when you finish the project. But if you can't rest for the next 18 hours or so, it's going to hurt. Not just you and your sleep rhythm (I didn't think that programmers ever really got a "sleep rhythm") but your project as well.
No cavities. I had scheduled for a filling, but it turned out to be worn enamel - apparently I grind my teeth. Saved me a few hundred dollars, too. Since I haven't gone in so long, I figured that I should at least do my best to brush regularly, use mouthwash, etc. The dentist commented on how well my teeth were doing after all that time away.
The dental hygienist was really cute and kept flirting with me. She stopped flirting so much once she saw my wedding ring.
Maybe I should submit my tale to Slashdot for front-page posting.
These kinds of things are posted on Collegehumor.com all the time. As a recent college graduate myself, I have seen a good number of AOL CD sculptures.
Since we're so interested in slow news, it started snowing today. And I went to the dentist for the first time in four years.
He sure did. An anonymous company paid him an unknown amount of money to not mention their company, their product, or even his name.
I agree with him. Google's Toolbar has the ability to transmit your info back to Google. They openly admit it and offer you the opportunity to turn it off. Plus, you can uninstall it easily.
That doesn't stop idiots from claiming that Google Toolbar is Spyware or that the entire company is evil. Come on - you're not losing anything by letting someone know where you surf, but you can gain the ability to use their software.
"Prevailing wage" means different things in different situations. Fresh-faced college kid salary: $26k. Experienced (and more qualified) expert salary: $80k.
Maybe they have to take other things into account, such as location and experience, but I rarely see a job listing with a pay rate that isn't a wide range.
World's Largest Metaphor Sinks!
(courtesy The Onion, in case you haven't seen "Our Dumb Century")
Here in Indiana, mass transit is a bad idea. You can't run public transportation routes (subways, trains, even a bus) to every place you need to go. And you certainly don't want to walk five miles to your house (which may or may not be surrounded by corn fields) because the bus stop is so far away.
Self-navigating cars will be wonderful. I wouldn't expect 20-30 years, though. I'd say they're 50 years off. Right around the time we've finished weaning ourselves off of gasoline.
Shh!!! They will hear you!
"It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."
As a developer myself, I know very well that what I think is usable is not always end-user usable. As close as I get to a project, knowing the code inside and out, I tend to miss the big picture stuff. It may sound logical and intuitive in my mind, but it usually takes some testing from non-geeks before I let anyone - especially a client - start using it.
Since you're already working with a compressed, lossy format copy of the song, you probably don't care about the fidelity or quality that much. So my suggestion would be to use another program to rip the song from your burned CD. There may be software out there to remove DRM restrictions on music from your specific service, but iTunes has shown that they can and will change the DRM to make it harder to get around (with that method).
So what I'm saying is that you can burn it via Napster's software, but then rip it from the CD into whatever format/software you want. Personally, I've been using iTunes for ripping CDs because it's fast enough for me and it's extremely easy/mindless.
If that fails you, you can always run your CD player into your microphone jack and record it that way. There's nothing they can do to stop that kind of copying.
Such as finding kidnapped students? Or tracking down students that were committing crimes? Or preventing non-students/staff/approved folks from entering the school?
I was in high school when the Columbine thing happened. After I graduated HS, there was a student that ran off with a teacher. While I was in college, at least a few students "disappeared," only to turn up dead a few weeks later.
I don't know enough about RFID, the technical limits, or how they'll implement the tags/readers to say how these cases could have been resolved. But it's usually someone who's doing something wrong that makes a complaint about police officers having "something better to do."
Whoa, something pissing you off there?
From
Wikipedia: Spelling of 'Encyclopedia':
None of the spellings -- encyclopedia, encyclopaedia, or encyclopædia -- are formally misspellings. Historically, however, the latter two represent a very old spelling mistake. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling with the ae or æ is "pseudo-Greek" and "an erroneous form (said to be a false reading) occurring in MSS. of Quintilian, Pliny, and Galen". The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the æ is not found in the original Greek enkyklios paideia for "encyclical education", described as "the circle of arts and sciences considered by the Greeks as essential to a liberal education".
He actually says in his letter that he hopes it will make it to Slashdot. Big community, a lot of connections.
Offtopic? Thank you for getting the joke. If there was ever an appropriate time to use the "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" line it would be in this story. You know, the one about robotic cockroaches infiltrating the dark places of the world to rid us of the live cockroaches? So inserting a "robotic" into that line would also be appropriate.
I haven't seen any "I for one welcome..." posts!
Man, my wife's anti-Simpsons campaign is having an effect on my Simpson's useless trivia knowledge. I had it confused with the flavored milk product.
*shudder*
"encyclypedia"
This reminds me of Bart's discovery that he was drinking "smilk."
Good luck with your encyclypedia.
This has been discussed many times. Biometrics are not a reliable way of handling security. Once compromised (and they can be compromised!) you're left with a "password" you cannot change.
When used in conjunction with other security mechanisms, such as hardware smartcards, passwords, etc. then you've got a much better chance. For the basic user, biometric identification is probably OK. But you wouldn't want to rely on that for anything "secure."