I've learned that Slashdot provides a lot of resources for procrastinating at work, reading articles about how much money is lost because employees surf the web at work...while surfing the web at work.
I was spending time with my family Extended vacation Self-education/Wanted to learn something new I was writing a book Home renovation/improvment Spiritual retreat in the desert Creating and failing with dot-com startup Using exfoliation to remove tattoo Hunted down Steve Bartman to "express my feelings"
Imagine the cash shelled out to develop their new name - and they come up with Slurp. Some marketing jackass is sitting in his yacht, drinking - no, *slurping* - a pina colada, and thinking to himself, "I can't believe they paid my for that."
Anand's site often recommends (for users with a budget, anyway) that people buy stuff that will run the software(games) they want to run now. I agree and make this recommendation often.
Don't spend $400+ on a video card for the performance you'll get on a game in a year or two. Spend $200 on a 9700 Pro (or whatever your pref.) for the games you play now. Then spend another $200 in a couple of years for whatever card you need to run your games. Buying top of the line means paying top dollar.
My thoughts exactly. Very little appears on the WB that doesn't make me wish I hadn't bought my nice TV.
Not trolling, but I'm awfully disappointed in television as a whole lately. Sometimes I work from home, during the day and at night, and the TV is almost always on in the background. Rarely does it have anything worthwhile. The Simpsons, most of Food Network, ER and Scrubs. That's it. Even 24 is hard to watch now. Occasionally, I'll catch a Family Guy or Futurama re-run on whatever random channels they're on from week to week, but they're usually late at night anyway.
And I don't even watch that much TV; an hour or two a day, I suppose.
Correct. I hadn't taken the time to Google, but here's his past. Still, in his talk with our class he did discuss these kinds of cases and his involvement.
It may also be of note that his arguments against file-sharing (of the parrot-on-the-shoulder sort) were not that it was unethical or that artists were starving. He simply stated that it was illegal and therefore wrong.
As I posted earlier in this discussion, the MS security officer is Scott Charney, formerly of the FBI Cybercrime division. So yes, there certainly are connections.
The security officer at Microsoft, Scott Charney, used to be the head of the FBI Cybercrime unit. I'm not sure of his exact title at either position, but I remember him speaking to my college class shortly after he left the FBI and before he started at MS.
One of our hosting providers dealt with this issue. They had to send physical mail to each person to have them sign a release opting-in to their mailing list. Not spam, mind you, but system messages that they were relying on.
I like the idea, but this creates a lot of work too. For the unemployed, though, I guess that doesn't always sound like a bad thing.:)
We have an Ethanol plant in our town. It smells awful. When the wind changes a bit - usually when it's getting colder, around football season - it blows right across campus. Freshman used to think it smelled like baking bread.
OT, I know. But I wouldn't wish Ethanol on anyone. It'll make you sick, and you don't even have to ingest any..
"software should more closely simulate the real world"
Because the real world doesn't have bugs, right? Our company doesn't have project management software yet - but we're working on it. Personally, I don't think it's worth it until we fix the real world project management issues that this software is supposed to help with. Maybe that's not quite the point, but it raised my eyebrows. (Which I'm thinking about shaving off.)
I realize all that. Personally, I use compact flash/usb keychain drives fairly frequently. In the long term, there are certainly advantages.
It also reminds me of a story I heard yesterday. A co-worker has a lot of repetitive stress injuries to his hands. He bought a $3000 laser-guided mouse pointer a few years back, when they were brand new. It was awful. Didn't work well, was expensive, bulky, etc. He returned it for a full refund (30 day trial period). Now, they sell far superior versions of those for about $100.
In the future, compact flash cards will be so large and so expensive that only the richest people in the world will have one.
$5,000 - 8GB compact flash card
$80 - 160GB Western Digital 7200RPM at Best Buy (wait for a sale)
Unless there's a $4900 mail in rebate on the compact flash card, then no way.
Comcast is expanding fast - too fast, perhaps. They bought out the AT&T service here in my area. I'm not sure of all the details of that merger/purchase/whatever, but our service went from expensive to holy crap in no time.
Also, they're ridiculous about support and customer service. I don't expect them to improve the state of Disney at all if this thing works out for them.
Was going to post: If you want to buy Disney, there's a whole store at the mall selling them.
We all know how convincing digitally altered photos or videos can be. I mean, what jury wouldn't be convinced that those dinosaurs in Jurassic park were real?
They sure looked real to me.
Obviously Java is not the same as Javascript. But learning Javascript (or Java, or C or C++ or a handful of other languages) will easily translate into other languages as well. I'm not talking details - I'm talking general concepts, logic, etc. I've studied both Javascript and Java, and I'll tell you that there's a lot of crap that comes with using Java that a beginner (just getting into it all) would be frustrated with. Javascript is nice because it's your browser. You can teach it with notepad (or vi, or whatever) and a browser.
Then NYTimes will have to link to the Google cache, someone will copy and paste the unformatted text on their site anyway, and we'll see a plagiarizing reporter trying to karma whore in order to get his job back.
Your steam Id is tied to your cd key. Your cd key can only be registered once. If you try to set up a new acct. with the same CD key, you'll be rejected.
Your only option is to buy a new CD (or try to get lucky with a keygen, I guess).
On the other hand, I mostly play on servers that I trust and only on secure servers. I don't recall seeing a hack or cheat used since I've been using Steam. Trust me, I know what a cheat looks like. As for being nubish, I've been fps-ing since Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom and Ken's frickin' Labyrinth. Not that those had much in the way of multiplayer cheats. My 2400 bps wouldn't have stood it.
Counter-strike 1.6 is delivered via Steam. It authenticates users via the net and if you're playing on a "secure" server, you'll be protected from cheaters by their Valve Anti-Cheat System, or VAC. It detects cheaters/hackers and bans their ID (and cd-key, consequently) from the system for five years. I've never seen a hack/cheat in a secure server on Counter-strike or Day of Defeat.
I began teaching my brother programming with Javascript. I also recommended to my department head that they use Java as a beginning programming introduction.
You need to learn the fundamentals of programming - not necessarily Assembly-level, but something that, upon completion of a beginning course, will be useful and applicable to other languages.
We spent three weeks learning conditionals, loops and case - in my Java course (specifically did not use the word "class" there, for anti-pun reasons...). The prerequisite courses were "intro programming" and another, such as VB. But all but three of students came into the class unable to understand an if-else. My time was wasted, my prof was furious and most students gave up.
You know what they learn in the intro programming class? QBASIC. You know how many people had a clue coming into Java or VB or C++? Two of us. We'd both been programming for ten years (and we were 20) and could teach the class. It was a req. for the major, so we had to take it.
Programming is best learned in front of a computer, with a task to do and a good reference to rely on. If that reference is a book, another programmer or freakin' Google, you can still learn the basics from there. I liked the idea of teaching my brother using Javascript because I could 1 - look at his code, 2 - point him at countless resources, examples, etc. and 3 - demonstrate that even if your code follows the rules, works on your machine and is well commented/indented, it won't work on everyone else's machine.
It won't teach you the inner workings of a machine (previous Slashdot post on Assembly as an intro language) but it will help prepare you for a real internship or at least for a class that will teach you more.
I remember: "Barbara Bush" called damn near everyone I know. The last thing I want to hear when I get home from my taxpaying - I'm sorry, working - is a recording of an old lady telling me to vote for so and so or give more of my money to whatever.
Yeah, but if the beginning salary is too low - are you willing to work there for five to ten years to make your way up to what you could/should have been making when you were hired?
I'm in this exact case. I keep hearing, "you'll be rewarded down the road" and "if we're around in five or ten years, you'll have a great position because you'll have been here from the beginning." I'd rather be making a "competitive" salary now instead of hoping to get enough raises over the years to equal what I could find elsewhere.
Me first. Company second. Anyone who believes otherwise is delusional.
Slashdot Mirror
I've learned that Slashdot provides a lot of resources for procrastinating at work, reading articles about how much money is lost because employees surf the web at work...while surfing the web at work.
And knowing's half the battle!
From plausible to absurd:
I was spending time with my family
Extended vacation
Self-education/Wanted to learn something new
I was writing a book
Home renovation/improvment
Spiritual retreat in the desert
Creating and failing with dot-com startup
Using exfoliation to remove tattoo
Hunted down Steve Bartman to "express my feelings"
Take your pick.
Imagine the cash shelled out to develop their new name - and they come up with Slurp. Some marketing jackass is sitting in his yacht, drinking - no, *slurping* - a pina colada, and thinking to himself, "I can't believe they paid my for that."
Anand's site often recommends (for users with a budget, anyway) that people buy stuff that will run the software(games) they want to run now. I agree and make this recommendation often.
/.
Don't spend $400+ on a video card for the performance you'll get on a game in a year or two. Spend $200 on a 9700 Pro (or whatever your pref.) for the games you play now. Then spend another $200 in a couple of years for whatever card you need to run your games. Buying top of the line means paying top dollar.
Then again, this is
If only the system could help sort trolls on Slashdot. *Sigh*
No kidding. Can't you just see the old guy on his rickety fishing boat with a $25,000 high-tech digital fish-sorting contraption?
My thoughts exactly. Very little appears on the WB that doesn't make me wish I hadn't bought my nice TV.
Not trolling, but I'm awfully disappointed in television as a whole lately. Sometimes I work from home, during the day and at night, and the TV is almost always on in the background. Rarely does it have anything worthwhile. The Simpsons, most of Food Network, ER and Scrubs. That's it. Even 24 is hard to watch now. Occasionally, I'll catch a Family Guy or Futurama re-run on whatever random channels they're on from week to week, but they're usually late at night anyway.
And I don't even watch that much TV; an hour or two a day, I suppose.
Correct. I hadn't taken the time to Google, but here's his past. Still, in his talk with our class he did discuss these kinds of cases and his involvement.
a n0 2/01-31CharneyPR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/j
It may also be of note that his arguments against file-sharing (of the parrot-on-the-shoulder sort) were not that it was unethical or that artists were starving. He simply stated that it was illegal and therefore wrong.
As I posted earlier in this discussion, the MS security officer is Scott Charney, formerly of the FBI Cybercrime division. So yes, there certainly are connections.
The security officer at Microsoft, Scott Charney, used to be the head of the FBI Cybercrime unit. I'm not sure of his exact title at either position, but I remember him speaking to my college class shortly after he left the FBI and before he started at MS.
One of our hosting providers dealt with this issue. They had to send physical mail to each person to have them sign a release opting-in to their mailing list. Not spam, mind you, but system messages that they were relying on.
:)
I like the idea, but this creates a lot of work too. For the unemployed, though, I guess that doesn't always sound like a bad thing.
We have an Ethanol plant in our town. It smells awful. When the wind changes a bit - usually when it's getting colder, around football season - it blows right across campus. Freshman used to think it smelled like baking bread. OT, I know. But I wouldn't wish Ethanol on anyone. It'll make you sick, and you don't even have to ingest any..
"software should more closely simulate the real world"
Because the real world doesn't have bugs, right? Our company doesn't have project management software yet - but we're working on it. Personally, I don't think it's worth it until we fix the real world project management issues that this software is supposed to help with. Maybe that's not quite the point, but it raised my eyebrows. (Which I'm thinking about shaving off.)
I realize all that. Personally, I use compact flash/usb keychain drives fairly frequently. In the long term, there are certainly advantages. It also reminds me of a story I heard yesterday. A co-worker has a lot of repetitive stress injuries to his hands. He bought a $3000 laser-guided mouse pointer a few years back, when they were brand new. It was awful. Didn't work well, was expensive, bulky, etc. He returned it for a full refund (30 day trial period). Now, they sell far superior versions of those for about $100.
In the future, compact flash cards will be so large and so expensive that only the richest people in the world will have one. $5,000 - 8GB compact flash card $80 - 160GB Western Digital 7200RPM at Best Buy (wait for a sale) Unless there's a $4900 mail in rebate on the compact flash card, then no way.
Comcast is expanding fast - too fast, perhaps. They bought out the AT&T service here in my area. I'm not sure of all the details of that merger/purchase/whatever, but our service went from expensive to holy crap in no time. Also, they're ridiculous about support and customer service. I don't expect them to improve the state of Disney at all if this thing works out for them. Was going to post: If you want to buy Disney, there's a whole store at the mall selling them.
reporting on Ike...
I didn't know President Eisenhower was a geek.
We all know how convincing digitally altered photos or videos can be. I mean, what jury wouldn't be convinced that those dinosaurs in Jurassic park were real? They sure looked real to me.
Obviously Java is not the same as Javascript. But learning Javascript (or Java, or C or C++ or a handful of other languages) will easily translate into other languages as well. I'm not talking details - I'm talking general concepts, logic, etc. I've studied both Javascript and Java, and I'll tell you that there's a lot of crap that comes with using Java that a beginner (just getting into it all) would be frustrated with. Javascript is nice because it's your browser. You can teach it with notepad (or vi, or whatever) and a browser.
Then NYTimes will have to link to the Google cache, someone will copy and paste the unformatted text on their site anyway, and we'll see a plagiarizing reporter trying to karma whore in order to get his job back.
Of course you know.... this means war.
Your steam Id is tied to your cd key. Your cd key can only be registered once. If you try to set up a new acct. with the same CD key, you'll be rejected.
Your only option is to buy a new CD (or try to get lucky with a keygen, I guess).
On the other hand, I mostly play on servers that I trust and only on secure servers. I don't recall seeing a hack or cheat used since I've been using Steam. Trust me, I know what a cheat looks like. As for being nubish, I've been fps-ing since Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom and Ken's frickin' Labyrinth. Not that those had much in the way of multiplayer cheats. My 2400 bps wouldn't have stood it.
Counter-strike 1.6 is delivered via Steam. It authenticates users via the net and if you're playing on a "secure" server, you'll be protected from cheaters by their Valve Anti-Cheat System, or VAC. It detects cheaters/hackers and bans their ID (and cd-key, consequently) from the system for five years. I've never seen a hack/cheat in a secure server on Counter-strike or Day of Defeat.
I began teaching my brother programming with Javascript. I also recommended to my department head that they use Java as a beginning programming introduction.
You need to learn the fundamentals of programming - not necessarily Assembly-level, but something that, upon completion of a beginning course, will be useful and applicable to other languages.
We spent three weeks learning conditionals, loops and case - in my Java course (specifically did not use the word "class" there, for anti-pun reasons...). The prerequisite courses were "intro programming" and another, such as VB. But all but three of students came into the class unable to understand an if-else. My time was wasted, my prof was furious and most students gave up.
You know what they learn in the intro programming class? QBASIC. You know how many people had a clue coming into Java or VB or C++? Two of us. We'd both been programming for ten years (and we were 20) and could teach the class. It was a req. for the major, so we had to take it.
Programming is best learned in front of a computer, with a task to do and a good reference to rely on. If that reference is a book, another programmer or freakin' Google, you can still learn the basics from there. I liked the idea of teaching my brother using Javascript because I could 1 - look at his code, 2 - point him at countless resources, examples, etc. and 3 - demonstrate that even if your code follows the rules, works on your machine and is well commented/indented, it won't work on everyone else's machine.
It won't teach you the inner workings of a machine (previous Slashdot post on Assembly as an intro language) but it will help prepare you for a real internship or at least for a class that will teach you more.
I remember: "Barbara Bush" called damn near everyone I know. The last thing I want to hear when I get home from my taxpaying - I'm sorry, working - is a recording of an old lady telling me to vote for so and so or give more of my money to whatever.
Yeah, but if the beginning salary is too low - are you willing to work there for five to ten years to make your way up to what you could/should have been making when you were hired?
I'm in this exact case. I keep hearing, "you'll be rewarded down the road" and "if we're around in five or ten years, you'll have a great position because you'll have been here from the beginning." I'd rather be making a "competitive" salary now instead of hoping to get enough raises over the years to equal what I could find elsewhere.
Me first. Company second. Anyone who believes otherwise is delusional.