Both math and language skills are important. I was going to add this to my post, but decided to stay on topic. Also, I am glad I didn't since I accidentally used a double negative due to bad editing and would have looked dumber.
I studied a lot of poetry in University and I feel this helps my coding considerably. Poetry literally means work and the sort of work skills necessary to write concise verse is very similar to the work necessary to write good code.
Learning to think and write in other languages is helpful too, since it teaches you to analyze the whole processes of language.
The math skills you need develop your mind to be able to pick up wierd API's and find creative ways around problems. It's sort of like when basketball players take ballet, they generally don't throw a pirouette into their layup routine, but the discipline pays off in transferable skills such as grace and injury avoidance.
You might not think the math skills aren't necessary because they are so ingrained into your way of thinking you no longer see the benefits anymore. But try and do basic gui programming with some one without an understanding of geometry... it's pretty scarry.
By day he tends the net for Super Mario, by night he codes for open source profits.
But I hear Patty Roy is working in Redmond now that he has retired from the Av's. so Fleury isn't alone in making the jump from tending the net to coding for it...
If it is spyware, it would be cool if a guy could get it widely distributed as an iso so everyone could test how strong the servers are in Minnesota and fill their tables up with worthless data... that would teach 'em, you betcha!
How do you do it? I have never cleaned out my junk mail and I have 16 emails in my junk mail folder and they are all from places I have done business with...
My work email has received two pieces of spam, both from the same IP address and I reported it to the ISP responsible and they stopped it pronto.
Where do you sign up for all of that? I mean I have tried and tried to get spam. When I finally got a letter from Nigeria it made my day. What's your secret!?? Where is the best place to sign up?
As they hemmorage subscribers , I think they are looking to make more money through litigation than through dial-up. In the future, AOL will just be a bank of honeypot accounts used to soak up all of the SPAM and turn that spam into profit!
AOL's New Business Plan
1. Sign up for free iPod
2. Receive Spam
3. Litigate!!!
4. $$$$$
I can't believe anyone gets any spam anymore. I actually feel sort of nostalgic for all of the strange offers.
What's next? Secret Service going to bust up a bunch of bolshevics?
Actually they probably should, all of the good spam came from communist countries anyways who were probably just sending it to thumb their nose at our freedom of speech and our weight and erectile problems.
I agree about The Current, I listen to the morning show daily. It's one of the best in the business and has replaced BBC's Chris Moyles in our home. I've been a big fan of Dale Connelly and Jim Ed Poole since they were broadcasting off of MPR out of Houghton, MI. and it's great to be able to pick up their show online. They are a great twist on the morning shock jock shows -- their jokes are funny and witty and they play a wide array of music.
There is a lot of great radio available for free due to public/government funding (NPR, BBC,WNUR,CBC.CA, Notmuch.com, to name a few), so I don't see why anyone would pay for it or want to listen to something loaded with commercials.
Commercials == junk.
I'd rather be strapped in a dental chair and be forced to listen to Canadian content like Bryan Adams, if it means being able to also listen to Saturday afternoon DNTO on CBC.CA, than ever listen to another beer commercial against my will.
So really it's not that Internet radio is dying, it's just that dinosaur formats are dying because they cannot make the evolutionary leap to the internet. And as far as commercial stations, there are some I will listen to anyways because of nostalic reasons. Otherwise, there are only so many people who want to hear a bland commercial Ohio radio station and most of them are in Ohio. If they can't make it on the Ohio airwaves, what makes them think they are going to make it in cyberspace?
Yes, the Toughbook is head and shoulders above the rest... but I have seen them die, but really my only gripe with them is proprietary drivers for onboard stuff.. not a big problem though.
Despite our best intentions, no body escapes the second law of thermaldynamics.
Just for example, I am currently involved in a project deploying several hundred ruggedized computers. We are still in the initial phases and testing out a few different types of devices. We currently have about fifty in the field and have experienced at least five catastrophic hardware failures in 6 months. Additionally we have experienced numerous data loss issues due to power interpt that has caused me to write into the application several data backup routines to avoid this unavoidable hardware gaffe.
Let me get this right, my premise that Anecdotal Evidence is not Data is proved wrong because you have had good service from a laptop model that I said was above the curve?
It's like your arguing with me that the life expectancy of an average male isn't around 70 years because your Grandma, who never smoked, is a hundred and six and she's fine and there's like three other ladies in her retirement home that are over a hundred.
In the same vein you shouldn't expect the average laptop to live more than three years, and it could die sooner or live longer depending on circumstances. I am really happy for you that you have such a nice laptop, really, but are you honestly suprised that most laptops are in the trash after three years?
Again, my premise, anecdotal evidence is not data. Yeah, I have a stack of laptops that are ancient compared to your spiffy centrino and they all work fine. But would you be willing to risk your job by outfitting a fleet of salesmen fresh out of the frat house with three to five year old average Dell laptops or would you pop the extra couple hundred per device to get them new machines with full warranties? I wouldn't risk it. How much is it going to cost your company if one of the road warrior's laptop goes tits up ten minutes before his big powerpoint presentation to a huge client because the hd circled the drain? Add in the cost of the flight, the hotel, the rental car, the lost business and the cost of hiring a new tech that isn't dumb enough to outfit professionals with old junk to save a few bucks... there is no cost savings. Anyways, most Corporations lease new to keep the capital off of their books.
The money you've added to your laptop would have provided you with a new replacement with full warrenty once you have figured in the scrap value of your old one. The fact is, you are not an average user. Not everyone is happy with only 512 megs of ram, I know I wouldn't want to be running memory intensive apps like Websphere, Photoshop, Access, Premiere or even office, explorer and outlook all at once with a bunch of windows open like the average luser does.... and I sure wouldn't want to be supporting a fleet of users who were trying to, either.
And as far as being locked out of MS Vista when it is released is due to mentions in the press that DRM in Vista will require users to get new monitors and I am not in a position to say if a laptop you buy today will meet the standards of Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management(PVP-OPM) or any other whacked out DRM Microsoft will require in your hardware once Vista comes out. This is the dance M$ does with the hardware companies, new software to require new hardware and it was ever thus...right now, all we have is speculation and there has been a lot of speculation over the past three years since this new OS was supposed to be release and things will change in the next three years drastically. There is too much money at play for it not to.
Yeah, it's just my experience. I never really thought about it until Cory Doctrow mentioned that he finds he goes through a laptop per year and I started thinking about it...
You sound like you are lucky with your machines or really careful. You definitely carefully picked out some good machines, because those are two outstanding models I didn't include on my brief list above. I have a 75 mhz vesa that is still ticking away -- even the battery works! And it spent much of its worklife in a dairy barn!
I have serviced and revived an aweful lot of laptops and the 1 - 3 years is just an educated guess I have found to work. It seems that after three years they really start getting buggy. I definitely wouldn't buy a used laptop unless it was twenty bucks and powered up especially when you can get a faster new one (w/warranty)for a price similar to the price people want for their old junk.
And yes, I can tell you, I have talked with many owners whose laptops have died in year two.. it's not pretty.
Yeah, the thinkpad is a really nice and tough notebook. So is the Fujitsu Lifebook and the Panasonic Toughbook, I have heard good things about Dells, but haven't experienced it first hand (and I am a former Dell Tech) I find their fans die slowly (they spin, but not enough) at about 9 -18 months and burn the thing out... but the laptops that last seven years aren't the average notebook, are they?
It was a joke, with a grain of truth. Basically a laptop's life expectancy is 1 - 3 years and more realistically a year of serious professional duty. How long does your battery last? Over 4 hours, still? That's usually the first to go... How about the optical drive and floppy? Can it read every burned disk you throw at it? In my experience, and I have a shelf full of old laptops, these things probably don't work too well. Laptops die young. This is why most manufactuers have never given them a long warranty. It's probably great for hobbist stuff, but would you still have your job if you tried issuing 7 year old laptops as standard corp. issue?
Your seven year old laptop is going to be hard pressed to run XP and I don't think any sensible admin is going to want to have a 98 book in the wild with sensitve data. How many minutes would it take me to own your computer if it's hooked up to the internet? If you really want to extend your laptop's life, get a copy of Solaris on the thing. I am running Solaris 8 for intel on an old stinkpad of the same vintage and it is as good as XP on a new machine with a gig of ram.
Now that I have explained the premise of the joke and expressed my sympathies with your concerns, I will continue with the punchline... How long has MS been telling us they are coming out with Longhorn, now Vista? A dang long time.
In reality it might come out this year, but it might be another year or two at the rate things are going. It's been delayed for easily a good three years now. See, that's why it is funny. If you bought a laptop for longhorn/Vista when it was supposed to be released it'd probably be dead right now especially if you bought a gateway, emachine, HP or sony. In anycase, it'd be slow and underpowered.
And yeah, you're better off waiting for the OS to be released and get a machine made for the OS because if the graphics card don't work, your not going to be able to swap it out... and there are a lot of components that might be questionable under the new trusted computing/closed A(nalog)-hole/DMCA/**AA design Microsoft is going for. Your best bet would be to wait. If you need a laptop buy a $500 Acer (they have a great warranty and build good gear) and save your money for the machine you really want.
And the name of my laptop? Why I use an Aristocrat!
The real question is, will it last long enough to see vista? Given that the average laptop dies a natural death in one to three years, it's anyone's guess...
I grew up before the main clinical description of autism was published, roughly 1984. This was lucky, since instead of being pigeonholed I just baffled the psychiatrists who the school had evaluate me. One example from sixth grade, the psychiatrist said I got the question wrong when asked why oil floated on top of water: I answered with a fairly complex explaination of the molecular make up (including diagrams) and why they can't mix. The answer written in the book was because oil is lighter. So I got it wrong.
My mother was baffled by me, too, but never quit on me. She worked hard to socialize me. She'd wake me up to watch SNL and Monty Python. I learned to tell jokes and understand humor. She exposed me to history, art and religion.
As I grew older I worked to socialize myself. I studied literature and learned how to read and write. I worked with animals and competed in sports (geek sports that required routine, discipline and long times spent alone training).
Still this didn't fully prepare me for the big world and I fell into the geek downward spiral... long periods of coding and disregard for personal hygine...
I could see it wasn't working and went into a concerted effort to break the cycle. I studied how people dressed and made an effort to be more social by going to a coffee shop regularly where the staff began to know me since I always ordered the same drink. But I also worked on learning to talk to people by studying interviews on the radio by Michael Enright, Terry Gross... My computer science teachers taught me a great deal too, one of the focuses of the course work was preparing geeks to interact with the public and the teachers were brilliant at bring us out of our shells. I am forever indebted.
Right now, a good friend of mine is hating his cube life and I am encouraging him to pursue work with autistic children since he enjoys his volunteer work much more than his job. I tell him that it can be done, people can be socialized. It just takes work.
And yes, there are people who are beyond hope, but most of these kids being diagnosed are within range of treatment. It just takes time and dedication to set them on the route. Once taught how to work at it, their innate need for repetition will carry them along.
Your math is all wrong. If you have a pool of potential atheletes the size of the U.S. versus the size of Finland you are statistically going to have a better group of atheletes to choose from.
Part of your falacy lies in assuming that the U.S. 'trains' atheletes. In fact most U.S. atheletes are self trained until they get to a national level and even at that they often work with their own coaches, if they had a coach, or move to the Olympic Training Center where they become part of the program.
In most European countries it is different because there is an Atheltic club system where most communities will have a local atheltic club that can offer coaching and competition. The U.S. focuses most of it's energies on sports that aren't Olympic events (Football) and leaves othere atheletes to fend for themselves.
But in the case of Finns, they are just superior. Finland's motto is Sisu, which basically means "blood and guts". Finns are tough fuckers. The whole culture is based on being tough, strong and taking no shit. As the original poster pointed out, Finland has worked hard to establish itself above the typical stereo type held by most Europeans. They kicked out the Soviets and they kicked out the Nazi's. Their environment and culture has selected tough bastard finns for centuries, so it's no suprise they kick ass. Spend a few years in Lahti, you'll see what I mean.
"The security flaw, which could have permitted contractor fraud, was reported to the agency's inspector general on Dec. 22, but almost three weeks passed before the system was taken offline Wednesday afternoon.
The General Services Administration is the federal agency responsible for procuring equipment and services, including computer security technology, making the lapse all the more striking.
"This is the government entity responsible for letting contracts for security," said Mark Rasch, chief security counsel for Solutionary, a security firm. "Clearly the people who log in would know about security.""
This is why you keep the rates in an updateable table and set up a relational database where you can hook up customer tax location w/the current rate table.
Currently the office keeps these tables on paper and do the calculations by hand.
This is just the start of things to come. Once they get the laws pressed out for the over $5million companies to pay state tax it's only a matter of time before it's everyone paying every ridiculous tax.
You're talking about money here. Once the wagon gets rolling, everyone is going to want on. Give it time.
Once the big fish are forced to pay, rather than fight the tax they'll lobby that it's unfair that every goof on ebay isn't paying, too. That limit will come down faster than the tax went up.
Sometimes reading an article involves actual 'reading'.
Minnesota, and other states, have required businesses to pay sales tax on all mail order items for years before ecommerce even existed. Recently many states have been trying to force people who buy smokes online from tax havens to "cough up" the state taxes by subpoenaing sales records of these sites and billing the customers for back taxes.
Right now, I am working on an app that calculates tax by county. What fun. There are roughly 3200 counties, parishes and independant cities in the US and every one has different rules on what is taxed and how much.
Something like this is really going offer employment opportunities for programmers. It will be a bigger boon than Y2K! Because if the states are getting their tax money, the counties will want theirs too. Of course it will crush commerce for the small guy and most everyone. Just think of the cost of tracking and sending these funds out on a regular basis. So it will be like a bigger bubble and a bigger crush. The nineties all over again.
I think I know why your bullshit detector went off and the cause points to your biased "research". Perhaps your detector wouldn't go off if you weren't in the room.
Okay, so you're a slashdot reader and you have a wife... while this in itself is hard to believe I'll go along with your story. The rest is just hogwash. If you do have a wife, you really ought to stop listening to her and start thinking for yourself instead of using her as your badge of authority.
This simple googling came up with some 112,000 hits of info on the Peking printings and direct contradiction to your bad data:
Prior to the October 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China there were five editions of Mao Tse-Tung's Selected Writings published in various "Liberated Area" locations around China between 1944 and 1948, their texts taken from newspaper articles and oral transcriptions but apparently none sanctioned by its author. These were filled with misprints, errors and omissions, often excluding important articles entirely and including texts by other writers incorrectly attributed to Mao. Thus, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decided a new edition of Mao's Selected Works was needed, so following the liberation of Peking in February 1949 a committee was formed to prepare and organize an authoritative version. The text selections were made in consultation with its author and Mao also agreed to proofread everything and organize additional notes with explanations. It was produced by The People's Publishing House (Peking) and arranged in chronological sections to coincide with periods of modern Chinese history: the first revolutionary civil war (1924-1927) and second revolutionary civil war (1927-1937) [Volume One], the war of resistance against Japan (1937-1945) [Volumes Two and Three], and the third revolutionary civil war (1945-1949) against the Nationalists [Volume Four]. The first volume was printed in October 1951 to coincide with the second anniversary founding of the PRC and its additional three parts were published over the next nine years. This became the source for selecting texts used in creating the "Little Red Book", and for that reason we include proper bibliographical citations:
Get a better book
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For the price, those "Learn something in (X)days" books suck. They are sort of like cheezy exercise equipment sold on late night infomercials -- they seem like a good idea, but in the end they lack the substance and you lack the will power to put up with the tedium and they end up as a clothes rack.
It takes a lot of practice to be a proficient programmer. Get a copy of Just Java 2 by Peter Van Der Linden. It's probably the best Java book out there and a fun read at that.
Read the book, put in the time and then get a job as a Java programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Both math and language skills are important. I was going to add this to my post, but decided to stay on topic. Also, I am glad I didn't since I accidentally used a double negative due to bad editing and would have looked dumber.
I studied a lot of poetry in University and I feel this helps my coding considerably. Poetry literally means work and the sort of work skills necessary to write concise verse is very similar to the work necessary to write good code.
Learning to think and write in other languages is helpful too, since it teaches you to analyze the whole processes of language.
To me codeing is mathematical poetry.
The math skills you need develop your mind to be able to pick up wierd API's and find creative ways around problems. It's sort of like when basketball players take ballet, they generally don't throw a pirouette into their layup routine, but the discipline pays off in transferable skills such as grace and injury avoidance.
You might not think the math skills aren't necessary because they are so ingrained into your way of thinking you no longer see the benefits anymore. But try and do basic gui programming with some one without an understanding of geometry... it's pretty scarry.
Math is the cross training of choice for coding.
By day he tends the net for Super Mario, by night he codes for open source profits.
But I hear Patty Roy is working in Redmond now that he has retired from the Av's. so Fleury isn't alone in making the jump from tending the net to coding for it...
If it is spyware, it would be cool if a guy could get it widely distributed as an iso so everyone could test how strong the servers are in Minnesota and fill their tables up with worthless data... that would teach 'em, you betcha!
Cool! I like all the spam you get with asian characters.
I will just have to try harder.
How do you do it? I have never cleaned out my junk mail and I have 16 emails in my junk mail folder and they are all from places I have done business with...
My work email has received two pieces of spam, both from the same IP address and I reported it to the ISP responsible and they stopped it pronto.
Where do you sign up for all of that? I mean I have tried and tried to get spam. When I finally got a letter from Nigeria it made my day. What's your secret!?? Where is the best place to sign up?
As they hemmorage subscribers , I think they are looking to make more money through litigation than through dial-up. In the future, AOL will just be a bank of honeypot accounts used to soak up all of the SPAM and turn that spam into profit!
AOL's New Business Plan
1. Sign up for free iPod
2. Receive Spam
3. Litigate!!!
4. $$$$$
it's that easy
I can't believe anyone gets any spam anymore. I actually feel sort of nostalgic for all of the strange offers.
What's next? Secret Service going to bust up a bunch of bolshevics?
Actually they probably should, all of the good spam came from communist countries anyways who were probably just sending it to thumb their nose at our freedom of speech and our weight and erectile problems.
Lousy communists!
I agree about The Current, I listen to the morning show daily. It's one of the best in the business and has replaced BBC's Chris Moyles in our home. I've been a big fan of Dale Connelly and Jim Ed Poole since they were broadcasting off of MPR out of Houghton, MI. and it's great to be able to pick up their show online. They are a great twist on the morning shock jock shows -- their jokes are funny and witty and they play a wide array of music.
There is a lot of great radio available for free due to public/government funding (NPR, BBC,WNUR,CBC.CA, Notmuch.com, to name a few), so I don't see why anyone would pay for it or want to listen to something loaded with commercials.
Commercials == junk.
I'd rather be strapped in a dental chair and be forced to listen to Canadian content like Bryan Adams, if it means being able to also listen to Saturday afternoon DNTO on CBC.CA, than ever listen to another beer commercial against my will.
So really it's not that Internet radio is dying, it's just that dinosaur formats are dying because they cannot make the evolutionary leap to the internet. And as far as commercial stations, there are some I will listen to anyways because of nostalic reasons. Otherwise, there are only so many people who want to hear a bland commercial Ohio radio station and most of them are in Ohio. If they can't make it on the Ohio airwaves, what makes them think they are going to make it in cyberspace?
Yes, the Toughbook is head and shoulders above the rest... but I have seen them die, but really my only gripe with them is proprietary drivers for onboard stuff.. not a big problem though.
Despite our best intentions, no body escapes the second law of thermaldynamics.
Just for example, I am currently involved in a project deploying several hundred ruggedized computers. We are still in the initial phases and testing out a few different types of devices. We currently have about fifty in the field and have experienced at least five catastrophic hardware failures in 6 months. Additionally we have experienced numerous data loss issues due to power interpt that has caused me to write into the application several data backup routines to avoid this unavoidable hardware gaffe.
Let me get this right, my premise that Anecdotal Evidence is not Data is proved wrong because you have had good service from a laptop model that I said was above the curve?
It's like your arguing with me that the life expectancy of an average male isn't around 70 years because your Grandma, who never smoked, is a hundred and six and she's fine and there's like three other ladies in her retirement home that are over a hundred.
In the same vein you shouldn't expect the average laptop to live more than three years, and it could die sooner or live longer depending on circumstances. I am really happy for you that you have such a nice laptop, really, but are you honestly suprised that most laptops are in the trash after three years?
Again, my premise, anecdotal evidence is not data. Yeah, I have a stack of laptops that are ancient compared to your spiffy centrino and they all work fine. But would you be willing to risk your job by outfitting a fleet of salesmen fresh out of the frat house with three to five year old average Dell laptops or would you pop the extra couple hundred per device to get them new machines with full warranties? I wouldn't risk it. How much is it going to cost your company if one of the road warrior's laptop goes tits up ten minutes before his big powerpoint presentation to a huge client because the hd circled the drain? Add in the cost of the flight, the hotel, the rental car, the lost business and the cost of hiring a new tech that isn't dumb enough to outfit professionals with old junk to save a few bucks... there is no cost savings. Anyways, most Corporations lease new to keep the capital off of their books.
The money you've added to your laptop would have provided you with a new replacement with full warrenty once you have figured in the scrap value of your old one. The fact is, you are not an average user. Not everyone is happy with only 512 megs of ram, I know I wouldn't want to be running memory intensive apps like Websphere, Photoshop, Access, Premiere or even office, explorer and outlook all at once with a bunch of windows open like the average luser does.... and I sure wouldn't want to be supporting a fleet of users who were trying to, either.
And as far as being locked out of MS Vista when it is released is due to mentions in the press that DRM in Vista will require users to get new monitors and I am not in a position to say if a laptop you buy today will meet the standards of Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management(PVP-OPM) or any other whacked out DRM Microsoft will require in your hardware once Vista comes out. This is the dance M$ does with the hardware companies, new software to require new hardware and it was ever thus...right now, all we have is speculation and there has been a lot of speculation over the past three years since this new OS was supposed to be release and things will change in the next three years drastically. There is too much money at play for it not to.
Yeah, it's just my experience. I never really thought about it until Cory Doctrow mentioned that he finds he goes through a laptop per year and I started thinking about it...
You sound like you are lucky with your machines or really careful. You definitely carefully picked out some good machines, because those are two outstanding models I didn't include on my brief list above. I have a 75 mhz vesa that is still ticking away -- even the battery works! And it spent much of its worklife in a dairy barn!
I have serviced and revived an aweful lot of laptops and the 1 - 3 years is just an educated guess I have found to work. It seems that after three years they really start getting buggy. I definitely wouldn't buy a used laptop unless it was twenty bucks and powered up especially when you can get a faster new one (w/warranty)for a price similar to the price people want for their old junk.
And yes, I can tell you, I have talked with many owners whose laptops have died in year two.. it's not pretty.
Yeah, the thinkpad is a really nice and tough notebook. So is the Fujitsu Lifebook and the Panasonic Toughbook, I have heard good things about Dells, but haven't experienced it first hand (and I am a former Dell Tech) I find their fans die slowly (they spin, but not enough) at about 9 -18 months and burn the thing out... but the laptops that last seven years aren't the average notebook, are they?
It was a joke, with a grain of truth. Basically a laptop's life expectancy is 1 - 3 years and more realistically a year of serious professional duty. How long does your battery last? Over 4 hours, still? That's usually the first to go... How about the optical drive and floppy? Can it read every burned disk you throw at it? In my experience, and I have a shelf full of old laptops, these things probably don't work too well. Laptops die young. This is why most manufactuers have never given them a long warranty. It's probably great for hobbist stuff, but would you still have your job if you tried issuing 7 year old laptops as standard corp. issue?
Your seven year old laptop is going to be hard pressed to run XP and I don't think any sensible admin is going to want to have a 98 book in the wild with sensitve data. How many minutes would it take me to own your computer if it's hooked up to the internet? If you really want to extend your laptop's life, get a copy of Solaris on the thing. I am running Solaris 8 for intel on an old stinkpad of the same vintage and it is as good as XP on a new machine with a gig of ram.
Now that I have explained the premise of the joke and expressed my sympathies with your concerns, I will continue with the punchline... How long has MS been telling us they are coming out with Longhorn, now Vista? A dang long time.
In reality it might come out this year, but it might be another year or two at the rate things are going. It's been delayed for easily a good three years now. See, that's why it is funny. If you bought a laptop for longhorn/Vista when it was supposed to be released it'd probably be dead right now especially if you bought a gateway, emachine, HP or sony. In anycase, it'd be slow and underpowered.
And yeah, you're better off waiting for the OS to be released and get a machine made for the OS because if the graphics card don't work, your not going to be able to swap it out... and there are a lot of components that might be questionable under the new trusted computing/closed A(nalog)-hole/DMCA/**AA design Microsoft is going for. Your best bet would be to wait. If you need a laptop buy a $500 Acer (they have a great warranty and build good gear) and save your money for the machine you really want.
And the name of my laptop? Why I use an Aristocrat!
The real question is, will it last long enough to see vista? Given that the average laptop dies a natural death in one to three years, it's anyone's guess...
I grew up before the main clinical description of autism was published, roughly 1984. This was lucky, since instead of being pigeonholed I just baffled the psychiatrists who the school had evaluate me. One example from sixth grade, the psychiatrist said I got the question wrong when asked why oil floated on top of water: I answered with a fairly complex explaination of the molecular make up (including diagrams) and why they can't mix. The answer written in the book was because oil is lighter. So I got it wrong.
My mother was baffled by me, too, but never quit on me. She worked hard to socialize me. She'd wake me up to watch SNL and Monty Python. I learned to tell jokes and understand humor. She exposed me to history, art and religion.
As I grew older I worked to socialize myself. I studied literature and learned how to read and write. I worked with animals and competed in sports (geek sports that required routine, discipline and long times spent alone training).
Still this didn't fully prepare me for the big world and I fell into the geek downward spiral... long periods of coding and disregard for personal hygine...
I could see it wasn't working and went into a concerted effort to break the cycle. I studied how people dressed and made an effort to be more social by going to a coffee shop regularly where the staff began to know me since I always ordered the same drink. But I also worked on learning to talk to people by studying interviews on the radio by Michael Enright, Terry Gross... My computer science teachers taught me a great deal too, one of the focuses of the course work was preparing geeks to interact with the public and the teachers were brilliant at bring us out of our shells. I am forever indebted.
Right now, a good friend of mine is hating his cube life and I am encouraging him to pursue work with autistic children since he enjoys his volunteer work much more than his job. I tell him that it can be done, people can be socialized. It just takes work.
And yes, there are people who are beyond hope, but most of these kids being diagnosed are within range of treatment. It just takes time and dedication to set them on the route. Once taught how to work at it, their innate need for repetition will carry them along.
Your math is all wrong. If you have a pool of potential atheletes the size of the U.S. versus the size of Finland you are statistically going to have a better group of atheletes to choose from.
Part of your falacy lies in assuming that the U.S. 'trains' atheletes. In fact most U.S. atheletes are self trained until they get to a national level and even at that they often work with their own coaches, if they had a coach, or move to the Olympic Training Center where they become part of the program.
In most European countries it is different because there is an Atheltic club system where most communities will have a local atheltic club that can offer coaching and competition. The U.S. focuses most of it's energies on sports that aren't Olympic events (Football) and leaves othere atheletes to fend for themselves.
But in the case of Finns, they are just superior. Finland's motto is Sisu, which basically means "blood and guts". Finns are tough fuckers. The whole culture is based on being tough, strong and taking no shit. As the original poster pointed out, Finland has worked hard to establish itself above the typical stereo type held by most Europeans. They kicked out the Soviets and they kicked out the Nazi's. Their environment and culture has selected tough bastard finns for centuries, so it's no suprise they kick ass. Spend a few years in Lahti, you'll see what I mean.
This morning, the NYTimes reports the GSA's website for contract bidding has been shut down due serious security flaws.
c ure.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/technology/13se
"The security flaw, which could have permitted contractor fraud, was reported to the agency's inspector general on Dec. 22, but almost three weeks passed before the system was taken offline Wednesday afternoon. The General Services Administration is the federal agency responsible for procuring equipment and services, including computer security technology, making the lapse all the more striking. "This is the government entity responsible for letting contracts for security," said Mark Rasch, chief security counsel for Solutionary, a security firm. "Clearly the people who log in would know about security.""
This is why you keep the rates in an updateable table and set up a relational database where you can hook up customer tax location w/the current rate table.
Currently the office keeps these tables on paper and do the calculations by hand.
This is just the start of things to come. Once they get the laws pressed out for the over $5million companies to pay state tax it's only a matter of time before it's everyone paying every ridiculous tax.
You're talking about money here. Once the wagon gets rolling, everyone is going to want on. Give it time.
Once the big fish are forced to pay, rather than fight the tax they'll lobby that it's unfair that every goof on ebay isn't paying, too. That limit will come down faster than the tax went up.
Sometimes reading an article involves actual 'reading'.
Well, I am doing it. But I do a lot of things people say can't be done -- that's basically my job description.
Minnesota, and other states, have required businesses to pay sales tax on all mail order items for years before ecommerce even existed. Recently many states have been trying to force people who buy smokes online from tax havens to "cough up" the state taxes by subpoenaing sales records of these sites and billing the customers for back taxes.
Right now, I am working on an app that calculates tax by county. What fun. There are roughly 3200 counties, parishes and independant cities in the US and every one has different rules on what is taxed and how much.
Something like this is really going offer employment opportunities for programmers. It will be a bigger boon than Y2K! Because if the states are getting their tax money, the counties will want theirs too. Of course it will crush commerce for the small guy and most everyone. Just think of the cost of tracking and sending these funds out on a regular basis. So it will be like a bigger bubble and a bigger crush. The nineties all over again.
Yow, Where's my aereon chair and foosball table?
Read down the article link and they show that it is the book that later was popularized with the red cover.
If you read the article, it only referenced The Little Red Book, not Selected Works.
From the article:
The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung.
Sounds like the same book mentioned in the link. Perhaps your Google search didn't work since you were looking for the wrong title.
I think I know why your bullshit detector went off and the cause points to your biased "research". Perhaps your detector wouldn't go off if you weren't in the room.
& sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&o e=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:off icial
Okay, so you're a slashdot reader and you have a wife... while this in itself is hard to believe I'll go along with your story. The rest is just hogwash. If you do have a wife, you really ought to stop listening to her and start thinking for yourself instead of using her as your badge of authority.
This simple googling came up with some 112,000 hits of info on the Peking printings and direct contradiction to your bad data:
keywords: mao peking version
http://www.google.com/search?q=mao+peking+version
Results 1 - 30 of about 112,000
including this academic background on the Peking Text:
http://www.bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Han/
Prior to the October 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China there were five editions of Mao Tse-Tung's Selected Writings published in various "Liberated Area" locations around China between 1944 and 1948, their texts taken from newspaper articles and oral transcriptions but apparently none sanctioned by its author. These were filled with misprints, errors and omissions, often excluding important articles entirely and including texts by other writers incorrectly attributed to Mao. Thus, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decided a new edition of Mao's Selected Works was needed, so following the liberation of Peking in February 1949 a committee was formed to prepare and organize an authoritative version. The text selections were made in consultation with its author and Mao also agreed to proofread everything and organize additional notes with explanations. It was produced by The People's Publishing House (Peking) and arranged in chronological sections to coincide with periods of modern Chinese history: the first revolutionary civil war (1924-1927) and second revolutionary civil war (1927-1937) [Volume One], the war of resistance against Japan (1937-1945) [Volumes Two and Three], and the third revolutionary civil war (1945-1949) against the Nationalists [Volume Four]. The first volume was printed in October 1951 to coincide with the second anniversary founding of the PRC and its additional three parts were published over the next nine years. This became the source for selecting texts used in creating the "Little Red Book", and for that reason we include proper bibliographical citations:
For the price, those "Learn something in (X)days" books suck. They are sort of like cheezy exercise equipment sold on late night infomercials -- they seem like a good idea, but in the end they lack the substance and you lack the will power to put up with the tedium and they end up as a clothes rack.
It takes a lot of practice to be a proficient programmer. Get a copy of Just Java 2 by Peter Van Der Linden. It's probably the best Java book out there and a fun read at that.
Read the book, put in the time and then get a job as a Java programmer.
$35 book + time = $70K per year.
You'll have your money back in no time.