One day, when my daughter was in first grade, she asked, "Dad, do you do anything cool?" The teacher was inviting parents to talk about their jobs. My daughter agreed that programming is cool, and I got an invitation to give a demo.
The kids all know what computers are and some of the things you can do with them. I explained that nowadays, computers are in everything - appliances, phones, cars, etc, - computers run the modern world. I told them that programmers tell the computer what to do, and without progams, they just sit there and do nothing.
For my demo, a student volunteered to be a "robot", and the class had to instruct her to walk across the room and sit in a chair. The kids had fun, and learned that they need to give very detailed instructions to the computer to get it to do anything useful.
I had dragged in an old PC - there were half a dozen in the classroom, but I couln't use them for the last part of my demo (see below). We fired it up, and wrote a small BASIC program that drew random sized, random colored rectangles on the sreen while making random beeping noises.
Then the part the kids REALLY liked - we opened up PC, and I explained what all of the parts do. We opened up the hard disk, and booted it for the last time - the platters spinning and the head seeking are fun to watch. After shutting down, we pulled out the video card, modem, mainboard, SIMMS, CPU, drives, etc, and passed them around. We disassembled the mouse and keyboard to see what makes them work. The kids loved this, and I had to give a "don't try this at home, your parents will have a cow" speech.
K-8 is a wide age range, it will be difficult to do something that will keep all of the kids interested. Lots of good suggestions have been posted, I'm sure you can pick and choose among them to find interesting ideas.
To this point the VoIP providers have been able to skirt issues such as universal service, E911 surcharges, TDD surcharges, mandated line fees, etc. and I believe they're rightfully doing so.
The downside to this is that E911 doesn't work over VOIP. If you have a life-or-death emergency, it's REAL handy when the dispatcher knows where you are even if you can't speak.
The end user, Madison River's local telephone customer, is paying for the bandwidth. Why should Vonage pay for it, too?
You (and I and everyone else here) pay an ISP for bandwidth. They agreed to route my packets, and I pay them for the service. The contents of those packets is none of thier business.
I'm a programmer with 21 years experience, was a manager for 3 years (didn't like the PHB gig), currently a lead programmer. I filter the stacks of resumes that HR sends to my managers (clueless PHBs). I choose who will be interviewed.
If you list F/OSS projects on your resume, I will be more interested. You are more likely to get an interview.
Anything that makes your resume stand out from the rest is good. You probably wouldn't want to work for anyone that counts F/OSS as a negative.
The signals are actually reflected from the trails of ionized gas created by the rocks burning up in the atmosphere. The rocks themselves are far too small to be useful reflectors.
I used to say POTS is more reliable, also. But, in the last 6 weeks, I have lost dial tone 6 times. When that happens, calling my number results in a busy signal. Local telco (Sprint) has been out to "fix" it each time. This weekend, it was out from Saturday morning until Monday afternoon (the techs don't work on weekends, apparently).
Yes, I paid my bill;-) No, it's not my inside wiring or equipment, as proved by testing at the network interface box. No dial tone at the NI and only 2.5V across the pair (should be approx 48V) with the inside wiring disconnected.
My DSL service (on the same copper pair) has been completely unaffected by the outages.
No, that would make too much sense. Local governments and utilities have to do it like they did in my old town:
Gas company digs up streets to replace lines, as they are required to do on a periodic (decades) basis. Streets are patched, and very bumpy. Town completely repaves the streets. Water company digs up (newly paved!) streets to replace old pipes. Streets are patched, and bumpy again. Town council passes an ordinance that streets cannot be dug up for any reason within 5 years of being repaved. Town coucil passes another ordinance mandating and funding "revitilization" of the old business district. The project requires water/sewer/gas infrastructure upgrades, but the streets have just been repaved...DOH!
When I was unemployed back in 2002, only defense contractors were hiring. I asked that question. The answer is a catch-22:
In order to get a security clearance, you must have a job that requires a security clearance. In order to get a job that requires a security clearance, you must have a security clearance.
I'm surprised that Kerry conceded so quickly. Projecting the trends, it was likely that Bush would win. However, I think Kerry had every right to wait until the Ohio absentee and provisional ballots were counted, they may have given him the Ohio electoral vote. Bush would still have the popular majority, but that's not what elects the president in the USA.
Anyway, a salute to Kerry for being a gentleman. It's good to get this behind us.
I have never seen so many people at the polls. It's a good thing, everyone who is qualified should vote.
If you haven't voted, please vote for the candidate you like best. Don't fall for the "throwing your vote away" and "lesser of two evils" bullshit. I do not like Bush, I do not like Kerry - why should I vote for someone I don't like? That is literally throwing my vote away.
I voted this morning, for the candidate I like best (Badnarik), the one with whom I agreed on the most issues. My candidate won't win, but I gave him what support I could.
And yes, I did vote Libertarian for House of Representatives (Austin Lett, NJ 11th district). Nothing really wrong with the incumbant Republican, but I like to stir the pot sometimes.
In my local races (Freeholders, Sheriff, etc), there were only Republican incumbants on the ballot. There weren't even any Democrats, let alone alternate parties!
Sorry, I don't have any scandals to report. We had the same touchscreen systems that have been in use for a few years now (don't know who makes them). I've never heard of any issues with them.
There are no sexually-explicit sites that target children
Yes, there are. Two examples:
My wife opened a URL that once belonged to Toys-R-Us. She bookmarked it a few years ago, but now it's a porn site. I TRU didn't renew it's domain registration for that particular domain, and the porn guys grabbed it.
You'd be surprised. I once dated a brilliant woman, PhD candidate in Egyptology, speaks six languages, is now a Fulbright scholar. We dated for about seven months, and she would still get lost on the way to my house. Some people really need this feature.
Sounds like a friend of mine. Has a PhD (engineering), IQ over 160, and a GPS/Nav system in his car. Even with explicit written directions, a highlighted map to my house, and the Nav system, he still got lost! I had to "talk him in" via phone.
My son (now 15) is turning out the same way. He's a genius, but got lost riding his bike home from his girlfriend's house, in our own neighborhood.
Back in the '70 and '80s, my father was working with "air logic" - computers based on pneumatics. He was doing the work for the DoD, but I don't know the exact application.
Forget the $200 soldering iron, it doesn't help if you can't see the parts to begin with. My 40 year old eyes just can't deal with SMT components. Even a magnifier doesn't help anymore.
My opthamologist says it's time for bifocals, maybe that will help.
Sometimes blocking your CPN is useful. For example, my sister blocks her CPN. Her husband is the mayor of thier town (small town, it's a part time job). They have a separate line for town business, and don't want people calling their personal line for town business. People call the mayor at all times of the day and night, because they want to bitch about something. My sister and His Honor try to keep the personal number secret so they can retain their sanity - only select friends and family know the number.
I just took a flight to boston from Philadelphia. The entire trip from parking at philadelphia to landing at boston took close to 3 hrs. It's probably 6 hours drive to boston. I'm not really saving much time here. Fortunately my company paid for it, but it was amazingly expensive because it was booked last minute for a customer.
Now, add in the time it took you to drive to the Philly airport. After landing in Boston, add the time to collect your baggage, rent a car, and drive to your customer's site. I'll bet it was even closer to 6 hours.
My cutoff for the fly/drive decision is 6 hours. If I can drive it in 6 hours or less, I don't fly, because it doesn't save any time.
Also, employers will reimburse you for business use of a personal vehicle. The reimbursement is always less than airline tickets and/or rental cars, and the money goes into your pocket. A win for everyone.
BTW, Amtrak runs between Philly and Bean Town. It's a 5 hour ride. It's not a 300MPH mag-lev, but still worth a look.
Errr....no. He's not mature enough, yet. My 14 year-old son is learning C++, with the goal of doing some graphics and games programming. I don't want him looking a porn, or emailing/IM'ing/chatting (text or video) with dirty old men claiming to be 14 year old girls.
I would like to get the PC in his room on our house LAN, so I am currently looking at available filtering tools. The stuff in the article looks interesting. I want to be able to block inapproriate sites from "accidentally" appearing on his browser, but I don't want to completely block net access. Currently, the PCs in my kids' bedrooms are not on the LAN, and they can only access the 'net from the "public" machines in the living room and dining room. (You know you're a geek when you have 8 PCs in your house, but only 4 people live there.)
I do agree, however, that kids will look for a way to bypass filters. They do it at school. At home, it took my 10 year-old daughter about 3 seconds to enter a fake birthdate so she could register at a site that said "you must be over 13 years of age or your parents must register for you."
When connected, phoneline was already dialed out (can't double-dial)
The dialer that my kid triggered disconnected the existing dial-up connection (local call, no chage) and then dialed the porn site (long-distance, huge fee). My kid didn't notice the disconnect/re-dial.
but from my dealings with scummy utility companies in the US, I know I'd pay every penny for a hijacked modem
Not necessarily - I got hit with a bill from AT&T for $120USD for a 20 minute call to Guinea-Bissau(never heard of the place before I got that bill). I told AT&T that I was not going to pay, period/full stop. Since this was my first dispute with them, they agreed, with the provision that my local telco add an international block on my line. I agreed, and the matter was settled.
The international block requires that I speak to an operator to place an internation call. Since I don't make international calls very often, it's not an issue for me. The block had to remain for some time (3 months?) to fulfill my part of the deal.
It turns out that my son (then 12 years old) triggered the porn dialer. He had clicked on a link to a "teen chat site", and clicked "yes" on a pop-up, without reading it (he knows not to do that again). This launched the dialer, which dialed the international call using AT&T's access code (1010288 +1....). Note that AT&T is not my long distance carrier. When the porn site opened, my son closed the browser and walked away from the PC (the PC is in the living room). The modem call stayed up for another 20 minutes.
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One day, when my daughter was in first grade, she asked, "Dad, do you do anything cool?" The teacher was inviting parents to talk about their jobs. My daughter agreed that programming is cool, and I got an invitation to give a demo.
The kids all know what computers are and some of the things you can do with them. I explained that nowadays, computers are in everything - appliances, phones, cars, etc, - computers run the modern world. I told them that programmers tell the computer what to do, and without progams, they just sit there and do nothing.
For my demo, a student volunteered to be a "robot", and the class had to instruct her to walk across the room and sit in a chair. The kids had fun, and learned that they need to give very detailed instructions to the computer to get it to do anything useful.
I had dragged in an old PC - there were half a dozen in the classroom, but I couln't use them for the last part of my demo (see below). We fired it up, and wrote a small BASIC program that drew random sized, random colored rectangles on the sreen while making random beeping noises.
Then the part the kids REALLY liked - we opened up PC, and I explained what all of the parts do. We opened up the hard disk, and booted it for the last time - the platters spinning and the head seeking are fun to watch. After shutting down, we pulled out the video card, modem, mainboard, SIMMS, CPU, drives, etc, and passed them around. We disassembled the mouse and keyboard to see what makes them work. The kids loved this, and I had to give a "don't try this at home, your parents will have a cow" speech.
K-8 is a wide age range, it will be difficult to do something that will keep all of the kids interested. Lots of good suggestions have been posted, I'm sure you can pick and choose among them to find interesting ideas.
To this point the VoIP providers have been able to skirt issues such as universal service, E911 surcharges, TDD surcharges, mandated line fees, etc. and I believe they're rightfully doing so.
The downside to this is that E911 doesn't work over VOIP. If you have a life-or-death emergency, it's REAL handy when the dispatcher knows where you are even if you can't speak.
The end user, Madison River's local telephone customer, is paying for the bandwidth. Why should Vonage pay for it, too?
You (and I and everyone else here) pay an ISP for bandwidth. They agreed to route my packets, and I pay them for the service. The contents of those packets is none of thier business.
I'm a programmer with 21 years experience, was a manager for 3 years (didn't like the PHB gig), currently a lead programmer. I filter the stacks of resumes that HR sends to my managers (clueless PHBs). I choose who will be interviewed.
If you list F/OSS projects on your resume, I will be more interested. You are more likely to get an interview.
Anything that makes your resume stand out from the rest is good. You probably wouldn't want to work for anyone that counts F/OSS as a negative.
The signals are actually reflected from the trails of ionized gas created by the rocks burning up in the atmosphere. The rocks themselves are far too small to be useful reflectors.
Weather forecast calls for clouds, rain and snow for the next 2-3 days. :-(
Why can't they schedule these things for clear nights?
I used to say POTS is more reliable, also. But, in the last 6 weeks, I have lost dial tone 6 times. When that happens, calling my number results in a busy signal. Local telco (Sprint) has been out to "fix" it each time. This weekend, it was out from Saturday morning until Monday afternoon (the techs don't work on weekends, apparently).
;-) No, it's not my inside wiring or equipment, as proved by testing at the network interface box. No dial tone at the NI and only 2.5V across the pair (should be approx 48V) with the inside wiring disconnected.
Yes, I paid my bill
My DSL service (on the same copper pair) has been completely unaffected by the outages.
No, that would make too much sense. Local governments and utilities have to do it like they did in my old town:
Gas company digs up streets to replace lines, as they are required to do on a periodic (decades) basis. Streets are patched, and very bumpy. Town completely repaves the streets. Water company digs up (newly paved!) streets to replace old pipes. Streets are patched, and bumpy again. Town council passes an ordinance that streets cannot be dug up for any reason within 5 years of being repaved. Town coucil passes another ordinance mandating and funding "revitilization" of the old business district. The project requires water/sewer/gas infrastructure upgrades, but the streets have just been repaved...DOH!
Wish I still had mod points for the parent.
That is EXACTLY what happened/is happening. The downside is that the qualified people ride the same wave, in terms of salary and demand for skills.
When I was unemployed back in 2002, only defense contractors were hiring. I asked that question. The answer is a catch-22:
In order to get a security clearance, you must have a job that requires a security clearance. In order to get a job that requires a security clearance, you must have a security clearance.
I passed on Thunderbird because calendaring wasn't integrated. Wasn't aware of Sunbird, I'll have to check it out. Does it integrate with Thunderbird?
Currently, I'm using Evolution as an Outlook replacement.
Firefox rocks!
I'm surprised that Kerry conceded so quickly. Projecting the trends, it was likely that Bush would win. However, I think Kerry had every right to wait until the Ohio absentee and provisional ballots were counted, they may have given him the Ohio electoral vote. Bush would still have the popular majority, but that's not what elects the president in the USA.
Anyway, a salute to Kerry for being a gentleman. It's good to get this behind us.
it's basically a patent on using matrix transforms to set up a model space and a viewer
I learned those methods as a Computer Science student in the mid 1980's.
I have never seen so many people at the polls. It's a good thing, everyone who is qualified should vote.
If you haven't voted, please vote for the candidate you like best. Don't fall for the "throwing your vote away" and "lesser of two evils" bullshit. I do not like Bush, I do not like Kerry - why should I vote for someone I don't like? That is literally throwing my vote away.
I voted this morning, for the candidate I like best (Badnarik), the one with whom I agreed on the most issues. My candidate won't win, but I gave him what support I could.
And yes, I did vote Libertarian for House of Representatives (Austin Lett, NJ 11th district). Nothing really wrong with the incumbant Republican, but I like to stir the pot sometimes.
In my local races (Freeholders, Sheriff, etc), there were only Republican incumbants on the ballot. There weren't even any Democrats, let alone alternate parties!
Sorry, I don't have any scandals to report. We had the same touchscreen systems that have been in use for a few years now (don't know who makes them). I've never heard of any issues with them.
There are no sexually-explicit sites that target children
/. post about how my son was tricked into firing up a porn-dialer http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=112780&cid =9562923
Yes, there are. Two examples:
My wife opened a URL that once belonged to Toys-R-Us. She bookmarked it a few years ago, but now it's a porn site. I TRU didn't renew it's domain registration for that particular domain, and the porn guys grabbed it.
Also, see my
Yet in the USofA it's still legal to use your hand held cell phone while driving,
It's not legal in New Jersey, but lots of people do it anyway. I think it is also illegal in New York.
You'd be surprised. I once dated a brilliant woman, PhD candidate in Egyptology, speaks six languages, is now a Fulbright scholar. We dated for about seven months, and she would still get lost on the way to my house. Some people really need this feature.
Sounds like a friend of mine. Has a PhD (engineering), IQ over 160, and a GPS/Nav system in his car. Even with explicit written directions, a highlighted map to my house, and the Nav system, he still got lost! I had to "talk him in" via phone.
My son (now 15) is turning out the same way. He's a genius, but got lost riding his bike home from his girlfriend's house, in our own neighborhood.
Back in the '70 and '80s, my father was working with "air logic" - computers based on pneumatics. He was doing the work for the DoD, but I don't know the exact application.
Forget the $200 soldering iron, it doesn't help if you can't see the parts to begin with. My 40 year old eyes just can't deal with SMT components. Even a magnifier doesn't help anymore.
My opthamologist says it's time for bifocals, maybe that will help.
Sometimes blocking your CPN is useful. For example, my sister blocks her CPN. Her husband is the mayor of thier town (small town, it's a part time job). They have a separate line for town business, and don't want people calling their personal line for town business. People call the mayor at all times of the day and night, because they want to bitch about something. My sister and His Honor try to keep the personal number secret so they can retain their sanity - only select friends and family know the number.
I just took a flight to boston from Philadelphia. The entire trip from parking at philadelphia to landing at boston took close to 3 hrs. It's probably 6 hours drive to boston. I'm not really saving much time here. Fortunately my company paid for it, but it was amazingly expensive because it was booked last minute for a customer.
Now, add in the time it took you to drive to the Philly airport. After landing in Boston, add the time to collect your baggage, rent a car, and drive to your customer's site. I'll bet it was even closer to 6 hours.
My cutoff for the fly/drive decision is 6 hours. If I can drive it in 6 hours or less, I don't fly, because it doesn't save any time.
Also, employers will reimburse you for business use of a personal vehicle. The reimbursement is always less than airline tickets and/or rental cars, and the money goes into your pocket. A win for everyone.
BTW, Amtrak runs between Philly and Bean Town. It's a 5 hour ride. It's not a 300MPH mag-lev, but still worth a look.
Errr....no. He's not mature enough, yet. My 14 year-old son is learning C++, with the goal of doing some graphics and games programming. I don't want him looking a porn, or emailing/IM'ing/chatting (text or video) with dirty old men claiming to be 14 year old girls.
I would like to get the PC in his room on our house LAN, so I am currently looking at available filtering tools. The stuff in the article looks interesting. I want to be able to block inapproriate sites from "accidentally" appearing on his browser, but I don't want to completely block net access. Currently, the PCs in my kids' bedrooms are not on the LAN, and they can only access the 'net from the "public" machines in the living room and dining room. (You know you're a geek when you have 8 PCs in your house, but only 4 people live there.)
I do agree, however, that kids will look for a way to bypass filters. They do it at school. At home, it took my 10 year-old daughter about 3 seconds to enter a fake birthdate so she could register at a site that said "you must be over 13 years of age or your parents must register for you."
When connected, phoneline was already dialed out (can't double-dial)
The dialer that my kid triggered disconnected the existing dial-up connection (local call, no chage) and then dialed the porn site (long-distance, huge fee). My kid didn't notice the disconnect/re-dial.
but from my dealings with scummy utility companies in the US, I know I'd pay every penny for a hijacked modem
....). Note that AT&T is not my long distance carrier. When the porn site opened, my son closed the browser and walked away from the PC (the PC is in the living room). The modem call stayed up for another 20 minutes.
Not necessarily - I got hit with a bill from AT&T for $120USD for a 20 minute call to Guinea-Bissau(never heard of the place before I got that bill). I told AT&T that I was not going to pay, period/full stop. Since this was my first dispute with them, they agreed, with the provision that my local telco add an international block on my line. I agreed, and the matter was settled.
The international block requires that I speak to an operator to place an internation call. Since I don't make international calls very often, it's not an issue for me. The block had to remain for some time (3 months?) to fulfill my part of the deal.
It turns out that my son (then 12 years old) triggered the porn dialer. He had clicked on a link to a "teen chat site", and clicked "yes" on a pop-up, without reading it (he knows not to do that again). This launched the dialer, which dialed the international call using AT&T's access code (1010288 +1
They ought to auction it on ebay. I wonder what it would go for...