I am not yet a parent, but hope to be soon, and we're actively trying. This is a subject very dear to me.
A lot of personality is laid down very early (first few years,) be it nature or nurture. This is what kind of person your child is, and how your child relates to other people. If you're actually bright creative geeks, raise your own kids if you can.
We won't be a 2 income family. Childcare is so expensive that the second salary means a lot less, especially compared to actually knowing and raising our own kids.
Your family can be a big help. Do you want to live in a big extended family? How involved do you want the grandparents to be? I'm hoping they'll spend a lot of time staying with us, because we both adore our parents. My wife spent a lot of time with her grandmother as a child, and I knew my grandparents very well too. We're both glad of it. Remember, they've done this before.
Think hard about how to get time with your family. I'm still trying to figure it out. Consult, contract, go cold turkey on half my salary so we could live on a teacher's pay? Moving's out because we want to be close to the grandparents.
My father was a college professor, and we got 3 month family vacations most years, in addition to 2 weeks off for Christmas. We often went to visit the grandparents on those vacations. When I started to think seriously about raising kids, I realized how difficult it will be to have anything like that with my own kids.
Tangentially, I think a lot of geeks, (or more generally intellectuals) underestimate people. People can be most complex and rewarding things you will ever encounter.
I like that usage of burned for a used up email address.
William S. Burroughs in _Junky_ used "burned down" for a pharmacy or doctor that could no longer be taken advantage of by a junkie. Burroughs was quoting an idiom already in use.
On the other hand, giving your address to SAGE is very low risk. This is the System Administrators Guild, and they're trying to increase professionalism of and regard for System Administrators. They're a very responsible organization.
If you are a system administrator, join SAGE, and learn, contribute, or both. I'm glad to be a member. It ain't cheap, ($135/yr?) but that survey alone more than made up the difference, and again when I advised a friend. They have a really good magazine, too.
Not multiples of (pick a number other than 1 & the prime.) They're defined by the patterns they don't fit. That looks like an irregular or near fit to a pattern.
I said all primes are odd in an earlier post. Sorry, all primes but the number two are odd.
I hacked up a perl script to demonstrate what these guys were describing. I don't want to drop it in here, because it's a shameful late night hack, but it's in my journal. It generates primes, increments, intervals, and a running total of the intervals, since Kumar says they tend to follow each other in opposition closely. I'm still unconvinced they're onto anything novel, but I'll look again in the AM.
Yeah, I remember being excited when I saw a graph of primes that were dots in a field of blank composites. There were lines & patterns all over the place. Wow!
Then I realized that the composite numbers will each make a pattern in any graph. By their nature they repeat.
What I was looking at was the space in between the patterns created by the composites. For example, all primes are odd. There's a set of straight lines on any graph. Well, it's more enlightening to say that none are even, becasue then they'd be divisible by two. Each new set of composites creates another pattern that makes a hole in possible primes.
Overall, they have to collect more than they pay out. If it was a good deal, they wouldn't be selling it, because they'd lose money. Also, the store has to get a good markup on it or they wouldn't push it so hard, so in addition to being a bad deal at wholesale, at retail it must be even worse. You're looking at like 10% in voluntary fees.
They can be hard to collect on. I've had difficulties getting things repaired. In fact, I was told that I was lucky that the (boss's IBM laptop) machine was still under the manufacturer's warranty, because getting it fixed through that was so much easier. This is straight from the extended warranty department at C_ C_. This brings up the next point.
They usually duplicate manufacturer's warranties. IBM provided a good 1 year warranty. You may be told that they're worth more, but make sure (read it) before you sign anything.
At some shops, you can buy them after the sale for some period of time. They want to sell them that badly. That can't be a good sign. That also means that you don't have to decide while the guy is hovering over you.
One clerk pointed out to me that it's a better deal for things that'll be used in a hostile environment. The $500 camcorder that goes to the beach needs it more than my $80 DVD player. That camcorder was actually a gift, and I'm more likely to provide such a thing as a part of a gift.
They could also be good if you're really risking way more than you can afford to lose. A similar example is automotive liability insurance. If you hurt someone with your car, it seems reasonable to do everything you can to be responsible about it.
Buy reputable products, from reputable vendors. I like what one poster said. "If I need the extended warranty so badly, it must be crap. See ya!"
Know your exposure before you buy an extended warranty.
Libraries are great! But: Your library may not be able to use your books, and may end up selling them off cheaply at a booksale. It's kind to give them a shot. I believe in libraries, but I know they actually have to pare down their collections, so don't give them a pile of crap.
Depending on the books you've collected, you may be able to sell them to used bookstores. They'll usually offer you more in credit than they do cash, so you can make trades more economically.
I've gone & sold 2/3 of a large pile to a used bookstore, then taken the last 1/3 to another used bookstore, & sold 2/3 of that. Iterate as desired. The last few I either kept or gave to Goodwill. I've given lots of books to friends, too.
I do a few things to economize on books. I am a real addict though. I even met my wife working in a bookstore.
Buy books at thrift stores, rummage sales, or library book sales. There are lots of wonderful books being sold by the peck sack.
Used bookstores can have bargains, but can also be overpriced. Very few computer books are of much use either to buy or sell, in a used bookstore. This akin to a friend of a friend's experience trying to sell a desktop computer to a pawn shop.
I try not to buy books I won't want to keep in the long run. Lots of books are very available through Project Gutenberg & the public libraries. You can read most classics free.
I also have a readers card at the nearest University library. It's not free, but it makes a lot of stuff available to me that I couldn't see otherwise. I think it's a better bargain at $75/year than O'Reilly's Safari.
Safari's a nice idea. Especially for geek books with a limited lifespan. Renting books troubles me a little though. If I want it enough to pay to rent it, as a professional, I'll likely want to own it anyway.
There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Libary of Babel, and it is a great illustration of an information theoretical point.
You're familiar with the idea that an infinite number of monkeys & typewriters would eventually compose the works of Shakespeare?
The Library of Babel contains every possible book of a certain length. The story is written from the point of view of a librarian in this library. This librarian has never seen a book of any meaning or interest, and has never met anyone who has. There are rumors, because the librarians have deduced that the library appears to have all possible books.
Finding the meaningful works in the huge search space will be much harder than composing them again intentionally, in fact humanly impossible unless you're starting from a very near point in the first place.
Extra credit question: See why an index or card catalog of the books would be of no real help?
Now, are you familiar with Searle's Chinese room experiment in AI? This is a room where you submit statements in Chinese and receive answers through a window. Supposedly the person inside doesn't understand Chinese at all, but only uses some set of rules to process the papers coming through the window. This set of rules allows him to compose an answer, possibly even passing a Turing test.
Does the system understand Chinese? Critics of AI would say not.
To me Borges' story illustrates a flaw with the Chinese room experiment itself. A sufficiently complex system can't be emulated without some kind of understanding.
It was a glorious feeling finding this for myself in Borges. I look at AI differently because of this story. I'm not coding AI, so maybe you aren't really interested in my opinion.
Extra credit answer: Any catalog or index that was sufficiently specific to be helpful would have to contain the needed information, and make reference to the library itself unneccessary. There is no Shakespeare finding algorithm that is perfectly accurate and doesn't already contain Shakespeare. See also pigeonhole problem.
It's a tiny 486sx 25 (no fpu,) and it runs on a camcorder battery.
http://pc110.ro.nu/
One person used to write about doing development on it, (including compiling in his pocket, while on walks) and maintained a Linux page for it. That's all gone now. I guess the machine's too slow to be very interesting anymore.
I bought one as a portable Linux system from one of the local import/discount houses after it was discontinued. I'm afraid I never did anything interesting with it. It's about the only full PC with a keyboard that's smaller than the Libretto. Unfortunately, it's also substantially less capable. Now that CF cards are so cheap, I should probably build a nice 128 meg slackware install, drop in a pcmcia modem & nic, & make it my laptop replacement. Hmmm. Better yet, I should just put it up onto Ebay. Squandered opportunities.
I think an awful lot of it comes down to social promotion.
Schools are doomed by social promotion. How can you have effective schools if it is essentially impossible to get left back, or to fail a grade?
Next year, you are guaranteed to have students who can't do the work getting promoted to the next grade. Teachers may not grade on a curve, but won't completely abandon those students who can't get the material. Repeat this cycle a few times with a consequent lowering of standards each time around, and it's a miracle that our schools work at all.
Once they're lost, they're lost for good. For example, reading ability is a big part of their ability to work around those bad teachers and crappy texts. If they don't learn to read, they'll hit a hard ceiling, just as they'll hit a hard ceiling later on if they don't learn mathematics. When you have illiterate kids graduating from high school, then obviously schools are failing.
If we don't quantify what we're trying to achieve we've got no chance of measuring success. Social promotion is the equivalent of renaming failure to success.
As far as respect goes, I didn't respect some of my teachers, in some cases with good reason. One of them was finally fired for throwing a stool at a student, (he taught 4th grade, so we're talking about an adult launching a stool at a nine year old.) This didn't surprise me, and he wasn't my worst teacher.
We'll always need better teachers, better textbooks, and wish our culture put more value on education. We will always need to pursue these things. I was lucky: Even if I didn't respect my teachers, I sure as hell wanted to learn from all of them, even the floating turds, who will always be there.
What we must do is try to make education about education, and put the mechanics in place for the system to succeed at its chosen task. Perhaps we should introduce the novel idea of academic promotion in school, as a sort of social experiment.
I find sundial rings appealing. You should find several at these sites:
http://www.villagecraftsmen.com/SUNDIALS2.HTM o r a larger picture of the design is here http://www.uniquecanes.com/AstroKey1721.html
Since this is something you'll be spending your life with, you might have one made by a jeweler. In that case, it could be designed for your latitude.
A cipher key phrase or a circular slide rule of some sort could be put into a ring also. Any slide rule should translate into a circular slide rule, but on the scale of a ring, it would be quite small, and so not terribly easy to use.
Not to be too much of a sanctimonious PITA, but how does your fiancee feel about this? This is an object that symbolizes your commitment to each other. While I wear a wedding ring that I made, I certainly discussed it with my wife, because this ring is about us.
You might try to find a phrase worthy of inscribing on the ring, if a plain band seems useless to you. That could increase the personal meaning. You might think of other designs you care about, or something you find unique and beautiful. Don't underestimate the importance of beauty and personal meaning.
OK, I spent enough time writing this that other people have made the same points. I'll risk redundancy, and say my piece anyway.
There's a good long tradition of these things too.
Ducati's motorcycle history goes back to 1946, when the Ducati factory produced a 48cc four stroke engine as a bicycle motor.
In 1947 Honda produced it's first product, a bicycle motor of 50 cc, based on the design of a batch of war surplus generator motors Soichiro had bought & then resold for the same purpose.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that spring to mind. I'd be interested to know exactly what engine he's using.
I was thinking about motorizing a scooter so I could still take it on Bart. Bicycles are not allowed during rush hour, and pushing a scooter any distance around a city like San Francisco is pretty slow hard work.
For those people who're complaining about noise, most of the engines you hear have little or no muffler. On a bicycle the weight penalty is substantially less than on a model airplane, so it could be muffled more efficiently. He could even put a tiny catalytic converter on it.
If you're in San Diego, Industrial Liquidators is fun. Mostly mechanical stuff, but some electronic gear. I bought a World's Fair icepick there (ever try to find an icepick?)
Then there's Murphy's in El Cajon. Want the voice hardware used in talking coke machines, or a gas cap with a built in mechanical fuel guage?
There used to be another one down the street from Murphy's that was more electronics oriented, but I don't recall the name, and I'm not sure it's still there. I try to make a pilgrimage to one or two of them every time I go down there, but I don't get to very often.
I'm interested in making my texts into audiobooks. I can read on the screen easily enough, but there are times I'd be happy to hear them read, even by a machine.
Etexts to listen to on my Zaurus would be fun, and I don't just mean MP3s.
As someone who reads aloud, I know it'll suck because not only will there be no inflection, but the pronunciation will be marginal. Still, it could be interesting. I'm also interested in the possibility of combining this with some sort of inflectional markup language.
That was my experience after spending several sessions and several hours with microsoft support.
We (network architect, NT specialist, and myself) worked with them, and kept giving them net dumps demonstrating the problem we were complaining of. They kept asking for more dumps with different specs. After we built a couple of test environments to their spec that demonstrated the problem, they finally declared that the behavior was intentional and as designed. Interesting that it didn't occur to them to say that in the first place.
Maybe this is just bad tech support, but anytime someone consistently benefits from their own mistakes, I'm skeptical. As far as they're concerned, that call wasn't about a bug, and I'll never buy support from them again, and never bother them with another bug again. It isn't worth it. This is what I'd always heard from my developers, but this was an interesting enough problem to make us want to pursue it.
Ultimately, our call wasn't about a bug , because Microsoft didn't call it a bug. Whatever. Now it's filed with NTBugtraq. They're interested in documenting bugs. Too bad they can't fix them.
They have an Echidna in the petting zoo there. I visited it fairly often, and it was always curled up in the corner. I suppose they have it there because it's well protected & not aggressive.
The really compelling thing about this to me is something I realized in studying the human brain. The sheer number of interconnections dwarfs the number of transistors we can manufacture in a short time.
To get a structure of that size and complexity, biology wins with exponential growth rather than linear.
For example, say your cell population doubles every half hour. In 32 hours you have 2^64 cells. Try to get to build that nunber of interconnected devices in one structure with any linear process.
Biology has always seemed to be the only way to get to large and complex enough structures to be truly interesting.
What else does Google get out of this that they couldn't get without buying Pyra?
Instantaneous access to blogs as updated doesn't sound interesting until you imagine correllating that data. I know instant zeitgeist doesn't sound terribly interesting, but I think it will be.
For example, Pud over at FC could improve the value of his rumors, with questions that only he could answer. Perhaps he's already doing this: Is a batch of rumors about a new F*ck coming from a competitor's netblock or the company's own? What's the timespread? There are other interesting things to be found in that data, too.
Google could build a killer blogsite. They could cruise existing blogs. They must want existing content & users, already blogging, and not just their content, which they already have, or could have. They're already caching a significant portion of the net. Other thoughts?
A visiting high school friend made a sandwich and poured himself a glass of milk. He took a drink and stumbled to the sink, to spit it out.
"What was that?" He hollered in a betrayed voice. I then realized that he had drunk the sour milk my mother was saving for making pancakes. When I explained, he pulled a magic marker out of his pocket & drew frowny faces on all four sides of the carton, scowling the whole time.
Oh! Low temperature attenuates smell. Not everyone uses sour milk for cooking.
People have suggested some great resources, but your company may need to invest in the helpdesk.
How much do you have to spend? 1-4 above are all costly in money, talent or time. Good people aren't cheap, any more than good processes or docs.
The people issues can be alleviated, but only in direct proportion to the quality and applicability of your processes and documentation.
Good docs are hard to write, so you can't just farm it out to your developers, or to the HD techs who don't have the confidence of the users. You're talking about as much work as writing a Dummies book for your company, and if it's less readable, it's less useful. Besides, there may be a reason for the user's lack of confidence in the helpdesk.
If you don't have good processes, your people have to be generalists. My observation has been that a HD person is eligible for a substantial promotion as soon as they become a good HD person. Of all the people I've personally seen and worked with who were laid off from HD roles (over a dozen) those who were good at the HD job got better jobs. The ones who were marginal had difficulties, but most found similar HD jobs where hopefully they can learn enough to become better techs. This is frontline user support in the SF Bay area after the economy tanked.
Truly talented & experienced troubleshooters with the social skills for customer service, can get work that is better compensated and better regarded than front line user support.
With good clear docs and cultivated customer service skills, the less skilled could be good first level support, but how often do you see docs of that quality? How much did those docs cost?
PCMCIA TDR is here, but it's an AOL members page, not a real commercial site, so I'm suspicious that it's vapor. I'd expect a company that tooled up for a PCMCIA TDR to be able to afford a real site. It's also not a NIC.
It's the second link on googling pcmcia time domain reflectometer -optical
Not exactly six feet, but six feet to the nearest inch. You used 1.8m to translate six feet, robbing me of over an inch of height. A tenth of a meter has enough latitude to accomodate a huge proportion of the population within one measure, because the standard deviation for height is under one tenth of a meter. Height is certainly an attribute lots of people "would want to measure."
On the other hand, a centimeter is generally excessive precision in measuring height. A centimeter of variation from morning to evening, is not unusual in an individual, so measurement to the centimeter can be misleading in describing height. Height doesn't often vary more than about a half an inch within a day though, making the inch about as accurate as one can expect to get without additional stipulations on measurement, such as time of day.
Regarding my previous comment: I misunderstood your comment about 1.8m & 2.4m because the context was several comments up. That was my error. I'm sorry about that.
"Why is 6 feet easier to comprehend than 2.4 metres? (actually ~1.8m). "
You've managed to make it hard to comprehend. 2.4 meters is not actually ~1.8 meters.
Integers are simple. Small integer fractions, simple. 1.8 meters is over an inch (2.54 cm) short of six feet. On the other hand, 6.56 feet is too many significant figures for most measures involving a couple of meters or few feet. You've made my point.
Use whatever works. Convert where appropriate, because after all, some of us can do maths, and don't mind converting. You don't like imperial measures? Don't use 'em. Don't call me stupid because I use yards roughing out a housing addition. I'm happy to use meters in a ballistics experiment. (Throwing rocks with a roman sling counts as a ballistics experiment, right?)
Look up a few craftsman's rules of thumb, and you'll find origins of a lot of these measures.
Some of them are obsolete. I hated trying to figure out a person's weight in stone, although in terms of human weight and its daily variations, it makes some sense to use a large increment. I'm glad medicine is measured in milligrams instead of grains. Maybe someday, prescriptions won't be written in latin, too.
I'd generally rather that a craftsman use a measure his trade deems appropriate than try to bend him to a metric rule for my convenience. Imagine you are talking with someone who is complaining that they don't know how much a byte is. You explain how to convert.
I discovered last weekend that my house is built with 2x4 that are actually two inches by four inches. A cheerful surprise, since the 2x4 (standard for lumber in the U.S. was slimmed down at about the time the house was built. Silly, isn't it?
I'm in favor of standardizing on commercial use of the metric system. I'm just tired of hearing that everything else is stupid, and think the arguments for using other measures are interesting. These strange measures carry information. Sometimes that information is obsolete, and merely of historical interest.
Perhaps I'm just arguing because I find it interesting. The arguments for metric are similar to the arguments for Esperanto. I'm afraid I find those arguments dull, since they are few although compelling. On the other hand, each individual measure, be it rod, fathom, mile, carat, stone, degree, or horsepower, has it's own history and supporting reasons for existing. I find each reason to be a bit of history, or accumulated human factors information, or insight into a craft, and interesting.
I love the way the metric system makes chemistry and physics work. I can hardly imagine the horror of trying to do chem without it. A lingua franca is an important idea. The Systeme International is an important lingua franca. Other languages continue to have their place.
Exactly. Human scale matters. These measurements evolved and survived because they were useful, not because they were mathematically convenient.
An entire order of magnitude is often too great a span. The expression "order of magnitude" which specifically means factor of ten even implies that this is a large difference. That's why our measures evolved as they did, as small integer fractions instead. Well, that & convenient math.
Intrpreting the phrase human scale more literally, my pace is 1 yard, as is the distance from the tips of my fingers to my nose. Excellent for measuring rope, cloth, or string. My wingspan and height, 2 yards, or 6 feet. Granted, most people do not have a pace of exactly a yard, but that's because most people are shorter, and consequently even further from an even meter pace.
I love the metric system when I'm doing calculations that involve lots of conversions, but when I'm foughly planning the addition to my house, it's awfully convenient to pace out the distances in integer yards. When I'm measuring cat5, it's damn simple to stretch it out, nose to fingertips a few times, and look at the leftover and know it's 10 feet.
Fractions are often easier to manipulate in one's head than decimals, especially if one is already using a convenient number like 12 as a base.
I love SI units and the concept of significant figures for chemistry. When I'm cooking, the scale of gallon/4= quart/2 =pint (a pound of water)/2 =cup/8 =ounce/2 =tablespoon/3 =teaspoon works quite well, and the significance of the figure is implicit in the measurement used as a rule, just like the appropriate amount of torque is implied by the length of the handle on a wrench.
Don't forget decimal time. "The benefits of decimal time are ease of calculation, a single number that can represent an exact time and date, and that can be used by everyone on the planet, or off it." As far as meeting my wife for lunch or calculating my timesheet, those factors are trivial compared with the importance of using a measure that is meaningful relative to the way I use time. Hence, no-one lives by a decimal clock. The French tried for a few years, but gave up.
Being "multilingual" in terms of measurement is a good thing. Different circumstances call for different measures. There are people who use decimal time for technical reasons. Peculiar measures are an easy target, but those arose because they had a particular function. The jigger is a damn convenient measure for liquor. Sure, we could call a jigger a 45 mil measure, but when we do, we lose something. In addition to the convenience of using integer measures with particular meaning, there's a little culture & history carried by these things too.
When that happens, pour me two fingers out of that fifth of bourbon, and I'll put two bits into the jukebox and we can try to talk Esperanto. Oh! Too late. The fifth is gone as a measure of liquor. Well, I can drink from a 750ml bottle.
Don't forget about Megabit and Megabyte (as interpreted by Disk Drive manufactureres vs. everybody else.) That factor of eight is a pain in the ass. We should go to decimal computing.
I'm tired of Fasciscs whining about democracy. People will deny fascism while denigrating democratic government and prosletyzing for corporate rule.
To claim that my vote is worthless in running the state, and that a corporation would give me more power, is Fascism.
A democratic government is intended to give a voice to everyone. I have some small amount of influence when I vote, and when I write to a representative, or participate more directly in more local government, where I have yet more influence over how things are run. Maybe voting isn't worth anything to you, but it is to me.
I'm not saying that the government should run everything, just responding to your assertion that the stock market gives me more power than democracy.
Corporate rule is far from democratic. The vast majority of Enron investors didn't decide to enrich the few folks who burned down the store. The folks with the voting shares weren't paying enough attention, but most of the people who lost money had no influence at all, putting the lie to your last paragraph.
Perhaps you merely meant that the government shouldn't own anything? Of course without owning anything, it couldn't govern, and would become irrelevant. That's OK for the fascists, because corporate rule will be best for us all.
Forced to choose between my stocks, and my vote, I'd pick my vote (even back in the 90's.) Fortunately, I get both.
I don't think it's "jest book larnin'" or "shallow premature experience" as much as a matter of personal aptitude & interest.
I think it's just a matter of being interested, and of thinking about how this stuff really works. I'm a sysadmin and I find astonishing the things many programmers don't understand, and aren't even interested in learning about the tools they use every day.
Memory leaks, disk thrashing, or filesystem limitations, are all too often mysterious and met with blank stares. These are bright, capable people, but they're too busy to go outside their box. That stuff is my job.
On the other hand, I'm a sysadmin because I'm something of a geek, and intersted in everything. It's a good Jack of all trades sort of job. I may be busy as hell, but learning new tools is a regular part of my job, and if somebody's using it, I'd better have an idea of not only how it works, but how it will interact with the rest of our systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not yet a parent, but hope to be soon, and we're actively trying. This is a subject very dear to me.
A lot of personality is laid down very early (first few years,) be it nature or nurture. This is what kind of person your child is, and how your child relates to other people. If you're actually bright creative geeks, raise your own kids if you can.
We won't be a 2 income family. Childcare is so expensive that the second salary means a lot less, especially compared to actually knowing and raising our own kids.
Your family can be a big help. Do you want to live in a big extended family? How involved do you want the grandparents to be? I'm hoping they'll spend a lot of time staying with us, because we both adore our parents. My wife spent a lot of time with her grandmother as a child, and I knew my grandparents very well too. We're both glad of it. Remember, they've done this before.
Think hard about how to get time with your family. I'm still trying to figure it out. Consult, contract, go cold turkey on half my salary so we could live on a teacher's pay? Moving's out because we want to be close to the grandparents.
My father was a college professor, and we got 3 month family vacations most years, in addition to 2 weeks off for Christmas. We often went to visit the grandparents on those vacations. When I started to think seriously about raising kids, I realized how difficult it will be to have anything like that with my own kids.
Tangentially, I think a lot of geeks, (or more generally intellectuals) underestimate people. People can be most complex and rewarding things you will ever encounter.
I like that usage of burned for a used up email address.
William S. Burroughs in _Junky_ used "burned down" for a pharmacy or doctor that could no longer be taken advantage of by a junkie. Burroughs was quoting an idiom already in use.
On the other hand, giving your address to SAGE is very low risk. This is the System Administrators Guild, and they're trying to increase professionalism of and regard for System Administrators. They're a very responsible organization.
If you are a system administrator, join SAGE, and learn, contribute, or both. I'm glad to be a member. It ain't cheap, ($135/yr?) but that survey alone more than made up the difference, and again when I advised a friend. They have a really good magazine, too.
Not multiples of (pick a number other than 1 & the prime.) They're defined by the patterns they don't fit. That looks like an irregular or near fit to a pattern.
I said all primes are odd in an earlier post. Sorry, all primes but the number two are odd.
I hacked up a perl script to demonstrate what these guys were describing. I don't want to drop it in here, because it's a shameful late night hack, but it's in my journal. It generates primes, increments, intervals, and a running total of the intervals, since Kumar says they tend to follow each other in opposition closely. I'm still unconvinced they're onto anything novel, but I'll look again in the AM.
Yeah, I remember being excited when I saw a graph of primes that were dots in a field of blank composites. There were lines & patterns all over the place. Wow!
Then I realized that the composite numbers will each make a pattern in any graph. By their nature they repeat.
What I was looking at was the space in between the patterns created by the composites. For example, all primes are odd. There's a set of straight lines on any graph. Well, it's more enlightening to say that none are even, becasue then they'd be divisible by two. Each new set of composites creates another pattern that makes a hole in possible primes.
Overall, they have to collect more than they pay out. If it was a good deal, they wouldn't be selling it, because they'd lose money. Also, the store has to get a good markup on it or they wouldn't push it so hard, so in addition to being a bad deal at wholesale, at retail it must be even worse. You're looking at like 10% in voluntary fees.
They can be hard to collect on. I've had difficulties getting things repaired. In fact, I was told that I was lucky that the (boss's IBM laptop) machine was still under the manufacturer's warranty, because getting it fixed through that was so much easier. This is straight from the extended warranty department at C_ C_. This brings up the next point.
They usually duplicate manufacturer's warranties. IBM provided a good 1 year warranty. You may be told that they're worth more, but make sure (read it) before you sign anything.
At some shops, you can buy them after the sale for some period of time. They want to sell them that badly. That can't be a good sign. That also means that you don't have to decide while the guy is hovering over you.
One clerk pointed out to me that it's a better deal for things that'll be used in a hostile environment. The $500 camcorder that goes to the beach needs it more than my $80 DVD player. That camcorder was actually a gift, and I'm more likely to provide such a thing as a part of a gift.
They could also be good if you're really risking way more than you can afford to lose. A similar example is automotive liability insurance. If you hurt someone with your car, it seems reasonable to do everything you can to be responsible about it.
Buy reputable products, from reputable vendors. I like what one poster said. "If I need the extended warranty so badly, it must be crap. See ya!"
Know your exposure before you buy an extended warranty.
Libraries are great! But: Your library may not be able to use your books, and may end up selling them off cheaply at a booksale. It's kind to give them a shot. I believe in libraries, but I know they actually have to pare down their collections, so don't give them a pile of crap.
Depending on the books you've collected, you may be able to sell them to used bookstores. They'll usually offer you more in credit than they do cash, so you can make trades more economically.
I've gone & sold 2/3 of a large pile to a used bookstore, then taken the last 1/3 to another used bookstore, & sold 2/3 of that. Iterate as desired. The last few I either kept or gave to Goodwill. I've given lots of books to friends, too.
I do a few things to economize on books. I am a real addict though. I even met my wife working in a bookstore.
Buy books at thrift stores, rummage sales, or library book sales. There are lots of wonderful books being sold by the peck sack.
Used bookstores can have bargains, but can also be overpriced. Very few computer books are of much use either to buy or sell, in a used bookstore. This akin to a friend of a friend's experience trying to sell a desktop computer to a pawn shop.
I try not to buy books I won't want to keep in the long run. Lots of books are very available through Project Gutenberg & the public libraries. You can read most classics free.
I also have a readers card at the nearest University library. It's not free, but it makes a lot of stuff available to me that I couldn't see otherwise. I think it's a better bargain at $75/year than O'Reilly's Safari.
Safari's a nice idea. Especially for geek books with a limited lifespan. Renting books troubles me a little though. If I want it enough to pay to rent it, as a professional, I'll likely want to own it anyway.
There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Libary of Babel, and it is a great illustration of an information theoretical point.
You're familiar with the idea that an infinite number of monkeys & typewriters would eventually compose the works of Shakespeare?
The Library of Babel contains every possible book of a certain length. The story is written from the point of view of a librarian in this library. This librarian has never seen a book of any meaning or interest, and has never met anyone who has. There are rumors, because the librarians have deduced that the library appears to have all possible books.
Finding the meaningful works in the huge search space will be much harder than composing them again intentionally, in fact humanly impossible unless you're starting from a very near point in the first place.
Extra credit question: See why an index or card catalog of the books would be of no real help?
Now, are you familiar with Searle's Chinese room experiment in AI? This is a room where you submit statements in Chinese and receive answers through a window. Supposedly the person inside doesn't understand Chinese at all, but only uses some set of rules to process the papers coming through the window. This set of rules allows him to compose an answer, possibly even passing a Turing test.
Does the system understand Chinese? Critics of AI would say not.
To me Borges' story illustrates a flaw with the Chinese room experiment itself. A sufficiently complex system can't be emulated without some kind of understanding.
It was a glorious feeling finding this for myself in Borges. I look at AI differently because of this story. I'm not coding AI, so maybe you aren't really interested in my opinion.
Extra credit answer: Any catalog or index that was sufficiently specific to be helpful would have to contain the needed information, and make reference to the library itself unneccessary. There is no Shakespeare finding algorithm that is perfectly accurate and doesn't already contain Shakespeare. See also pigeonhole problem.
It's a tiny 486sx 25 (no fpu,) and it runs on a camcorder battery.
http://pc110.ro.nu/
One person used to write about doing development on it, (including compiling in his pocket, while on walks) and maintained a Linux page for it. That's all gone now. I guess the machine's too slow to be very interesting anymore.
I bought one as a portable Linux system from one of the local import/discount houses after it was discontinued. I'm afraid I never did anything interesting with it. It's about the only full PC with a keyboard that's smaller than the Libretto. Unfortunately, it's also substantially less capable. Now that CF cards are so cheap, I should probably build a nice 128 meg slackware install, drop in a pcmcia modem & nic, & make it my laptop replacement. Hmmm. Better yet, I should just put it up onto Ebay. Squandered opportunities.
I think an awful lot of it comes down to social promotion.
Schools are doomed by social promotion. How can you have effective schools if it is essentially impossible to get left back, or to fail a grade?
Next year, you are guaranteed to have students who can't do the work getting promoted to the next grade. Teachers may not grade on a curve, but won't completely abandon those students who can't get the material. Repeat this cycle a few times with a consequent lowering of standards each time around, and it's a miracle that our schools work at all.
Once they're lost, they're lost for good. For example, reading ability is a big part of their ability to work around those bad teachers and crappy texts. If they don't learn to read, they'll hit a hard ceiling, just as they'll hit a hard ceiling later on if they don't learn mathematics. When you have illiterate kids graduating from high school, then obviously schools are failing.
If we don't quantify what we're trying to achieve we've got no chance of measuring success. Social promotion is the equivalent of renaming failure to success.
As far as respect goes, I didn't respect some of my teachers, in some cases with good reason. One of them was finally fired for throwing a stool at a student, (he taught 4th grade, so we're talking about an adult launching a stool at a nine year old.) This didn't surprise me, and he wasn't my worst teacher.
We'll always need better teachers, better textbooks, and wish our culture put more value on education. We will always need to pursue these things. I was lucky: Even if I didn't respect my teachers, I sure as hell wanted to learn from all of them, even the floating turds, who will always be there.
What we must do is try to make education about education, and put the mechanics in place for the system to succeed at its chosen task. Perhaps we should introduce the novel idea of academic promotion in school, as a sort of social experiment.
Nah, I'm sure it's much too risky.
I find sundial rings appealing. You should find several at these sites:
o r a larger picture of the design is herel
http://www.villagecraftsmen.com/SUNDIALS2.HTM
http://www.uniquecanes.com/AstroKey1721.htm
Since this is something you'll be spending your life with, you might have one made by a jeweler. In that case, it could be designed for your latitude.
A cipher key phrase or a circular slide rule of some sort could be put into a ring also. Any slide rule should translate into a circular slide rule, but on the scale of a ring, it would be quite small, and so not terribly easy to use.
Not to be too much of a sanctimonious PITA, but how does your fiancee feel about this? This is an object that symbolizes your commitment to each other. While I wear a wedding ring that I made, I certainly discussed it with my wife, because this ring is about us.
You might try to find a phrase worthy of inscribing on the ring, if a plain band seems useless to you. That could increase the personal meaning. You might think of other designs you care about, or something you find unique and beautiful. Don't underestimate the importance of beauty and personal meaning.
OK, I spent enough time writing this that other people have made the same points. I'll risk redundancy, and say my piece anyway.
There's a good long tradition of these things too.
Ducati's motorcycle history goes back to 1946, when the Ducati factory produced a 48cc four stroke engine as a bicycle motor.
In 1947 Honda produced it's first product, a bicycle motor of 50 cc, based on the design of a batch of war surplus generator motors Soichiro had bought & then resold for the same purpose.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that spring to mind. I'd be interested to know exactly what engine he's using.
I was thinking about motorizing a scooter so I could still take it on Bart. Bicycles are not allowed during rush hour, and pushing a scooter any distance around a city like San Francisco is pretty slow hard work.
For those people who're complaining about noise, most of the engines you hear have little or no muffler. On a bicycle the weight penalty is substantially less than on a model airplane, so it could be muffled more efficiently. He could even put a tiny catalytic converter on it.
If you're in San Diego, Industrial Liquidators is fun. Mostly mechanical stuff, but some electronic gear. I bought a World's Fair icepick there (ever try to find an icepick?)
Then there's Murphy's in El Cajon. Want the voice hardware used in talking coke machines, or a gas cap with a built in mechanical fuel guage?
There used to be another one down the street from Murphy's that was more electronics oriented, but I don't recall the name, and I'm not sure it's still there. I try to make a pilgrimage to one or two of them every time I go down there, but I don't get to very often.
I'm interested in making my texts into audiobooks. I can read on the screen easily enough, but there are times I'd be happy to hear them read, even by a machine.
Etexts to listen to on my Zaurus would be fun, and I don't just mean MP3s.
As someone who reads aloud, I know it'll suck because not only will there be no inflection, but the pronunciation will be marginal. Still, it could be interesting. I'm also interested in the possibility of combining this with some sort of inflectional markup language.
That was my experience after spending several sessions and several hours with microsoft support.
We (network architect, NT specialist, and myself) worked with them, and kept giving them net dumps demonstrating the problem we were complaining of. They kept asking for more dumps with different specs. After we built a couple of test environments to their spec that demonstrated the problem, they finally declared that the behavior was intentional and as designed. Interesting that it didn't occur to them to say that in the first place.
Maybe this is just bad tech support, but anytime someone consistently benefits from their own mistakes, I'm skeptical. As far as they're concerned, that call wasn't about a bug, and I'll never buy support from them again, and never bother them with another bug again. It isn't worth it. This is what I'd always heard from my developers, but this was an interesting enough problem to make us want to pursue it.
Ultimately, our call wasn't about a bug , because Microsoft didn't call it a bug. Whatever. Now it's filed with NTBugtraq. They're interested in documenting bugs. Too bad they can't fix them.
And you can go pet one at the San Diego zoo.
They have an Echidna in the petting zoo there. I visited it fairly often, and it was always curled up in the corner. I suppose they have it there because it's well protected & not aggressive.
The really compelling thing about this to me is something I realized in studying the human brain. The sheer number of interconnections dwarfs the number of transistors we can manufacture in a short time.
To get a structure of that size and complexity, biology wins with exponential growth rather than linear.
For example, say your cell population doubles every half hour. In 32 hours you have 2^64 cells. Try to get to build that nunber of interconnected devices in one structure with any linear process.
Biology has always seemed to be the only way to get to large and complex enough structures to be truly interesting.
What else does Google get out of this that they couldn't get without buying Pyra?
Instantaneous access to blogs as updated doesn't sound interesting until you imagine correllating that data. I know instant zeitgeist doesn't sound terribly interesting, but I think it will be.
For example, Pud over at FC could improve the value of his rumors, with questions that only he could answer. Perhaps he's already doing this: Is a batch of rumors about a new F*ck coming from a competitor's netblock or the company's own? What's the timespread? There are other interesting things to be found in that data, too.
Google could build a killer blogsite. They could cruise existing blogs. They must want existing content & users, already blogging, and not just their content, which they already have, or could have. They're already caching a significant portion of the net. Other thoughts?
A visiting high school friend made a sandwich and poured himself a glass of milk. He took a drink and stumbled to the sink, to spit it out.
"What was that?" He hollered in a betrayed voice. I then realized that he had drunk the sour milk my mother was saving for making pancakes. When I explained, he pulled a magic marker out of his pocket & drew frowny faces on all four sides of the carton, scowling the whole time.
Oh!
Low temperature attenuates smell.
Not everyone uses sour milk for cooking.
People have suggested some great resources, but your company may need to invest in the helpdesk.
How much do you have to spend? 1-4 above are all costly in money, talent or time. Good people aren't cheap, any more than good processes or docs.
The people issues can be alleviated, but only in direct proportion to the quality and applicability of your processes and documentation.
Good docs are hard to write, so you can't just farm it out to your developers, or to the HD techs who don't have the confidence of the users. You're talking about as much work as writing a Dummies book for your company, and if it's less readable, it's less useful. Besides, there may be a reason for the user's lack of confidence in the helpdesk.
If you don't have good processes, your people have to be generalists. My observation has been that a HD person is eligible for a substantial promotion as soon as they become a good HD person. Of all the people I've personally seen and worked with who were laid off from HD roles (over a dozen) those who were good at the HD job got better jobs. The ones who were marginal had difficulties, but most found similar HD jobs where hopefully they can learn enough to become better techs. This is frontline user support in the SF Bay area after the economy tanked.
Truly talented & experienced troubleshooters with the social skills for customer service, can get work that is better compensated and better regarded than front line user support.
With good clear docs and cultivated customer service skills, the less skilled could be good first level support, but how often do you see docs of that quality? How much did those docs cost?
PCMCIA TDR is here, but it's an AOL members page, not a real commercial site, so I'm suspicious that it's vapor. I'd expect a company that tooled up for a PCMCIA TDR to be able to afford a real site. It's also not a NIC.
It's the second link on googling
pcmcia time domain reflectometer -optical
http://members.aol.com/tdrcard/home.html
Not exactly six feet, but six feet to the nearest inch. You used 1.8m to translate six feet, robbing me of over an inch of height. A tenth of a meter has enough latitude to accomodate a huge proportion of the population within one measure, because the standard deviation for height is under one tenth of a meter. Height is certainly an attribute lots of people "would want to measure."
On the other hand, a centimeter is generally excessive precision in measuring height. A centimeter of variation from morning to evening, is not unusual in an individual, so measurement to the centimeter can be misleading in describing height. Height doesn't often vary more than about a half an inch within a day though, making the inch about as accurate as one can expect to get without additional stipulations on measurement, such as time of day.
Regarding my previous comment: I misunderstood your comment about 1.8m & 2.4m because the context was several comments up. That was my error. I'm sorry about that.
"Why is 6 feet easier to comprehend than 2.4 metres? (actually ~1.8m). "
You've managed to make it hard to comprehend. 2.4 meters is not actually ~1.8 meters.
Integers are simple. Small integer fractions, simple. 1.8 meters is over an inch (2.54 cm) short of six feet. On the other hand, 6.56 feet is too many significant figures for most measures involving a couple of meters or few feet. You've made my point.
Use whatever works. Convert where appropriate, because after all, some of us can do maths, and don't mind converting. You don't like imperial measures? Don't use 'em. Don't call me stupid because I use yards roughing out a housing addition. I'm happy to use meters in a ballistics experiment. (Throwing rocks with a roman sling counts as a ballistics experiment, right?)
Look up a few craftsman's rules of thumb, and you'll find origins of a lot of these measures.
Some of them are obsolete. I hated trying to figure out a person's weight in stone, although in terms of human weight and its daily variations, it makes some sense to use a large increment. I'm glad medicine is measured in milligrams instead of grains. Maybe someday, prescriptions won't be written in latin, too.
I'd generally rather that a craftsman use a measure his trade deems appropriate than try to bend him to a metric rule for my convenience. Imagine you are talking with someone who is complaining that they don't know how much a byte is. You explain how to convert.
I discovered last weekend that my house is built with 2x4 that are actually two inches by four inches. A cheerful surprise, since the 2x4 (standard for lumber in the U.S. was slimmed down at about the time the house was built. Silly, isn't it?
I'm in favor of standardizing on commercial use of the metric system. I'm just tired of hearing that everything else is stupid, and think the arguments for using other measures are interesting. These strange measures carry information. Sometimes that information is obsolete, and merely of historical interest.
Perhaps I'm just arguing because I find it interesting. The arguments for metric are similar to the arguments for Esperanto. I'm afraid I find those arguments dull, since they are few although compelling. On the other hand, each individual measure, be it rod, fathom, mile, carat, stone, degree, or horsepower, has it's own history and supporting reasons for existing. I find each reason to be a bit of history, or accumulated human factors information, or insight into a craft, and interesting.
I love the way the metric system makes chemistry and physics work. I can hardly imagine the horror of trying to do chem without it. A lingua franca is an important idea. The Systeme International is an important lingua franca. Other languages continue to have their place.
Exactly. Human scale matters. These measurements evolved and survived because they were useful, not because they were mathematically convenient.
/2 =cup/8 =ounce/2 =tablespoon/3 =teaspoon
An entire order of magnitude is often too great a span. The expression "order of magnitude" which specifically means factor of ten even implies that this is a large difference. That's why our measures evolved as they did, as small integer fractions instead. Well, that & convenient math.
Intrpreting the phrase human scale more literally, my pace is 1 yard, as is the distance from the tips of my fingers to my nose. Excellent for measuring rope, cloth, or string. My wingspan and height, 2 yards, or 6 feet. Granted, most people do not have a pace of exactly a yard, but that's because most people are shorter, and consequently even further from an even meter pace.
I love the metric system when I'm doing calculations that involve lots of conversions, but when I'm foughly planning the addition to my house, it's awfully convenient to pace out the distances in integer yards. When I'm measuring cat5, it's damn simple to stretch it out, nose to fingertips a few times, and look at the leftover and know it's 10 feet.
Fractions are often easier to manipulate in one's head than decimals, especially if one is already using a convenient number like 12 as a base.
I love SI units and the concept of significant figures for chemistry. When I'm cooking, the scale of
gallon/4= quart/2 =pint (a pound of water)
works quite well, and the significance of the figure is implicit in the measurement used as a rule, just like the appropriate amount of torque is implied by the length of the handle on a wrench.
Don't forget decimal time. "The benefits of decimal time are ease of calculation, a single number that can represent an exact time and date, and that can be used by everyone on the planet, or off it." As far as meeting my wife for lunch or calculating my timesheet, those factors are trivial compared with the importance of using a measure that is meaningful relative to the way I use time. Hence, no-one lives by a decimal clock. The French tried for a few years, but gave up.
Being "multilingual" in terms of measurement is a good thing. Different circumstances call for different measures. There are people who use decimal time for technical reasons. Peculiar measures are an easy target, but those arose because they had a particular function. The jigger is a damn convenient measure for liquor. Sure, we could call a jigger a 45 mil measure, but when we do, we lose something. In addition to the convenience of using integer measures with particular meaning, there's a little culture & history carried by these things too.
When that happens, pour me two fingers out of that fifth of bourbon, and I'll put two bits into the jukebox and we can try to talk Esperanto. Oh! Too late. The fifth is gone as a measure of liquor. Well, I can drink from a 750ml bottle.
Don't forget about Megabit and Megabyte (as interpreted by Disk Drive manufactureres vs. everybody else.) That factor of eight is a pain in the ass. We should go to decimal computing.
I'm tired of Fasciscs whining about democracy. People will deny fascism while denigrating democratic government and prosletyzing for corporate rule.
To claim that my vote is worthless in running the state, and that a corporation would give me more power, is Fascism.
A democratic government is intended to give a voice to everyone. I have some small amount of influence when I vote, and when I write to a representative, or participate more directly in more local government, where I have yet more influence over how things are run. Maybe voting isn't worth anything to you, but it is to me.
I'm not saying that the government should run everything, just responding to your assertion that the stock market gives me more power than democracy.
Corporate rule is far from democratic. The vast majority of Enron investors didn't decide to enrich the few folks who burned down the store. The folks with the voting shares weren't paying enough attention, but most of the people who lost money had no influence at all, putting the lie to your last paragraph.
Perhaps you merely meant that the government shouldn't own anything? Of course without owning anything, it couldn't govern, and would become irrelevant. That's OK for the fascists, because corporate rule will be best for us all.
Forced to choose between my stocks, and my vote, I'd pick my vote (even back in the 90's.) Fortunately, I get both.
So much for my offtopic answer to a troll.
I don't think it's "jest book larnin'" or "shallow premature experience" as much as a matter of personal aptitude & interest.
I think it's just a matter of being interested, and of thinking about how this stuff really works. I'm a sysadmin and I find astonishing the things many programmers don't understand, and aren't even interested in learning about the tools they use every day.
Memory leaks, disk thrashing, or filesystem limitations, are all too often mysterious and met with blank stares. These are bright, capable people, but they're too busy to go outside their box. That stuff is my job.
On the other hand, I'm a sysadmin because I'm something of a geek, and intersted in everything. It's a good Jack of all trades sort of job. I may be busy as hell, but learning new tools is a regular part of my job, and if somebody's using it, I'd better have an idea of not only how it works, but how it will interact with the rest of our systems.
For a lot of people, it's just a job.