That sounds like a reasonable plan only if the existing cabling is Cat-5 or better. Most dedicated phone cabling (especially if it's more than about 10 years old) is almost certainly not Cat-5.
Re:Git could use revision numbers
on
The Rise of Git
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Revision numbers are easier for humans to deal with. For example, here's a common flow I use every day:
$ hg pull $ hg log | less { see some change I'm curious about and note the change number } $ hg export 3742 | less
With change numbers, it's easy to remember 4 (or even 5) digits for the time it takes to type the export command. If I only had hashes, I'd have to copy-paste the string. Things like this matter less to people who only use GUIs. For command line folks, however, being able to easily read, pronounce, remember, and type change numbers is essential. Even if you're just talking with other people, it's a lot easier to say, "Oh, I see what happened, in change 2456, you did..." than to refer to hash strings.
I've used rcs, cvs, clearcase, perforce, dabbled in svn, dabbled in git, and am currently using hg. Of the centralized bunch, perforce is my favorite (not free, but reasonably priced and amazingly excellent tech support). I can't see anybody wanting to use svn for any new projects today. When it first came out, it was a a significant improvement over cvs and people naturally flocked to it, but there's just so many better alternatives today.
Clearcase is an interesting beast. For sure, it's overpriced bloatware that's on life support, being kept alive mostly by big legacy customers with neanderthalic IT and Release Engineering departments who still believe IBM can do no wrong. But, it did have some interesting ideas. That every revision of every file exists simultaneously in the file system namespace is really powerful.
Between git and hg, I'd say they are fundamentally identical in capability, but I find the hg command set easier to get my head around. All the people who say, "X is the best possible vcs. I used to use cvs and when I switched to X my sex life improved overnight", fail to understand that "X is way better than cvs" is true for pretty much any value of X, and says nothing about the relative merits of the various X instances.
There is an old saying: "Aviate, navigate, communicate". Once you have the airplane under control, then you worry about where you're going. And only after you've got that sorted do you bother to talk to ATC. Nothing is more important than flying the airplane. From what I can tell by reading the report (http://tinyurl.com/3wo95a3) these guys had their hands full doing that. Talking to ATC is way, way, way down on the list of things to worry about.
When I bought my current 15" MBP (about a year ago?), I paid for the 1680 x 1050 upgrade. Absolutely stunning. And it's not just "looks pretty". I do most of my work in terminal windows. If I need to see a lot of text, I can crank the font size way down and get 330 columns x 84 lines on the screen, with it still being reasonably easy to read (even with my 50-something eyes). Popping up a couple of sizes, I can get 236 x 62 and it's entirely comfortable. Good to see they're continuing to offer that option. Worth every penny for the upgrade. I got the matte screen (which, IIRC, was a no-cost option vs glossy).
Part of it is the raw pixel resolution. Part of it is that Apple's fonts (I use Monaco 13 pt antialised for most work) and font rendering machinery blows the doors off the competition. My Ubuntu system running X-11 at the same screen res isn't in the same ballpark.
The "Advisory Circular" mentioned briefly in the interview video is FAA AC 91-57, "Model Aircraft Operating Standards". You can download a copy of it from http://tinyurl.com/28wko9o . As the "A" in the name implies, ACs are advisory in nature. They do not carry the force of law, but generally if you can show that you've complied with an AC, the FAA is happy.
It's pretty clear, however, that he didn't comply with several points of the AC. The Verrazano bridge towers are 690 feet tall, and clearly he was above that, so he obviously didn't stay below 400 feet. The reason for the 400 foot limit is because "real" planes are supposed to stay above 500 feet, per 14 CFR 91.119(c). If you stay below 400 and they stay above 500, nobody swaps paint.
Given the areas and altitudes he flew in, it's unlikely he caused any hazard to jet traffic flying in or out of the three big NYC airports, but there's a lot of low-level seaplane (East River below the 59th street bridge), and helicopter traffic (numerous busy heliports all over the place) in and out of there. A plane like this is essentially invisible to the pilots of those aircraft. "Big sky, small plane" works in your favor here, even more so than usual.
It looks to me like he stayed mostly over water, so I'd guess the hazard to people on the ground was minimal. Although, I don't know what would happen if he had lost radio control. Do these things have some kind of dead man switch which cuts power to the prop if radio signal is lost? If so, then it's hard to imagine doing any kind of major damage.
The weather observing issue is tricky. Yes, it's true there are a lot of weather observing stations, but they're mostly (for very large values of most) at airports. There is also a network of about 10,000 cooperative observing stations (http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/coop/weatherstation.php). I don't know how much overall value the coop stations add into the total weather observing system (I suspect very little, except in remote areas).
The problem with mobile sensors is that they're difficult to calibrate. A real weather observing station (AWOS, ASOS, etc) has the temperature, pressure, and dewpoint sensors in a carefully designed structure to ensure that it has free air circulation but is not in direct sunlight. The location is surveyed, so the exact elevation is known. The wind and sky sensors are likewise put in carefully controlled locations to ensure they're not blocked by buildings, trees, etc.
It's not as easy as just bolting an instrument package to the roof of a truck and driving it around. The truck itself is a significant heat source. Getting useful temperature and dewpoint readings would be virtually impossible. It also moves, so wind readings would be equally pointless. When it's at rest, it's likely to be near a building or under a tree, so even stationary wind readings would be worthless.
PHP is the retarded brother of C, $so $that's $doable $it's $just $syntax $issues.
PHP and C are nothing like each other, beyond the most shallow typographic similarities of using curly braces and semicolons.
PHP is a high-level (albeit, brain-dead) object-oriented scripting language. It has dynamic typing. Built-in strings with automatic memory allocation. Built-in hash tables and vectors (both bound up in some kind of bizarre composite container thingie they call an array). Exceptions. Run-time symbol lookup. Introspection. Built-in hooks to integrate with a web server front-end. In short, it's nothing like C at all in any way that matters.
PHP is really Perl on steroids, with a marginally nice OO layer slathered on top.
Flash is evil for man reasons, but the most in-your-face reason if you use a Mac is that the Mac Flash plugin crashes all the time. It is the #1 (by far) reason for Safari crashes on the Mac.
I'm not wild about PDF, but at least I don't see PDF viewers crashing all over the place.
Slowly, the scientific world is starting to realize that they are no longer beholden to the publishing companies to distribute the results of their research.
A few days ago, at his first press conference, Barak Obama called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post to ask a question. For those that don't understand the significance of this event, The Huffington post is a web-only newspaper. No paper.
Some day, the journal publishers will wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that the one essential step in the publishing process that they control, the hugely expensive printing presses, is no longer essential. Most of the value the journals add in the editorial arena (reviewing and editing) is done by the peers of the people who are submitting the articles. That same level of editorial review can just as easily happen on a web site, at far less cost. We're moving in that direction slowly, and if bills like this become law, that will just accelerate the pressure to move there.
I haven't been involved in scientific publishing since the mid to late 80's, when I was the "computer guy" at a research institute. We had a Vax running BSD unix, a bunch of Apple LaserWriters, and everybody was churning out documents with troff, tbl, eqn, and bib. Those were the days!
The biggest pain in my butt was maintaining 47 thousand different bib styles. Each journal seemed to have their own stupid idea of how to format references. Author, title, journal, date, page number, maybe volume/issue number. What more do you really need? Yet, we spent an ungodly amount of time obsessing over getting the formatting/punctuation/etc exactly right, otherwise the journal would reject it.
One place wants you to cite it as "Journal of Molecular Biology", another wants "J. Mol. Biol.". First name, or just first initial? Maybe the first author is formatted differently? "R Smith, Foober, F, and Blow, J"? Comma between the name and initial, or not? How do you turn compound names (Wu-Xin Li) into initials? Is it "Li, W", or "Li, W-X", or what? What's the right way to cite a chapter in a book, when each chapter has an author, but the book also has an editor?
The list of variations was endless. The amount of time spent groveling over bib macros was endless squared. Scientists are supposed to be doing science, not wasting huge amounts of time worrying about semicolons and font selection.
At least nobody wanted the Ibid, Loc cit, Op cit crap they taught us in high school:-)
By the way, what are we going to do with the ISS when we're done with it? That's a lot of hardware up there. Is there a plan to safely de-orbit it without dropping lots of metal on some poor unsuspecting city?
Stupid HTML fixed sized layout too. In Safari 3, if you resize the text area box, the enclosing boxes don't resize with it. Maybe they're recruiting for people who design brain-dead web layouts?
I agree that it seems unlikely for wireless to ever take over inside server farms or data centers. As long as CPUs are talking to disks over the network, there will be a need for as much bandwidth as you can get, and it seems likely that at any point in time, copper will give you more than air.
On the other hand, most desktop machines can get along just fine with even 802.11b speeds. It's very expensive to run cable to every single cube/desk/workstation in a large office environment, and move/add/changes are expensive and time-consuming too. IT departments could save a ton of money if they could do away with all that.
Yes, there are security issues with wireless, but WPA, perhaps in combination with 2-factor authentication, makes it pretty secure. If you want more, run a VPN layer on top of the wireless. In any case, IT departments already have to deal with these security issues because evolutionary pressures have forced even the most conservative companies to roll out wireless access to conference rooms and other shared spaces. At some point, IT departments are going to start looking at provisioning data access in new construction and say, "We just can't justify the cost of wire any more".
I'm less than a year away from being a 48 y.o. s/w engineer, so this comment kind of annoys me. Most of the best developers in my shop are older people (40's and up). Our best guy (who now holds the title of "Chief Architect" is 10 years older than I am. None of us "old guys" are using the languages or tools that we were using when we first got into the field. Successful species evolve; old dinosaurs get turned into petroleum.
When you're right out of school, knowing the hottest technology of the day will get you a high paying job. You can ride on that for a few years, but then you will discover that no matter how good you are, or how hot that new hot technology is (php, C#, Java, Ajax, whatever), by the time you're 30, you will indeed be "obsolete and irrelevant" unless you learn whatever is the hot new technology 10 years from now. If you sit on your butt and wait for your employer to train you, you will indeed be a dinosaur faster than you can say "fossil fuel".
The answer is to keep learning new stuff yourself. Push yourself to learn one new language or technology every year. Some of them will become hot and you'll be in demand. Others will just add to your depth of knowledge and experience. If you want a career where you don't have to learn anything new once you get established, try bricklaying or ditchdigging.
Also, don't just learn programming languages. Study computer science. Learn about algorithms. Learn about different development processes. Learn about QA. Learn about project management. All of these things will help you be a better programmer. They'll also help you be a better player in a big development project because you'll be better able to interact with other groups.
Am I the only one scared of this?
on
Google Calendar
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They already know about everything I search for. If I let them, they would also know about every usenet article I read, and have all my email too, but I'm not willing to give them that. And now, I can add to the list of things I could let them know about me who I have appointments to see, and when. Sure, why not? Perhaps next we'll be seeing Google Bank, Google Dating Service, Google Medical Records, Google Credit History, Google TV, Google Phone Company? All services supplied for free, just let them own everything there is to know about you.
*blink*
A web designer shouldn't have to look at HTML source much?
I'm a programmer. I can't remember the last time I looked at assembly language. At one time, the idea that a programmer wouldn't know the assembler for the machine he was working would have been shocking. HTML is just the assembly language of the web.
Just for kicks, I plugged in my phone and zip (I'm not a subscriber, so I certainly didn't expect it to be found). It came back with:
We're sorry, but based on the information you provided, we cannot find your name in our database. Please try again with a different phone number (home, office or cellular) or call our hotline at 1-888-665-2644. Thank you.
They're apologizing because they'd didn't barf my credit card number to the world?
The only problem with this is (it appears, anyway) that the bookmarks have to be stored on google's servers. Google already knows enough about me from my searches. I don't need them knowing what bookmarks I've got (I don't use Gmail either, for exactly that reason). What would *really* be cool is if your bookmarks could be stored and retrieved by ftp, then you could put them on any ftp server you trust.
It is almost inconceivable that the service will get shut down, for the simple reason that it would hurt NTP as much as it would hurt RIM (and their customers). Some patent suits are about keeping a somebody from competing with your business, but RIM isn't NTP's competitor. NTP has no business other than (trying to) license their patent(s).
Imagine if you will, the (absurd) situation of RIM throwing up their hands and saying, "OK, you win, we'll stop infringing, shut it all down, and go out of business". At that point, NTP would be stuck with a worthless patent. I suppose they could try to build their own network so they could practice their patent, or maybe shop it around to some other licensee, but neither one seems very likely.
There are two very different kinds of newspapers, both in the print and on-line worlds. First off are the hoards of local papers which mostly reprint wire stories. In-house content largely consists of covering local events, weather, sports, etc. I lump "USA Today" into that bin too. Here in New York, that would mean The Daily News and The Post, as well as suburban papers like The Bergen Record, The Star Ledger, and Newsday. I don't see much of a future for these papers on-line, since most of their content can be gotten from other on-line sources just as easily.
The other category has the much smaller number of papers which maintain a real investigative journalism staff, typically with national or international scope. Local examples would be The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. What's happening more and more, is that these companies are no longer competing against other papers, they're competing against all other news organizations around the world. If I want to see some other points of view on global events, I can go to CNN, the BBC or even Al Jazeera.
For things like moves and comics, I don't bother with newspapers at all any more, but cherry-pick my sources. For simply accessing an up-to-date database of what's playing where and reserving tickets, there's 777film, and for reviews, there's tons of sources, ranging from commercial sites to blogs and wikis. For comics, I go right to the comic publisher's site. I'm not much into sports, but if I was, I would probably go to ESPN, since that's their specialty.
Death March is sort of the modern-day Mythical Man-Month. I found it by accident a couple of years ago while involved in a Death March myself. Excellent book, and worth being on any developer's bookshelf.
I've heard people say, "Wikipedia is like a public toilet; when you need, you're glad it's there, but you never know who was there before you".
I've been editing Wikipedia for about a year now, and while I find some of the utopian aspects (i.e. allowing anybody, even anonymous users, to edit) to be intellectually appealing, the result is, without a doubt, mostly crap. Instead of spending my time improving quality, I spend my time fighting blatant vandals, well-intentioned idiots, and clueless newbies. And what time is left over gets eaten up in silly beaurocracy.
Like many/.'ers, I do software development for a living. No software development project (or any big project, be it buiding a space ship or digging ditches) would survive with the attitude that anybody can do anything they want. People need to both be educated as to the right way to do things and prove themselves trustworthy.
Wikipedia is a great resource. I turn to it often to get background, or find out interesting facts about almost anything. But I wouldn't trust it for anything important.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a reasonable plan only if the existing cabling is Cat-5 or better. Most dedicated phone cabling (especially if it's more than about 10 years old) is almost certainly not Cat-5.
Revision numbers are easier for humans to deal with. For example, here's a common flow I use every day:
$ hg pull
$ hg log | less { see some change I'm curious about and note the change number }
$ hg export 3742 | less
With change numbers, it's easy to remember 4 (or even 5) digits for the time it takes to type the export command. If I only had hashes, I'd have to copy-paste the string. Things like this matter less to people who only use GUIs. For command line folks, however, being able to easily read, pronounce, remember, and type change numbers is essential. Even if you're just talking with other people, it's a lot easier to say, "Oh, I see what happened, in change 2456, you did..." than to refer to hash strings.
I've used rcs, cvs, clearcase, perforce, dabbled in svn, dabbled in git, and am currently using hg. Of the centralized bunch, perforce is my favorite (not free, but reasonably priced and amazingly excellent tech support). I can't see anybody wanting to use svn for any new projects today. When it first came out, it was a a significant improvement over cvs and people naturally flocked to it, but there's just so many better alternatives today.
Clearcase is an interesting beast. For sure, it's overpriced bloatware that's on life support, being kept alive mostly by big legacy customers with neanderthalic IT and Release Engineering departments who still believe IBM can do no wrong. But, it did have some interesting ideas. That every revision of every file exists simultaneously in the file system namespace is really powerful.
Between git and hg, I'd say they are fundamentally identical in capability, but I find the hg command set easier to get my head around. All the people who say, "X is the best possible vcs. I used to use cvs and when I switched to X my sex life improved overnight", fail to understand that "X is way better than cvs" is true for pretty much any value of X, and says nothing about the relative merits of the various X instances.
There is an old saying: "Aviate, navigate, communicate". Once you have the airplane under control, then you worry about where you're going. And only after you've got that sorted do you bother to talk to ATC. Nothing is more important than flying the airplane. From what I can tell by reading the report (http://tinyurl.com/3wo95a3) these guys had their hands full doing that. Talking to ATC is way, way, way down on the list of things to worry about.
When I bought my current 15" MBP (about a year ago?), I paid for the 1680 x 1050 upgrade. Absolutely stunning. And it's not just "looks pretty". I do most of my work in terminal windows. If I need to see a lot of text, I can crank the font size way down and get 330 columns x 84 lines on the screen, with it still being reasonably easy to read (even with my 50-something eyes). Popping up a couple of sizes, I can get 236 x 62 and it's entirely comfortable. Good to see they're continuing to offer that option. Worth every penny for the upgrade. I got the matte screen (which, IIRC, was a no-cost option vs glossy).
Part of it is the raw pixel resolution. Part of it is that Apple's fonts (I use Monaco 13 pt antialised for most work) and font rendering machinery blows the doors off the competition. My Ubuntu system running X-11 at the same screen res isn't in the same ballpark.
The "Advisory Circular" mentioned briefly in the interview video is FAA AC 91-57, "Model Aircraft Operating Standards". You can download a copy of it from http://tinyurl.com/28wko9o . As the "A" in the name implies, ACs are advisory in nature. They do not carry the force of law, but generally if you can show that you've complied with an AC, the FAA is happy.
It's pretty clear, however, that he didn't comply with several points of the AC. The Verrazano bridge towers are 690 feet tall, and clearly he was above that, so he obviously didn't stay below 400 feet. The reason for the 400 foot limit is because "real" planes are supposed to stay above 500 feet, per 14 CFR 91.119(c). If you stay below 400 and they stay above 500, nobody swaps paint.
Given the areas and altitudes he flew in, it's unlikely he caused any hazard to jet traffic flying in or out of the three big NYC airports, but there's a lot of low-level seaplane (East River below the 59th street bridge), and helicopter traffic (numerous busy heliports all over the place) in and out of there. A plane like this is essentially invisible to the pilots of those aircraft. "Big sky, small plane" works in your favor here, even more so than usual.
It looks to me like he stayed mostly over water, so I'd guess the hazard to people on the ground was minimal. Although, I don't know what would happen if he had lost radio control. Do these things have some kind of dead man switch which cuts power to the prop if radio signal is lost? If so, then it's hard to imagine doing any kind of major damage.
The weather observing issue is tricky. Yes, it's true there are a lot of weather observing stations, but they're mostly (for very large values of most) at airports. There is also a network of about 10,000 cooperative observing stations (http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/coop/weatherstation.php). I don't know how much overall value the coop stations add into the total weather observing system (I suspect very little, except in remote areas).
The problem with mobile sensors is that they're difficult to calibrate. A real weather observing station (AWOS, ASOS, etc) has the temperature, pressure, and dewpoint sensors in a carefully designed structure to ensure that it has free air circulation but is not in direct sunlight. The location is surveyed, so the exact elevation is known. The wind and sky sensors are likewise put in carefully controlled locations to ensure they're not blocked by buildings, trees, etc.
It's not as easy as just bolting an instrument package to the roof of a truck and driving it around. The truck itself is a significant heat source. Getting useful temperature and dewpoint readings would be virtually impossible. It also moves, so wind readings would be equally pointless. When it's at rest, it's likely to be near a building or under a tree, so even stationary wind readings would be worthless.
PHP is the retarded brother of C, $so $that's $doable $it's $just $syntax $issues.
PHP and C are nothing like each other, beyond the most shallow typographic similarities of using curly braces and semicolons.
PHP is a high-level (albeit, brain-dead) object-oriented scripting language. It has dynamic typing. Built-in strings with automatic memory allocation. Built-in hash tables and vectors (both bound up in some kind of bizarre composite container thingie they call an array). Exceptions. Run-time symbol lookup. Introspection. Built-in hooks to integrate with a web server front-end. In short, it's nothing like C at all in any way that matters.
PHP is really Perl on steroids, with a marginally nice OO layer slathered on top.
Flash is evil for man reasons, but the most in-your-face reason if you use a Mac is that the Mac Flash plugin crashes all the time. It is the #1 (by far) reason for Safari crashes on the Mac.
I'm not wild about PDF, but at least I don't see PDF viewers crashing all over the place.
Slowly, the scientific world is starting to realize that they are no longer beholden to the publishing companies to distribute the results of their research.
A few days ago, at his first press conference, Barak Obama called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post to ask a question. For those that don't understand the significance of this event, The Huffington post is a web-only newspaper. No paper.
Some day, the journal publishers will wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that the one essential step in the publishing process that they control, the hugely expensive printing presses, is no longer essential. Most of the value the journals add in the editorial arena (reviewing and editing) is done by the peers of the people who are submitting the articles. That same level of editorial review can just as easily happen on a web site, at far less cost. We're moving in that direction slowly, and if bills like this become law, that will just accelerate the pressure to move there.
I haven't been involved in scientific publishing since the mid to late 80's, when I was the "computer guy" at a research institute. We had a Vax running BSD unix, a bunch of Apple LaserWriters, and everybody was churning out documents with troff, tbl, eqn, and bib. Those were the days!
The biggest pain in my butt was maintaining 47 thousand different bib styles. Each journal seemed to have their own stupid idea of how to format references. Author, title, journal, date, page number, maybe volume/issue number. What more do you really need? Yet, we spent an ungodly amount of time obsessing over getting the formatting/punctuation/etc exactly right, otherwise the journal would reject it.
One place wants you to cite it as "Journal of Molecular Biology", another wants "J. Mol. Biol.". First name, or just first initial? Maybe the first author is formatted differently? "R Smith, Foober, F, and Blow, J"? Comma between the name and initial, or not? How do you turn compound names (Wu-Xin Li) into initials? Is it "Li, W", or "Li, W-X", or what? What's the right way to cite a chapter in a book, when each chapter has an author, but the book also has an editor?
The list of variations was endless. The amount of time spent groveling over bib macros was endless squared. Scientists are supposed to be doing science, not wasting huge amounts of time worrying about semicolons and font selection.
At least nobody wanted the Ibid, Loc cit, Op cit crap they taught us in high school :-)
By the way, what are we going to do with the ISS when we're done with it? That's a lot of hardware up there. Is there a plan to safely de-orbit it without dropping lots of metal on some poor unsuspecting city?
Stupid HTML fixed sized layout too. In Safari 3, if you resize the text area box, the enclosing boxes don't resize with it. Maybe they're recruiting for people who design brain-dead web layouts?
I agree that it seems unlikely for wireless to ever take over inside server farms or data centers. As long as CPUs are talking to disks over the network, there will be a need for as much bandwidth as you can get, and it seems likely that at any point in time, copper will give you more than air.
On the other hand, most desktop machines can get along just fine with even 802.11b speeds. It's very expensive to run cable to every single cube/desk/workstation in a large office environment, and move/add/changes are expensive and time-consuming too. IT departments could save a ton of money if they could do away with all that.
Yes, there are security issues with wireless, but WPA, perhaps in combination with 2-factor authentication, makes it pretty secure. If you want more, run a VPN layer on top of the wireless. In any case, IT departments already have to deal with these security issues because evolutionary pressures have forced even the most conservative companies to roll out wireless access to conference rooms and other shared spaces. At some point, IT departments are going to start looking at provisioning data access in new construction and say, "We just can't justify the cost of wire any more".
I'm less than a year away from being a 48 y.o. s/w engineer, so this comment kind of annoys me. Most of the best developers in my shop are older people (40's and up). Our best guy (who now holds the title of "Chief Architect" is 10 years older than I am. None of us "old guys" are using the languages or tools that we were using when we first got into the field. Successful species evolve; old dinosaurs get turned into petroleum.
When you're right out of school, knowing the hottest technology of the day will get you a high paying job. You can ride on that for a few years, but then you will discover that no matter how good you are, or how hot that new hot technology is (php, C#, Java, Ajax, whatever), by the time you're 30, you will indeed be "obsolete and irrelevant" unless you learn whatever is the hot new technology 10 years from now. If you sit on your butt and wait for your employer to train you, you will indeed be a dinosaur faster than you can say "fossil fuel".
The answer is to keep learning new stuff yourself. Push yourself to learn one new language or technology every year. Some of them will become hot and you'll be in demand. Others will just add to your depth of knowledge and experience. If you want a career where you don't have to learn anything new once you get established, try bricklaying or ditchdigging.
Also, don't just learn programming languages. Study computer science. Learn about algorithms. Learn about different development processes. Learn about QA. Learn about project management. All of these things will help you be a better programmer. They'll also help you be a better player in a big development project because you'll be better able to interact with other groups.
They already know about everything I search for. If I let them, they would also know about every usenet article I read, and have all my email too, but I'm not willing to give them that. And now, I can add to the list of things I could let them know about me who I have appointments to see, and when. Sure, why not? Perhaps next we'll be seeing Google Bank, Google Dating Service, Google Medical Records, Google Credit History, Google TV, Google Phone Company? All services supplied for free, just let them own everything there is to know about you.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I've got a whole wall of vinyl
I'm a programmer. I can't remember the last time I looked at assembly language. At one time, the idea that a programmer wouldn't know the assembler for the machine he was working would have been shocking. HTML is just the assembly language of the web.
Are they really dedicating an entire fiber strand for one lousy 3 kHz voice channel???
Just for kicks, I plugged in my phone and zip (I'm not a subscriber, so I certainly didn't expect it to be found). It came back with:
They're apologizing because they'd didn't barf my credit card number to the world?
The only problem with this is (it appears, anyway) that the bookmarks have to be stored on google's servers. Google already knows enough about me from my searches. I don't need them knowing what bookmarks I've got (I don't use Gmail either, for exactly that reason). What would *really* be cool is if your bookmarks could be stored and retrieved by ftp, then you could put them on any ftp server you trust.
It is almost inconceivable that the service will get shut down, for the simple reason that it would hurt NTP as much as it would hurt RIM (and their customers). Some patent suits are about keeping a somebody from competing with your business, but RIM isn't NTP's competitor. NTP has no business other than (trying to) license their patent(s).
Imagine if you will, the (absurd) situation of RIM throwing up their hands and saying, "OK, you win, we'll stop infringing, shut it all down, and go out of business". At that point, NTP would be stuck with a worthless patent. I suppose they could try to build their own network so they could practice their patent, or maybe shop it around to some other licensee, but neither one seems very likely.
A successful parasite never kills its host.
The physics of aerodynamics pretty much drives the exterior shape of the car if you want to get good highway mileage.
There are two very different kinds of newspapers, both in the print and on-line worlds. First off are the hoards of local papers which mostly reprint wire stories. In-house content largely consists of covering local events, weather, sports, etc. I lump "USA Today" into that bin too. Here in New York, that would mean The Daily News and The Post, as well as suburban papers like The Bergen Record, The Star Ledger, and Newsday. I don't see much of a future for these papers on-line, since most of their content can be gotten from other on-line sources just as easily.
The other category has the much smaller number of papers which maintain a real investigative journalism staff, typically with national or international scope. Local examples would be The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. What's happening more and more, is that these companies are no longer competing against other papers, they're competing against all other news organizations around the world. If I want to see some other points of view on global events, I can go to CNN, the BBC or even Al Jazeera.
For things like moves and comics, I don't bother with newspapers at all any more, but cherry-pick my sources. For simply accessing an up-to-date database of what's playing where and reserving tickets, there's 777film, and for reviews, there's tons of sources, ranging from commercial sites to blogs and wikis. For comics, I go right to the comic publisher's site. I'm not much into sports, but if I was, I would probably go to ESPN, since that's their specialty.
Death March is sort of the modern-day Mythical Man-Month. I found it by accident a couple of years ago while involved in a Death March myself. Excellent book, and worth being on any developer's bookshelf.
I've heard people say, "Wikipedia is like a public toilet; when you need, you're glad it's there, but you never know who was there before you".
I've been editing Wikipedia for about a year now, and while I find some of the utopian aspects (i.e. allowing anybody, even anonymous users, to edit) to be intellectually appealing, the result is, without a doubt, mostly crap. Instead of spending my time improving quality, I spend my time fighting blatant vandals, well-intentioned idiots, and clueless newbies. And what time is left over gets eaten up in silly beaurocracy.
Like many /.'ers, I do software development for a living. No software development project (or any big project, be it buiding a space ship or digging ditches) would survive with the attitude that anybody can do anything they want. People need to both be educated as to the right way to do things and prove themselves trustworthy.
Wikipedia is a great resource. I turn to it often to get background, or find out interesting facts about almost anything. But I wouldn't trust it for anything important.