While any developer worth their salt should be able to write code in a text editor, any developer worth their salt will also know that it can easily become a slow, error-prone process when dealing with larger or more complex code bases. Using a decent IDE can dramatically speed up development and reduce the likelihood of introducing errors.
Myself, I've used a number of IDEs in the past - Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA - and I have to say that IntelliJ IDEA is really hands down (in my opinion) the best one out there.
A few reasons why:
It's fast. It's extremely customizable, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins available to extend the IDE's functionality. It supports dozens of languages and file types. It's got an excellent debugger. Git and Maven integration are fantastic. Refactoring can be done perfectly in seconds or minutes instead of potentially hours if done manually. Navigating the code base is made super easy with "Find usages" and "Go to source."
Also, because the company (JetBrains) is in the business of making money, they actually sell their products instead of just giving them away for free (although there are free, reduced-functionality versions available), they have a lot more money to pour into their products than other options out there, and it shows.
Basically, as a software developer, I want to spend my time writing code, not dealing with associated peripheral tasks, i.e. noise. Using a good IDE can help you do this.
yeah I know what you mean. I got a taste of DAF myself in speech therapy in high school for my stutter, and I couldn't tolerate it, drove me absolutely nuts.
in fact, I tried a number of different approaches in speech therapy when I was a kid, and none of it worked. eventually I said f-it to therapy and made a go of fixing it on my own. I'm pleased to say that whatever I did worked, such that today (and for the last 15-20 years, since college) I stutter so infrequently that when I do, people who don't know me often think I'm making a joke or otherwise screwing around. for all intents and purposes I'm now completely fluent, although being really tired or really agitated / anxious exacerbates it. those situations don't occur very often, thankfully.
what I found that *did* work though, was a combination of two things :
the first is something I like to call "speech buffering." simply put, this is the act of thinking about what I'm going to say just before I say it. I do this in real-time while I'm speaking, and the buffer only contains one or maybe two words, but that's enough. this is *not* composing an entire thought in my head before I say it - that level of composition isn't necessary. I think the buffering works by creating a better flow between syllables, such that I expect and mentally map the sounds before they get executed. I think I still do it, but I've been doing it for so long I'm not even particularly conscious of it at this point.
the second thing I credit with really helping to resolve my stutter involved learning how to calm myself down when I get anxious about speaking - clear the mind, regulate the breathing, slow the heart rate. I found this to be really useful because public speaking has always made me nervous, and being anxious exacerbates my disfluency.
however, between these two strategies - speech buffering and meditation / breathing exercises - I've been able to speak in front of large groups of strangers, speak before televised city council meetings, give presentations at work, etc., all with negligible disfluency.
worked really well for me, maybe it can work for someone else.
How many people clicked on the link to read about the World's Most Boring Day? How intriguing! Let me read about that!
Not so boring now, is it? I foresee the topic of April 11, 1954 becoming an overnight internet meme sensation, retroactively promoting the day to one of reverence, in a not-dissimilar fashion to the mechanism by which certain artists become famous and revered only many years after they've departed.
FWIW, I'm currently reading "Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior" by Ori and Rom Brafman. It's a really excellent book, similar in topic, and well-researched, and enjoyable to read with interesting real-life anecdotes to exemplify the points they raise. It touches on many different influences that affect our decision making processes.
This is a practice that is probably still going on to these days.
I can say for certain it's definitely still going on these days in West Africa, and probably all over Africa. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 2006 through 2008, and many Gambians have these sorts of primitive tattoos, in the Wolof language called "nyaas," that are created by taking a razor blade and cutting a design in the skin. After, the charred, sooty remains of ground nuts (what we know as peanuts, which are a staple crop there) are ground into the cuts. The soot stops the bleeding, and the scar heals through and around the soot. If you don't mess with it while it's healing, it comes out looking pretty good - color me nuts, but I went through this procedure while I was there, as did a fair number of other PCVs. It's pretty cool.
Nyaas has several purposes, depending on where it's located on the body.
If it's on the face, it's usually for beautification. Women there tended to get small cuts below and to the sides of their eyes.
If it's on the arms or chest, it may be for beautification, but it could also be a form of "juju," or protective ward. There are many kinds of jujus - most are Koranic inscriptions written by marabous (a sort of Islamic tribal "witch doctor," although I don't really like using that term), bound into a protective leather pouch and worn on the body. Some jujus are concoctions that you drink. Anyway, so some nyass are protective jujus.
And lastly, some nyaas are used as remedies for such mental ailments as epilepsy, for example. These are usually placed on the back, above and between the shoulder blades.
So yeah, still being done, you just gotta know where to look.
huh, so the app doesn't even do any form of steganography at all - anyone looking at the image can clearly tell it's not a regular image.
probably overwrites all 8 bits of each red, green, and blue color channel with the payload. if you want the app to actually hide the torrent, you have to take a regular PNG, and overwrite only the least N significant bits of each color channel with the payload. the more bits you overwrite, the more payload you can store, but eventually (overwriting around 4 or 5 bits per color channel) the image begins to get all grainy and you can pretty easily tell there's something going on with it. overwriting all 8 bits generates an image like the example linked to in parent.
so perhaps a combination of what I suggested, plus browser/user-level whitelisting of domains you want to support? ABP currently allows you to add "exception rules" to its filter to enable ads for user-specified domains which accomplishes the whitelisting part.
ABP is currently exclusive by default (that is, it blocks all items unless specified otherwise). if you combined what I suggested in my last post about dynamic filtering based on content and aesthetics and applied that to only the whitelisted domains the user specifies (via the exception rules), you could view only the kinds of ads you like on only your whitelisted domains. this way if you don't want to view any ads on 99% of all sites out there - great! easy, just go about business as usual. if you want to support a site by allowing ads, you'd have the flexibility to do that.
I'll agree though, that if ABP doesn't allow the user the ability to fully tweak out their ad-viewing preferences, most users of the software will rebel as they - myself included - feel similarly to you. I expect a code fork would likely come about in such an event.
I will not grant them the right to inflict their buggy flash/java script/animated ads on me just because I have to go there often
so, what if AdBlock Plus had in their preferences a way to specify the types of things that annoy you in ads, and then filter all ads that meet any of those criteria? Such a system would require users who encounter new ads to specify what each ad contains so ABP would know how to block it (other than obvious technical stuff you can search for like JS or Flash), but with as many ABP users there are out there, this seems like a trivial task and would make the system smart.
Set up in ABP Preferences a list like this:
Block any ads that contain:
JavaScript
Flash animations
Epileptic blinking crap
Anything having to do with Viagra, Cialis, etc.
Anything that resembles a Windows dialog
Anything telling me I've won something
Anything pornographic in nature
this way, only ads that meet various content and aesthetic criteria are displayed. Maybe it'll encourage companies that make annoying ads to refine their ways?
I got rid of my debit card and replaced it with an ATM card (for getting cash directly from my bank) and credit cards (for everything else) for reasons related to this, but more generally referred to as rational paranoia.
it goes something like this:
1. I don't like entering my bank account's PIN in the local Try-N-Save. it just feels like a bad idea. now, according to the very brief amount I've read on this here, it is;
2. debit cards are linked directly to your bank account. someone uses it even as a Visa card (no PIN necessary!), not even as a debit card, and that money comes straight from your bank account, not from a credit card buffer (which you can contest, and for which you aren't necessarily liable). and I don't know about you, but I'd rather contest a charge on my credit card than get a call from my bank telling me that my mortgage payment failed due to insufficient funds;
3. I prefer using credit cards instead of debit cards anyway as it helps improve my credit rating, and I get perks like discount airline tickets (AMEX's Blue Sky card is pretty sweet). all you gotta do is remember to pay your bill every month and you're good to go.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 06-08 as an ICT (Information Communication Technology) Specialist / Education Volunteer. I had two primary projects - one was to teach software programming to students at the Gambia Technical Training Institute (GTTI) in Kanifing (which was a whole boatload of problems, let me tell you - just try teaching programming in a computer lab - WITHOUT WORKING COMPUTERS! hah! yeah, that's what I had to deal with for an entire semester, to say nothing of the intermittent electricity, crummy virus-ridden workstations, and students who classified as "advanced" by knowing how to use Microsoft Office applications.
anyway.
my second project was to create population statistics collection software for the Gambian government's Office of the National Population Secretariat. I decided to write the software using Java with RMI over SSL using a PostgreSQL back end, with a Swing front end. problem was, I didn't have a computer - last thing I thought I'd do in a rural West African country was to write software, so I didn't bring my laptop.
so I built one from spare parts at GTTI and brought that back to my place. it wasn't much, but it's what I used to start development on the software for the first 4-5 months until I could coerce another Volunteer who was visiting America to courier my laptop back with her, which she graciously did.
so then I had my laptop. but working conditions still weren't very good, in particular the heat (got upwards of 120 Fahrenheit in the hot seasons), all the fine particulate sand that blows everywhere and gets into everything electrical (especially with fans sucking it in the way it does), the intermittent electricity (thank you laptop battery and voltage regulator, surge protector, and hackneyed grounding setup!), NO internet anywhere near my place (I had to walk a couple miles to get to the nearest net connection, where I'd do my research, download files and whatever to a USB flash drive at a whopping 6-10k per second, and then walk home, clean the viruses off my flash drive that it had picked up at the internet shop (all running cracked copies of Windows without virus scanners, of course), and continue my development. Until I hit my next roadblock, at which point I'd do it all over again.
on the plus side, I didn't have anyone looking over my shoulder telling me how to write the software, which was really nice 'cause I got to try my hand as a software architect - think I did a pretty good job with it all.
by the end of my service, I had gotten the software to work, and work well - of course, the government office I was working for had neglected to follow my instructions to procure a server for the software to run on until the last week of my service (and even then it only happened because my APCD pulled strings with the Vice President, to whom she was related, to get the computer purchased). still, it was only enough time for me to install the software and then fly back home to the US. we never did pilot launch the client applications, sadly....
A Volunteer replace me there as I understand it, but he's not a software engineer and although I've offered to assist from here how I can, I'm fairly certain the project fell apart.
And THIS is a perfect example of how even minor spelling and grammatical errors can not only make you look stupid, but also cause confusion and misunderstanding on the part of the reader.
Specifically in this case, if the original "slough" had been capitalized, it would have immediately presented as a proper name, causing its second use farther along ("Sloughs") to make more sense (as it was, I figured the second, capitalized "Slough" was capitalized due to it starting a sentence).
Anyway, I feel that the horse is probably dead at this point and needs no further kicking. Still, a good point all around I think.
"...setting a video game in slough amuses me. Almost all video game heroes start out in New York or Tokyo. Sloughs time has come"
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the game in question. But I have to ask, what exactly are the grammatical errors with the word "slough?" Checking it's definitions, this one seems to fit pretty well with what I presume him to be talking about:
1. an area of soft, muddy ground; swamp or swamplike region.
At the risk of sounding dumb, what exactly is the grammatical error? I mean, aside from not using an apostrophe in the quote "...Slough's time has come." How's it being misused?
I've seen evidence of people trying to fix that very error after Firefox started including a spell checker by default. After looking at the first few alternatives offered they apparently chose "allot"!
*smacks palm to forehead* Why does this not really surprise me? *sigh*
Perhaps spell-checker dictionaries should provide brief definitions of suggested words in addition to the suggested words themselves? Would probably be a fun project, and the developer could chalk it up to some kind of humanitarian cause, improving education and combating illiteracy and whatnot.
that this guy thinks this is a good idea. spelling correctly isn't particularly difficult, and anyone who misspells common words, especially the common words, IMHO, has some serious issues, and it says something uncomplimentary about the person's character.
"Use the spell-checker Luke! It's all around you!"
Spell a word wrong? Oh hey, what's that little red line underneath the word? huh, let's check it out. Oh hey! Whaddya know? "alot" isn't a word at all, is it? Huh, now I know!
And knowing is half the battle!
... or we could just give in to apathy. it's a slippery slope here people.
Oh right, one more thing: not knowing how to spell words, unless you're talking about really difficult, uncommon ones, makes you look really, really stupid. Even if you're not, otherwise.
Practical example. You apply for a job. If your resume or cover letter has even a single misspelled word, and the person reading your docs picks up on it, chances are good your resume gets tossed. If nothing else, it says you're not detail oriented and gives an impression of incompetence. Not exactly an impression anyone wants to give.
There are social services to take care of you. There is no such system in Africa, or at least there wasn't in my little corner of West Africa.
Maybe there should be a focus on providing these. I imagine a non-profit organisation which charges a monthly fee to people in these areas which is some fraction of the cost of feeding a child, and only accepts people with two or fewer children. In exchange for this, it offers interest-free hardship loans to people after poor harvests and so on. If most of the people are able to repay their loans later, then it's self-sustaining and the monthly fees cover the few that default.
Perhaps there should be something like this. It's not a bad idea. The problems I could see surrounding such a system involve first, that I really can't think of a single family I met in my two years there that had only one or two kids, unless the couple had just gotten married within the previous couple years. In the rural sections, which is nearly the entire country, people have lots of kids, and I'm just not sure how to change this part of their culture. Just getting people to understand the benefit of, and to begin the practice of using condoms (as a deterrent to catching HIV) is difficult enough (especially when the President claims to be able to cure AIDS with a mixture of herbs and the Qu'ran).
The other thing I can see as being a problem is the idea of monthly payments. In the rural parts, where people farm for a living, they really don't seem to have monthly bills of any kind. Or bills of any sort, really. We're talking about a part of the world where people don't even really know how old they are as there aren't any solid records of when they were born. Mobile phones involve prepaid scratch cards to add minutes. And forget about water or electricity bills, 'cause their water comes from a common well in their village and the only electricity they may have comes from solar panels. All I'm trying to get at here is that in such a culture, getting people to pay monthly insurance bills is going to be a very difficult uphill battle. It just is. And then there's the "getting people to repay their loans later" point, which when you're talking about rural farmers who really don't make much if any money in the first place, asking them to repay a loan is just asking for them to default.
Which isn't to say it's not a good idea and worth trying out! And I don't mean to be a downer here, but really, the best way I'm aware of, the idea being tossed around Peace Corps / The Gambia right now, is to
Get rural farmers to stop buying and eating imported rice (which is now very expensive);
To start eating coos instead (a local, healthier grain that they can grow that's similar to millet, but is sadly seen as "poor people's" food); and
To grow Nerica rice which can be sold for profit (due again to the increased cost of rice).
Employing multiple cropping techniques can also be used to improve yields - in fact, many crops are symbiotic and actually thrive better if grown in the same environment as other edible crops.
In short, we educate rural farmers about new techniques to help them adapt to the food crisis by becoming more self-reliant.
Bringing it back around to the whole "free handouts to Africa are bad" argument. Which they are.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to move the entire population of gambia/senegal/guinea-bissau/guinea conakry) to China/Continental USA/Canada/non-kyoto-signatories?
Good luck with getting anyone on either side of that argument to agree to such an idea.
Reversing the CO2 trend in the atmosphere is awfully expensive, so it might be cheaper?
Attempting to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere benefits everyone. It is going to be expensive, but IMHO, and in many other people's opinions, very necessary to ensure the welfare of our global environment. In short, even if it were cheaper in the short run to move people around like you're suggesting, the underlying cause is still there, and such environmental changes are going to eventually be felt in other parts of the world. It's just happening in West Africa now due to the proximity of the Sahara. Ask yourself, where else can you find barren, arid parts of the world? Now imagine those growing, too. Something along those sort of lines.
Can I make just one point here about the supply of food in Africa?
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa, for the last two years. Many Gambians there have had good crops in the past. True, some years are better than others, some worse than others. That's how it goes. But the Sahara is near, in the grand scheme of things, and it's getting nearer. The land is getting more and more arid. The rainy seasons are slowly getting shorter. It is predicted that within the next 20 years, The Gambia (and with it Senegal and parts of Guinea-Bissau and Guinea Conakry) will be basically Saharan countries. The ability to grow food in these countries will be drastically reduced as a result.
Do you want to take a wild guess as to why the Sahara is creeping south? Let me give you a hint: global warming has a lot to do with it. Want to improve the lives of people in sub-Saharan Africa? Go carbon neutral! You can start by getting rid of that smog-belching SUV and trading up to a PZEV or, better yet, ride your bike to work. Basically, what I'm saying, is that a lot of the "natural" food shortages in the third world are caused indirectly by our extravagant habits in the first world.
They really need to stop having so many kids, smaller families will put far less of a strain on the available resources.
True, except that having smaller families just isn't something that's going to happen. A primary reason for this is that families provide the social "safety net" that our government in America provides for us. If you fall down on your luck in America, you lose your job or whatever, you collect unemployment until you get back on your feet. There are social services to take care of you. There is no such system in Africa, or at least there wasn't in my little corner of West Africa. It was your family and the families in your village that took care of people when they were down on their luck. The larger the family, the larger the village, the better off everyone is. This is a real tangible benefit that ties directly to your survival.
What people need to do in the rural farming lands out there, IMHO, is to start planting multiple crops in a single plot of land. They need to adapt better techniques of land utilization. Lots of farmers there will allocate a specific plot of land to coos, cassava, rice, tomatoes, beans, groundnuts, whatever. Each plot of land has one crop. But there are techniques you can use, such as double cropping that can significantly increase yields. This is just an example.
The problem is, I think, that a lot of these farmers don't want to try new things, and here's why: trying something new presents a risk. What if the new thing doesn't work as well as the old thing? It's fine if you're talking about something superfluous, but when you're talking about your crops, you're also talking about whether or not your family has food for the next year. I think that that's just not something most rural farmers are going to take a risk on. So they go with what they know, and as a result lose out on the benefits of improved methodologies.
(FWIW: I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 2006-2008 in The Gambia, West Africa)
First, you're right: sending stuff to Africa to give away, or to sell very cheap in markets, doesn't help their local economy. Local tailors can't compete with all the stuff that gets shipped in from overseas - everyone is dressed in designer jeans and 50 Cent shirts with "New York" baseball caps. People do wear locally made garments, but it's not the norm.
I don't agree so much with the "Want to help? Then don't" sentiment. Help is good, so long as it's not in the form of stuff being thrown haphazardly at Africa in the forms of money or food or clothing. If you want to help, then help! But do it by donating your time to go there to teach, for example. Do something where you can transfer knowledge and skills. That whole "give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry again" mentality.
And for God's sake, please stop sending broken Pentium 3 computers there! Broken computers are one thing, they can often be fixed. Africans are extremely good at eeking out functionality from stuff we Americans would be very happy to throw away. But sending old computers that don't run current applications is a waste - there's no support for Windows 98 anymore, so sending old systems with 32 megs of RAM and a 1 gig drive doesn't help anyone. When I was there, it really did feel like Europe was treating Africa like a dumping ground in this respect. Heck, a lot of the computers were password-protected in the BIOS so you couldn't even boot the damn things. Talk about stupid.
(FWIW: I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 2006-2008, taught IT skills in The Gambia, West Africa and saw a lot of the effects of these cheap / free clothes first hand on the local economy, and have lots of personal gripes with the crummy computers that got sent to us from Europe)
I'm one of these geeks who sit behind a desk all day, writing code and working on servers. I've found that I build up massive, MASSIVE amounts of energy each day that has me fidgeting my brains out if I don't do something to release it. So what do I do? Damn near every day after work, I go and practice Taekwondo for a couple hours. I burn myself out in the first 20 minutes, and then push myself to the edge for the next hour. By the time I'm done, not only am I totally physically wasted, but I've been learning an awesome, practical skill with which to impress all those ladies I don't get.
For real though, it's kept me sane for years. You train in a relatively safe environment (but of course accidents do happen, I've sprained toes, ankles, wrists, fingers, and almost broken quite a number of those as well), but you get to punch and kick the crap out of bags, boards, and bricks, and release massive amounts of stress at the same time.
Additionally, no matter what art you do, it's bound to involve a degree of meditation. Now, I don't mean necessarily sitting there like a monk focusing on nothing, although we do that here and there, no - I mean the kind of medidation that takes place while doing patterns (kata, forms, etc.) - it's a great way to calm yourself and mentally reset.
I strongly recommend it in favor of doing something as unregulated and, IMHO, stupid, as these fight clubs.
I work in IT, and have done so for about 10 years, through college and after. I write software, but of course a fair amount of my time is spent talking with users who are, by any definition, computer illiterate.
The difference I see between those who are computer literate, and those who get the "il" prefix, is the ability to - at least to a rudimentary level - figure out what to do when something doesn't go as planned, whether it be an error message, a network share not appearing, something not saving to the folder they thought it was going to save to, etc. The benefit here is that in order to do basic troubleshooting, you need to have at least some degree of understanding about how the computer works and does its thing - all to the benefit of becoming more computer literate.
Additionally, I would say that a prerequisite for basic troubleshooting skills would have to be a little less fear about using computers. It seems like people are under the impression that it's remarkably easy to destroy all your data and crash your operating system by clicking OK on a message box. It reminds me of that Far Side comic where you've got a kid on a plane in a regular passenger seat, and there's a switch by the window that toggles between "WINGS STAY ON" and "WINGS FALL OFF." Users need to understand that computers are not designed with inadvertently-switchable "WINGS FALL OFF" levers.
So, I would consider someone who has 1) less fear of computers, and 2) the ability to do some very basic troubleshooting, to be a computer-literate individual.
People live for a lot longer than 20 years. Do you want your teeth to fall out by the time you're 25? Personally, I'd like to keep mine for as long as I live, and given today's averages in the US, that should be 80ish years.
Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve W. Berman, of Seattle. But that's beside the point of the lawsuit, which takes issue with the potential the iPod has to cause irreparable hearing loss, Berman said.
(emphasis mine)
okay, so by this logic, we could:
file a class action lawsuit against car manufacturers, because cars have the potential to go fast, and if you hit stuff when driving quickly it can kill you! (forget hearing loss, this is much worse!)
sue all food manufacturers because certain foods have the potential to cause obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, increase your cholesterol, etc. - the list is nearly endless! (hey, food is dangerous, folks, be careful)
file a lawsuit against your next-door neighbor for having a pet dog, because the dog has the potential to come into your house and bite off your nuts when you're sleeping (it could happen)
Point is, IIRC (but IANAL), I don't think you can file lawsuits for potential damages, just real ones. (someone care to correct me on this and prove just how stupid the US legal system really is?)
This guy is wack, right up there with Ms. I-didn't-know-steaming-hot-coffee-could-burn-you, except she actually got burned, so this guy is worse.
Slashdot Mirror
While any developer worth their salt should be able to write code in a text editor, any developer worth their salt will also know that it can easily become a slow, error-prone process when dealing with larger or more complex code bases. Using a decent IDE can dramatically speed up development and reduce the likelihood of introducing errors.
Myself, I've used a number of IDEs in the past - Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA - and I have to say that IntelliJ IDEA is really hands down (in my opinion) the best one out there.
A few reasons why:
It's fast. It's extremely customizable, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins available to extend the IDE's functionality. It supports dozens of languages and file types. It's got an excellent debugger. Git and Maven integration are fantastic. Refactoring can be done perfectly in seconds or minutes instead of potentially hours if done manually. Navigating the code base is made super easy with "Find usages" and "Go to source."
Also, because the company (JetBrains) is in the business of making money, they actually sell their products instead of just giving them away for free (although there are free, reduced-functionality versions available), they have a lot more money to pour into their products than other options out there, and it shows.
Basically, as a software developer, I want to spend my time writing code, not dealing with associated peripheral tasks, i.e. noise. Using a good IDE can help you do this.
Good luck with your decision making process!
yeah I know what you mean. I got a taste of DAF myself in speech therapy in high school for my stutter, and I couldn't tolerate it, drove me absolutely nuts.
in fact, I tried a number of different approaches in speech therapy when I was a kid, and none of it worked. eventually I said f-it to therapy and made a go of fixing it on my own. I'm pleased to say that whatever I did worked, such that today (and for the last 15-20 years, since college) I stutter so infrequently that when I do, people who don't know me often think I'm making a joke or otherwise screwing around. for all intents and purposes I'm now completely fluent, although being really tired or really agitated / anxious exacerbates it. those situations don't occur very often, thankfully.
what I found that *did* work though, was a combination of two things :
the first is something I like to call "speech buffering." simply put, this is the act of thinking about what I'm going to say just before I say it. I do this in real-time while I'm speaking, and the buffer only contains one or maybe two words, but that's enough. this is *not* composing an entire thought in my head before I say it - that level of composition isn't necessary. I think the buffering works by creating a better flow between syllables, such that I expect and mentally map the sounds before they get executed. I think I still do it, but I've been doing it for so long I'm not even particularly conscious of it at this point.
the second thing I credit with really helping to resolve my stutter involved learning how to calm myself down when I get anxious about speaking - clear the mind, regulate the breathing, slow the heart rate. I found this to be really useful because public speaking has always made me nervous, and being anxious exacerbates my disfluency.
however, between these two strategies - speech buffering and meditation / breathing exercises - I've been able to speak in front of large groups of strangers, speak before televised city council meetings, give presentations at work, etc., all with negligible disfluency.
worked really well for me, maybe it can work for someone else.
How many people clicked on the link to read about the World's Most Boring Day? How intriguing! Let me read about that!
Not so boring now, is it? I foresee the topic of April 11, 1954 becoming an overnight internet meme sensation, retroactively promoting the day to one of reverence, in a not-dissimilar fashion to the mechanism by which certain artists become famous and revered only many years after they've departed.
Any takers? Yes? No?
FWIW, I'm currently reading "Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior" by Ori and Rom Brafman. It's a really excellent book, similar in topic, and well-researched, and enjoyable to read with interesting real-life anecdotes to exemplify the points they raise. It touches on many different influences that affect our decision making processes.
http://www.amazon.com/Sway-Irresistible-Pull-Irrational-Behavior/dp/0385530609/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256331144&sr=8-1
This is a practice that is probably still going on to these days.
I can say for certain it's definitely still going on these days in West Africa, and probably all over Africa. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 2006 through 2008, and many Gambians have these sorts of primitive tattoos, in the Wolof language called "nyaas," that are created by taking a razor blade and cutting a design in the skin. After, the charred, sooty remains of ground nuts (what we know as peanuts, which are a staple crop there) are ground into the cuts. The soot stops the bleeding, and the scar heals through and around the soot. If you don't mess with it while it's healing, it comes out looking pretty good - color me nuts, but I went through this procedure while I was there, as did a fair number of other PCVs. It's pretty cool.
Nyaas has several purposes, depending on where it's located on the body.
So yeah, still being done, you just gotta know where to look.
huh, so the app doesn't even do any form of steganography at all - anyone looking at the image can clearly tell it's not a regular image. probably overwrites all 8 bits of each red, green, and blue color channel with the payload. if you want the app to actually hide the torrent, you have to take a regular PNG, and overwrite only the least N significant bits of each color channel with the payload. the more bits you overwrite, the more payload you can store, but eventually (overwriting around 4 or 5 bits per color channel) the image begins to get all grainy and you can pretty easily tell there's something going on with it. overwriting all 8 bits generates an image like the example linked to in parent.
so perhaps a combination of what I suggested, plus browser/user-level whitelisting of domains you want to support? ABP currently allows you to add "exception rules" to its filter to enable ads for user-specified domains which accomplishes the whitelisting part.
ABP is currently exclusive by default (that is, it blocks all items unless specified otherwise). if you combined what I suggested in my last post about dynamic filtering based on content and aesthetics and applied that to only the whitelisted domains the user specifies (via the exception rules), you could view only the kinds of ads you like on only your whitelisted domains. this way if you don't want to view any ads on 99% of all sites out there - great! easy, just go about business as usual. if you want to support a site by allowing ads, you'd have the flexibility to do that.
I'll agree though, that if ABP doesn't allow the user the ability to fully tweak out their ad-viewing preferences, most users of the software will rebel as they - myself included - feel similarly to you. I expect a code fork would likely come about in such an event.
I will not grant them the right to inflict their buggy flash/java script/animated ads on me just because I have to go there often
so, what if AdBlock Plus had in their preferences a way to specify the types of things that annoy you in ads, and then filter all ads that meet any of those criteria? Such a system would require users who encounter new ads to specify what each ad contains so ABP would know how to block it (other than obvious technical stuff you can search for like JS or Flash), but with as many ABP users there are out there, this seems like a trivial task and would make the system smart.
Set up in ABP Preferences a list like this:
Block any ads that contain:
this way, only ads that meet various content and aesthetic criteria are displayed. Maybe it'll encourage companies that make annoying ads to refine their ways?
I got rid of my debit card and replaced it with an ATM card (for getting cash directly from my bank) and credit cards (for everything else) for reasons related to this, but more generally referred to as rational paranoia.
it goes something like this:
1. I don't like entering my bank account's PIN in the local Try-N-Save. it just feels like a bad idea. now, according to the very brief amount I've read on this here, it is;
2. debit cards are linked directly to your bank account. someone uses it even as a Visa card (no PIN necessary!), not even as a debit card, and that money comes straight from your bank account, not from a credit card buffer (which you can contest, and for which you aren't necessarily liable). and I don't know about you, but I'd rather contest a charge on my credit card than get a call from my bank telling me that my mortgage payment failed due to insufficient funds;
3. I prefer using credit cards instead of debit cards anyway as it helps improve my credit rating, and I get perks like discount airline tickets (AMEX's Blue Sky card is pretty sweet). all you gotta do is remember to pay your bill every month and you're good to go.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 06-08 as an ICT (Information Communication Technology) Specialist / Education Volunteer. I had two primary projects - one was to teach software programming to students at the Gambia Technical Training Institute (GTTI) in Kanifing (which was a whole boatload of problems, let me tell you - just try teaching programming in a computer lab - WITHOUT WORKING COMPUTERS! hah! yeah, that's what I had to deal with for an entire semester, to say nothing of the intermittent electricity, crummy virus-ridden workstations, and students who classified as "advanced" by knowing how to use Microsoft Office applications.
anyway.
my second project was to create population statistics collection software for the Gambian government's Office of the National Population Secretariat. I decided to write the software using Java with RMI over SSL using a PostgreSQL back end, with a Swing front end. problem was, I didn't have a computer - last thing I thought I'd do in a rural West African country was to write software, so I didn't bring my laptop.
so I built one from spare parts at GTTI and brought that back to my place. it wasn't much, but it's what I used to start development on the software for the first 4-5 months until I could coerce another Volunteer who was visiting America to courier my laptop back with her, which she graciously did.
so then I had my laptop. but working conditions still weren't very good, in particular the heat (got upwards of 120 Fahrenheit in the hot seasons), all the fine particulate sand that blows everywhere and gets into everything electrical (especially with fans sucking it in the way it does), the intermittent electricity (thank you laptop battery and voltage regulator, surge protector, and hackneyed grounding setup!), NO internet anywhere near my place (I had to walk a couple miles to get to the nearest net connection, where I'd do my research, download files and whatever to a USB flash drive at a whopping 6-10k per second, and then walk home, clean the viruses off my flash drive that it had picked up at the internet shop (all running cracked copies of Windows without virus scanners, of course), and continue my development. Until I hit my next roadblock, at which point I'd do it all over again.
on the plus side, I didn't have anyone looking over my shoulder telling me how to write the software, which was really nice 'cause I got to try my hand as a software architect - think I did a pretty good job with it all.
by the end of my service, I had gotten the software to work, and work well - of course, the government office I was working for had neglected to follow my instructions to procure a server for the software to run on until the last week of my service (and even then it only happened because my APCD pulled strings with the Vice President, to whom she was related, to get the computer purchased). still, it was only enough time for me to install the software and then fly back home to the US. we never did pilot launch the client applications, sadly....
A Volunteer replace me there as I understand it, but he's not a software engineer and although I've offered to assist from here how I can, I'm fairly certain the project fell apart.
Oh well, c'est la vie.
if you wanna check out the software I wrote, search for "Population Tracker" on Sourceforge. or rather, here's a link: http://poptracker.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/poptracker/
And I, for one, welcome our new super-intelligent computer overlords...
And THIS is a perfect example of how even minor spelling and grammatical errors can not only make you look stupid, but also cause confusion and misunderstanding on the part of the reader.
Specifically in this case, if the original "slough" had been capitalized, it would have immediately presented as a proper name, causing its second use farther along ("Sloughs") to make more sense (as it was, I figured the second, capitalized "Slough" was capitalized due to it starting a sentence).
Anyway, I feel that the horse is probably dead at this point and needs no further kicking. Still, a good point all around I think.
"...setting a video game in slough amuses me. Almost all video game heroes start out in New York or Tokyo. Sloughs time has come"
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the game in question. But I have to ask, what exactly are the grammatical errors with the word "slough?" Checking it's definitions, this one seems to fit pretty well with what I presume him to be talking about:
1. an area of soft, muddy ground; swamp or swamplike region.
At the risk of sounding dumb, what exactly is the grammatical error? I mean, aside from not using an apostrophe in the quote "...Slough's time has come." How's it being misused?
I've seen evidence of people trying to fix that very error after Firefox started including a spell checker by default. After looking at the first few alternatives offered they apparently chose "allot"!
*smacks palm to forehead* Why does this not really surprise me? *sigh*
Perhaps spell-checker dictionaries should provide brief definitions of suggested words in addition to the suggested words themselves? Would probably be a fun project, and the developer could chalk it up to some kind of humanitarian cause, improving education and combating illiteracy and whatnot.
that this guy thinks this is a good idea. spelling correctly isn't particularly difficult, and anyone who misspells common words, especially the common words, IMHO, has some serious issues, and it says something uncomplimentary about the person's character.
"Use the spell-checker Luke! It's all around you!"
Spell a word wrong? Oh hey, what's that little red line underneath the word? huh, let's check it out. Oh hey! Whaddya know? "alot" isn't a word at all, is it? Huh, now I know!
And knowing is half the battle!
... or we could just give in to apathy. it's a slippery slope here people.
Oh right, one more thing: not knowing how to spell words, unless you're talking about really difficult, uncommon ones, makes you look really, really stupid. Even if you're not, otherwise.
Practical example. You apply for a job. If your resume or cover letter has even a single misspelled word, and the person reading your docs picks up on it, chances are good your resume gets tossed. If nothing else, it says you're not detail oriented and gives an impression of incompetence. Not exactly an impression anyone wants to give.
Okay, all done ranting.
There are social services to take care of you. There is no such system in Africa, or at least there wasn't in my little corner of West Africa.
Maybe there should be a focus on providing these. I imagine a non-profit organisation which charges a monthly fee to people in these areas which is some fraction of the cost of feeding a child, and only accepts people with two or fewer children. In exchange for this, it offers interest-free hardship loans to people after poor harvests and so on. If most of the people are able to repay their loans later, then it's self-sustaining and the monthly fees cover the few that default.
Perhaps there should be something like this. It's not a bad idea. The problems I could see surrounding such a system involve first, that I really can't think of a single family I met in my two years there that had only one or two kids, unless the couple had just gotten married within the previous couple years. In the rural sections, which is nearly the entire country, people have lots of kids, and I'm just not sure how to change this part of their culture. Just getting people to understand the benefit of, and to begin the practice of using condoms (as a deterrent to catching HIV) is difficult enough (especially when the President claims to be able to cure AIDS with a mixture of herbs and the Qu'ran).
The other thing I can see as being a problem is the idea of monthly payments. In the rural parts, where people farm for a living, they really don't seem to have monthly bills of any kind. Or bills of any sort, really. We're talking about a part of the world where people don't even really know how old they are as there aren't any solid records of when they were born. Mobile phones involve prepaid scratch cards to add minutes. And forget about water or electricity bills, 'cause their water comes from a common well in their village and the only electricity they may have comes from solar panels. All I'm trying to get at here is that in such a culture, getting people to pay monthly insurance bills is going to be a very difficult uphill battle. It just is. And then there's the "getting people to repay their loans later" point, which when you're talking about rural farmers who really don't make much if any money in the first place, asking them to repay a loan is just asking for them to default.
Which isn't to say it's not a good idea and worth trying out! And I don't mean to be a downer here, but really, the best way I'm aware of, the idea being tossed around Peace Corps / The Gambia right now, is to
In short, we educate rural farmers about new techniques to help them adapt to the food crisis by becoming more self-reliant.
Bringing it back around to the whole "free handouts to Africa are bad" argument. Which they are.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to move the entire population of gambia/senegal/guinea-bissau/guinea conakry) to China/Continental USA/Canada/non-kyoto-signatories?
Good luck with getting anyone on either side of that argument to agree to such an idea.
Reversing the CO2 trend in the atmosphere is awfully expensive, so it might be cheaper?
Attempting to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere benefits everyone. It is going to be expensive, but IMHO, and in many other people's opinions, very necessary to ensure the welfare of our global environment. In short, even if it were cheaper in the short run to move people around like you're suggesting, the underlying cause is still there, and such environmental changes are going to eventually be felt in other parts of the world. It's just happening in West Africa now due to the proximity of the Sahara. Ask yourself, where else can you find barren, arid parts of the world? Now imagine those growing, too. Something along those sort of lines.
Better to treat the cause then the symptom.
Can I make just one point here about the supply of food in Africa?
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa, for the last two years. Many Gambians there have had good crops in the past. True, some years are better than others, some worse than others. That's how it goes. But the Sahara is near, in the grand scheme of things, and it's getting nearer. The land is getting more and more arid. The rainy seasons are slowly getting shorter. It is predicted that within the next 20 years, The Gambia (and with it Senegal and parts of Guinea-Bissau and Guinea Conakry) will be basically Saharan countries. The ability to grow food in these countries will be drastically reduced as a result.
Do you want to take a wild guess as to why the Sahara is creeping south? Let me give you a hint: global warming has a lot to do with it. Want to improve the lives of people in sub-Saharan Africa? Go carbon neutral! You can start by getting rid of that smog-belching SUV and trading up to a PZEV or, better yet, ride your bike to work. Basically, what I'm saying, is that a lot of the "natural" food shortages in the third world are caused indirectly by our extravagant habits in the first world.
They really need to stop having so many kids, smaller families will put far less of a strain on the available resources.
True, except that having smaller families just isn't something that's going to happen. A primary reason for this is that families provide the social "safety net" that our government in America provides for us. If you fall down on your luck in America, you lose your job or whatever, you collect unemployment until you get back on your feet. There are social services to take care of you. There is no such system in Africa, or at least there wasn't in my little corner of West Africa. It was your family and the families in your village that took care of people when they were down on their luck. The larger the family, the larger the village, the better off everyone is. This is a real tangible benefit that ties directly to your survival.
What people need to do in the rural farming lands out there, IMHO, is to start planting multiple crops in a single plot of land. They need to adapt better techniques of land utilization. Lots of farmers there will allocate a specific plot of land to coos, cassava, rice, tomatoes, beans, groundnuts, whatever. Each plot of land has one crop. But there are techniques you can use, such as double cropping that can significantly increase yields. This is just an example.
The problem is, I think, that a lot of these farmers don't want to try new things, and here's why: trying something new presents a risk. What if the new thing doesn't work as well as the old thing? It's fine if you're talking about something superfluous, but when you're talking about your crops, you're also talking about whether or not your family has food for the next year. I think that that's just not something most rural farmers are going to take a risk on. So they go with what they know, and as a result lose out on the benefits of improved methodologies.
(FWIW: I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 2006-2008 in The Gambia, West Africa)
Two things:
First, you're right: sending stuff to Africa to give away, or to sell very cheap in markets, doesn't help their local economy. Local tailors can't compete with all the stuff that gets shipped in from overseas - everyone is dressed in designer jeans and 50 Cent shirts with "New York" baseball caps. People do wear locally made garments, but it's not the norm.
I don't agree so much with the "Want to help? Then don't" sentiment. Help is good, so long as it's not in the form of stuff being thrown haphazardly at Africa in the forms of money or food or clothing. If you want to help, then help! But do it by donating your time to go there to teach, for example. Do something where you can transfer knowledge and skills. That whole "give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry again" mentality.
And for God's sake, please stop sending broken Pentium 3 computers there! Broken computers are one thing, they can often be fixed. Africans are extremely good at eeking out functionality from stuff we Americans would be very happy to throw away. But sending old computers that don't run current applications is a waste - there's no support for Windows 98 anymore, so sending old systems with 32 megs of RAM and a 1 gig drive doesn't help anyone. When I was there, it really did feel like Europe was treating Africa like a dumping ground in this respect. Heck, a lot of the computers were password-protected in the BIOS so you couldn't even boot the damn things. Talk about stupid.
(FWIW: I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 2006-2008, taught IT skills in The Gambia, West Africa and saw a lot of the effects of these cheap / free clothes first hand on the local economy, and have lots of personal gripes with the crummy computers that got sent to us from Europe)
I'm one of these geeks who sit behind a desk all day, writing code and working on servers. I've found that I build up massive, MASSIVE amounts of energy each day that has me fidgeting my brains out if I don't do something to release it. So what do I do? Damn near every day after work, I go and practice Taekwondo for a couple hours. I burn myself out in the first 20 minutes, and then push myself to the edge for the next hour. By the time I'm done, not only am I totally physically wasted, but I've been learning an awesome, practical skill with which to impress all those ladies I don't get.
For real though, it's kept me sane for years. You train in a relatively safe environment (but of course accidents do happen, I've sprained toes, ankles, wrists, fingers, and almost broken quite a number of those as well), but you get to punch and kick the crap out of bags, boards, and bricks, and release massive amounts of stress at the same time.
Additionally, no matter what art you do, it's bound to involve a degree of meditation. Now, I don't mean necessarily sitting there like a monk focusing on nothing, although we do that here and there, no - I mean the kind of medidation that takes place while doing patterns (kata, forms, etc.) - it's a great way to calm yourself and mentally reset.
I strongly recommend it in favor of doing something as unregulated and, IMHO, stupid, as these fight clubs.
Matt
I work in IT, and have done so for about 10 years, through college and after. I write software, but of course a fair amount of my time is spent talking with users who are, by any definition, computer illiterate.
The difference I see between those who are computer literate, and those who get the "il" prefix, is the ability to - at least to a rudimentary level - figure out what to do when something doesn't go as planned, whether it be an error message, a network share not appearing, something not saving to the folder they thought it was going to save to, etc. The benefit here is that in order to do basic troubleshooting, you need to have at least some degree of understanding about how the computer works and does its thing - all to the benefit of becoming more computer literate.
Additionally, I would say that a prerequisite for basic troubleshooting skills would have to be a little less fear about using computers. It seems like people are under the impression that it's remarkably easy to destroy all your data and crash your operating system by clicking OK on a message box. It reminds me of that Far Side comic where you've got a kid on a plane in a regular passenger seat, and there's a switch by the window that toggles between "WINGS STAY ON" and "WINGS FALL OFF." Users need to understand that computers are not designed with inadvertently-switchable "WINGS FALL OFF" levers.
So, I would consider someone who has 1) less fear of computers, and 2) the ability to do some very basic troubleshooting, to be a computer-literate individual.
Matt
They live for 20 years and their teeth are fine.
People live for a lot longer than 20 years. Do you want your teeth to fall out by the time you're 25? Personally, I'd like to keep mine for as long as I live, and given today's averages in the US, that should be 80ish years.
Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve W. Berman, of Seattle. But that's beside the point of the lawsuit, which takes issue with the potential the iPod has to cause irreparable hearing loss, Berman said.
(emphasis mine)
okay, so by this logic, we could:
Point is, IIRC (but IANAL), I don't think you can file lawsuits for potential damages, just real ones. (someone care to correct me on this and prove just how stupid the US legal system really is?)
This guy is wack, right up there with Ms. I-didn't-know-steaming-hot-coffee-could-burn-you, except she actually got burned, so this guy is worse.
Matt
Naw, blargh ain't any good... but is it any surprise that quick ping times make us happy? To answer: no, no it's not. (see definition #5).