Like the Motorolla Blur, perhaps? We've got them at work and we've had to replace a screen already (we've been using the Blur for about a month so far). $50, quick and easy. Generator service technicians are really hard on their phones. I'm sure it's not the only repairable phone out there, but it is the one in my pocket at the moment.
I wrote one, actually. It's in C#. It's basically a SMTP proxy and an outlook add in. Does whitelisting, graylisting, blacklisting and bayesian filtering. I no longer hide my email address and, with training, I'm down to about 2 spam/day and still improving (I reset the database 3 weeks ago). Best of all, I'm giving it away public domain, however, the code isn't quite fit for human consumption at this time. The training is managed via a Outlook add in (also part of the package). Want to know more? Just email me!
Why did I do this? There are some really good spam filters out there (SA, ASSP, SpamBayes), but getting them to work exactly the way I want was difficult, and this was an excellent learning experiance. I'd written my own email server about a decade ago (I've since switched to Exchange for the webmail and because that's what I run at work), so this seemed like a natural fit for me.
Oh, the things I didn't know when I started doing embedded software development. I learned a rather frustating lesson that Microchip's PIC16 series only has a 7 level call stack. Ironicly, I was only overflowing when I called a routine to output debugging information.
To further muddy the waters, the device transmits data to a server where everything is written in C#. My work can be frustrating at times. Much less so since we switched development to the PIC32 series (128k ram? Heaven!)
Hear hear. I've read every link I've seen here, but I can't find what was actually tweeted. The specific text that was tweeted is very important and I haven't been able to find it yet. There are a few very narrow areas of unprotected speech: overt threats and intimidation (which isn't really speech, but an underlying behavior). About whom, however, is completely irrelevant. The 14th amendment provides for equal protection of the laws. Calling someone a "public figure" is just a distraction from the fundamental issue.
I think the point of this thing is that it's a major improvement in conversion efficiency over thermocouples. One of the target applications is RTGs on spacecraft. So maybe you can get 3x the electricity out of the same chunk of plutonium. That's a major improvement. However, using it as a replacement for laptop batteries probably isn't going to fly.
Oh, wrong again. The phrase has already been used and appears to be in the public domain. The correct answer is Trademark, with which you can appropriate anything and sue anyone who tries to put it on a T-Shirt.
That's the one big flaw I find with Netflix (and it particularly affects my parents because they only have 1.5mb DSL). Is it too much to ask that things get cached on a local server during off peak hours? There's enormous amounts of bandwith being not used at 3am. And a 2TB drive is not expensive. Netflix could make a killing and save a fortune by selling a caching server and letting people download their queue during off peak hours. Plus, effectively no service outages. Double win!
No, the bandwidth is fantastic. It's the latency that really sucks.
What Netflix represents, however, is a market efficiency. There are few movies/TV shows that I want to watch more than once. As such, ideally, I want to rent, because it's cheaper and there's really no value in owning a copy for most things, unless the price becomes super cheap. By comparison, I listen to the same 2000 (or thereabout) songs over and over again, and I purchase them. So netflix is efficient. It's cheap, there are no stores to run and no teenage kids costing $10/hour to pay. So it's clearly superior to Blockbuster, but so is RedBox. It also beats RedBox in that I don't have to get off my couch at all. The only thing lacking at this point is new releases. That will change.
In any event, the article isn't asking if this is going to kill DVDs overnight. And it's not saying that the iMac killed the floppy. It's saying that this is the same sort of bold pronouncement that the end of an era is over. Physical media will hand on for a while. It's only recently that I started buying my music digitally, and only then when I could buy it in an unencrypted royalty free format that I could play anywhere. I still use physical DVDs for some purposes: watching movies while travelling, mostly. They won't completely die until I can buy movies in an unencrypted royalty free format that I can copy to a thumb drive and watch anywhere. The end.
I'd bet that a Boston/Foreigner joint version would sell a ton of units. I bought the Smash Hits edition because it had tracks from earlier versions that I hadn't played. But more than that, it had a lot of songs that I wanted to play.
In any event, I've gone as far with that game as I can. Once someone finally succeeds with making a GH like game using a real guitar, that really works as a game, I'll be back on board. Until then, my daughter has recently discovered karaoke, and she's in to metal, so I might get her the microphone for GH and see if she can learn to sing on key. I certainly can't.
I've been using a Syswan Octolinks for years with no problems, because at one point I had 3 connections to manage.
I also have a Barracuda Link Balancer that I'm rather underwhelmed with. The DHCP server on the unit seems to crash every few months, and Barracuda support was no help, so the solution was simply to use something else to provide DHCP services.
Oh, you laugh, but there's actually a lot of old communications equipment out there using 2400 baud modems to communicate. One variant of the product that I make is still using them! On a practical level, it's at least an order of magnitude more reliable than an ethernet product. There's no firewall, the CO is battery backed up, and no configuration other than a phone number. Ethernet, by comparison, goes off line frequently through no fault of the product itself. People change DNS servers and the product doesn't get updated. Likewise for firewalls, routers, etc.
At least the OS is slowly moving in the right direction. Windows 7 makes it fairy painless to turn off autoplay, which I have. Everything is consolidated into a nice littel control panel, and most things prompt by default.
I'm pleased to see that none of the 4 number codes I use in daily life made the top 10 list. If someone wants to steal my bike, they'll have to work at it a bit longer.
of course, there's the question of why an all-electric car gives a fuck about fuel economy...
The battery economy of an electric car is highly variable depending on driving conditions. From an engineering perspective, there is just no substitue for massive amounts of data from actual field use. Also, hypermilers are OCD douchebags who really like to feel smug about their driving habits.
Hey, when I first started working as a contractor, I cared. I tried to take on extra tasks because my basic position only took me 20 hours a week max. The client didn't care. As long as my one task was being done, that's all they wanted. I was literally told to read slashdot by my immediate supervisor. I was also advised not to draw attention to the fact that I had extra time as it might make me look expendable to the higher ups. I did get invited to the division xmas party, but I was told I had to pay $30 and it would be unpaid time off (since it was during business hours). Something better came along and I wasted no time in getting out of there.
It's worth noting that it makes sense to pack this functionality directly into the TV. The TV already has the decoders for a number of digital formats built in, along with the processing power to add things like menus and overlays. Adding an TCP stack to that doesn't require much. And there are no moving parts to wear out (ie., the case against integrating a DVD/BluRay player into the TV). So, it's a natural fit. Plus, NetFlix and most of the other major streaming services are available on the 3 major consoles. The WiFi on my Roku died, but instead of replacing it, I just use the Wii. If I ever update the TV, it will certainly be a model that has streaming built in to it.
The Roku box itself will fade away as its no longer needed, unless it comes up with some interesting new functionality. Something useful would be a household media server, or maybe something that caches the Netflix queue for low-bandwith users that can't stream things at a decent quality. (My parents could use that, DSL at their house maxes out at 1.5M)
Aspergers counts another sufferer. Nominating yourself (or promoting yourself) for an award is extremely tacky. It just is. Jimbo deserves a lot of credit, but surely he can find someone outside the project to pimp it for him.
Yes, that's the whole point. There needs to be a complete and total paradigm shift in the way software runs. And plug-ins are one of the biggest problems. So you have to restructure things. The plugi-n becomes a child process that can only write to its designated child window, and can only access data that is specifically passed to it. But running a plug-in in the same program space as the parent program must be strictly forbidden. It's going to be inconveniant at first, but it needs to be done.
As for the word processor example, if/etc/hosts and/ect/passwd are OS files, then the OS must provide a specific mechanism for modifying them. Or maybe there shouldn't be a mechanism for modifitying them. The word processor only gets to edit files that exist in user storage space. So if a rogue program does get installed it can trash your data and run wild for a while, but it will still be a trivial matter to remove it from your system.
As it is, tonight I'm going to be fixing computers for two family members who trashed their systems this past week just from visiting websites that served them malicious flash based ads (at least, that's what we suspect the infection vector was).
The problem is that Windows (and MacOS and Linux) is a "Wild West" operating system where anyone with admin access (ie., most home users) can trash the whole operating system. We're going to have to move to a model where the OS provides each application a sandbox, and nothing can modify the operating system, and no application can directly modify any other application. The band-aid security that's out there will never be adequate.
I'm not traveling 20 light years to eat instant oatmeal when I've got a Jamba Juice up the road next door to Starbucks, so I can get my coffee and some good oats in one easy trip.
When I interview new hires, I'm typically looking at people fresh out of school (or not even graduated) because they're cheap. But they still need to be experianced. Like the article says, you should have a side project. You should have something that you work on in your spare time. You should be the sort of person who is driven to write code.
On the weekends I've got my own little side projects. I've written my own mail server (though at this exact moment, I'm running Exchange) and a spam filter that has an Outlook plugin for submitting ham/spam from the end user desktop. I'm helping my kid write her first game. And I work on these things, not because I have to, but because I can. And that's what I look for in people I hire.
The problem with hiring people like this is that they move on in a couple of years (or less) because I can't afford to pay them what they're worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the Motorolla Blur, perhaps? We've got them at work and we've had to replace a screen already (we've been using the Blur for about a month so far). $50, quick and easy. Generator service technicians are really hard on their phones. I'm sure it's not the only repairable phone out there, but it is the one in my pocket at the moment.
Ok, my email is apparently not showing (but it should be. Still trying to figure out what's wrong with my user prefs)
dan@bance.net
I wrote one, actually. It's in C#. It's basically a SMTP proxy and an outlook add in. Does whitelisting, graylisting, blacklisting and bayesian filtering. I no longer hide my email address and, with training, I'm down to about 2 spam/day and still improving (I reset the database 3 weeks ago). Best of all, I'm giving it away public domain, however, the code isn't quite fit for human consumption at this time. The training is managed via a Outlook add in (also part of the package). Want to know more? Just email me!
Why did I do this? There are some really good spam filters out there (SA, ASSP, SpamBayes), but getting them to work exactly the way I want was difficult, and this was an excellent learning experiance. I'd written my own email server about a decade ago (I've since switched to Exchange for the webmail and because that's what I run at work), so this seemed like a natural fit for me.
Oh, the things I didn't know when I started doing embedded software development. I learned a rather frustating lesson that Microchip's PIC16 series only has a 7 level call stack. Ironicly, I was only overflowing when I called a routine to output debugging information.
To further muddy the waters, the device transmits data to a server where everything is written in C#. My work can be frustrating at times. Much less so since we switched development to the PIC32 series (128k ram? Heaven!)
Hear hear. I've read every link I've seen here, but I can't find what was actually tweeted. The specific text that was tweeted is very important and I haven't been able to find it yet. There are a few very narrow areas of unprotected speech: overt threats and intimidation (which isn't really speech, but an underlying behavior). About whom, however, is completely irrelevant. The 14th amendment provides for equal protection of the laws. Calling someone a "public figure" is just a distraction from the fundamental issue.
I think the point of this thing is that it's a major improvement in conversion efficiency over thermocouples. One of the target applications is RTGs on spacecraft. So maybe you can get 3x the electricity out of the same chunk of plutonium. That's a major improvement. However, using it as a replacement for laptop batteries probably isn't going to fly.
Government has been trying to foster the development of PV solar for 40 years. At what point do we decide to cut the cord and turn it loose?
Oh, wrong again. The phrase has already been used and appears to be in the public domain. The correct answer is Trademark, with which you can appropriate anything and sue anyone who tries to put it on a T-Shirt.
That's the one big flaw I find with Netflix (and it particularly affects my parents because they only have 1.5mb DSL). Is it too much to ask that things get cached on a local server during off peak hours? There's enormous amounts of bandwith being not used at 3am. And a 2TB drive is not expensive. Netflix could make a killing and save a fortune by selling a caching server and letting people download their queue during off peak hours. Plus, effectively no service outages. Double win!
No, the bandwidth is fantastic. It's the latency that really sucks.
What Netflix represents, however, is a market efficiency. There are few movies/TV shows that I want to watch more than once. As such, ideally, I want to rent, because it's cheaper and there's really no value in owning a copy for most things, unless the price becomes super cheap. By comparison, I listen to the same 2000 (or thereabout) songs over and over again, and I purchase them. So netflix is efficient. It's cheap, there are no stores to run and no teenage kids costing $10/hour to pay. So it's clearly superior to Blockbuster, but so is RedBox. It also beats RedBox in that I don't have to get off my couch at all. The only thing lacking at this point is new releases. That will change.
In any event, the article isn't asking if this is going to kill DVDs overnight. And it's not saying that the iMac killed the floppy. It's saying that this is the same sort of bold pronouncement that the end of an era is over. Physical media will hand on for a while. It's only recently that I started buying my music digitally, and only then when I could buy it in an unencrypted royalty free format that I could play anywhere. I still use physical DVDs for some purposes: watching movies while travelling, mostly. They won't completely die until I can buy movies in an unencrypted royalty free format that I can copy to a thumb drive and watch anywhere. The end.
I'd bet that a Boston/Foreigner joint version would sell a ton of units. I bought the Smash Hits edition because it had tracks from earlier versions that I hadn't played. But more than that, it had a lot of songs that I wanted to play.
In any event, I've gone as far with that game as I can. Once someone finally succeeds with making a GH like game using a real guitar, that really works as a game, I'll be back on board. Until then, my daughter has recently discovered karaoke, and she's in to metal, so I might get her the microphone for GH and see if she can learn to sing on key. I certainly can't.
I've been using a Syswan Octolinks for years with no problems, because at one point I had 3 connections to manage.
I also have a Barracuda Link Balancer that I'm rather underwhelmed with. The DHCP server on the unit seems to crash every few months, and Barracuda support was no help, so the solution was simply to use something else to provide DHCP services.
Oh, you laugh, but there's actually a lot of old communications equipment out there using 2400 baud modems to communicate. One variant of the product that I make is still using them! On a practical level, it's at least an order of magnitude more reliable than an ethernet product. There's no firewall, the CO is battery backed up, and no configuration other than a phone number. Ethernet, by comparison, goes off line frequently through no fault of the product itself. People change DNS servers and the product doesn't get updated. Likewise for firewalls, routers, etc.
At least the OS is slowly moving in the right direction. Windows 7 makes it fairy painless to turn off autoplay, which I have. Everything is consolidated into a nice littel control panel, and most things prompt by default.
RTFA.
5683, with letter substitutions, spells LOVE.
I'm pleased to see that none of the 4 number codes I use in daily life made the top 10 list. If someone wants to steal my bike, they'll have to work at it a bit longer.
of course, there's the question of why an all-electric car gives a fuck about fuel economy...
The battery economy of an electric car is highly variable depending on driving conditions. From an engineering perspective, there is just no substitue for massive amounts of data from actual field use. Also, hypermilers are OCD douchebags who really like to feel smug about their driving habits.
Hey, when I first started working as a contractor, I cared. I tried to take on extra tasks because my basic position only took me 20 hours a week max. The client didn't care. As long as my one task was being done, that's all they wanted. I was literally told to read slashdot by my immediate supervisor. I was also advised not to draw attention to the fact that I had extra time as it might make me look expendable to the higher ups. I did get invited to the division xmas party, but I was told I had to pay $30 and it would be unpaid time off (since it was during business hours). Something better came along and I wasted no time in getting out of there.
Fate plays exactly like Diablo, only it's PG. It's well made, but due to its nature, ultimately unsatisfying.
If you want co-op play, there's always Neverwinter Nights. Should be suitable for a 10 year old.
It's worth noting that it makes sense to pack this functionality directly into the TV. The TV already has the decoders for a number of digital formats built in, along with the processing power to add things like menus and overlays. Adding an TCP stack to that doesn't require much. And there are no moving parts to wear out (ie., the case against integrating a DVD/BluRay player into the TV). So, it's a natural fit. Plus, NetFlix and most of the other major streaming services are available on the 3 major consoles. The WiFi on my Roku died, but instead of replacing it, I just use the Wii. If I ever update the TV, it will certainly be a model that has streaming built in to it.
The Roku box itself will fade away as its no longer needed, unless it comes up with some interesting new functionality. Something useful would be a household media server, or maybe something that caches the Netflix queue for low-bandwith users that can't stream things at a decent quality. (My parents could use that, DSL at their house maxes out at 1.5M)
Aspergers counts another sufferer. Nominating yourself (or promoting yourself) for an award is extremely tacky. It just is. Jimbo deserves a lot of credit, but surely he can find someone outside the project to pimp it for him.
Taco was going to study grammar, but he had a snow day.
I don't know who's having all these snow days. I live in Minnesota and my kid hasn't had a snow day yet.
Yes, that's the whole point. There needs to be a complete and total paradigm shift in the way software runs. And plug-ins are one of the biggest problems. So you have to restructure things. The plugi-n becomes a child process that can only write to its designated child window, and can only access data that is specifically passed to it. But running a plug-in in the same program space as the parent program must be strictly forbidden. It's going to be inconveniant at first, but it needs to be done.
As for the word processor example, if /etc/hosts and /ect/passwd are OS files, then the OS must provide a specific mechanism for modifying them. Or maybe there shouldn't be a mechanism for modifitying them. The word processor only gets to edit files that exist in user storage space. So if a rogue program does get installed it can trash your data and run wild for a while, but it will still be a trivial matter to remove it from your system.
As it is, tonight I'm going to be fixing computers for two family members who trashed their systems this past week just from visiting websites that served them malicious flash based ads (at least, that's what we suspect the infection vector was).
The problem is that Windows (and MacOS and Linux) is a "Wild West" operating system where anyone with admin access (ie., most home users) can trash the whole operating system. We're going to have to move to a model where the OS provides each application a sandbox, and nothing can modify the operating system, and no application can directly modify any other application. The band-aid security that's out there will never be adequate.
I'm not traveling 20 light years to eat instant oatmeal when I've got a Jamba Juice up the road next door to Starbucks, so I can get my coffee and some good oats in one easy trip.
When I interview new hires, I'm typically looking at people fresh out of school (or not even graduated) because they're cheap. But they still need to be experianced. Like the article says, you should have a side project. You should have something that you work on in your spare time. You should be the sort of person who is driven to write code.
On the weekends I've got my own little side projects. I've written my own mail server (though at this exact moment, I'm running Exchange) and a spam filter that has an Outlook plugin for submitting ham/spam from the end user desktop. I'm helping my kid write her first game. And I work on these things, not because I have to, but because I can. And that's what I look for in people I hire.
The problem with hiring people like this is that they move on in a couple of years (or less) because I can't afford to pay them what they're worth.