Good idea. I've got a whole house sound system that's not really being utilized. Right now, I just plug in my cell phone and use that as a music server. Thanks.
I got a Raspberry Pi for xmas. There was a point in my life where this would have been the coolest thing ever, but right now, I'm kind of wondering what to do with it. This is further complicated by the fact that the only HDMI display in the house is the living room TV.
About the only thing I've come up with is maybe putting XBMC on it so I can stream videos off my home server. However, that would require running some network cables to the TV first. Is there a decent WiFi adapter for this thing?
It's been my experiance that good programmers always have a project in the works. It's almost a disease. I can't go 2 weeks without writing something. So if you've gone 6 years without writing anything, I've got to wonder if it's really your thing.
That said, the next question is where to start. Pick something with high demand where it's relatively easy to get your foot in the door. The biggest problem you'll encounter is that everyone wants 5 years of experiance. If you can work programming into your current job, great. That's how I switch from systems administration to programming. I'd recommend learning C# and MVC. The tools are excellent and there's huge demand for it right now. The HTML and Javascript side of it will translate over to anything else you want to do.
The important thing to note is that they're approaching "middle class" status. Generally, as income rises, so does pollution, but only to a certain level. Eventually, the middle class can afford things like catylitic converters for their cars and better enginges and pollution starts to decline. California, for example, has twice as many cars as they did 30 years ago, but better air quality thanks to better emissions control on new vehicles.
Don't be retarded. New bulbs were coming with or without government. All regulation did was take away the bulbs I prefer before an adequate substitute was available and affordable. Except I went out and bought a four year stockpile of my preferred bulbs so I'm fine. I tried CFLs. They suck. They're slow to reach full brightness and they don't last any longer (in most cases, they die much faster than incandescants). I like LEDs, but they're expensive and they don't adapt very well to traditional bulb formats. And this new format doesn't actually exist yet. When it shows up at the hardware store, I'll check it out. And if I like it, I'll buy it. Free markets at work.
Unfortunately, too many CCs are teaching the wrong programs. At least as far as programming is concerned. All of them offer associates degrees in game programming. News flash: major game studios don't hire guys with 2 year CC degrees. On the other hand, what I really need and want to hire are programmers with 2 years of training on the Microsoft stack (C#, ASP.NET, MVC, SQL Server) to work on line of business apps. Can't find 'em.
He did do something wrong here. Whatever his intentions, he was poking around AT&T's web server in a way he knew he shouldn't have been. Just because AT&T was wrong doesn't make him right. As an analogy, I often leave my car unlocked. If you take it, you're still a car thief, even if I should have taken better care of my car. In any event, you don't have to harvest 114k emails to demonstrate a problem.1 or 2 is adequate proof that there's a problem.
The IP isn't the issue, it's the domain name. I use a hosts file to do my ad blocking (works great). If the domain name for the ads and the content is the same, you're out of luck, but nothing is ever 100% effective anyway.
The real problem is that all we're doing now is getting into an arms race. Without ads, we've got to pay for content. Alternatively, ads will go back to being embedded in websites instead of comming from an outside source. In which case, we'll see more latency in loading web pages.
I don't object to ads. I object to ads that take over my screen and attempt to infect my computer with malware. Quite simply, the ad netowrks can not be trusted right now. Honestly, I don't see that changing anytime in the forseeable future. This is why we can't have nice things.
District level judges should be apolitical. However, appellete judges are inherently political, despite what they may like to pretend. They need a philosophy on the limits of government and areas that aren't explicitly spelled out in law. It would be impossible to spell out the rights of people. It's why the 9th amendment to the Constitution exists - a reminder that the Bill of Rights is incomplete.
But even at the trial level, Judges have a lot of discretion on sentencing. Some might be very harsh in sentencing drug cases, others could be very leniant. Although, for the most part, it doesn't matter because when I voted this morning, all the judges were running unopposed. The only contested seats were on the state supreme court, where I was able to research the candidates.
It's not so much the set of designs as it is having the manufacturing facilities to make and assemble all the small parts. That, and having an adequate foundry for the steel fabrication. And all the hydraulic hoses.
It's a cute project, but they've got the emphasis on all the wrong things.
Those are trade organizations, not unions. Related, but different. They tend to work on political issues, particularly raising the barriers to entry, which also translates to higher wages for existing members. Developers could probably benefit from a good trade organization, but history shows they tend towards occupational licensing, which would be bad. Especially for me as I never finished college.
That's the main reason developers don't need a union. Unions are for supporting interchangeable employees. Devlopers have very specific skill sets. Generally speaking, most high end professions don't have unions: doctors, lawyers, engineers.
You might be able to unionize at a particluarly large shop (Google, Microsoft, etc.), but most of them are already paying top dollar for top talent. No, about the only place I could see unionizing happen is at some place like Zynga.
The most likely solution to my mind would be a soybean geneticly spliced to hell and back to drip with oil. Only it would probably be developed by Monsanto and all the Greens would try and get it banned. But I don't think you're going to get a viable fuel crop without some serious GMO work.
Ok, so my list of phones to not buy currently stands at (these have all done me or someone I know wrong):
Apple Nokia Motorolla Samsung HTC Blackberry LG
Um, is there anything left?
In any event, I'm actually looking at a Win8 phone for my next phone. My last 2 Android phones have been full of buggy crap that wasn't maintained by the handset maker. I only use 6 things with my phone: voice, sms, email, browser, maps, and music. Any phone will do that now. What I hear about the Windows phones is that they're not big on the apps, they're not sexy, but they work. That's what I want. I'm not an Apple person and BlackBerry has no future, so Win8 phone it is.
When I took typing in 1992, it was still 80% girls and the curriculum was based around writing business letters. Typing was taught by the business ed department and was still done on typewriters. The following year, they switched to computers. Sadly, that was also when the lab of Apple ][e computers was replaced with x86 PCs. For writing class papers, we had a computer lab of dumb terminals that worked poorly and had a really awful UI.
By 1993, I had my own 486 at home along with Microsoft Professional BASIC, MASM, and Quick C. My high school had one programming class - Pascal, which I took for the easy A. Prior to that, I'd already had classes on BASIC at the local community college.
The start menu is still there. You just don't see the icon in the task bar. All the functionality of it is still there. The first level is for commonly used programs. It's a nice clean layout that's easy to customize. From there, you can call up the 'All Programs' section. That's not organized quite so well, but it works.
There's no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 8, but unlike Vista, there's no reason to actively avoid it.
Ha, I'd love to see your mathematical proof for the 100 million lines of code in Windows 8. That type of programming worked for NASA because the systems and the programs were sufficiently concise.
In any event, I've been using the latest preview of Windows 8 for about a month now, and generally it's fantastic. Now that I've gotten used to the corners, I like the new start menu. All the start menu functionality is still there, it just looks different. The tiles are nice and easy to layout. Switching between Metro apps and Desktop apps is awkward and that's the biggest failing. On the other hand, my kid loves Metro. It intrinsicly makes sense to her and she just uses it. The big difference between her and I is that I use a lot of things that are not conducive to the Metro "chrome-less" look (ie., Visual Studio). So there's some awkwardness to the UI, particularly for power users, but this is not the tired dog that Vista was. Windows 8 is going to be a hit with casual users and everyone else will get used to it quickly enough.
Except that the modem light thing was successfully recreated in the lab (so long as the TX and RX LEDs were driven by the raw signals). So that's at least possible. As far as I know, the lights on the cable modem are driven by the CPU and not the raw signal, so that wouldn't work.
Some of us have a skill set that's all Microsoft. My kid and I downloaded XNA and hacked out a rudimentary 2D game and a map editor in a couple of hours. I suspect I would spend at least as much time downloading SDL and getting it to work with Visual Studio. Run anywhere approaches usually mean a lot of work getting things to run correctly on the target platform. No thanks.
It's also a return deterrant. Once you've shredded the package, you're much less likely to try and return it if you don't like it. Still, you could solve that by using a tear away strip. The packaging is irrepairably damaged, but the product is then easy to get out.
Another key advantage is that it's very effective at protecting goods in shipping. It makes a very good shock absorber and it's very hard to damage the product inside. Unless you work in manufacturing or product development, you probably don't realize how much damage and vibration boxes suffer in the back of a truck.
99% of my customers run Windows and MS Office. That's the standard business environment. By sticking with it, I have fewer problems exchanging documents with my customers. That's a business expense that has to be accounted for. If your staff or customers can't open a spreadsheet, they're wasting their time and they drag IT into it, wasting more resources, and on top of that, you have angry, frustrated customers.
Personally, I like Outlook as a mail client. However, Exchange is awful to deal with. It's just not geared towards the smaller business. I would definately recommend either outsourcing the mail server or using something less complex. What you ultimately use will probably be dictated by what type of phones your employees carry.
The problem is that most consumers don't have a proper Windows install disc. Microsoft long ago quit mandating that manufactures include a generic Windows disc in their packaging. Some manufacturers let you do a plain reinstall as part of the recovery process, some reload all the crapware. So for them to get a clean Windows install, either they have to pay someone (such as the Microsoft Store) or bother a friend/acquaintance such as you or me to do it for them. Frankly, I'm tired of doing that. Usually, I just tell people to run "msconfig.exe" and uncheck everything under the startup tab. Hell, I do that at the office just due to the crap that we load on to PCs that thinks it needs to autostart.
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Thanks. I haven't had a computer running Linux in about 10 years. Lots of good helpful responses here.
Good idea. I've got a whole house sound system that's not really being utilized. Right now, I just plug in my cell phone and use that as a music server. Thanks.
I got a Raspberry Pi for xmas. There was a point in my life where this would have been the coolest thing ever, but right now, I'm kind of wondering what to do with it. This is further complicated by the fact that the only HDMI display in the house is the living room TV.
About the only thing I've come up with is maybe putting XBMC on it so I can stream videos off my home server. However, that would require running some network cables to the TV first. Is there a decent WiFi adapter for this thing?
It's been my experiance that good programmers always have a project in the works. It's almost a disease. I can't go 2 weeks without writing something. So if you've gone 6 years without writing anything, I've got to wonder if it's really your thing.
That said, the next question is where to start. Pick something with high demand where it's relatively easy to get your foot in the door. The biggest problem you'll encounter is that everyone wants 5 years of experiance. If you can work programming into your current job, great. That's how I switch from systems administration to programming. I'd recommend learning C# and MVC. The tools are excellent and there's huge demand for it right now. The HTML and Javascript side of it will translate over to anything else you want to do.
The important thing to note is that they're approaching "middle class" status. Generally, as income rises, so does pollution, but only to a certain level. Eventually, the middle class can afford things like catylitic converters for their cars and better enginges and pollution starts to decline. California, for example, has twice as many cars as they did 30 years ago, but better air quality thanks to better emissions control on new vehicles.
They said that it's a strategic decision. No one said it was a good strategy.
Don't be retarded. New bulbs were coming with or without government. All regulation did was take away the bulbs I prefer before an adequate substitute was available and affordable. Except I went out and bought a four year stockpile of my preferred bulbs so I'm fine. I tried CFLs. They suck. They're slow to reach full brightness and they don't last any longer (in most cases, they die much faster than incandescants). I like LEDs, but they're expensive and they don't adapt very well to traditional bulb formats. And this new format doesn't actually exist yet. When it shows up at the hardware store, I'll check it out. And if I like it, I'll buy it. Free markets at work.
Unfortunately, too many CCs are teaching the wrong programs. At least as far as programming is concerned. All of them offer associates degrees in game programming. News flash: major game studios don't hire guys with 2 year CC degrees. On the other hand, what I really need and want to hire are programmers with 2 years of training on the Microsoft stack (C#, ASP.NET, MVC, SQL Server) to work on line of business apps. Can't find 'em.
He did do something wrong here. Whatever his intentions, he was poking around AT&T's web server in a way he knew he shouldn't have been. Just because AT&T was wrong doesn't make him right. As an analogy, I often leave my car unlocked. If you take it, you're still a car thief, even if I should have taken better care of my car. In any event, you don't have to harvest 114k emails to demonstrate a problem.1 or 2 is adequate proof that there's a problem.
The IP isn't the issue, it's the domain name. I use a hosts file to do my ad blocking (works great). If the domain name for the ads and the content is the same, you're out of luck, but nothing is ever 100% effective anyway.
The real problem is that all we're doing now is getting into an arms race. Without ads, we've got to pay for content. Alternatively, ads will go back to being embedded in websites instead of comming from an outside source. In which case, we'll see more latency in loading web pages.
I don't object to ads. I object to ads that take over my screen and attempt to infect my computer with malware. Quite simply, the ad netowrks can not be trusted right now. Honestly, I don't see that changing anytime in the forseeable future. This is why we can't have nice things.
District level judges should be apolitical. However, appellete judges are inherently political, despite what they may like to pretend. They need a philosophy on the limits of government and areas that aren't explicitly spelled out in law. It would be impossible to spell out the rights of people. It's why the 9th amendment to the Constitution exists - a reminder that the Bill of Rights is incomplete.
But even at the trial level, Judges have a lot of discretion on sentencing. Some might be very harsh in sentencing drug cases, others could be very leniant. Although, for the most part, it doesn't matter because when I voted this morning, all the judges were running unopposed. The only contested seats were on the state supreme court, where I was able to research the candidates.
It's not so much the set of designs as it is having the manufacturing facilities to make and assemble all the small parts. That, and having an adequate foundry for the steel fabrication. And all the hydraulic hoses.
It's a cute project, but they've got the emphasis on all the wrong things.
Those are trade organizations, not unions. Related, but different. They tend to work on political issues, particularly raising the barriers to entry, which also translates to higher wages for existing members. Developers could probably benefit from a good trade organization, but history shows they tend towards occupational licensing, which would be bad. Especially for me as I never finished college.
That's the main reason developers don't need a union. Unions are for supporting interchangeable employees. Devlopers have very specific skill sets. Generally speaking, most high end professions don't have unions: doctors, lawyers, engineers.
You might be able to unionize at a particluarly large shop (Google, Microsoft, etc.), but most of them are already paying top dollar for top talent. No, about the only place I could see unionizing happen is at some place like Zynga.
The most likely solution to my mind would be a soybean geneticly spliced to hell and back to drip with oil. Only it would probably be developed by Monsanto and all the Greens would try and get it banned. But I don't think you're going to get a viable fuel crop without some serious GMO work.
Ok, so my list of phones to not buy currently stands at (these have all done me or someone I know wrong):
Apple
Nokia
Motorolla
Samsung
HTC
Blackberry
LG
Um, is there anything left?
In any event, I'm actually looking at a Win8 phone for my next phone. My last 2 Android phones have been full of buggy crap that wasn't maintained by the handset maker. I only use 6 things with my phone: voice, sms, email, browser, maps, and music. Any phone will do that now. What I hear about the Windows phones is that they're not big on the apps, they're not sexy, but they work. That's what I want. I'm not an Apple person and BlackBerry has no future, so Win8 phone it is.
When I took typing in 1992, it was still 80% girls and the curriculum was based around writing business letters. Typing was taught by the business ed department and was still done on typewriters. The following year, they switched to computers. Sadly, that was also when the lab of Apple ][e computers was replaced with x86 PCs. For writing class papers, we had a computer lab of dumb terminals that worked poorly and had a really awful UI.
By 1993, I had my own 486 at home along with Microsoft Professional BASIC, MASM, and Quick C. My high school had one programming class - Pascal, which I took for the easy A. Prior to that, I'd already had classes on BASIC at the local community college.
The start menu is still there. You just don't see the icon in the task bar. All the functionality of it is still there. The first level is for commonly used programs. It's a nice clean layout that's easy to customize. From there, you can call up the 'All Programs' section. That's not organized quite so well, but it works.
There's no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 8, but unlike Vista, there's no reason to actively avoid it.
Ha, I'd love to see your mathematical proof for the 100 million lines of code in Windows 8. That type of programming worked for NASA because the systems and the programs were sufficiently concise.
In any event, I've been using the latest preview of Windows 8 for about a month now, and generally it's fantastic. Now that I've gotten used to the corners, I like the new start menu. All the start menu functionality is still there, it just looks different. The tiles are nice and easy to layout. Switching between Metro apps and Desktop apps is awkward and that's the biggest failing. On the other hand, my kid loves Metro. It intrinsicly makes sense to her and she just uses it. The big difference between her and I is that I use a lot of things that are not conducive to the Metro "chrome-less" look (ie., Visual Studio). So there's some awkwardness to the UI, particularly for power users, but this is not the tired dog that Vista was. Windows 8 is going to be a hit with casual users and everyone else will get used to it quickly enough.
Careful there cowboy. Sloppy syntax can send you into an infinite loop.
Except that the modem light thing was successfully recreated in the lab (so long as the TX and RX LEDs were driven by the raw signals). So that's at least possible. As far as I know, the lights on the cable modem are driven by the CPU and not the raw signal, so that wouldn't work.
Some of us have a skill set that's all Microsoft. My kid and I downloaded XNA and hacked out a rudimentary 2D game and a map editor in a couple of hours. I suspect I would spend at least as much time downloading SDL and getting it to work with Visual Studio. Run anywhere approaches usually mean a lot of work getting things to run correctly on the target platform. No thanks.
It's also a return deterrant. Once you've shredded the package, you're much less likely to try and return it if you don't like it. Still, you could solve that by using a tear away strip. The packaging is irrepairably damaged, but the product is then easy to get out.
Another key advantage is that it's very effective at protecting goods in shipping. It makes a very good shock absorber and it's very hard to damage the product inside. Unless you work in manufacturing or product development, you probably don't realize how much damage and vibration boxes suffer in the back of a truck.
Professionalism.
99% of my customers run Windows and MS Office. That's the standard business environment. By sticking with it, I have fewer problems exchanging documents with my customers. That's a business expense that has to be accounted for. If your staff or customers can't open a spreadsheet, they're wasting their time and they drag IT into it, wasting more resources, and on top of that, you have angry, frustrated customers.
Personally, I like Outlook as a mail client. However, Exchange is awful to deal with. It's just not geared towards the smaller business. I would definately recommend either outsourcing the mail server or using something less complex. What you ultimately use will probably be dictated by what type of phones your employees carry.
The problem is that most consumers don't have a proper Windows install disc. Microsoft long ago quit mandating that manufactures include a generic Windows disc in their packaging. Some manufacturers let you do a plain reinstall as part of the recovery process, some reload all the crapware. So for them to get a clean Windows install, either they have to pay someone (such as the Microsoft Store) or bother a friend/acquaintance such as you or me to do it for them. Frankly, I'm tired of doing that. Usually, I just tell people to run "msconfig.exe" and uncheck everything under the startup tab. Hell, I do that at the office just due to the crap that we load on to PCs that thinks it needs to autostart.