Until we find far greater stores of cheap clean energy and raw materials, consumption will always yield pollution and environmental damage. We must reduce consumption to reduce global warming. This is the expensive and unfortunate consequence of tackling global warming... the lifestyle that we covet must change. Once/if we move down that path, it will be economically painful in the short-term, but at some point we just won't have any other choices and we'll end up with a radically different society/world (which I am optimistic will be for the better).
Where I live, I buy green (primarily wind) electricity directly from the grid. It only costs me a few dollars extra a month. (It's how I donate to charity.) With green electricity being priced close to normal electricity, it's only a matter of old-fashioned engineering to bring the price down to levels where it ends up being the cheapest electricity available.
Another thing worth considering: When the car was invented, it was partially to solve an environmental problem! Roads were littered with horse shit and horse carcasses. If you think global warming is bad, just picture what it would be like to have to wade through horse shit in order to cross the street.
It's really not our lifestyle that has to change; it's our attitude that has to change.
Consider just starting her out with email and a web-based version of a newspaper or magazine that she's into. This will allow her to learn how to use the computer, and will allow you to gauge her vulnerabilities before she puts her money on the internet.
Another strategy is simple risk management. Assuming your grandmother has life savings that she doesn't touch often, keep that money off of the internet. You could start her off by only setting up a bank account that her weekly/monthly check goes into. This will allow her to pay bills electronically, but protect her nest-egg.
While I love this idea, I think it's some wishful thinking. With ~80% of the US being Christian, I think a significant percentage of them will refuse to vote for any candidate that isn't openly Christian.
ClickOnce is an immature technology from Microsoft that sandboxes a.Net application that's stored in a web server. If the.Net WinForms API, (or another cross-platform GUI API) is generally accepted on the Mac and Linux, ClickOnce will provide what you describe.
Basically, what happens with ClickOnce is that you compile a standard.Net application using a few extra switches, and drop it on a web server. When the user clicks on a link. the newest DLLs are automagically downloaded, and the application runs. If the application needs to do anything risky, (like access files, open sockets, ect,) the user must install a security certificate. (For enterprise-level applications, the company can use a standard security certificate that's part of their standard build.)
The reason why I say the technology is immature is that when I last played with it, ClickOnce only allowed me to call web services on the server that my application was hosted on, unless the user installed a security certificate. ClickOnce didn't allow me to open a socket or use any other remoting protocol to talk to the server that my application was hosted on, unless I required the user to install a security certificate. I didn't like this limitation, as web services are much more complex then writing my own simple server.
Yahoo is no different then the old multi-line monolithic BBSs that did everything for everybody. Look where those ended up...
I recently logged into Yahoo for the first time in years. All I wanted to do was get added to an email list! Instead of being able to submit my email address and walk away, I had to jump through hoops to figure out my old yahoo ID and password. What a pain in the ass!
Yeah, but once you eat the apple there's no going back!
If you ever get the oppertunity, take a look at La Vallee. It's a movie about a group of hippies trying to return to Africa to do exactly what you describe.
XML is a nescessary evil. Even though it's slow and inefficent, it's a good system for quickly developing a parser for varied file types without having to design an editor.
Acedemicly-pure XML is just needless overkill, IMO.
I typically don't keep a hard drive running longer then 4 years. (After suffering a HD crash months after I rebuilt a laptop, I don't plan on keeping a laptop drive running longer then 2 years.) After 4 years or so, usually a $100-$150 drive is so much bigger that it's stupid NOT to upgrade. Don't put the old drive on the shelf and rely on it as a backup; in my experience they don't work when you plug them in a few months later.
For my important data, I keep it in Perforce (a source code control program) using an old 400mhz machine as my server. It has an automated XCOPY of the repository on a nightly basis to a second hard drive. This made recovery of my important data very quick when my laptop's hard drive died.
Shared-responsibility code works well. This is where one coder develops a function/class/module, but another developer debugs/enhaces it. It creates a consistant style, because everyone is working with everyone's code.
Allow a little bit of artistic freedom... If you're that uptight about code, have a pretty-printer run at checkin.
Avoid inventing a style guide when there are plenty already in use. For example, when I develop in C# with Visual Studio, I follow Microsoft's style guide and encourage everyone else to. That being stated, sometimes you need a style guide for egotistical morons who refuse to follow establsihed conventions in preexisting code.
It's easy to overdo unit tests an automated builds; ultimatly you need a developer who takes responsibility for the unit tests and build environment. I've been in such a situation before, and I had to occasionally crack a few kneecaps.
Fire developers who throw temper-tantrums when they refuse to follow the sytles and conventions of an existing project. Seriously, someone who can't adapt to different programming techniques is useless as a software engineer or a rank & file coder. (I had to put up with an asshat who refused to use GUIDs in a Microsoft database. His arguing put us behind schedule.)
Ultimatly, you need to trust your developers. Some things are worth getting uptight about, like consistant data access and indexing schemes, and others aren't, like tabbing.
It's very easy to accidentally watch offensive content, especially if you're someone like me who 1: doesn't pay attention to ratings, and 2: usually watches movies that I haven't seen before. I've done the, "hey that's a nice set of boo... oh shit!" At least with a laptop, it's easier to quickly put a hand over nudity, but with screens in the backs of seats, it takes a few seconds.
Actually, there are several approaches to make a serial application multi-core aware. The approach that my current project takes is to just run lots of jobs in parallel. Another approach, which could work for JIT environments like Java and.Net, is to make the JIT compiler do something similar to out-of-order execution.
For me, on the other hand, I use an uber-cheap phone from T-Mobile. There's no way I'm going to watch a commercial every time I make a call when it's so damn cheap to own my phone outright. (Granted, I'd use a free phone if the WALLPAPER were an advertisement...)
From my experience: In the spring of 2001 I had the misfortune of taking software engineering from a professor who claimed that "SCHEME is the perfect language for teaching software engineering." While we did try to emulate "real" programming by meeting with "customers" and designing interfaces; most of the lessons were degraded because she was too busy promoting her husband's SCHEME development environment to us.
Thus, from what I can remember during my undergrad CS degree, this is what helped me learn real-world programming:
Every summer I had an internship developing real software. I also did a 7-month co-op with a major tech company.
A good mix of solo projects, projects with partners, and projects with groups. Most of my group and partner projects were in the advanced classes.
GUI programming in an OO language is a good introduction to "real" OO programming.
When trying to teach "real" software engineering, avoid requiring an obscure language. It's difficult to teach important theoretical concepts when students are too busy figuring out your hairbrained language of choice. (SCHEME fans: this means you!) For example, when I took AI, I had the option of using LISP, Java, or C.
I had professors with industry experience teach some Freshmen-level courses. Their old war-stories go a long way in the classroom.
My professors realize that the academic environment can't truly emulate a corporate environment.
I got very angry at my school because I was forced into too many poorly-though-out experimental curriculums; I didn't like paying > $30k just to be someone's lab rat.
However, charging high prices is not a form of unfair competition. As you point out, it is good for the alternative vendors, just bad for consumers.
This is just speculation, but there's no garuntee that MS will keep the price of Vista high indefinatly. There are other reasons for keeping high prices; for example, they might want to minimize support issues from customer upgrades.
Linux, and its ally BSD, won the Unix war. SCO Unix was a big loser.
As far as on the desktop, I don't think we'll ever see a "Linux" win. Instead, we might see a distro become popular, but the average person won't use the term "Linux". For example, someone will say, "I run Red Hat", not "I run Linux".
.Net 3.0 adds LINQ, which is a very powerful feature. One of my favorite variants is DLINQ, which allows you to write a database query in syntax that is native to C# and VB; AND, it will automatically populate your objects!
As a professionall C#/SQL developer, this feature is a godsend!
Why? If you have an HTPC, you can just download your content. Optical media is so five years ago.
Do you want to download a 30-gig movie over today's broadband? I'd much rather go to an all-download system, but I really don't see that becoming a reality for 4-7 years. (Besides, on a large screen, bitrate really does matter!)
Playback is going to be windows vista 64bit only, you can go screw yourself if you use anything else.
I plan on using 64-bit Vista, at least until HD-DVD, BluRay, and CableCard are cracked. If Myth has a better UI, then I might be tempted to try it out.
Some spammer is using an email address of mine to send spam from. So I get the people writing back, asking why I am sending them spam. And another of my domains is obviously listed somewhere as a domain where guessing user accounts might be a good idea. So I get cqoiecn@mydomain.com, zqopqwn@mydomain.com, etc. It all just sucks. I'm currently getting about 10 spams per minute.
Use SPF. (Sender Policy Framework.) I set it up last week and the amount of bounces that I get from spammers spoofing my domain dropped about 80-90%. I'd also consider switching to a service provider that implements some kind of a brute-force attack filter; my catch-all, hosted by Lunarpages, doesn't get "10 spams per minute".
Yeah, whatever. Setting up SPF might (or might not) be helpful for something, but it won't do a thing to decrease the volume of spam being sent.
When SPF is used it prevents spoofed mail from reaching receipients' inboxes. It significantly reduces the amount of bounces that a mail server sends when a spammer tries to send spam to non-existant email addresses. It also means that spammers have less domains that they can spoof, which does make their job harder.
I know this is wishful thinking, but if all domains published SPF and all email servers enforced SPF, the spammers would have to start buying lots of domains.
I guess I'll just wait until I can get a player that will play them both."
I'm just going to build a HTPC with both a BluRay and HD-DVD drive... (Granted, you can't buy HD-DVD drives and I can't find a fanless graphics card with the MPAA's blessing, HDCP.)
It seems like you'd enjoy the Perl job. Tell them about your other offer and see what they come back with. They might not be able to match it, but if they are able to get to say, 140% of your current salary, it might be enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I live, I buy green (primarily wind) electricity directly from the grid. It only costs me a few dollars extra a month. (It's how I donate to charity.) With green electricity being priced close to normal electricity, it's only a matter of old-fashioned engineering to bring the price down to levels where it ends up being the cheapest electricity available.
Another thing worth considering: When the car was invented, it was partially to solve an environmental problem! Roads were littered with horse shit and horse carcasses. If you think global warming is bad, just picture what it would be like to have to wade through horse shit in order to cross the street.
It's really not our lifestyle that has to change; it's our attitude that has to change.
Consider just starting her out with email and a web-based version of a newspaper or magazine that she's into. This will allow her to learn how to use the computer, and will allow you to gauge her vulnerabilities before she puts her money on the internet.
Another strategy is simple risk management. Assuming your grandmother has life savings that she doesn't touch often, keep that money off of the internet. You could start her off by only setting up a bank account that her weekly/monthly check goes into. This will allow her to pay bills electronically, but protect her nest-egg.
While I love this idea, I think it's some wishful thinking. With ~80% of the US being Christian, I think a significant percentage of them will refuse to vote for any candidate that isn't openly Christian.
You're describing ClickOnce
ClickOnce is an immature technology from Microsoft that sandboxes a .Net application that's stored in a web server. If the .Net WinForms API, (or another cross-platform GUI API) is generally accepted on the Mac and Linux, ClickOnce will provide what you describe.
Basically, what happens with ClickOnce is that you compile a standard .Net application using a few extra switches, and drop it on a web server. When the user clicks on a link. the newest DLLs are automagically downloaded, and the application runs. If the application needs to do anything risky, (like access files, open sockets, ect,) the user must install a security certificate. (For enterprise-level applications, the company can use a standard security certificate that's part of their standard build.)
The reason why I say the technology is immature is that when I last played with it, ClickOnce only allowed me to call web services on the server that my application was hosted on, unless the user installed a security certificate. ClickOnce didn't allow me to open a socket or use any other remoting protocol to talk to the server that my application was hosted on, unless I required the user to install a security certificate. I didn't like this limitation, as web services are much more complex then writing my own simple server.
Yahoo is no different then the old multi-line monolithic BBSs that did everything for everybody. Look where those ended up...
I recently logged into Yahoo for the first time in years. All I wanted to do was get added to an email list! Instead of being able to submit my email address and walk away, I had to jump through hoops to figure out my old yahoo ID and password. What a pain in the ass!
Yeah, but once you eat the apple there's no going back!
If you ever get the oppertunity, take a look at La Vallee. It's a movie about a group of hippies trying to return to Africa to do exactly what you describe.
XML is a nescessary evil. Even though it's slow and inefficent, it's a good system for quickly developing a parser for varied file types without having to design an editor.
Acedemicly-pure XML is just needless overkill, IMO.
Batteries LOOSE about 10% of their power. Except for their size / weight, they're once of the most efficient energy storage mediums.
I typically don't keep a hard drive running longer then 4 years. (After suffering a HD crash months after I rebuilt a laptop, I don't plan on keeping a laptop drive running longer then 2 years.) After 4 years or so, usually a $100-$150 drive is so much bigger that it's stupid NOT to upgrade. Don't put the old drive on the shelf and rely on it as a backup; in my experience they don't work when you plug them in a few months later.
For my important data, I keep it in Perforce (a source code control program) using an old 400mhz machine as my server. It has an automated XCOPY of the repository on a nightly basis to a second hard drive. This made recovery of my important data very quick when my laptop's hard drive died.
I did similar things in college with Perl. (shudders*) The programs were OS-neutral; I think I developed mine in Windows under Cygwin.
*Yes, I know Slashdot is written in Perl.
In my experience...
Shared-responsibility code works well. This is where one coder develops a function/class/module, but another developer debugs/enhaces it. It creates a consistant style, because everyone is working with everyone's code.
Allow a little bit of artistic freedom... If you're that uptight about code, have a pretty-printer run at checkin.
Avoid inventing a style guide when there are plenty already in use. For example, when I develop in C# with Visual Studio, I follow Microsoft's style guide and encourage everyone else to. That being stated, sometimes you need a style guide for egotistical morons who refuse to follow establsihed conventions in preexisting code.
It's easy to overdo unit tests an automated builds; ultimatly you need a developer who takes responsibility for the unit tests and build environment. I've been in such a situation before, and I had to occasionally crack a few kneecaps.
Fire developers who throw temper-tantrums when they refuse to follow the sytles and conventions of an existing project. Seriously, someone who can't adapt to different programming techniques is useless as a software engineer or a rank & file coder. (I had to put up with an asshat who refused to use GUIDs in a Microsoft database. His arguing put us behind schedule.)
Ultimatly, you need to trust your developers. Some things are worth getting uptight about, like consistant data access and indexing schemes, and others aren't, like tabbing.
It's very easy to accidentally watch offensive content, especially if you're someone like me who 1: doesn't pay attention to ratings, and 2: usually watches movies that I haven't seen before. I've done the, "hey that's a nice set of boo... oh shit!" At least with a laptop, it's easier to quickly put a hand over nudity, but with screens in the backs of seats, it takes a few seconds.
Actually, there are several approaches to make a serial application multi-core aware. The approach that my current project takes is to just run lots of jobs in parallel. Another approach, which could work for JIT environments like Java and .Net, is to make the JIT compiler do something similar to out-of-order execution.
Maybe this would work in a developing nation?
For me, on the other hand, I use an uber-cheap phone from T-Mobile. There's no way I'm going to watch a commercial every time I make a call when it's so damn cheap to own my phone outright. (Granted, I'd use a free phone if the WALLPAPER were an advertisement...)
From my experience: In the spring of 2001 I had the misfortune of taking software engineering from a professor who claimed that "SCHEME is the perfect language for teaching software engineering." While we did try to emulate "real" programming by meeting with "customers" and designing interfaces; most of the lessons were degraded because she was too busy promoting her husband's SCHEME development environment to us.
Thus, from what I can remember during my undergrad CS degree, this is what helped me learn real-world programming:
This is just speculation, but there's no garuntee that MS will keep the price of Vista high indefinatly. There are other reasons for keeping high prices; for example, they might want to minimize support issues from customer upgrades.
Linux, and its ally BSD, won the Unix war. SCO Unix was a big loser.
As far as on the desktop, I don't think we'll ever see a "Linux" win. Instead, we might see a distro become popular, but the average person won't use the term "Linux". For example, someone will say, "I run Red Hat", not "I run Linux".
.Net 3.0 adds LINQ, which is a very powerful feature. One of my favorite variants is DLINQ, which allows you to write a database query in syntax that is native to C# and VB; AND, it will automatically populate your objects!
As a professionall C#/SQL developer, this feature is a godsend!
Do you want to download a 30-gig movie over today's broadband? I'd much rather go to an all-download system, but I really don't see that becoming a reality for 4-7 years. (Besides, on a large screen, bitrate really does matter!)
I plan on using 64-bit Vista, at least until HD-DVD, BluRay, and CableCard are cracked. If Myth has a better UI, then I might be tempted to try it out.
Use SPF. (Sender Policy Framework.) I set it up last week and the amount of bounces that I get from spammers spoofing my domain dropped about 80-90%. I'd also consider switching to a service provider that implements some kind of a brute-force attack filter; my catch-all, hosted by Lunarpages, doesn't get "10 spams per minute".
When SPF is used it prevents spoofed mail from reaching receipients' inboxes. It significantly reduces the amount of bounces that a mail server sends when a spammer tries to send spam to non-existant email addresses. It also means that spammers have less domains that they can spoof, which does make their job harder.
I know this is wishful thinking, but if all domains published SPF and all email servers enforced SPF, the spammers would have to start buying lots of domains.
I'm just going to build a HTPC with both a BluRay and HD-DVD drive... (Granted, you can't buy HD-DVD drives and I can't find a fanless graphics card with the MPAA's blessing, HDCP.)
It seems like you'd enjoy the Perl job. Tell them about your other offer and see what they come back with. They might not be able to match it, but if they are able to get to say, 140% of your current salary, it might be enough.
Domain owners: Set up SPF NOW!!!
I set up SPF on my domains and the number of bounces from spoofed SPAM dropped dramatically.
Do not wait any longer, do your duty to the internet community: Set up SPF NOW!!!