Who would have though that a cooperative community of storefronts selling lego bricks and sets would be a thing - but that site is huge... I went looking for light gray parts in the USA, and I got 10 pages worth...
I have a friend who finds old lego sets, builds them and hocks them on eBay, he says he actually makeds some money doing it.
This siet is as bad as the guy who writes C code to generate the 1x1x1 lego brick designs for mathematical curves...
How do you pronounce lego anyway? I'm not a smart enough dork to know...
While this has not happenned to me since this current layoff - one month ago, I'd entertain the opportunity.
I helped my last company for several weeks during transition into a new job about 3 years ago. It paid off for me, because now when I go looking ofr recommendations, its easy to get them from the past employer.
That said, you need to get paid some kind of money...
I usually decide on some fixed hourly rate, and leave it at that. The other thing for me is that there is a com[promise between getting paid, and being responsible. A friend of mine poiinted this out: the more you charge the greater the percecption that you have something tied to the outcome of the work.
So, I tend not to charge large hourly rates especially, if I'm sick of the old employer. I dont want them to feel like they can just call me any time. it needs to cost them enough, but not so much that they think they can just have me any time.
I recently had to go laptop shopping. I needed a better day-to-day computing tool.
I looked at everything. Originally my bias was towards the PC, because it has so much penetration, and because of Microsoft Office. I have not yet found a better tool than that.
I agree with this post, we all use Windows, Bill has got the lock on the desktop. Honestly, I'm not sure that that needs to change in a big hurry. I have not yet seen any desktop productivity apps that really make Linux usable for daily work. So it really only leaves Windows.
Finally, I got around to looking at Macintosh. What really attracted me was the Mach Kernel, adn the UNIX underneath the whole thing. The fact that I could get Microsoft Office and the Entourage client (If you have not yet seen entourage, you've got to check it at least once, its mail and calendaring done RIGHT - by Mickeysoft no less.)
So, I bought one. I am a happy camper. All my perl works - if I wated to run postgres on it I could... I can seemlessly ssh to all my remote systems from a set of icons on my desktop. I've upgraded to perl 5.8.0 without resorting to Fink...
So I get UNIX, day-to-day productivity, decent performance from 256MB RAM, and best thing is that, like the rest of the apple switch ads say - stuff just works.
I plugged my camera into the thing. I was fully prepared for the nightmare of installing and rebooting several times, etyc. etc. But NO! the camera worked seamlessly - no software installs, no reboots. Same with my MP3 player. I did need the OSX driver for my printer, but that was a no-brainer.
Anyway, all I know is that if you want UNIX and desktop apps, you cant go wrong with a Macintosh. Oh yeah, I bought the iBook w/ 14" display, and built in wireless.
from Windows to OS X, because of the UNIX underneath.
Let me just tell you that the networking is faster on the Mac than on windows, I can play higher quality streams without the constant re-buffering that I had in Windows.
I've got Mozilla, Chimera, and IE on theis machine, I use Mozilla the most - but that is changing, I like the look and feel of Chimera a lot it is growsing on me.
I do alot of surfing, and web development, and I am finding the mac to be faster in starting up applications than the windows boxes I've used...
When I needed to do this - learn about electronic music, I went to the local Record (vinyl) store, and purchased some compilation CD's. Alot of the stuff I didn't like.
But I came to love Trance, and some of the more famous DJ's.
Rabbit in the Moon Paul Oakenfold (Bunkka is actually kind of cool) Sasha John Digweed - My favorite DJ right now Sander Kleinenberg - My second fave.
But I also found some great stuff like Hooverphonic from Belgium. I saw them live here in St. Louis. They are a studio band - they did not perform well live...
What about Ambient Dub - Thievery Corporation?
Anyway, I'd go and get your self some compilations from the Electrnoica section of a record store that also sells used CD's - believe it or not, here in St. Louis, Vintage Vinyl is the best music store around - best selection!
Why dont they just set up an extranet for suppliers to bid on? That would be a great tool for them, and a way to get some good prices while they're at it!
I agree that its really sad that they are "reduced" to this, but is it really so bad? hell I think its about time, at least ONE government org has some sense.
The other thing that this probably encourages is aggregation. They could potentially plan across many disciplines, and buy in a larger volume that way, satisfying more groups, and cutting costs.
Much of the time, I find that while I really want to test software, there just isn't the time to do it.
I dont go around building things from beta software, but it seems that we (my company) wait until products and tools are proven by others.
Again, its not that I dont want to test, but my timeline for eval is so short, and I have so few others in my team that want to take time, that it just isnt convenient. Welcome to world of telecom.
Recently, we did set up an test OpenNMS server - because we got sick of the limitations imposed by our HPOV admin...
While I appreciate RAID, I've never been able to get very good performance from it. Maybe thats my fault, but ultimately my lack of ability is not the focus here.
I've always gotten more from assembling JBOD's so that I could dedicate one disk to one task, and therefore one I/O stream.
This has the consequnce of tuning things at an atomicity that i can understand.
My point here is that there may be no one way to design this, there may be a number of components that are integrated, and used by the service on demand at the time that a user demands them.
Certainly, LDAP is a very good infrastructure for access to naming and location of services, as well as authentication, and storrage of things like keys and such.
After that, I think that files should be files, so I'd have to integrate DAV into an apache server, and back the auth. into the LDAP.
There are places where users might wish to store relational data, and that is bit trickier. But allowing access to a database would certainly be required, hell it would probably serve as the backend to the LDAP service.
I guess, If I were to implement asomething like this, here is what my goal would be initially.
1) provide one-time registration and authentication for users - be a registration provider to many web sites and services.
2) provide a place to store flat files, be a backup for your hard drive, sort of.
Yes, a service like this would be a sinkhole for security attacks, but I think good initial engineering can provide good security.
Ultimately, like I said, its going to take a componentized approach, I think all the tools are there, just waiting for someone to implement.
This article raises some good questions about Linux, and business.
I dont think that there is a question that OpenSource could save money for Walmart, but you can see from the other posts here that there are questions about whether or not the churn rate at Walmart would have some impact on systems and profitability at some layer or other.
So the question is this, which services can Linux and its applications offer that offer a clkear incentive to Walmart. Maybe we need to start thinking about which services Linux offers that can minimize the impact of that churn rate.
Or maybe we need to think in a different way than that -- Instead of trying to replace systems entirely, how can we help to augment systems? Can we fit in the food chain in some other place?
"Retail Link" has got to have a large food chain associated with it.
* Integration between retailers systems and the retail link software on the supplier's side.
* The retail link software for suppliers.
* The messaging gateway between supplier and walmart.
Any of these could be a component that we could offer up as a tool.
what if the feature set in the "Retail Link" that we offered, was more modern, and more scalable thanks to our judicious use of the Linux Kernel?
What if we sought out freely available messaging tools that offered SSL, or TLS capabilities?
I guess all I'm saying is that the Linux community can move quickly, we are small, retailers are big, if we want to swim with the fish, we might have to decide which way the current is going first.
I think its great that Orbitz has such cool software. But there web site is abismal. I've spent more money than I had to on flights there. Well, no more...
Unfortunately, I still think that the ease of use award goes to -- Ugghhh -- Expedia. The expedia site is simple, clear, does not flood you with data. Itineraries are presented in simple concise ways that people can understand.
I got stuck with a night lay-over in Baltimore in an itinerary, in a flight from Boston to Saint Louis. Somehow, Orbitz thiught that it could present me with that, Well, I didn't see a night layover in the itinerary until I had printed it out... Expedia makes it easy to see that sort of problem with a flight up front.
All the software in the world cant fix a bad user experience.
I think that this story is so cool, that a repost is not necessarily a bad thing.
Thanks for reminding us this amazing, wonderful and powerful advance in technology.
Personally, I get so inured reading stuff, that I sometimes forget how damn cool some of these stories really are. Hearing them again is not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh yeah, its also not a bad thing to thank people for working hard, faux pas or not.
If you've had a bad day, not gotten some role you really wanted, is there a wattering hole where you can commiserate with other actors, and where you all share techniques that worked, and some that have not worked so well? How much do you rely on each other the way that coding, and system administration are shared and collaborative?
In this sense is the acting community open, and sharing regarding techniques? Even business stuff of like how to go get that role that really want... Or do you pretty much just work it out with your agent?
I'm not trying to compare acting to open-source here, I'm just trying to get a sense about whether actors are very collaborative, or do you develop your own techniques that work for you, and are reluctant to share with others because of your success?
I use it for the document root of my webservers. It offers faster access to the files themselves, while having very good fault tolerance.
I serve very few dynamic documents - I'm getting alot of milage out of small machines. My sites have a deep directory structure, with fairly few files in each. ReiserFS shines for this layout.
I tested several different FS for this application, ReiserFS won for me.
Oh yeah, the other benefit is the relative ease of install and upgrade.
Actually, I hadn't even thought of this, and it is one of the best points I've seen so far.
Dictating a backdoor in an encryption system only yields a vulnerability in that particular system.
What we need to remember is that this is mostly tail chasing. Once you come up with a new scheme, you are basically asking that it be broken. Look at that article posted earlier on Slash about the Microsoft EBook cracker who decided not to release his code...
While I realize that it is an invasion of our liberties...
If they want to read my email, let 'em.
If they want ot read email about confidential stuff that I work with that requires NDA -- who am I? I dont care...
What I want is for ('them' - The Gov't) to be able to monitor things, so that the bad guys go where they need to go. I get that they are not the most compenant people, but if this is what they want, they'll probably get it anyway...
I'm surprised that anyone really cares about the speed of a CPU. It's not really that immportant. Isn't the problem mostly getting work done? Actually, I's praise AMD, if I thought that wasn't a blatant marketing move.
I've always thought that even software developers, knowing that they had 1GHz of throughput to work with would purposefully bloat their code.
Maybe its time to abstract out processor speed in favor of other things. Maybe looking at FEATURES, and not speed?
"As a private company Borders cannot be prosecuted if it breaches human rights legislation. If it were to breach a citizen's human rights then the British government would have to answer the case in Strasbourg for not protecting human rights sufficiently under UK law."
That strikes me as a problem with UK law. Why for god's sake would the entity violating your rights not be held responsible?
Or are prosecutability and responsibility two different things?
Has anyone seen any of the original hypertext systems? The ones that ran on the Xerox Star and Alto?
Those worked like this does, for any given word or term, they consulted a database for the list of links, and they produced a feature on the screen that allowed you to access those links. So at the same time, as one could add new links to the system, you in a certain sense had no control over how your document was linked.
Read some of the early works by Vanevar Bush, his ideas on this were very modern for the time, adn I think that this is just getting the web to behave like the living document that it should be.
Personally, I think it is worse than BattleBots, mostly because BattleBots presents more organized competition, I mean they have a bracket for chrissake!
Why do I hate all these show? They still rely on manual control of the robots. Come on, when are we going to let go of the control and use code to drive the robots behavior?
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when I come back to the store wearing the shirt I bought two years ago?
Do I get accused of shoplifting?
I am an old Mac User, and I shrugged it off for the joy of the PC. But now I'm back and OSX tastes really good these days.
I can smell the deep fried pixels Now!
Yippy - Go team, Go!
the link to bricklink was better.
Though, they should call it brickBay...
Who would have though that a cooperative community of storefronts selling lego bricks and sets would be a thing - but that site is huge... I went looking for light gray parts in the USA, and I got 10 pages worth...
I have a friend who finds old lego sets, builds them and hocks them on eBay, he says he actually makeds some money doing it.
This siet is as bad as the guy who writes C code to generate the 1x1x1 lego brick designs for mathematical curves...
How do you pronounce lego anyway? I'm not a smart enough dork to know...
While this has not happenned to me since this current layoff - one month ago, I'd entertain the opportunity.
I helped my last company for several weeks during transition into a new job about 3 years ago. It paid off for me, because now when I go looking ofr recommendations, its easy to get them from the past employer.
That said, you need to get paid some kind of money...
I usually decide on some fixed hourly rate, and leave it at that. The other thing for me is that there is a com[promise between getting paid, and being responsible. A friend of mine poiinted this out: the more you charge the greater the percecption that you have something tied to the outcome of the work.
So, I tend not to charge large hourly rates especially, if I'm sick of the old employer. I dont want them to feel like they can just call me any time. it needs to cost them enough, but not so much that they think they can just have me any time.
I think I'd make a great switch campaign ad...
I recently had to go laptop shopping. I needed a better day-to-day computing tool.
I looked at everything. Originally my bias was towards the PC, because it has so much penetration, and because of Microsoft Office. I have not yet found a better tool than that.
I agree with this post, we all use Windows, Bill has got the lock on the desktop. Honestly, I'm not sure that that needs to change in a big hurry. I have not yet seen any desktop productivity apps that really make Linux usable for daily work. So it really only leaves Windows.
Finally, I got around to looking at Macintosh. What really attracted me was the Mach Kernel, adn the UNIX underneath the whole thing. The fact that I could get Microsoft Office and the Entourage client (If you have not yet seen entourage, you've got to check it at least once, its mail and calendaring done RIGHT - by Mickeysoft no less.)
So, I bought one. I am a happy camper. All my perl works - if I wated to run postgres on it I could... I can seemlessly ssh to all my remote systems from a set of icons on my desktop. I've upgraded to perl 5.8.0 without resorting to Fink...
So I get UNIX, day-to-day productivity, decent performance from 256MB RAM, and best thing is that, like the rest of the apple switch ads say - stuff just works.
I plugged my camera into the thing. I was fully prepared for the nightmare of installing and rebooting several times, etyc. etc. But NO! the camera worked seamlessly - no software installs, no reboots. Same with my MP3 player. I did need the OSX driver for my printer, but that was a no-brainer.
Anyway, all I know is that if you want UNIX and desktop apps, you cant go wrong with a Macintosh. Oh yeah, I bought the iBook w/ 14" display, and built in wireless.
from Windows to OS X, because of the UNIX underneath.
Let me just tell you that the networking is faster on the Mac than on windows, I can play higher quality streams without the constant re-buffering that I had in Windows.
I've got Mozilla, Chimera, and IE on theis machine, I use Mozilla the most - but that is changing, I like the look and feel of Chimera a lot it is growsing on me.
I do alot of surfing, and web development, and I am finding the mac to be faster in starting up applications than the windows boxes I've used...
Just my $.02
I forgot to mention that I wanted to put my vote in for best house/trance/electronic internet radio station:
Proton Radio - they rule.
They played Sasha/Digweed Delta-Heavy opener that was on Essential Mix for a week straight!
Also, you might want to listen to BBC Radio One Essential Mix with Pete Tong - it is a definitive DJ Radio Show...
When I needed to do this - learn about electronic music, I went to the local Record (vinyl) store, and purchased some compilation CD's. Alot of the stuff I didn't like.
But I came to love Trance, and some of the more famous DJ's.
Rabbit in the Moon
Paul Oakenfold (Bunkka is actually kind of cool)
Sasha
John Digweed - My favorite DJ right now
Sander Kleinenberg - My second fave.
But I also found some great stuff like Hooverphonic from Belgium. I saw them live here in St. Louis. They are a studio band - they did not perform well live...
What about Ambient Dub - Thievery Corporation?
Anyway, I'd go and get your self some compilations from the Electrnoica section of a record store that also sells used CD's - believe it or not, here in St. Louis, Vintage Vinyl is the best music store around - best selection!
If I were you thats what I'd do.
My $0.02...
Why dont they just set up an extranet for suppliers to bid on? That would be a great tool for them, and a way to get some good prices while they're at it!
I agree that its really sad that they are "reduced" to this, but is it really so bad? hell I think its about time, at least ONE government org has some sense.
The other thing that this probably encourages is aggregation. They could potentially plan across many disciplines, and buy in a larger volume that way, satisfying more groups, and cutting costs.
Much of the time, I find that while I really want to test software, there just isn't the time to do it.
I dont go around building things from beta software, but it seems that we (my company) wait until products and tools are proven by others.
Again, its not that I dont want to test, but my timeline for eval is so short, and I have so few others in my team that want to take time, that it just isnt convenient. Welcome to world of telecom.
Recently, we did set up an test OpenNMS server - because we got sick of the limitations imposed by our HPOV admin...
While I appreciate RAID, I've never been able to get very good performance from it. Maybe thats my fault, but ultimately my lack of ability is not the focus here.
I've always gotten more from assembling JBOD's so that I could dedicate one disk to one task, and therefore one I/O stream.
This has the consequnce of tuning things at an atomicity that i can understand.
My point here is that there may be no one way to design this, there may be a number of components that are integrated, and used by the service on demand at the time that a user demands them.
Certainly, LDAP is a very good infrastructure for access to naming and location of services, as well as authentication, and storrage of things like keys and such.
After that, I think that files should be files, so I'd have to integrate DAV into an apache server, and back the auth. into the LDAP.
There are places where users might wish to store relational data, and that is bit trickier. But allowing access to a database would certainly be required, hell it would probably serve as the backend to the LDAP service.
I guess, If I were to implement asomething like this, here is what my goal would be initially.
1) provide one-time registration and authentication for users - be a registration provider to many web sites and services.
2) provide a place to store flat files, be a backup for your hard drive, sort of.
Yes, a service like this would be a sinkhole for security attacks, but I think good initial engineering can provide good security.
Ultimately, like I said, its going to take a componentized approach, I think all the tools are there, just waiting for someone to implement.
If I email them my SS#, can they tell me if I lived through it?
This article raises some good questions about Linux, and business.
I dont think that there is a question that OpenSource could save money for Walmart, but you can see from the other posts here that there are questions about whether or not the churn rate at Walmart would have some impact on systems and profitability at some layer or other.
So the question is this, which services can Linux and its applications offer that offer a clkear incentive to Walmart. Maybe we need to start thinking about which services Linux offers that can minimize the impact of that churn rate.
Or maybe we need to think in a different way than that -- Instead of trying to replace systems entirely, how can we help to augment systems? Can we fit in the food chain in some other place?
"Retail Link" has got to have a large food chain associated with it.
* Integration between retailers systems and the retail link software on the supplier's side.
* The retail link software for suppliers.
* The messaging gateway between supplier and walmart.
Any of these could be a component that we could offer up as a tool.
what if the feature set in the "Retail Link" that we offered, was more modern, and more scalable thanks to our judicious use of the Linux Kernel?
What if we sought out freely available messaging tools that offered SSL, or TLS capabilities?
I guess all I'm saying is that the Linux community can move quickly, we are small, retailers are big, if we want to swim with the fish, we might have to decide which way the current is going first.
I think its great that Orbitz has such cool software. But there web site is abismal. I've spent more money than I had to on flights there. Well, no more...
Unfortunately, I still think that the ease of use award goes to -- Ugghhh -- Expedia. The expedia site is simple, clear, does not flood you with data. Itineraries are presented in simple concise ways that people can understand.
I got stuck with a night lay-over in Baltimore in an itinerary, in a flight from Boston to Saint Louis. Somehow, Orbitz thiught that it could present me with that, Well, I didn't see a night layover in the itinerary until I had printed it out... Expedia makes it easy to see that sort of problem with a flight up front.
All the software in the world cant fix a bad user experience.
I think that this story is so cool, that a repost is not necessarily a bad thing.
Thanks for reminding us this amazing, wonderful and powerful advance in technology.
Personally, I get so inured reading stuff, that I sometimes forget how damn cool some of these stories really are. Hearing them again is not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh yeah, its also not a bad thing to thank people for working hard, faux pas or not.
Thanks Slashdot.
If you've had a bad day, not gotten some role you really wanted, is there a wattering hole where you can commiserate with other actors, and where you all share techniques that worked, and some that have not worked so well? How much do you rely on each other the way that coding, and system administration are shared and collaborative?
In this sense is the acting community open, and sharing regarding techniques? Even business stuff of like how to go get that role that really want... Or do you pretty much just work it out with your agent?
I'm not trying to compare acting to open-source here, I'm just trying to get a sense about whether actors are very collaborative, or do you develop your own techniques that work for you, and are reluctant to share with others because of your success?
I use it for the document root of my webservers. It offers faster access to the files themselves, while having very good fault tolerance.
I serve very few dynamic documents - I'm getting alot of milage out of small machines. My sites have a deep directory structure, with fairly few files in each. ReiserFS shines for this layout.
I tested several different FS for this application, ReiserFS won for me.
Oh yeah, the other benefit is the relative ease of install and upgrade.
Actually, I hadn't even thought of this, and it is one of the best points I've seen so far.
Dictating a backdoor in an encryption system only yields a vulnerability in that particular system.
What we need to remember is that this is mostly tail chasing. Once you come up with a new scheme, you are basically asking that it be broken. Look at that article posted earlier on Slash about the Microsoft EBook cracker who decided not to release his code...
While I realize that it is an invasion of our liberties...
If they want to read my email, let 'em.
If they want ot read email about confidential stuff that I work with that requires NDA -- who am I? I dont care...
What I want is for ('them' - The Gov't) to be able to monitor things, so that the bad guys go where they need to go. I get that they are not the most compenant people, but if this is what they want, they'll probably get it anyway...
Sorry, but thats my feeling.
Dave
I am excited about this. Is it going to use the Apache license, or will it be a binary module, that I have to license from you?
I'm surprised that anyone really cares about the speed of a CPU. It's not really that immportant. Isn't the problem mostly getting work done? Actually, I's praise AMD, if I thought that wasn't a blatant marketing move.
I've always thought that even software developers, knowing that they had 1GHz of throughput to work with would purposefully bloat their code.
Maybe its time to abstract out processor speed in favor of other things. Maybe looking at FEATURES, and not speed?
From the article:
"As a private company Borders cannot be prosecuted if it breaches human rights legislation. If it were to breach a citizen's human rights then the British government would have to answer the case in Strasbourg for not protecting human rights sufficiently under UK law."
That strikes me as a problem with UK law. Why for god's sake would the entity violating your rights not be held responsible?
Or are prosecutability and responsibility two different things?
Has anyone seen any of the original hypertext systems? The ones that ran on the Xerox Star and Alto?
Those worked like this does, for any given word or term, they consulted a database for the list of links, and they produced a feature on the screen that allowed you to access those links. So at the same time, as one could add new links to the system, you in a certain sense had no control over how your document was linked.
Read some of the early works by Vanevar Bush, his ideas on this were very modern for the time, adn I think that this is just getting the web to behave like the living document that it should be.
Personally, I think it is worse than BattleBots, mostly because BattleBots presents more organized competition, I mean they have a bracket for chrissake!
Why do I hate all these show? They still rely on manual control of the robots. Come on, when are we going to let go of the control and use code to drive the robots behavior?
-- Waiting to register as goodlife --
DaveI really feel as though the nerd comunity (I prefer to think of us as geeks) is losing our role models quickly these days.
I just want to say that we all need to spend time studying the likes of Huffman, Greenspun, and Minsky, Mandelbrot, so that good ideas can stay alive.
Thanks.
David