Good points. I see three things we're working on here:
1) The process of learning
2) Specialized curriculums
3) Education-Employment relationship(s)
1) The process of learning. There's no doubt in my mind that rote, absorbing learning at a young age is key. E.g., children are better at picking up foreign languages than adults. Why? It helps that they aren't worried about credit card debt or a girlfriend missing her period, I'm sure. No, a young mind is just so beautifully uncluttered. You know, like a blank whiteboard, shiny and pure. There's no better time to fill it with facts and ideas, before responsibilities and anxieties poison it.
However, getting in high school and college, so much more of what we learn comes from social interaction. This time is better spent keeping the hell out of the kids' ways. College is two things to every college student: his GPA and his dick (or the female's erogenous zones, her vagina, tits, and ass--God it's not fair you ladies have three zones!). The world wants his GPA, and he wants the world to have his dick. It's just a paradox that every kid goes through. Thank God for Cliff's Notes; if it weren't for Cliff, I wouldn't have had time to discover my dick. I would have been bogged down with Bronte's Wuthering Heights or some other fscking coming of age drivel.
2) Specialized curriculums. I don't know about you, but I have read and written exponentially more since I finished college. Many more subjects and genres too. We may be having an agreement here. I too am a fan of a broadening one's knowledge of more subjects. However, I don't think regimented syllabi, attendance, and essay exams (*shiver*) stimulate a person's desire to understand the subject. Maintain a GPA maybe, but not understand the subject. I always felt the quicker I get away from college the more time I would have to think. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but think about...:)
3) The education-employment relationship(s). I agree that many folks end up in a line of work they don't conceive themselves taking up or has little to do with what they studied in college, but is that necessarily good? Are they happy? Do they pine for something more or different? College curricula exacerbates this problem, because so previous little material covers real-world processes and situations. Of course, looking at this from the outside in, most jobs in America require very little specialized, trained, enhanced thinking or skills. My personality dictates that I anger at ceremonial requirements like learning Dijkstra's algorithm and Hamming code when all I want to do is register a domain, set up a DNS server, and build a web site. I don't like doing things, because everyone else is doing them.
Here's how I look at it. With so much of what I do for a living learned on my own time, I cannot justify the tens of thousand of dollars required to take up cross-cultural requirements and other sixteen week death marches. I agree with you, writertype, that honing one's ability to learn and reason are important. Experiencing unpleasant (read: stupid) things can be educational and enriching. I fumed during the first two weeks of a required pre-1800 English literature course. It turned out to be one of the more interesting genres of literature (Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels reached me despite the longwinded prose). But these pleasant revelations were sparse compared to the "just get through it" courses I suffered. When a 30% on a physics exam scales to an A, understanding evaporates.
And for the record, I started college as a business finance major. Struggled through the freshman requirements, then got a 98% on my first accounting exam. Got bored with the rest of the sophomore classes' filler material and nearly flunked out in spectacular fashion. Switched to CS the next year and labored through logic gates and big O notation in class while building a 486 and discovering the nuances of Linux at home. I had a reputation as an ace essay writer in my fraternity house (another story altogether though I have a tattoo to show for it), and after earning an A for a friend's twenty-five page grad school history paper, I switched to English. And the rest is history...
BTW, don't worry about dating me, because I've got one foot out of MLB's door. If they reinstate Pete Rose, I quit. That coming from a kid who wore his number in grade school and saw him break Cobb's record with 4192 in Riverfront Stadium. Really. MLB is a fucking disgrace, and letting a known tax cheat, hot dog of the first order, a man who charges fans large lumps of $ for his autograph despite riding an overwhelming wave of their support, and a man who explicitly put the earnest competition of a major league sport into question by gambling on his own team constitutes an absolute withdrawal from honest sporting competition. Not that MLB has given a damn about that for over a decade now by allowing a Dixie cup strike zone, turning a blind eye to rampant performance enhancing chemistry, marginalizing the playoffs with the wildcard, and doing anything else for the Almighty Buck. I intend to spend every spare minute this Summer enjoying everything else but major league baseball.
I passionately hate math (ducking flames now). Any time I see an equation with coefficients and variables, I want to puke. I don't care about trains A and B: they'll get there when they get there. I might have understood Calculus better had my teachers spoken Old English instead. But I was and continue to be highly fluent in algebra, because my mother drilled me until I cried buckets.
I learned my multiplication tables in the second grade thanks to my mother's patience with a very loud, uncooperative brat, me. Our class would have a competition where a kid would stand up and go up and down the rows of desks and be challenged by each student. My teacher would hold up a card with a multiplication, e.g. 4x4, and the student who answered correctly first would continue down the row. My mother sat me down the night before and went over every multiplication from zero to twelve until I had it.
I mean burned in folks. The next day when the teacher held up the cards, I didn't see the multiplication, I saw the answer. 4x4 wasn't 4x4. It was 16. I was so quick that next day, I went around the classroom five times before my teacher asked me to sit down and give others a chance. I think he let me go on so long, because he couldn't believe it. I'll never forget that day. It was one of my proudest, most fulfilling days of my life. Mathematics of all things.
I graduated college with a B.A. in English. I write poetry chapbooks. Literature rocks my world. But I'm the guy that always adds up the scorecard correctly, tallies the stats, and runs the numbers for others.
Ironically, I was a terrible reader until the fifth grade. I never could put events in sequence correctly (remember?). But my fifth grade teacher, the best I ever had, never let up on me. He worked me, gave me a ton of things to read until I improved. I love to read so much now, I'm in dire need of bookshelves.
The point is, you have to drill kids when they're young. Parents and teachers alike. IMHO, you have until the sixth grade to educate a kid on the fundamentals: reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, school is a social call. No high schooler cares more about metaphors or differentials than he does about his social standing. To this day, I don't remember what I studied let alone learned in the seventh and eighth grades, because I was too busy considering tits and cars.
We in the U.S. need two basic changes to our education system:
First, drill the absolute shit out of kids from first to sixth grades. Algebra, reading comprehension, and writing composition should be outstanding by the end of the sixth grade. If you think about adulthood, if you can add, subtract, multiply, divide, read, and write well, then you can take care of yourself. It all comes back to these fundamentals.
Second and just as important, completely reform high school and college curriculums to prepare people for jobs. I firmly believe that if you take two eighteen year old men and run one through a college curriculum and start the other in an apprenticeship or company, the kid outside of the college halls is going to be light years ahead of the collegian after his four years are gone. Colleges as institutions are more enterprising then educational, period. College curriculums are the combo value meals of understanding. I knew intimately that I could not hack it as an engineer or scientist due to my lack of interest/understanding of calculus. But I had to waste away for two semesters of calculus regardless. Same story with requirements completely irrelevant to my interests and strengths. Strip away these requirements and structure a series of classes that revolve around my interests and strengths, and I should have departed college no more than two years after starting.
I'll end with this important point. I'm afraid of the American job market and its limitations not on the sheer number of jobs but on what we Americans have to take up to earn a decent living. I am lucky enough to make some money writing in addition to my regular gig as a web programmer, but I would love to make a living in a skilled labor trade. Electrician, carpenter, etc. The way I see things--and my parents steered me this way for better or worse--you're gonna have to be a lawyer, manager, or doctor to get by in the years to come. Maybe I'm wrong. We manufacture almost nothing in the U.S. any more. Look around your apartment or house. MADE IN CHINA.
Our system of education is supposedly geared to turn out knowledgeable workers, but there's only so many of those jobs to go around, right? Not everybody can be a manager. I long for the day when the phrase reads, "The world needs CEOs too."
I respectfully disagree. The key when building a PC is to buy quality opponents that you can carry forward along your upgrade path. Three years ago I built a 500MHz Athlon with a 19" Sony Trinitron monitor and some mid-range components. A friend recently dropped a nice Soundblaster Live 5.1 card on me for nothing. That will go into the new rig.
So yesterday, I bought some more components for a new PC, and I stepped up the quality that I bought. Asus mobo, 40GB drive, case, power supply, P4 2.4B CPU, radeon 9700 pro, 48x CD-RW, 512MB pc2700 RAM. I got all of this for just under $1000 with shipping. Top drawer gaming will be mine as I bring along the SB Live, 19" Trinitron, nice speakers with subwoofer, keyboard & mouse from my older PC (which happily serves my web sites, mail, and ftp).
$1000 is greater than $200, but I could have gone even cheaper if I bought a vanilla CD-ROM, less RAM, etc. You also cannot repurpose a gaming console. I hope to make a PVR out of one of my PCs some day. There's just so much more you can do with a PC these days. Ham radio. PVR. Home theater. DVD player/ripper/recorder. File server.
The money spent on the 19" monitor is going to carry forward a long time I hope. I hope the P4-2.4B CPU and radeon 9700 pro last a while longer than the typical 3 years I go between PC purchases.
Nothing to gain by taking Google public
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Google vs. Evil
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Google is a shining example of why private companies are typically better in every respect than public companies. First, there's only so much stock the buying public hungers for. Second, private companies are far less dependent on growth to survive; they can focus on what they do whereas public companies constantly have to look for ways to generate revenue. Third, choices private companies make based on their own philosophies and culture are typically less scrutinized than those that public companies make, and this is good.
I don't want stock. I want a search engine. Anything that preserves that is a Good Thing. As soon as you have shareholders to answer to, you're ideas are owned.
I had forgotten how annoying popups were until I went home to my parents over Thanksgiving. They have Microsoft and IE installed (Dad's choice as he uses those at work). So when I started to surf, I was back to fighting popups everywhere I went. I didn't even want to think about cookies.
I took a long shower when I got home and scrubbed vigorously.
The difference between computer and human intelligence is the human ability to revel in his. That is, taunt others. Until a computer can get in my grill and explain to me on a colorful fashion that I am nothing more than a grab-ass-tic piece of *human* sh!t, then I won't think much of computers.
You're right. But I think it is important to note that advertising used to be the little bits: store hours, what's in stock, and sales. Somewhere along the way, it became the mess that it is. I think when the Internet came along, businesses just fell in love with the ease of information gathering, demographic stuff and the like, and forgot to keep their eye on the ball, their businesses.
Yes, I think any retail outfit can benefit from having a presence on the web, even if they don't actively sell their goods. I especially like the idea of being able to put together an order online and then have the ability to pick up the merchandise at the store. This is a huge timesaver and can keep human beings from packing stores like sardines.
That said, I think businesses grossly overestimate the value of marketing/demographic data they seem hell-bent on gathering these days. Not just businesses either. Whether you're purchasing goods or inquiring about a TV program, the fuckers on the other end of the wire are going to extract everything they can from you. How may terabytes are tucked away *every day* in SQL databases for name/address/e-mail address and phone number?
Tip for small businesses who are getting their web sites off the ground: you do not have to become an intelligence agency. Collect only relevant information for your business, go to every length possible to safeguard your customers' privacy, and stick to *your* business model, not some marketing sleezebag's.
I realize as a web programmer I'm in a "geeky" line of work, but it never occurred to me advertise myself as a geek. I don't like it. I mean I'm no stud, I don't sport Olympic wood, and I not better than you, but I consider geekiness a rung on the totem pole I don't want to be below. Not to rant really, but I just consider the term "geek" to be derogatory.
I had to use their PC which has Windows ME and IE installed. I use Linux and Mozilla at home and work, and I had forgotten what a scurge pop-ups were until I did some browsing on their machine. My GOD! Why does anyone bother to surf if they're using IE? Between banner ad image blocking and Javascript handcuffing, Mozilla is the bomb. It kind of reaffirmed why I'm a reticent, bitter bastard when it comes to popular computing.
I'm pro second amendment, but from what I've seen gun laws are very odd things. E.g., in one or more states it is illegal to buy an AK-47 (and other assault rifles, I think) if it has a bayonet attachment. No bayonet? Cool and the gang.
Now, I don't know what about the bayonet, a scary last line of defense if you tote an AK-47, nullifies the deal. But from what I know, this kind of "compromise" by gun lobbyists is commonplace. Oh well. Sorry for the off-topic post.
ROBOLAWYER: You are in violation of the DMCA. Drop the coupon and back away. You have fifteen seconds to comply!
(Terrified, consumer drops coupon and takes a step back.)
ROBOLAWYER: You have ten seconds to comply!
(Confused, the consumer looks around nervously.)
ROBOLAWYER: You have five seconds to comply!
(Consumer panics and darts a couple steps to his right, then back to left ending up where he started before the coupon and droid. ROBOLAWYER opens fire and shreds the consumer riddling him with bullets. The consumer falls forward. Cut to close-up of consumer, the coupon, bloodied, rests in front of his nose.)
ROBOLAWYER: Will that be cash or credit for the bullets?
Better yet, when you receive a call from an inmate, most prison phone systems will spout out something like "This call is from a correctional facility." Pretty funny when you're shooting the breeze with a friend "on the inside."
Is there any hope of a reunion of the Golden Throats? Your rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is outta sight!
Re:Fuck banks
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Add-Ons Add Up
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· Score: 4, Informative
I get a dated deposit slip. But the deposit is not actually posted to my account (balance reflects the deposit, can withdraw against it) for three or four days. Like I said, this is a common practice among banks, especially those trying to lure college kids (of which I am not). They delay posting deposits, and post withdrawals in an order that maximizes overdraft fees.
For example, you have $100 in your checking account. You deposit $500 on Monday. On Tuesday you write checks for $25 and $80. On Wednesday you write a check for $100. When you check your balance on Friday, you see that the $100 check is posted first, and depending on fees your bank levies against you, they hit you for a $25 overdraft fee. Then the $25 and $80 checks are posted: two more $25 overdraft charges. Then your deposit is posted on Wednesday or Thursday. So you expect your balance on Friday to be $395. Bzzt! Your bank has you for $320.
Again, I keep a balance above $500, mainly because of this bullshit practice. Yet, it galls me that I have to wait three days for a deposit to be posted when my bank charges me $3 for teller assistance. That's worse than any $2.50 ATM charge (which I never pay) in my book.
I have been nickled-and-dimed with a diminuation of service by my bank, a bank we call Bank One, for too long now. They charge me $3 for "teller assistance" when I deposit a check. Then, my deposits aren't posted to my account sometimes until three or four days have passed. Like many other banks, they try to "order" my withdrawals and deposits in such a way as to attempt to charge me for overdrafts. And I typically keep a balance in my checking account at or above $500. Fucking absurd.
I've had it with Bank One. My next paycheck is going into a new checking account with a new bank that isn't going to hold me upside down and shake me for loose change.
First, it's too much of a crapshoot. Even the possibility of a flat beverage turns me away. Second, as you already mentioned, fountain drinks are way overpriced unless you want that diabetic fit inducing 64 oz. Big Pull. Finally, when you think about it, you're gonna save $ if you just by a sandwich and get your soda a the grocery store.
Wine with or without Windows?
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Fun With Wine
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· Score: 2
I've got a laptop dual booting Linux and Windows 2000. The Win2k I need for work. It is my understanding that Wine works best with a Windows install, preferrably Windows 95/98. Is that true? If so, why? I just can't get most things to work under Wine with my setup.
I'm not a C/C++ hack, so my experience is somewhat different from yours. I have made a tidy little living coding with Perl and Java, and I've always felt more at home with those things that are common to a Linux distro. The VI editor, the ability to custom build an Apache web server, CVS, a shell, diff, grep, patch. Here's a little but important one: a native cron daemon. Seriously, how can you call a server a server if it doesn't have a cron daemon?
For me, a web app developer, there's no better platform than the one the Internet grew up on.
Win this war on two fronts my fellow geeks. Of course oppose DRM, get your felt-tip markers out, brush up on your hexidecimal. But don't miss a chance to siphon off some dollar bills from these jokers. Companies that in the security and DRM business are going to be doing swift business whether any of us like it or the stuff they produce works. Seriously, consider buying stock in small-cap companies that show iniative in this industry.
Why? Because secure digital media is a contradiction in terms. It's one of those rarities in life that are so misunderstood and unviable that people are going to wage a war of attrition in its name. I, for one, am going to capitalize on that. All while burning my CDs to Ogg.:)
If you're interested in good looking stills, broke, and understand very high level scripting languages, you might want to look at POV-Ray. Additionally, if you're working on a Windows platform, an outstanding modeller called Moray that works with POV-Ray. The author is very responsive and makes one of the finer modellers I've worked with. POV-Ray has a deathly slow renderer though.
Look, I don't disagree that UIs are slow to evolve, but isn't that good to a degree? What's the point of an interface that is completely different version to version? Fact is, on the PC desktop, we've basically reached UI valhalla. There's not much more you can do *better* with a mouse and keyboard.
Now, if the hardware were to change such that we weren't tethered to mice and keyboards, then I can see some interesting possibilities. But things being what they are, I'm quite content with my shell and VI.
Slashdot Mirror
1) The process of learning
2) Specialized curriculums
3) Education-Employment relationship(s)
1) The process of learning. There's no doubt in my mind that rote, absorbing learning at a young age is key. E.g., children are better at picking up foreign languages than adults. Why? It helps that they aren't worried about credit card debt or a girlfriend missing her period, I'm sure. No, a young mind is just so beautifully uncluttered. You know, like a blank whiteboard, shiny and pure. There's no better time to fill it with facts and ideas, before responsibilities and anxieties poison it.
However, getting in high school and college, so much more of what we learn comes from social interaction. This time is better spent keeping the hell out of the kids' ways. College is two things to every college student: his GPA and his dick (or the female's erogenous zones, her vagina, tits, and ass--God it's not fair you ladies have three zones!). The world wants his GPA, and he wants the world to have his dick. It's just a paradox that every kid goes through. Thank God for Cliff's Notes; if it weren't for Cliff, I wouldn't have had time to discover my dick. I would have been bogged down with Bronte's Wuthering Heights or some other fscking coming of age drivel.
2) Specialized curriculums. I don't know about you, but I have read and written exponentially more since I finished college. Many more subjects and genres too. We may be having an agreement here. I too am a fan of a broadening one's knowledge of more subjects. However, I don't think regimented syllabi, attendance, and essay exams (*shiver*) stimulate a person's desire to understand the subject. Maintain a GPA maybe, but not understand the subject. I always felt the quicker I get away from college the more time I would have to think. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but think about... :)
3) The education-employment relationship(s). I agree that many folks end up in a line of work they don't conceive themselves taking up or has little to do with what they studied in college, but is that necessarily good? Are they happy? Do they pine for something more or different? College curricula exacerbates this problem, because so previous little material covers real-world processes and situations. Of course, looking at this from the outside in, most jobs in America require very little specialized, trained, enhanced thinking or skills. My personality dictates that I anger at ceremonial requirements like learning Dijkstra's algorithm and Hamming code when all I want to do is register a domain, set up a DNS server, and build a web site. I don't like doing things, because everyone else is doing them.
Here's how I look at it. With so much of what I do for a living learned on my own time, I cannot justify the tens of thousand of dollars required to take up cross-cultural requirements and other sixteen week death marches. I agree with you, writertype, that honing one's ability to learn and reason are important. Experiencing unpleasant (read: stupid) things can be educational and enriching. I fumed during the first two weeks of a required pre-1800 English literature course. It turned out to be one of the more interesting genres of literature (Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels reached me despite the longwinded prose). But these pleasant revelations were sparse compared to the "just get through it" courses I suffered. When a 30% on a physics exam scales to an A, understanding evaporates.
And for the record, I started college as a business finance major. Struggled through the freshman requirements, then got a 98% on my first accounting exam. Got bored with the rest of the sophomore classes' filler material and nearly flunked out in spectacular fashion. Switched to CS the next year and labored through logic gates and big O notation in class while building a 486 and discovering the nuances of Linux at home. I had a reputation as an ace essay writer in my fraternity house (another story altogether though I have a tattoo to show for it), and after earning an A for a friend's twenty-five page grad school history paper, I switched to English. And the rest is history...
BTW, don't worry about dating me, because I've got one foot out of MLB's door. If they reinstate Pete Rose, I quit. That coming from a kid who wore his number in grade school and saw him break Cobb's record with 4192 in Riverfront Stadium. Really. MLB is a fucking disgrace, and letting a known tax cheat, hot dog of the first order, a man who charges fans large lumps of $ for his autograph despite riding an overwhelming wave of their support, and a man who explicitly put the earnest competition of a major league sport into question by gambling on his own team constitutes an absolute withdrawal from honest sporting competition. Not that MLB has given a damn about that for over a decade now by allowing a Dixie cup strike zone, turning a blind eye to rampant performance enhancing chemistry, marginalizing the playoffs with the wildcard, and doing anything else for the Almighty Buck. I intend to spend every spare minute this Summer enjoying everything else but major league baseball.
Phew. I'm sweating now...
I passionately hate math (ducking flames now). Any time I see an equation with coefficients and variables, I want to puke. I don't care about trains A and B: they'll get there when they get there. I might have understood Calculus better had my teachers spoken Old English instead. But I was and continue to be highly fluent in algebra, because my mother drilled me until I cried buckets.
I learned my multiplication tables in the second grade thanks to my mother's patience with a very loud, uncooperative brat, me. Our class would have a competition where a kid would stand up and go up and down the rows of desks and be challenged by each student. My teacher would hold up a card with a multiplication, e.g. 4x4, and the student who answered correctly first would continue down the row. My mother sat me down the night before and went over every multiplication from zero to twelve until I had it.
I mean burned in folks. The next day when the teacher held up the cards, I didn't see the multiplication, I saw the answer. 4x4 wasn't 4x4. It was 16. I was so quick that next day, I went around the classroom five times before my teacher asked me to sit down and give others a chance. I think he let me go on so long, because he couldn't believe it. I'll never forget that day. It was one of my proudest, most fulfilling days of my life. Mathematics of all things.
I graduated college with a B.A. in English. I write poetry chapbooks. Literature rocks my world. But I'm the guy that always adds up the scorecard correctly, tallies the stats, and runs the numbers for others.
Ironically, I was a terrible reader until the fifth grade. I never could put events in sequence correctly (remember?). But my fifth grade teacher, the best I ever had, never let up on me. He worked me, gave me a ton of things to read until I improved. I love to read so much now, I'm in dire need of bookshelves.
The point is, you have to drill kids when they're young. Parents and teachers alike. IMHO, you have until the sixth grade to educate a kid on the fundamentals: reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, school is a social call. No high schooler cares more about metaphors or differentials than he does about his social standing. To this day, I don't remember what I studied let alone learned in the seventh and eighth grades, because I was too busy considering tits and cars.
We in the U.S. need two basic changes to our education system:
First, drill the absolute shit out of kids from first to sixth grades. Algebra, reading comprehension, and writing composition should be outstanding by the end of the sixth grade. If you think about adulthood, if you can add, subtract, multiply, divide, read, and write well, then you can take care of yourself. It all comes back to these fundamentals.
Second and just as important, completely reform high school and college curriculums to prepare people for jobs. I firmly believe that if you take two eighteen year old men and run one through a college curriculum and start the other in an apprenticeship or company, the kid outside of the college halls is going to be light years ahead of the collegian after his four years are gone. Colleges as institutions are more enterprising then educational, period. College curriculums are the combo value meals of understanding. I knew intimately that I could not hack it as an engineer or scientist due to my lack of interest/understanding of calculus. But I had to waste away for two semesters of calculus regardless. Same story with requirements completely irrelevant to my interests and strengths. Strip away these requirements and structure a series of classes that revolve around my interests and strengths, and I should have departed college no more than two years after starting.
I'll end with this important point. I'm afraid of the American job market and its limitations not on the sheer number of jobs but on what we Americans have to take up to earn a decent living. I am lucky enough to make some money writing in addition to my regular gig as a web programmer, but I would love to make a living in a skilled labor trade. Electrician, carpenter, etc. The way I see things--and my parents steered me this way for better or worse--you're gonna have to be a lawyer, manager, or doctor to get by in the years to come. Maybe I'm wrong. We manufacture almost nothing in the U.S. any more. Look around your apartment or house. MADE IN CHINA.
Our system of education is supposedly geared to turn out knowledgeable workers, but there's only so many of those jobs to go around, right? Not everybody can be a manager. I long for the day when the phrase reads, "The world needs CEOs too."
So yesterday, I bought some more components for a new PC, and I stepped up the quality that I bought. Asus mobo, 40GB drive, case, power supply, P4 2.4B CPU, radeon 9700 pro, 48x CD-RW, 512MB pc2700 RAM. I got all of this for just under $1000 with shipping. Top drawer gaming will be mine as I bring along the SB Live, 19" Trinitron, nice speakers with subwoofer, keyboard & mouse from my older PC (which happily serves my web sites, mail, and ftp).
$1000 is greater than $200, but I could have gone even cheaper if I bought a vanilla CD-ROM, less RAM, etc. You also cannot repurpose a gaming console. I hope to make a PVR out of one of my PCs some day. There's just so much more you can do with a PC these days. Ham radio. PVR. Home theater. DVD player/ripper/recorder. File server.
The money spent on the 19" monitor is going to carry forward a long time I hope. I hope the P4-2.4B CPU and radeon 9700 pro last a while longer than the typical 3 years I go between PC purchases.
I don't want stock. I want a search engine. Anything that preserves that is a Good Thing. As soon as you have shareholders to answer to, you're ideas are owned.
I took a long shower when I got home and scrubbed vigorously.
The difference between computer and human intelligence is the human ability to revel in his. That is, taunt others. Until a computer can get in my grill and explain to me on a colorful fashion that I am nothing more than a grab-ass-tic piece of *human* sh!t, then I won't think much of computers.
You're right. But I think it is important to note that advertising used to be the little bits: store hours, what's in stock, and sales. Somewhere along the way, it became the mess that it is. I think when the Internet came along, businesses just fell in love with the ease of information gathering, demographic stuff and the like, and forgot to keep their eye on the ball, their businesses.
That said, I think businesses grossly overestimate the value of marketing/demographic data they seem hell-bent on gathering these days. Not just businesses either. Whether you're purchasing goods or inquiring about a TV program, the fuckers on the other end of the wire are going to extract everything they can from you. How may terabytes are tucked away *every day* in SQL databases for name/address/e-mail address and phone number?
Tip for small businesses who are getting their web sites off the ground: you do not have to become an intelligence agency. Collect only relevant information for your business, go to every length possible to safeguard your customers' privacy, and stick to *your* business model, not some marketing sleezebag's.
I realize as a web programmer I'm in a "geeky" line of work, but it never occurred to me advertise myself as a geek. I don't like it. I mean I'm no stud, I don't sport Olympic wood, and I not better than you, but I consider geekiness a rung on the totem pole I don't want to be below. Not to rant really, but I just consider the term "geek" to be derogatory.
I had to use their PC which has Windows ME and IE installed. I use Linux and Mozilla at home and work, and I had forgotten what a scurge pop-ups were until I did some browsing on their machine. My GOD! Why does anyone bother to surf if they're using IE? Between banner ad image blocking and Javascript handcuffing, Mozilla is the bomb. It kind of reaffirmed why I'm a reticent, bitter bastard when it comes to popular computing.
So is that fascist chick from the Austin Powers franchise going to be at the press conference?
Now, I don't know what about the bayonet, a scary last line of defense if you tote an AK-47, nullifies the deal. But from what I know, this kind of "compromise" by gun lobbyists is commonplace. Oh well. Sorry for the off-topic post.
ROBOLAWYER: You are in violation of the DMCA. Drop the coupon and back away. You have fifteen seconds to comply!
(Terrified, consumer drops coupon and takes a step back.)
ROBOLAWYER: You have ten seconds to comply!
(Confused, the consumer looks around nervously.)
ROBOLAWYER: You have five seconds to comply!
(Consumer panics and darts a couple steps to his right, then back to left ending up where he started before the coupon and droid. ROBOLAWYER opens fire and shreds the consumer riddling him with bullets. The consumer falls forward. Cut to close-up of consumer, the coupon, bloodied, rests in front of his nose.)
ROBOLAWYER: Will that be cash or credit for the bullets?
Better yet, when you receive a call from an inmate, most prison phone systems will spout out something like "This call is from a correctional facility." Pretty funny when you're shooting the breeze with a friend "on the inside."
Is there any hope of a reunion of the Golden Throats? Your rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is outta sight!
For example, you have $100 in your checking account. You deposit $500 on Monday. On Tuesday you write checks for $25 and $80. On Wednesday you write a check for $100. When you check your balance on Friday, you see that the $100 check is posted first, and depending on fees your bank levies against you, they hit you for a $25 overdraft fee. Then the $25 and $80 checks are posted: two more $25 overdraft charges. Then your deposit is posted on Wednesday or Thursday. So you expect your balance on Friday to be $395. Bzzt! Your bank has you for $320.
Again, I keep a balance above $500, mainly because of this bullshit practice. Yet, it galls me that I have to wait three days for a deposit to be posted when my bank charges me $3 for teller assistance. That's worse than any $2.50 ATM charge (which I never pay) in my book.
I've had it with Bank One. My next paycheck is going into a new checking account with a new bank that isn't going to hold me upside down and shake me for loose change.
First, it's too much of a crapshoot. Even the possibility of a flat beverage turns me away. Second, as you already mentioned, fountain drinks are way overpriced unless you want that diabetic fit inducing 64 oz. Big Pull. Finally, when you think about it, you're gonna save $ if you just by a sandwich and get your soda a the grocery store.
I've got a laptop dual booting Linux and Windows 2000. The Win2k I need for work. It is my understanding that Wine works best with a Windows install, preferrably Windows 95/98. Is that true? If so, why? I just can't get most things to work under Wine with my setup.
For me, a web app developer, there's no better platform than the one the Internet grew up on.
Why? Because secure digital media is a contradiction in terms. It's one of those rarities in life that are so misunderstood and unviable that people are going to wage a war of attrition in its name. I, for one, am going to capitalize on that. All while burning my CDs to Ogg. :)
I'd be more than happy to off Fluffy, if he'll leave an address. Come here, boy! Good boy!
If you're interested in good looking stills, broke, and understand very high level scripting languages, you might want to look at POV-Ray. Additionally, if you're working on a Windows platform, an outstanding modeller called Moray that works with POV-Ray. The author is very responsive and makes one of the finer modellers I've worked with. POV-Ray has a deathly slow renderer though.
Now, if the hardware were to change such that we weren't tethered to mice and keyboards, then I can see some interesting possibilities. But things being what they are, I'm quite content with my shell and VI.
MONTANA: Say hello to my little Flash!