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User: amiga500

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  1. Teach yourself X in 24 hours on What Is the Most Influential Programming Book? · · Score: 1

    Seriously, how many other professions have such books? Teach yourself brain surgery, teach yourself plumbing, teach yourself law... No ours is the only profession in which someone can think themselves an expert in a few weeks time. The good thing is many people can improve their lives by studying one of these books and switching jobs. The bad thing is this may be part of why CS graduates have been declining.

  2. Re:Best advice not to get caught on Collar-Bomber Tracked By Gmail Accesses · · Score: 1

    But, this being Slashdot, everyone knows that already.

  3. Postage is the solution on Is Google Playing Fair With Groupon, et al? · · Score: 1

    I would like to see a feature added to mail programs which allows me to set a price level above which I would be interested in reading a piece of mail. LinkedIn attempted to do this with their InMail, except they set the level and they keep the fee. The $5 fee is so high that no one pays it, and instead recruiters spam you by inviting you to join their network. I'd like to set the level and I'd like to receive the fee if I open their piece of mail. If Groupon or Google Offers really wants me to read their mail, they could simply attach some postage to it. Gmail would see the postage amount and prioritize it based on my preferences. Like a CPM ad, if I don't open the email, the sender wouldn't get charged the postage.

  4. Re:Writing printer and scanner drivers?? on German Foreign Office Going Back To Windows · · Score: 1

    Governments and corporations often use printers which you would never find at your local Staples. For example check writing printers are one niche. Other specialty printers include wide format printers or high capacity printers. These printers also tend to have a longer life-span than your typical desktop printer. If the printers have a 10 year lifespan, the government may not have the chance to negotiate with the manufacture on getting Linux drivers.

  5. Re:First Address Targeted Advertising, Then We'll on Wikipedia Meets $16M Budget Goal · · Score: 1

    That's what I felt up until last week when WoW ads started crawling all over the page. I don't know if they are still running them, as I disabled advertising when I saw them.

  6. Software only solution? on Stephen Fry and DVD Jon Back USB Sniffer Project · · Score: 1

    Pardon my ignorance, but why can't this sort of thing be done entirely in software? On consoles this wouldn't be possible, but for Windows can't you create a virtual USB driver which is a proxy to hardware USB device? It seems folks have been doing this sort of thing with Ethernet for a long time.

  7. CL 9 on Dual-Core CPU Opens Door To 1080p On Smartphones · · Score: 1

    The CL 9 remote control (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9) contained both an 8 bit CPU and a 4 bit CPU, and that was in 1985. Just imagine what Woz could have done with a dual-core 6502!

  8. Forward market on Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar · · Score: 1

    An electricity generator must sell their electricity to the market. A power plant may decide to sell forward 10 years of electricity in order to finance it's capital. It is then required to produce exactly the amount which it sold on each day. If it fails to produce this amount, the ISO will issue it large fines. Traditional PV solar is very unpredictable, as the sun can go behind a cloud and cut the power generated in half. This means it's very difficult to sell a contract to deliver a fixed amount of electricity. As such, large installations of solar PV have been rare in the US. However, most states have laws allowing for 'net metering'. This allows homes and small business to send small amounts of electricity back to the grid, without having to sell it to a power company in advance. In the US, coal and hydro cost less than $0.05/KWH. While I expect solar to continue to get less expensive, it's still by far the most costly way to generate electricity.

  9. Change speed limit signs to hours per 100 miles on 2 In 3 Misunderstand Gas Mileage; Here's Why · · Score: 1

    I've driven a Prius in both Australia and in the US. In Australia, the car reported in liters per 100km, as TFA reported, which kept be completely confused. I find the L/100km about as useful as a speed limit sign stating hours per 100 miles.

  10. Searches are still open to side channel attacks on Google Rolls Out Encrypted Web Search Option · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I study done a few months ago showed how one can easily deduce searches by looking at the size of the AJAX requests. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/side-channel_at.html Yes, https should have been available a long time ago, and still isn't available for www.google.com.hk.

  11. find / grep / glimpse on Learning and Maintaining a Large Inherited Codebase? · · Score: 1
    On Windows I install cygwin, so I can execute grep. I use the following bash function to help me search code:

    ffind ()
    {
    find . -name ".svn" -prune -o -name "CVS" -prune -o -name ".hg" -prune -o -exec grep --color=auto "$@" {} +
    }

    For larger code bases, I use the command line version of glimpse to search through the code. While there are a few open source code search engines, I find glimpse with a few formatting scripts works just fine.

  12. Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U on OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I managed to complete a post-graduate course using Open Office. Assignments were given as Word documents, and needed to be submitted as the same. I always saved in Word 2000 format and my professors never had a problem. If Word was offered at the same price as OO, I would buy Word. I've only used OO because I'm too cheap and don't using office apps enough at home to justify the price. I wish OO were better than MS Office, but it's far behind. When ever I try to format text Writer never does what I want. I've tried drawing diagrams in Draw but soon gave up due to the poor interface, and Impress, well that's the worst of the lot.

  13. Re:sounds familiar on Wii Balance Board Gives $18,000 Medical Device a Run For Its Money · · Score: 2, Informative

    Do you know how much it costs to sell an $800 hammer? It's easy to sell a $10 hammer. For the $800 one, you need to hire a sales staff and lobbyists getting government contracts. You need to entertain your buyers, you may have to do trial runs, POC, RFP, provide 'free' training etc.. These things are all must be added into the cost of the product. I doubt Nintendo has sent salespeople to visit the doctors in the Melbourne, nor have they likely taken them out for dinner, provided them with equipment leasing options, or guaranteed a service and replacement contract. When I sent my Wii in for repair, it took six weeks and I lost all my data. You can't expect hospitals to get the same level of service as consumers.

  14. Re:And... on URL Shorteners Get Some Backup · · Score: 1

    Why not just get a government guarantee that if the company goes bankrupt, the government will come bail them out. Why should banks and car manufactures be the only ones getting bailed out?

  15. URLs to long on URL Shorteners Get Some Backup · · Score: 1

    ./ seems biased against long URLs. When I try to paste one from http://iliil.com/ or http://011010.com/ I get: "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there."

  16. Re:paper in your wallet on Best Tool For Remembering Passwords? · · Score: 1

    Agreed - I like to carry a grid which looks like one of those word search puzzles. It's easy for me to find my passwords, but hard for someone to guess.

  17. Re: on Simple, Cost-Effective, Multiroom Audio? · · Score: 1

    Simple, Cost-Effective, Multiroom - pick any two.

  18. Re:TCP regulating congestion on uTorrent To Build In Transfer-Throttling Ability · · Score: 1

    TCP does effectively limit throughput by means of the Sliding Window Protocol. Packet loss will decrease the size of the sliding window, but on a congested network, the window will be slow to increase. What TCP doesn't offer is different Quality of Service. uTP attempts to run TCP at a lower priority than existing TCP traffic. Allowing Skype or YouTube to run at a higher priority is advantageous to the users of those services.

  19. Re:As an Australian living in Australia.... on Obama Looks Down Under For Broadband Plan · · Score: 1

    Telstra also offers it's iPhone plans starting with 2.5MB of data per month. http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/phones/iphone/pricing.html * Pay As You Go rate is $2 per MB

  20. Gmail paper on Google Offering Print Versions of Online Books · · Score: 1

    I've been awaiting a long time for Google to deliver on their Gmail Paper product. http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html Now with their printers in place it should be easy for them to deliver my email in hard copy.

  21. Re:Wifi on (Near) Constant Internet While RV'ing? · · Score: 1

    Many campgrounds will have WiFi of some sort or the other. If they don't, you're probably staying in an area which isn't going to have 3G service, and may only be able to get a 1 bar signal on Edge.
    I'd suggest building a cantenna, as often campgrounds have a single Linksys router in the lodge, and if your parked more than 50 ft away you'll have a hard time connecting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna

  22. Re:Glasses breaks the deal for me on Panasonic 3D TV Does Not Disappoint · · Score: 1

    The 'free' pair of red and blue lensed glasses made any 3D movie worth going to when I was a kid. I would continue to get enjoyment from the glasses long after the movie was over. Do these LCD glasses make you look cool and give you X-Ray vision as well?

  23. New Jersey on Thieves Clear Out NJ Apple Store In 31 Seconds · · Score: 1

    I think this says more about New Jersey than it does Apple.

  24. Air Traffic Control on Wind Farms Can Interfere With Doppler Radar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Having setup an ATC radar in Palm Springs, I can attest that the wind farms add a lot of noise to ATC radar systems as well as weather systems. Noise on the radar screen makes ATC more difficult, and increases the risk of accidents. The wind mills in Palm Springs are the small blade, fast moving type which birds like to fly into. I think the newer, larger wind farms are less of an issue for ATC radar. The slower moving blades can be filtered out. If they could build the windmills with flat edges, or use radar absorbing materials, they would become invisible to the radar.

  25. Any noun works well as a hash on Suitable Naming Conventions For Workstations? · · Score: 1

    Users, tech support, and admins can easily remember names and lookup details in a spreadsheet or db. At the prior bank, workstations had names like 'piglet'. When looking at DB locks, the first few times I had to look up the user, but subsequently I quickly memorized the frequent workstation names I came across. Where I work now, they use an alphanumeric identifier. I can't even remember my own workstation name. Workstations already have unique id's like a MAC address and service tag - the machine name doesn't need to be hard to memorize like these are.