This is something I would really like. PDAs are too small to type on. I type at 115 wpm and can't stand using PDAs at all, yet there are things I'd like to do without the power consumption, size, and weight of a full laptop.
I'd love something like the Alphasmart Dana except in clamshell style. Doesn't need to be incredibly tiny, just as big as a small keyboard.
Unfortunately, even if I liked the size of this device, it costs around $600. Smaller and cheaper than a laptop, my butt. I'm currently using a used IBM T21 laptop that cost $425.
According to the C FAQ, this is _not_ true; there's a whole section on NULL and pointers. One can always compare against zero in a pointer context, and the compiler knows how the null pointer is represented. It is indeed true that the null pointer can be something besides a bit pattern of all zeroes on some machines, but in a pointer context 0 is seen as just an abbreviation for "whatever the null pointer is represented as".
However setting NULL=0 or ((void*)0) can be useful if one is not comfortable using bare zeroes in pointer-related code; it's a matter of style.
Sometimes I'm quite confused on _how_ to utilize the system at hand. It often takes someone with just the right kind of emotional and social skills to frame things in ways that a doctor will understand and take seriously. I tend to not feel emotional about my medical problems, and to not get help for serious problems because I honestly don't emote intensely about my pain and symptoms. That's just one example. It's not easy for eveyrone to utilize the system.
One thing being tried now in Canada, that I think is a great idea in cases like this, is a kind of medical coach that can help one in communicating with doctors and working through towards a solution. Perhaps he needs to find someone emotionally unattached to the problem, yet able to communicate effectively, and let that person filter communications for him. I know that this benefits me on occasion.
GX50 medium-profile machines here have had nothing but constant hard drive failures since they were installed in our lab. And don't even get me started on the suckage of trying to do any CD burning with the low-profile CD-RW drives; they have a lifespan of about 3 months. Actually, CD burning on any of the Dells in our lab, which now include regular desktop-size GX60s as well, is horribly unstable, requiring frequent reboots and incantations.
I've personally provided technical support for people who, while they can barely read, certainly can't do more than match a few common patterns seen on buttons and forms with words in their heads. And I'm not just being facetious about the typical cow-orker jokes; I'm talking about the functionally illiterate who could not read a paragraph of 3rd-grade level writing if presented to them. And these people were evidently happy enough with what they could accomplish online to continue paying for Internet accounts, though perhaps relatives set them up.
Given the ubiquitous presence of pictures and videos and audio on the 'net, this really doesn't surprise me.
Actually that story was not about Robert Johnson but rather about a different Johnson, though the two may have known each other, and the legend has deeper roots than that. Go check it out at
luckymojo.com
The item that seems most interesting to me, and the one that makes this device something between a lightweight desktop and a PDA, is the combined fact that
* it has 2 USB adapters * the USB code is based on a freely available kernel
There are some devices that have USB, but most of them only act as a USB _peripheral_. This can be a USB _host_. While it might seem more useful to use CF or SD for storage needs, the use of USB opens up the possibility of using lots of peripheral devices not usually open to PDAs, especially since designing drivers for Linux is generally understood.
Ture. But in my area, your cable service really isn't any faster after they start draconian capping (no, not after gigabytes, after about 5 minutes of high-spead downloading of something) and you aren't allowed to run servers and things, and it goes down at the drop of a hat.
Qwest DSL is a better option here, or to be more specific, Qwest DSL + VISI.COM services. If you're in the Minneapolis area you should give VISI a try if you don't needs lots of handholding, they've been wonderful and let customers do just about anything they want with the connection.
I think you misunderstand the point of that poster. That person _also_ thought that this is stupid, but he realizes that with the legal limit going so incredibly low all it takes is one drink, plus a poorly calibrated breath tester, to screw someone over. You think that they _won't_ have the car phone home and charge you with something just for even _trying_ to drive?
I would trust this lots more if I weren't aware of the calibration problems with low-end breath testers, and I doubt the expensive units will be affordable for this purpose.
Actually, the human ear has no problem with "B". The problem is that the 12 frets, or the 12 steps of the chromatic scale, stand for multiple notes. Bb is not the same as A#, and even any one of those notes actually stands for several other slightly different notes that fit with different chords in different keys.
It's all about equal temperament not matching the notes one really wants to use. Good guitarrists compensate slightly by stretching strings just a bit, but it still can't match the flexibility of a well-played fretless instrument. The 12 chromatic steps are just a convenient lie to prevent the necessity of over 30 notes per octave.
There may be such a thing as a _legal_ MLM. However, to me there is _no_ _moral_ MLM.
I don't know why I have such an illogical fear of the usual MLM schemes. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that our lives already consist of 99% marketing. One can't breathe without being reminded of something to buy. MLM organizations, even those selling legitimate products, manipulate their agents into converting friendship relationships into conditional relationships based on whether money can be made, and encourage their agents to cut themslelves off from anyone who won't buy.
The best way for anyone to get permanently on my real-life blacklist (won't communicate face-to-face, through email, or through telephone; will refuse to acknowledge your existence though you stand in front of me waving your arms) is to join an MLM and try to sell to me, and dishonor the first request I make that you never, never try to sell to me again, or even let me _hear_ your sales pitch within my presence. Friends of mine get _one_ chance to make good on this promise before being blacklisted.
Of course you don't _copy_ verbatim another resume you found. But you _must_ use the langage expected by the person who is going to read it, and for HR folks, that almost invariably means groupthink speak that can easily be scanned into a database.
In several cases I've created different resumes for the HR department, interviewer, and hiring manager, all of them definitely discussing the same things, but each one with a different focus. HR was interested in database scanning for buzzwords, the interviewer was interested in understanding my social interactions with other people, and the hiring manager was interested in the social skills + raw technical capabilities.
After this, despite several experts saying I had the best resume/application materials they'd ever seen, along with a solid technical background, it took almost two years to find another technically oriented job.
Some of it might have to do with visible disabilities that make it difficult to share space with me until you're used to it. Some of it might be due to the fact that I'm not the _best_ in the world at what I do, and neither am I an A-type alpha-male personality that so many people tend to look for these days. Yet more if it has to do with the fact that probably 75% of the "jobs" out there are for companies without a shred of collective morality or benevolence to temper greed.
But in the end, it's a fact that there just aren't many jobs out there, and those that are available just aren't desirable, and no amount of research can help you accurately represent yourself if the company in question willfully lies to you about the hiring process, or uses a poorly informed HR department to scan for technical requirements it doesn't understand. Let these companies die the death they deserve.
I think people are using "random" to describe these attacks, when they're in reality not at all random.
There is one kind I call a "vocabulary" attack which uses words selected pseudo-randomly from a dictionary.
There's another one I just call "misrepresentation". It includes key phrases and sentences from a specific type of literature, say political activism or charities.
There are indeed attacks I classify as "random" that just spew forth strings of random characters.
The danger of any of these is that eventually the pools of spam and non-spam weights will get confused. In theory one can go back to the junk box and correct false positives, which would force the filter to start disregarding anything common to the false positive and desired emails. However, I can't be alone in that my junk box gets so massive that I just don't have time to do this regularly, and I can't go through every last message to separate real spam from annoying but requested commercial mail that I might want to hear from again.
Fragmentation of Email into useless subsets of the whole network is where this is going. Like another poster, I have had to resort to using a whitelist for lots of my work. But I do have need to field unsolicited mail from people I haven't met, so that isn't a real solution. The only real solution, I fear, is to remove the part of the brain that makes humans selfish even to the point of destroying the systems that give them a free ride in the short term.
I saw one just yesterday that contained a list of important key sentences and phrases from the literature of common charities and political activism organizations.
In other words, if your Bayesian filter accepts those, based on your past decisions, it will detect the spam. If you reject the spam, you reject these communications as well.
Good filtering practice would dictate that one reads the junk box carefully enough to find both false positives and negatives. But the sheer bulk of mail that ends up in the junk box makes this unfeasible for many.
I have started letting these particular kinds of spam through, manually categorizing them (many words of random strings, dictionary vocabulary attack, positive phrase attack) in the hopes that filtering technology will soon advance to the point where these can be used as inputs to a more intelligent system.
Of course overhauling the mail system is a prerequisite to solving any of this long-term. For once I don't mind D. J. Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 proposals. Of course there are other proposed systems, none of which has enough momentum to start a slow steady change. The end result of any non-consensus system will be to fragment the worldwide network of Email into competing, noncompatible systems that need to communicate through some kind of loophole or gateway. Back to FIDO-net days.
Unfortunately, since the people that use and hire technology experts have disconnected from each other in most companies, that acronymic crap you speak of is exactly what they're looking for, and the _only_thing that can only get you in the door for an interview with a marketroid. Once you get to that interview, the only way to get a job is to go through ten levels of bullshit interviews involving acronym-groupthink-speak until you finally get to someone technically inclined. Then _that_ person will hold your obviously pandering answers to the previous stages against you.
What it comes down to is that only those who are willing to play both sides and to lie about their nature will get the most desirable jobs. Political skills have always determined the winners from the losers, those who are not alpha males must find out how to simulate alpha male qualities, enlist under the protection of an alpha male, or be cast away by society.
Any woman who plays that little game (and there are many) is only ever going to be approached by the overconfident, disrespectful assmunches of the world, the very kind that doesn't respect the "fact" that she's taken, and yet will manage to bitch about it when she's dumped for some new novelty of the week. Such a woman is not worth my time or attention.
Am I the only one here that feels the first thing one should do with a major-brand laptop or desktop is wipe it clean and reinstall an operating system from scratch, without all the silly support bells and whistles they try to include as a "feature"?
More often than not these "tools" are buggy or fail to provide any actual benefit over calling the manufacturer or a local service center, and serve the additional purpose of making tech support outside the manufacturer difficult because things aren't where one would expect on a stock install.
In my daily work I've found Dreamweaver MX to be quite buggy and unstable even running natively on Windows, and I still manage to "depend" on in meaning that it's the first application I reach for. Of course, productive work on websites doesn't depend on using such a tool, and if it fails I can always use a vi-alike.
Actually a good 40%-50% of the newly produced pop music seems to use blatantly obvious autotuning. The other 50% probably contains some of the software you're talking about. But most of that first 40%-50% of music wasn't _meant_ to be obvious to the listener. There are just too many subtle, purposeful uses of micro-pitch in a good artist's performance for autotune to be a good idea in most cases. Of course I hate the "produced sound" in general, preferring high-quality live recordings of good performances.
I can certainly detect more than the most blatant style-driven hard tune algorithms, though. Lots of people seem to mix a very small amount of autotuned track in with a natural track, and to selectively use it during portions of a vocal.
But that very fact makes it stick out. It's like one can sense the "irregularity of irregularities" when there are natural and autotuned portions, even with a really dry mix between autotune and original.
Anyone who thinks that notes can and should be limited to the 12 chromatic pitches of the equal-tempered music system is full of crap. Read a good book on the history of tuning systems. I can detect an autotune-processed track within seconds of hearing it, due to the utter piano-like lack of pitch sensitivity and expression.
The saddest of sad is when you hear autotune processing on the voice of an artist who understands how to use the many subtleties of pitch, yet bows to the record company execs by submitting to the autotuner.
How about a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science? Or a Bachelor of Science in Music? I managed to do the second.
At many schools the school one gets the degree from is _not_ linked to the core curriculum one studies. It just changes the balance of general education courses.
Sounds suspiciously like FUD to me . . .
on
Flaming Cellphones
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Oh, so this information just came from _somewhere_ and the replacement battery was from a _flea market_?
I could see this being true, but I could just as easily see it as a story planted by the phone manufacturer for one of two purposes:
To keep selling official batteries at higher markup
To hide the fact that there's some kind of heat management flaw in the company's product
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love something like the Alphasmart Dana except in clamshell style. Doesn't need to be incredibly tiny, just as big as a small keyboard.
Unfortunately, even if I liked the size of this device, it costs around $600. Smaller and cheaper than a laptop, my butt. I'm currently using a used IBM T21 laptop that cost $425.
According to the C FAQ, this is _not_ true; there's a whole section on NULL and pointers. One can always compare against zero in a pointer context, and the compiler knows how the null pointer is represented. It is indeed true that the null pointer can be something besides a bit pattern of all zeroes on some machines, but in a pointer context 0 is seen as just an abbreviation for "whatever the null pointer is represented as".
However setting NULL=0 or ((void*)0) can be useful if one is not comfortable using bare zeroes in pointer-related code; it's a matter of style.
One thing being tried now in Canada, that I think is a great idea in cases like this, is a kind of medical coach that can help one in communicating with doctors and working through towards a solution. Perhaps he needs to find someone emotionally unattached to the problem, yet able to communicate effectively, and let that person filter communications for him. I know that this benefits me on occasion.
GX50 medium-profile machines here have had nothing but constant hard drive failures since they were installed in our lab. And don't even get me started on the suckage of trying to do any CD burning with the low-profile CD-RW drives; they have a lifespan of about 3 months. Actually, CD burning on any of the Dells in our lab, which now include regular desktop-size GX60s as well, is horribly unstable, requiring frequent reboots and incantations.
I've personally provided technical support for people who, while they can barely read, certainly can't do more than match a few common patterns seen on buttons and forms with words in their heads. And I'm not just being facetious about the typical cow-orker jokes; I'm talking about the functionally illiterate who could not read a paragraph of 3rd-grade level writing if presented to them. And these people were evidently happy enough with what they could accomplish online to continue paying for Internet accounts, though perhaps relatives set them up.
Given the ubiquitous presence of pictures and videos and audio on the 'net, this really doesn't surprise me.
Many of us not only got over this a few minutes after birth, but actively resist the brainwashing that continues to spout off about it.
Or do you think that everyone within the geographic borders of the Fascist States of America likes the way things are going?
Actually that story was not about Robert Johnson but rather about a different Johnson, though the two may have known each other, and the legend has deeper roots than that. Go check it out at luckymojo.com
The item that seems most interesting to me, and the one that makes this device something between a lightweight desktop and a PDA, is the combined fact that
* it has 2 USB adapters
* the USB code is based on a freely available kernel
There are some devices that have USB, but most of them only act as a USB _peripheral_. This can be a USB _host_. While it might seem more useful to use CF or SD for storage needs, the use of USB opens up the possibility of using lots of peripheral devices not usually open to PDAs, especially since designing drivers for Linux is generally understood.
Qwest DSL is a better option here, or to be more specific, Qwest DSL + VISI.COM services. If you're in the Minneapolis area you should give VISI a try if you don't needs lots of handholding, they've been wonderful and let customers do just about anything they want with the connection.
I think you misunderstand the point of that poster. That person _also_ thought that this is stupid, but he realizes that with the legal limit going so incredibly low all it takes is one drink, plus a poorly calibrated breath tester, to screw someone over. You think that they _won't_ have the car phone home and charge you with something just for even _trying_ to drive?
I would trust this lots more if I weren't aware of the calibration problems with low-end breath testers, and I doubt the expensive units will be affordable for this purpose.
Actually, the human ear has no problem with "B". The problem is that the 12 frets, or the 12 steps of the chromatic scale, stand for multiple notes. Bb is not the same as A#, and even any one of those notes actually stands for several other slightly different notes that fit with different chords in different keys.
It's all about equal temperament not matching the notes one really wants to use. Good guitarrists compensate slightly by stretching strings just a bit, but it still can't match the flexibility of a well-played fretless instrument. The 12 chromatic steps are just a convenient lie to prevent the necessity of over 30 notes per octave.
There may be such a thing as a _legal_ MLM. However, to me there is _no_ _moral_ MLM.
I don't know why I have such an illogical fear of the usual MLM schemes. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that our lives already consist of 99% marketing. One can't breathe without being reminded of something to buy. MLM organizations, even those selling legitimate products, manipulate their agents into converting friendship relationships into conditional relationships based on whether money can be made, and encourage their agents to cut themslelves off from anyone who won't buy.
The best way for anyone to get permanently on my real-life blacklist (won't communicate face-to-face, through email, or through telephone; will refuse to acknowledge your existence though you stand in front of me waving your arms) is to join an MLM and try to sell to me, and dishonor the first request I make that you never, never try to sell to me again, or even let me _hear_ your sales pitch within my presence. Friends of mine get _one_ chance to make good on this promise before being blacklisted.
Y'know, not everyone with Tourette's Syndrome swears up a storm. Educate yourself.
Of course you don't _copy_ verbatim another resume you found. But you _must_ use the langage expected by the person who is going to read it, and for HR folks, that almost invariably means groupthink speak that can easily be scanned into a database.
In several cases I've created different resumes for the HR department, interviewer, and hiring manager, all of them definitely discussing the same things, but each one with a different focus. HR was interested in database scanning for buzzwords, the interviewer was interested in understanding my social interactions with other people, and the hiring manager was interested in the social skills + raw technical capabilities.
After this, despite several experts saying I had the best resume/application materials they'd ever seen, along with a solid technical background, it took almost two years to find another technically oriented job.
Some of it might have to do with visible disabilities that make it difficult to share space with me until you're used to it. Some of it might be due to the fact that I'm not the _best_ in the world at what I do, and neither am I an A-type alpha-male personality that so many people tend to look for these days. Yet more if it has to do with the fact that probably 75% of the "jobs" out there are for companies without a shred of collective morality or benevolence to temper greed.
But in the end, it's a fact that there just aren't many jobs out there, and those that are available just aren't desirable, and no amount of research can help you accurately represent yourself if the company in question willfully lies to you about the hiring process, or uses a poorly informed HR department to scan for technical requirements it doesn't understand. Let these companies die the death they deserve.
I think people are using "random" to describe these attacks, when they're in reality not at all random.
There is one kind I call a "vocabulary" attack which uses words selected pseudo-randomly from a dictionary.
There's another one I just call "misrepresentation". It includes key phrases and sentences from a specific type of literature, say political activism or charities.
There are indeed attacks I classify as "random" that just spew forth strings of random characters.
The danger of any of these is that eventually the pools of spam and non-spam weights will get confused. In theory one can go back to the junk box and correct false positives, which would force the filter to start disregarding anything common to the false positive and desired emails. However, I can't be alone in that my junk box gets so massive that I just don't have time to do this regularly, and I can't go through every last message to separate real spam from annoying but requested commercial mail that I might want to hear from again.
Fragmentation of Email into useless subsets of the whole network is where this is going. Like another poster, I have had to resort to using a whitelist for lots of my work. But I do have need to field unsolicited mail from people I haven't met, so that isn't a real solution. The only real solution, I fear, is to remove the part of the brain that makes humans selfish even to the point of destroying the systems that give them a free ride in the short term.
I saw one just yesterday that contained a list of important key sentences and phrases from the literature of common charities and political activism organizations.
In other words, if your Bayesian filter accepts those, based on your past decisions, it will detect the spam. If you reject the spam, you reject these communications as well.
Good filtering practice would dictate that one reads the junk box carefully enough to find both false positives and negatives. But the sheer bulk of mail that ends up in the junk box makes this unfeasible for many.
I have started letting these particular kinds of spam through, manually categorizing them (many words of random strings, dictionary vocabulary attack, positive phrase attack) in the hopes that filtering technology will soon advance to the point where these can be used as inputs to a more intelligent system.
Of course overhauling the mail system is a prerequisite to solving any of this long-term. For once I don't mind D. J. Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 proposals. Of course there are other proposed systems, none of which has enough momentum to start a slow steady change. The end result of any non-consensus system will be to fragment the worldwide network of Email into competing, noncompatible systems that need to communicate through some kind of loophole or gateway. Back to FIDO-net days.
What it comes down to is that only those who are willing to play both sides and to lie about their nature will get the most desirable jobs. Political skills have always determined the winners from the losers, those who are not alpha males must find out how to simulate alpha male qualities, enlist under the protection of an alpha male, or be cast away by society.
Any woman who plays that little game (and there are many) is only ever going to be approached by the overconfident, disrespectful assmunches of the world, the very kind that doesn't respect the "fact" that she's taken, and yet will manage to bitch about it when she's dumped for some new novelty of the week. Such a woman is not worth my time or attention.
Am I the only one here that feels the first thing one should do with a major-brand laptop or desktop is wipe it clean and reinstall an operating system from scratch, without all the silly support bells and whistles they try to include as a "feature"?
More often than not these "tools" are buggy or fail to provide any actual benefit over calling the manufacturer or a local service center, and serve the additional purpose of making tech support outside the manufacturer difficult because things aren't where one would expect on a stock install.
In my daily work I've found Dreamweaver MX to be quite buggy and unstable even running natively on Windows, and I still manage to "depend" on in meaning that it's the first application I reach for. Of course, productive work on websites doesn't depend on using such a tool, and if it fails I can always use a vi-alike.
Actually a good 40%-50% of the newly produced pop music seems to use blatantly obvious autotuning. The other 50% probably contains some of the software you're talking about. But most of that first 40%-50% of music wasn't _meant_ to be obvious to the listener. There are just too many subtle, purposeful uses of micro-pitch in a good artist's performance for autotune to be a good idea in most cases. Of course I hate the "produced sound" in general, preferring high-quality live recordings of good performances.
I can certainly detect more than the most blatant style-driven hard tune algorithms, though. Lots of people seem to mix a very small amount of autotuned track in with a natural track, and to selectively use it during portions of a vocal.
But that very fact makes it stick out. It's like one can sense the "irregularity of irregularities" when there are natural and autotuned portions, even with a really dry mix between autotune and original.
Anyone who thinks that notes can and should be limited to the 12 chromatic pitches of the equal-tempered music system is full of crap. Read a good book on the history of tuning systems. I can detect an autotune-processed track within seconds of hearing it, due to the utter piano-like lack of pitch sensitivity and expression.
The saddest of sad is when you hear autotune processing on the voice of an artist who understands how to use the many subtleties of pitch, yet bows to the record company execs by submitting to the autotuner.
How about a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science? Or a Bachelor of Science in Music? I managed to do the second.
At many schools the school one gets the degree from is _not_ linked to the core curriculum one studies. It just changes the balance of general education courses.
I could see this being true, but I could just as easily see it as a story planted by the phone manufacturer for one of two purposes:
But in the _real_ world, the employer can spend so much time and money making life difficult that it would have been better to be fired.