Do you care to share what mp3 players you use and what you like best about them?

Also, if you're in the US, you can get a ton of audiobooks to listen to for free at your local library. If they don't have them at your local branch, they can probably get them via inter-library loan. I've listened to tons of books this way.

Libravox is nice, and I fully support the idea. But I find many of the readers difficult to listen to over a long book - and I'm sure my own reading would be hard for others to hear as well. There's a reason professional readers like Scott Brick, George Guidall, James Delotel, Lloyd James, and Jim Dale, are popular and hopefully well-paid. They're essentially actors and doing a lot more than just reading words off the page.

It sounds like they're vending accessories like mice and keyboards, rather than internal components like memory and such.

I suspect it's pretty easy for the company and the vendor to agree in advance to a list of parts/accessories that will be supplied and what the prices will be.

If Facebook is letting the vendor screw them, then that's their stupidity to allow that.

If they're smart, they probably do some kind of vendor managed inventory and just like the way soda machines are stocked, some dude from the computer parts supply place comes in and makes sure its full of stuff. The vendor owns the inventory and they have an incentive to keep it stocked so that there's product to be bought. I think office supply companies like Staples and Office Max offer services like this for traditional office supplies.

The dumb way would be to have someone in IT manage the vending machine and spending their time ordering things in ones and twos to keep the machine stocked.

Have you actually spent time with government employees?

Because if what you say is true ("Politicians bribe government workers in exchange for votes with benefits") then there wold be very few right-wingers in government jobs. They'd all be left-wingers because that's the side that's not trying to take away their pay and benefits.

However, in any group of government workers I've been around, it's generally split pretty evenly. Unless I'm in a rural area, then they tend to be mostly right-wing.

But don't forget that pretty much any numerical analysis will take place on a computer with a limited ability to represent floating point numbers. There will be a diminishing point of returns when decreasing dt when the increased precision from the smaller dt is eaten up by the increased errors in the floating point numbers.

One of my favorite descriptions of this problem comes from RW Hamming's book, "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers": http://books.google.com/books/about/Numerical_Methods_for_Scientists_and_Eng.html?id=Y3YSCmWBVwoC

Everyone I know, and I mean EVERYONE, will be really shocked to find out I'm not a computer geek. However, I'm not a computer, at least not of the electromechanical kind with cores.

But to follow your analogy, it generally takes much less time to cut a piece of meat than it does to chew it. Under your model, the hands-core spends a lot of time idling while it's waiting for the mouth-core to finish. That's probably okay if the only thing you're doing is eating meat. But there are probably other foods on that plate, and beverages in a glass not far from the plate, and a napkin you may wish to dab your mouth with between bites. But your hands-core is occupied, holding the knife and fork and doing nothing, so you have to waste cycles putting down the knife and fork when you decide you want a drink or a piece of bread.

Generally it's more efficient to bring a whole chunk of memory into the cache all at once (cutting the meat up at once) than it is to keep going out to memory (or disk) to get your data one byte at a time.

The problem here is that optimality is not an absolute condition, and a good engineer should know that.

If you're trying to optimize how much time you spend cutting up your meat so you can spend more time doing other things, then cutting it up all at once is the optimal choice. But to talk about any option being an optimal one, you have to also factor in all the conditions and constraints.

Maybe in a European or American setting, it's optimal for avoiding the derision of your peers to cut your meat one bite at a time. But if you're in Japan, you should generally serve your guests food that is already cut up and able to be eaten with chopsticks (or soft enough to cut with chopsticks).

The conditions and constraints matter and there is very rarely a single optimal solution that applies in all conditions and satisfies all constraints. People who don't recognize this, while passing themselves off as competent, cause enormous messes, and a real engineer has to clean up after them instead of doing actual work.

I was only there for 2 weeks for a special session held on the MIT campus in January. However, almost every time I went to the Mead Hall or the Cambridge Brewing Company, they were busy and had a long wait for a table. The exception was late one Sunday evening.

Several of the people I talked to were MIT students (or at least claimed to be - I didn't ask to see IDs), so there are some of them who are getting out. But I suppose a student who doesn't go out much wouldn't see the people who did, and would only see the students who don't go out much either.

Yes - I've been on slashdot for many years, so I know what kind of site it's been.

I've been plugged into things of a geek nature for quite a long time and with a fair amount of breadth and this was the first I'd heard of Evernote. Nobody can keep up with every fly-by-night web service that pops up and then has security problems.

I'm just suggesting that if you're writing about something that is not as well known as Microsoft, Twitter, etc., and if your goal is to be a good news site, then it's probably worth spending an extra 20 characters saying what something is.

And sure, anyone can Google for it, but again, if your site is funded by ad revenue, one of the dumbest thing you can do is drive people to other sites to figure out what the heck you're writing about. People only have a limited amount of time to be on teh web. If you drive them off to Google or some other site during the that time when they could be on your site and now someone else is collecting those ad revenues.

And here I was saying just last night how I wish there was an easier way to get picture of my genitals, warts and all, up into the cloud and back onto all my computers (and apparently everyone else's now).

And people say the era of specialization is over!

I only bring it up because Slashdot at least used to call itself a news site, and putting useful information like that in the summary is generally a good thing to do for a news site. "News" is often about things a person might not have a direct interest in. From a news point of view it's good to answer the basic questions of who, what, when, where, etc.

From the point of view of a site trying to derive revenue from ads, it's dumb to force people off the site to get that kind of basic information.

When people complain regularly about the declining quality of Slashdot, paying attention to little things like this can help a lot.

The summary would be much more helpful if it spent a few words explaining who/what Evernote is.

Crick may have been a brilliant microbiologist, but he certainly doesn't know shit about business.

Well, to be fair to Dr. Crick, he's been dead since 2004, so knowing much of anything is probably a pretty big challenge for him.

I think it was Steinbeck who said: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

In the US, speed-dial will probably not be of much help. When my friend was arrested, they took her phone and stored it with her personal property and did not allow her to access it, even to get a needed phone number.