I'm looking for skilled java engineers. Are you talented, and looking for stable work? My company had its most profitable year yet in 2009, and is way behind on hiring. Please contact me here, and I'll work to get you into our interviewing process.

Silicon Valley area (Foster City).

I recently got trashed, extensively, for a comment I made that people were crazy to trust the house in online poker games. People were absolutely sure that such things did not and would not happen.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26563848/

In a previous journal entry, I mentioned my goal of achieving with a single post every moderation, at the time there were 8:
Insightful Offtopic Interesting Flamebait Funny Troll Informative Redundant
since then they've added Underrated / Overrated.

I recently reached a new high with 6 different moderations.

there is no question, posted to Making Statements With Video Games, has been moderated Offtopic (-1).
there is no question, posted to Making Statements With Video Games, has been moderated Insightful (+1).
there is no question, posted to Making Statements With Video Games, has been moderated Interesting (+1).
there is no question, posted to Making Statements With Video Games, has been moderated Troll (-1).
there is no question, posted to Making Statements With Video Games, has been moderated Flamebait (-1).
there is no question, posted to Making Statements With Video Games, has been moderated Underrated (+1).

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=656913&cid=24744813/

I have never been tempted to go for a first post, until now.

http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=313513&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=20811157

I saw the 10th anniversary discussion pop up, with no comments, as I was checking email this morning. I've never even seen a first post opportunity before. I've never gone for it. And here was the chance to get the 10th anniversary first post.

I had only seconds to think. What would I say? How could I craft the perfect post?

I couldn't. I had to go for something simple, short, quick to type.

I went for a post that would:
a) seem completely banal.
b) show the 'typical' slashdot bravado about lower user nums being better.
c) NOT mention the first post. That was a tough call, but I thought it would be better to seem as if I didn't care about such a 'monumental' accomplishment. As though I were just posting because I thought my comment were actually germane to the conversation.

All in all, for 5 seconds of thought, I feel like it came off ok. If I'd had more time I would have tried to craft something more interesting, but I had no idea this was coming up.

Happened to notice this post, but it was too old to reply:

  by eddy the lip (20794) Alter Relationship on Mon Aug 15, '05 03:28 PM (#13326226)

(sorry, been away from slashdot for a few days, or I would have replied sooner).

You got me on that one - I never did this myself. A friend way back in the day claimed to have jacked his TRS-80 up to 1MB. Now, this was many years ago, when people actually used the TRS-80 for other than geek nostalgia value, so I may be misremembering (or have been outright duped. I was young. It could happen....) He bragged to me about it 'cause I was stuck with the standard 32KB.

A bit of googling didn't turn up anything that would substantiate the viability of the claim. And now I have an unresolved mystery from my youth to contend with. Thanks a lot ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80 (the processor in the TRS-80)

16 bit address registers + 8 bit data = 64k bytes memory max.
Hence your friend with the 1MB was lying.
Well, maybe he managed to solder on a MB chip, but the TRS-80 couldn't have used it.

After three successful years, Notacon's 2007 event will also be host to Blockparty, a North American demoparty. In the past, Notacon has tackled its goal of being a creativity-oriented technology event by pushing themes of art, music, history, communication, community, and hacker culture. This year, there'll be talks from some of the biggest names in the demo scene, competitions, and even more great prizes. Also in the works is a talk given by a dead guy. (His sense of humor would totally approve.) There's a ham radio station planned for this year, plus the streaming-audio Notacon Radio. Oh yes, bring your contraptions for Anything but Ethernet, my absurd networking contest.

Now here's what makes it all interesting: Notacon just announced the first three speakers for the 2007 event, but the Call for Proposals is still open. Notacon's all about giving interesting ideas a venue, so if you have something to contribute to the milieu, write it up! Submit it! Do it today!

A problem I've found is that when I want to purchase or otherwise invest myself into some product or service, I want to know what others think about it. Especially for those things that are offered be multiple sources. It's so hard to find reviews that are by techies and for techies; a google search of "[productName] reviews" yields link farms and the ever-so-useless CNet reviews and epinions sites.

I've got a Blackberry 7100i from Nextel and am in the market for a bluetooth headset for it. Has anyone out there got any recommendations or comparisons from actual use?

_______________________________

Are you a Democrat, Republican or Southerner?

Here is a little test that will help you decide.

The answer can be found by posing the following question:

You're walking down a deserted street with your wife and two small children.

Suddenly, an Islamic Terrorist with a huge knife comes around the corner,

locks eyes with you, praises Allah, raises the knife, and charges at you.

You are carrying a Glock cal 40, and you are an expert shot.

You have mere seconds before he reaches you and your family. What do you do?

Democrat's Answer:

Well, that's not enough information to answer the question!

Does the man look poor! Or oppressed?

Have I ever done anything to him that would inspire him to attack?

Could we run away?

What does my wife think?

What about the kids?

Could I possibly swing the gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand?

What does the law say about this situation?

Does the Glock have appropriate safety built into it?

Why am I carrying a loaded gun anyway, and what kind of message does this send
to society and to my children?

Is it possible he'd be happy with just killing me?

Does he definitely want to kill me, or would he be content just to wound me?

If I were to grab his knees and hold on, could my family get away while
he was stabbing me?

Should I call 9-1-1?

Why is this street so deserted?

We need to raise taxes, have a paint and weed day and make this happier,
healthier street that would discourage such behavior.
This is all so confusing! I need to debate this withsome friends for few
days and try to come to a consensus.

Republican's Answer: BANG!

Southerner's Answer:

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! click.....

                        (sounds of reloading).

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! click

Daughter: "Nice grouping, Daddy! Were those the Winchester Silver Tips or Hollow Points?

Son: Can I shoot the next one!

Wife: You ain't taking that to the Taxidermist!

Alexander Ratushnyak's most recent (09/10/2006) Hutter Prize program purports a nearly 6% increase in compression of the first 100M of Wikipedia over the prize baseline. I've verified this with my own system running his program. If this withstands the 30-day comment period then this represents a very good start for the Hutter Prize, which was active for just a month before this entry. Congratulations are premature as yet but I just wanted to share some of the potentially good news with people. If you have any kind of financial means I really urge you to contribute to this prize fund. It is truly the most crucial technology prize of all due to the fact that it represents a proven sound way of advancing artificial intelligence -- a discipline with the potential to advance all other knowledge.

If you're wondering why I friended you, it's usually that you posted something I found interesting, and I don't want to trust the moderators to interesting your other posts.

Please read the alert here. The Broadcast Flag is back, this time as a WIPO treaty, and if you don't speak up, it'll be decided by bureaucrats without any democratic input at all.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&cid=14558550 I don't see a reason for the negative moderation. I'd appreciate if anyone with mod points would help fix this.

Bruce

Slashdot user rodgster sent me 1000 slashdot subscription pages because he likes my comments. Thanks, rodgster!

For anyone interested, squish has changed quite a bit since I last journaled. I have worked on the layout to make it more friendly for 800x600 resolution. It also no longer requires accepting an applet signature, which seemed to scare some people.

http://ptth.net/squish/

Please journal comments here.

There is now a how to play page linked from the main page.

Note: requires java 5. If you don't have Java 5 installed and usable from your browser, you'll get a class loader error in your java console, or an applet loading failure. I'm interested in pretty much any other bug reports, as there is nothing I can do about how Sun handles these errors (I've had no error reports so far that did not trace back to not having Java 5 installed & set up to be used from the browser).