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.

But, this being Slashdot, everyone knows that already.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

./ 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."