simc

Sailor, Platinum and Pilot are the big three Japanese brands. You can generally get them outside of Japan but there might be Japan exclusives and the prices might be better in Japan.

SAIC also screwed up the FBI's Virtual Case File, NSA's Trailblazer, New York's CityTime (with a extra helping of fraud thrown in). It would be interesting to hear of any software project they did do which was not a multi hundred million dollar software engineering disaster.

Make a contract with yourself. Set the times of the day when you shouldn't be screwing around on the internet. Get a program that takes screenshots of what is on your monitor every ten minutes or so. At the end of the day use those screenshots to estimate how much you spent screwing around on the internet inside "work time". For each hour spent, donate $10 (or more) to a hated poltical candiate's run for president. For example, Sarah Palin for President 2012.

If you are giving Sarah more than $100 each week, I think you should seek advice from a professional.

Why? Do lamas have radar dishes installed in their foreheads?

Taiwan's first election was in 1996, though there was very gradual political reform from 1978 onwards. Before that the Guomindang Party ruled Taiwan using the sort of party-state capitalist Leninist system that the Chinese Communist Party rules mainland China with today.

Yeah, i've been to Beijing and people don't really seem to drive in lanes there. It would be really nice if they could get this to work, but it seems a bit utopian.

2004 you mean.

Presumably they are trying to tell us that the better way is the "Appistry® CloudIQ® Platform".

I watch Al Jazeera English sometimes and IMHO it is better than CNN International and nearly as good as BBC World.

Slapping a 25% tariff on Chinese imports would be a terrible move from a diplomatic point of view. The CCP's main pillars of legitimacy are the economy and protecting national honour. If the U.S. put a 25% tariff on Chinese imports the CCP would likely hit back hard or else they would look weak to the Chinese public. Mr Krugman should think of who lends the money to pay for U.S. deficits.

Actually, I looked at the site again today and they said that they have fixed that. I guess if you don't hear it then it has been fixed.

Hurrah for white (or brown) noise. If you are in an environment that is full of chat and conversation its great for blocking all that out. You can still hear that people are talking , but you can't understand what they are saying so you can more easily block it out. Wonderful if you are a bit of an introvert and want a little bit of mental isolation in cubeland, or even worse, an open plan office.

The problem with the SimplyNoise site is that the track only lasts 30 seconds or so and then repeats, so every 30 seconds you hear an annoying click. Instead, download Audacity which can generate a brown noise track as long as you want. I have a 30 minute brown noise track as an MP3 which I have on repeat.

The facts can speak for themselves. Most laypeople don't have the time or training to make sense of them, so depend on reputation. So who would you trust, a reputable scientist or a partisan crackpot?

Ian Wishart also publishes a magazine called "Investigate" which instead of doing investigative journalism publishes rumors and exaggerations. On the front cover of his magazine once he claimed to have the "smoking gun" that the Prime Ministers' husband was gay. The "evidence" was a photograph of him kissing somebody who was a close relative, so no he wasn't gay.

PostgreSQL was not an object-oriented database, it was an object-relational database. Despite not living up to some people's exceptions that that it would replace the relational database object-oriented databases were not a "huge failure". They are useful for applications where relational databases were not suitable, for example CAD (as mentioned in the article).

Keep your hands off his Microsoft shares Bill Gates.

> I hate the F-Lock key with a passion. I haven't managed to hit f-lock by accident. The older Microsoft keyboards didn't remember the f-lock state between reboots. THAT was annoying.

It's not coming to New Zealand either. You have to wonder why they are excluding a substantial portion of the english speaking world.

Well, the first two actually did have longer titles:

-Walden; or, Life in the Woods

-An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

No, that chapter is not from Concepts, Techniques, and Models but most of the programming models mentioned in that PDF are covered in more depth in CTM.

SQL is popular because it was the query language that was available in the Oracle and IBM relational databases, which were the first relational database products to come to market. SQL subsequently became an ISO standard. Eventually all relational database vendors switched to SQL. Other DBMSs (Ingres, Informix, Postgres) originally used QUEL which was thought by many to be superior to SQL eventually switched as SQL became dominant/the standard. (Although QUEL can still be used with Ingres). There may be other reasons, but I think that in large part these are the reasons why SQL is dominant today.

Relational databases became popular because the declarative high level query language was less time consuming to write queries in than earlier non-relational database.

SQL is far from the perfect query language though. It's syntax is often bizarre and confounding, and has many non relational extensions (column ordering, duplicate tuples in a relation).

Well, I have had a similar problem. I haven't beaten it but here are some things I have found helps:

1) Exercise: spending time going running or cycling helps relax and really makes you feel like you have more energy for other things.

2) Being Organised: When you are organised you know what has to be done by when and what you can start working on right now. I find this lowers the amount of energy required to get started. A TODO list plus calender are probably enough but more high powered systems like GTD also might be worth considering.

3) Embrace your fears, create safety: In my experience this is the root cause of procrastination. In my case it is the fear of failure, so we try to avoid the experience temporarily be engaging in other activities that don't remind us of our fear. This is covered in "The Now Habit", in which is called "creating safety". You might also might consider looking at something called "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy" which provides strategies for accepting which is aimed at overcoming "experiential avoidance". There is a good self help workbook "Get out of your mind and into your life".

4) Internet blocker: I was unhappy with with Leechblock as its approach was a bit authoritarian. I wrote a firefox extention that made me type in "this browsing is for the purpose of completing my degree" or "i have worked hard and deserve a break", which unlocks the internet for 20 minutes. I can still browse the internet as much as I want but this helps remind me that some sorts of browsing can wait. It helps but I still don't win constantly (right now for instance).

5) Time off, sharpen the saw, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. You could combine this with 1) and take up a sport, running, cycling, yoga, tai chi, etc. "The Now Habit" recommends scheduling free time to look forward to after your work is done.

I am planning to put it up, but it is basically does what I want it to now so I am not going to put a lot effort into it to go the extra mile for consumer grade usability. You have to create a pcx file for every question/answer card, which makes it a bit difficult to use if you can't program a script to render them from a csv file. I was thinking of putting the program up with a couple of premade decks like remembering the kanji and perhaps some other textbooks.

I'm a serious student of Chinese. Would I pay for this? Maybe if it was cheap, but probably not. The stroke order thing is useful, and that is the only reason i'd use it. It just revealed to me the while I was writing the strokes for 我 in the right order I was writing the first stroke the wrong way, which was interesting I guess. However, your stroke order for 好 seems wrong (the woman radical upward vertical stroke, should come before the horizontal, according to Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1).

However now I'm not a absolute beginner any more so I have a reasonably good intuition about stroke order, but if I write them in the wrong order I guess I don't really care very much.There are already many good spaced repetition programs like Anki, which are free. I've implemented my own system based of Leitner flashcards for the Nintendo DS (I haven't released it), which is what I use.

I think this guy shows that pursuing what you love is available to everyone, even to poor Chinese peasants. His life might not be profitable one, but it is certainly a life well lived.