Unfortunately, he's not a tenth the deep thinker he thinks he is, but he nonetheless gets put on some sort of pedestal by the free software community. Fetchmail isn't THAT cool folks.
Power losses are too great to ship electricity over very far distances. It makes cross-continental power delivery very expensive and inefficient.
A more-interconnected electricity grid will likely be one that is even less stable.
There is a cure for all of this, in two parts: regulation and decentralization. Electricity regulation worked much better than the current insane system. Ask California and now the Northeast for details. Decentralization allows for waste heat from power generation to be used for heating, improving efficiency (i.e. your office building could heat & provide power for itself with a small on-site plant). Solar and wind (but esp. solar) can be easily added to residential buildings, further insulating homes from grid instability.
More grids, more massive centralized facilities, less regulation: big power problems in the future. Guaranteed. Trying to do this on a world wide basis is general idiocy.
They've actually come up with yet another way to degrade and infantilize high school age children. Kids in high school are just a few years from becoming full members of society - driving, voting, military service, etc. Why don't we try treating them as such? Why not reconsider what's wrong with school culture and try to change it to promote better behavior? Naww...just use technology instead!
None of the above dude. Not all of us work in software - hell, I've been carefully avoiding applying to software engineering jobs because of shit like this.
However, the exportation of white-collar middle-class software jobs affects all of us who are white-collar middle-class since we could be next...
More than that dude. Grover Norquist heads a project to place a memorial to Ronald Reagan IN EVERY COUNTY in the US. Yup, Reagan is the new Lenin, who would've guessed?
uh, not quite. Most of the social spending is non-discretionary, things like Social Security. The military budget devours half of the discretionary budget, starving the government of funds for things like public health, education, and infrastructure.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...
Re:Fantastic! This will come in eh...'handy' for:
on
Swiping Out Cancer
·
· Score: 1
The wonderful Molly Ivins compared a mammogram to laying on a cement floor, placing a sheet of plywood on your chest, and having a large friend walk over it.
Seriously, ditching caffeine last year has had many benefits: more energy, better concentration, easier time sleeping, and more restful sleep. Plus no frantic lunges for the mug when those caffeine deprivation headaches set in.
These days I'll brew up strong decaf (to make up for the flavor loss from decaffeination), herbal tea (roibos, yum), and decaf black tea. I save those wonderful espressos, cappuccinos, etc. for those times when I'm terribly exhausted, at which point the caffeine has a big big effect since the addiction's gone. Or I'll drink a mate for a similar kick.
Globalization seeks infinite mobility of capital. Labor is screwed, since workers can't follow capital and jobs.
India will continue to grow for sometime until wages increase, then they will be shafted as their jobs are exported to Uganda or Peru or somewhere where wages are cheaper, and they will follow the US into its downward spiral.
Globalization as it exists is designed to maximize profits for US-based multinational firms. At last, the middle-class white collar folks (like me) are feeling the pinch. I don't know what the solution is, but I guarantee it's going to get a lot worse for the US worker before it gets better...
Expect a serious decline in living standards in the US over the next 10-20 years if nothing is done.
I was in a similar position...I was using Linux to run a laser tweezer setup in our small research group. Linux was such a pain - inconsistent libraries, poor support, flaky drivers unsupported by vendors, etc.
I switched to Windows 2000 Pro for the vastly superior support for data acquisition hardware, framegrabbers, and so on. Along the way I switched from doing GUI stuff in wxWindows/C++ to Matlab. The GUI stuff in Matlab 6.x is pretty good. It's got a bigger learning curve than LabView but it can also be used to implement much of your data analysis as well, with its vast libraries of mathematical functions and decent performance.
With the new hardware coming out, our lab now has a standing policy to only purchase items with USB or FireWire interfaces whenever possible, so the PCs don't even need to be opened up anymore. These drivers are rarely if ever available for Linux.
Use whatever makes your lab the most productive. Standard lab software like LabView, Matlab, and Mathematica are a safe way to implement software since they're so popular and they're more efficient and productive than C/C++ or VB. If you need high performance computing, then go consider F90, C++, etc., but instrumentation should never be controlled like that. You need real time? Buy a real time board.
Justly acclaimed for his lucid biography of physicist I. I. Rabi, Rigden here shifts his focus from person to problem, chronicling how one enduring conundrum--that of explaining the element hydrogen--has challenged two centuries of brilliant scientists. Beginning with the British chemist William Prout's pioneering hypothesis defining hydrogen as nature's fundamental building block, Rigden recounts episode after episode in which the mysteries of the simplest element--a bare proton and electron--have yielded their secrets to intellectually daring and resourceful researchers. In the process, he clarifies for general readers the nature of the scientific enterprise, in which elegant theories must meet the test of empirical verification. Nor does Rigden neglect the often-quirky personalities of the humans who frame the theories and conduct the experiments: we share, for example, in the frivolous musical ditties composed by Bloch and in the irreverent jokes circulated about Dirac. Readers will marvel that in its very first square, the periodic table holds so much science, so much history, so much humanity.
The average person is also not prepared to shoot another person dead, which is of course the threat behind a gun. A huge percentage of cops that are shot are shot with their own guns, even more for homeowners in home invasions.
I've found the random, cobbled together nature of the Linux kernel to be irritating. I don't find it to be well-engineered as a whole, and development seems extremely haphazard. How many USB interfaces were there??
The BSD's are also free, run the same software, have rational development models, and while there isn't a profusion of distributions, the ones that exist are extremely easy to customize and very simple to maintain. Linux does have mindshare though...perhaps it's another example of the less-well-made product beating out the superior ones by virtue of marketing.
I've got an HP 842c deskjet here at home, which has been running 3 years without any trouble whatsoever. At work I use an HP 2100M Laserjet, which also runs flawlessly.
My brother's been through 2 Lexmark, 1 Epson, and is now on a Canon inkjet in 3 years. He finally bought a 10 year old HP laserjet and hasn't had any trouble since...
From the article: "If foreign countries specialize in high-skilled areas where we have an advantage, we could be worse off," says Harvard University economist Robert Z. Lawrence, a prominent free-trade advocate. "I still have faith that globalization will make us better off, but it's no more than faith."
There you have it - a clear admittance that free trade globalization as it is currently practiced is based on groundless faith.
The results of this will be a global race to the bottom - once jobs in India & China get too expensive, they'll switch to Chile & Tibet, or wherever. Same goes with manufacturing jobs. The countries with the least wages, standards of living, health care, worker benefits, environmental standards, and interest in corporate affairs win the jobs. Wealth gets enormously concentrated, class and racial divisions are exacerbated, and democracies die. The vast majority of us get fucked.
What is human labor worth? Why should jobs be as transferable as, say, a bushel of wheat? Is this really the most just way to encourage the development of other countries? What sort of society are we creating when we convince people (like me) to get their PhDs, get educated, and then pursue governmental policies to get rid of our livelihoods?
The only ones who profit under this system are the transnational corporations and the politicians they own. This course wrecks societies and is destroying the environmental health of the planet, which is the ultimate source of wealth. 50 years, tops, before it all implodes.
Re:So stop voting for higher taxes.
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 2, Troll
Do you even know how many Fortune 100 companies don't even pay income taxes anymore? And how many of them get rebates anyway? Overtaxation is hardly a problem for US companies - the problem is boundless greed and a capitalistic system that owes nothing to the communities and workers that make profits for the small cadre of owners.
And fuck your flat tax - go read up on the declining marginal utility of money and think again.
Re:Just Like City to Suburb, Only International
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think those who are threatened have to either get more competetive (i.e. work cheaper) or move overseas
Two problems with your two solutions: 1) everyone trying to work cheaper destroys our standard of living and causes a global race to the bottom. 2) you cannot move overseas easily - corporations can, you can't. The lack of mobility of labor is one of the major flaws in theories of global trade as it is practiced today.
Too bad the author is no good
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've read it. It's amusing. However, Philip Kaplan's writing is flat out the worst part of the book.
How many times can you read about a company and have the comments boil down to "they were dumb, they went out of business"? That's pretty much the outer limits of Kaplan's critical and analytic skills. The whole dot-com boom & bust phenomena (which so many/. posters bought into) is deserving of much more thought and research than went into this little one off, quick buck, mindless catalog of failures.
The book gets real dull. Fortunately it's short. Kaplan, next time get a ghostwriter. Heck, how about an interview with megalomaniac ESR on his old essay "musings on sudden wealth" now that VA Linux has essentially gone tits up.
I once worked there - it's an engineering country club. All employees arrive at 8:00, the all dash for the door at 4:30. Since it's an FFRDC, it's all government/defense work.
How noble, now the CEO of Xilinx only makes 400x the average Xilinx worker's salary rather than 532x, the average for CEOs. (disclaimer: that 532x is a rough memory, it's in the 500's tho)
Logging companies completely clearcut vast swaths of forest. When they bother to replant, they typically do so with monocultures - a single tree species, which must then be massively fertilized and insecticided to survive. When not clearcutting they select the tallest, straightest, healthiest trees which leads to a degradation of the tree gene pool in the area and shittier trees.
Clearcutting also results in the decimation of streams and habitat for other creatures. Trees also create rain and are the sources of forest streams through transpiration, so clearcutting is also an assault on our water resources.
Modern agriculture is a disaster. We've created a system where we put in more calories of energy into a crop than we can harvest. Simply saying that logging companies are doing 'tree farming' is really a complete condemnation of what they're doing.
It is possible to profitably harvest trees at a sustainable rate that has a negligible effect on the forest. It can even improve the forest by thinning out diseased or damaged trees. Yes, this would result in a somewhat lower supply of trees, but there are many, many methods to reduce tree usage in home construction.
1 house == 1-2 clearcut acres. Is this really the way to go???
Slashdot Mirror
This is why the BSDs exist. Stable, safe release versions, and fun, exciting dev versions.
Make the switch. It won't hurt too much, and you'll feel much better afterwards.
Much better coffee than starbucks, at least the regular stuff, I don't care for flavored coffee.
Unfortunately, he's not a tenth the deep thinker he thinks he is, but he nonetheless gets put on some sort of pedestal by the free software community. Fetchmail isn't THAT cool folks.
Power losses are too great to ship electricity over very far distances. It makes cross-continental power delivery very expensive and inefficient.
A more-interconnected electricity grid will likely be one that is even less stable.
There is a cure for all of this, in two parts: regulation and decentralization. Electricity regulation worked much better than the current insane system. Ask California and now the Northeast for details. Decentralization allows for waste heat from power generation to be used for heating, improving efficiency (i.e. your office building could heat & provide power for itself with a small on-site plant). Solar and wind (but esp. solar) can be easily added to residential buildings, further insulating homes from grid instability.
More grids, more massive centralized facilities, less regulation: big power problems in the future. Guaranteed. Trying to do this on a world wide basis is general idiocy.
They've actually come up with yet another way to degrade and infantilize high school age children. Kids in high school are just a few years from becoming full members of society - driving, voting, military service, etc. Why don't we try treating them as such? Why not reconsider what's wrong with school culture and try to change it to promote better behavior? Naww...just use technology instead!
None of the above dude. Not all of us work in software - hell, I've been carefully avoiding applying to software engineering jobs because of shit like this.
However, the exportation of white-collar middle-class software jobs affects all of us who are white-collar middle-class since we could be next...
More than that dude. Grover Norquist heads a project to place a memorial to Ronald Reagan IN EVERY COUNTY in the US. Yup, Reagan is the new Lenin, who would've guessed?
uh, not quite. Most of the social spending is non-discretionary, things like Social Security. The military budget devours half of the discretionary budget, starving the government of funds for things like public health, education, and infrastructure.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...
The wonderful Molly Ivins compared a mammogram to laying on a cement floor, placing a sheet of plywood on your chest, and having a large friend walk over it.
Seriously, ditching caffeine last year has had many benefits: more energy, better concentration, easier time sleeping, and more restful sleep. Plus no frantic lunges for the mug when those caffeine deprivation headaches set in.
These days I'll brew up strong decaf (to make up for the flavor loss from decaffeination), herbal tea (roibos, yum), and decaf black tea. I save those wonderful espressos, cappuccinos, etc. for those times when I'm terribly exhausted, at which point the caffeine has a big big effect since the addiction's gone. Or I'll drink a mate for a similar kick.
Globalization seeks infinite mobility of capital. Labor is screwed, since workers can't follow capital and jobs.
India will continue to grow for sometime until wages increase, then they will be shafted as their jobs are exported to Uganda or Peru or somewhere where wages are cheaper, and they will follow the US into its downward spiral.
Globalization as it exists is designed to maximize profits for US-based multinational firms. At last, the middle-class white collar folks (like me) are feeling the pinch. I don't know what the solution is, but I guarantee it's going to get a lot worse for the US worker before it gets better...
Expect a serious decline in living standards in the US over the next 10-20 years if nothing is done.
I was in a similar position...I was using Linux to run a laser tweezer setup in our small research group. Linux was such a pain - inconsistent libraries, poor support, flaky drivers unsupported by vendors, etc.
I switched to Windows 2000 Pro for the vastly superior support for data acquisition hardware, framegrabbers, and so on. Along the way I switched from doing GUI stuff in wxWindows/C++ to Matlab. The GUI stuff in Matlab 6.x is pretty good. It's got a bigger learning curve than LabView but it can also be used to implement much of your data analysis as well, with its vast libraries of mathematical functions and decent performance.
With the new hardware coming out, our lab now has a standing policy to only purchase items with USB or FireWire interfaces whenever possible, so the PCs don't even need to be opened up anymore. These drivers are rarely if ever available for Linux.
Use whatever makes your lab the most productive. Standard lab software like LabView, Matlab, and Mathematica are a safe way to implement software since they're so popular and they're more efficient and productive than C/C++ or VB. If you need high performance computing, then go consider F90, C++, etc., but instrumentation should never be controlled like that. You need real time? Buy a real time board.
Hydrogen: The Essential Element
by John S. Rigden
From amazon.com:
Justly acclaimed for his lucid biography of physicist I. I. Rabi, Rigden here shifts his focus from person to problem, chronicling how one enduring conundrum--that of explaining the element hydrogen--has challenged two centuries of brilliant scientists. Beginning with the British chemist William Prout's pioneering hypothesis defining hydrogen as nature's fundamental building block, Rigden recounts episode after episode in which the mysteries of the simplest element--a bare proton and electron--have yielded their secrets to intellectually daring and resourceful researchers. In the process, he clarifies for general readers the nature of the scientific enterprise, in which elegant theories must meet the test of empirical verification. Nor does Rigden neglect the often-quirky personalities of the humans who frame the theories and conduct the experiments: we share, for example, in the frivolous musical ditties composed by Bloch and in the irreverent jokes circulated about Dirac. Readers will marvel that in its very first square, the periodic table holds so much science, so much history, so much humanity.
The average person is also not prepared to shoot another person dead, which is of course the threat behind a gun. A huge percentage of cops that are shot are shot with their own guns, even more for homeowners in home invasions.
I've found the random, cobbled together nature of the Linux kernel to be irritating. I don't find it to be well-engineered as a whole, and development seems extremely haphazard. How many USB interfaces were there??
The BSD's are also free, run the same software, have rational development models, and while there isn't a profusion of distributions, the ones that exist are extremely easy to customize and very simple to maintain. Linux does have mindshare though...perhaps it's another example of the less-well-made product beating out the superior ones by virtue of marketing.
I've got an HP 842c deskjet here at home, which has been running 3 years without any trouble whatsoever. At work I use an HP 2100M Laserjet, which also runs flawlessly.
My brother's been through 2 Lexmark, 1 Epson, and is now on a Canon inkjet in 3 years. He finally bought a 10 year old HP laserjet and hasn't had any trouble since...
PVC wears out. You have to use vitrified clay piping if you want any longevity (~150 years so far proven).
When you grow an aesthetic sense, let us know.
There you have it - a clear admittance that free trade globalization as it is currently practiced is based on groundless faith.
The results of this will be a global race to the bottom - once jobs in India & China get too expensive, they'll switch to Chile & Tibet, or wherever. Same goes with manufacturing jobs. The countries with the least wages, standards of living, health care, worker benefits, environmental standards, and interest in corporate affairs win the jobs. Wealth gets enormously concentrated, class and racial divisions are exacerbated, and democracies die. The vast majority of us get fucked.
What is human labor worth? Why should jobs be as transferable as, say, a bushel of wheat? Is this really the most just way to encourage the development of other countries? What sort of society are we creating when we convince people (like me) to get their PhDs, get educated, and then pursue governmental policies to get rid of our livelihoods?
The only ones who profit under this system are the transnational corporations and the politicians they own. This course wrecks societies and is destroying the environmental health of the planet, which is the ultimate source of wealth. 50 years, tops, before it all implodes.
Do you even know how many Fortune 100 companies don't even pay income taxes anymore? And how many of them get rebates anyway? Overtaxation is hardly a problem for US companies - the problem is boundless greed and a capitalistic system that owes nothing to the communities and workers that make profits for the small cadre of owners.
And fuck your flat tax - go read up on the declining marginal utility of money and think again.
Two problems with your two solutions: 1) everyone trying to work cheaper destroys our standard of living and causes a global race to the bottom. 2) you cannot move overseas easily - corporations can, you can't. The lack of mobility of labor is one of the major flaws in theories of global trade as it is practiced today.
I've read it. It's amusing. However, Philip Kaplan's writing is flat out the worst part of the book.
/. posters bought into) is deserving of much more thought and research than went into this little one off, quick buck, mindless catalog of failures.
How many times can you read about a company and have the comments boil down to "they were dumb, they went out of business"? That's pretty much the outer limits of Kaplan's critical and analytic skills. The whole dot-com boom & bust phenomena (which so many
The book gets real dull. Fortunately it's short. Kaplan, next time get a ghostwriter. Heck, how about an interview with megalomaniac ESR on his old essay "musings on sudden wealth" now that VA Linux has essentially gone tits up.
I once worked there - it's an engineering country club. All employees arrive at 8:00, the all dash for the door at 4:30. Since it's an FFRDC, it's all government/defense work.
How noble, now the CEO of Xilinx only makes 400x the average Xilinx worker's salary rather than 532x, the average for CEOs. (disclaimer: that 532x is a rough memory, it's in the 500's tho)
Logging companies completely clearcut vast swaths of forest. When they bother to replant, they typically do so with monocultures - a single tree species, which must then be massively fertilized and insecticided to survive. When not clearcutting they select the tallest, straightest, healthiest trees which leads to a degradation of the tree gene pool in the area and shittier trees.
Clearcutting also results in the decimation of streams and habitat for other creatures. Trees also create rain and are the sources of forest streams through transpiration, so clearcutting is also an assault on our water resources.
Modern agriculture is a disaster. We've created a system where we put in more calories of energy into a crop than we can harvest. Simply saying that logging companies are doing 'tree farming' is really a complete condemnation of what they're doing.
It is possible to profitably harvest trees at a sustainable rate that has a negligible effect on the forest. It can even improve the forest by thinning out diseased or damaged trees. Yes, this would result in a somewhat lower supply of trees, but there are many, many methods to reduce tree usage in home construction.
1 house == 1-2 clearcut acres. Is this really the way to go???