I've seen this in particular with millennials and those who had helicopter parents getting hit by the real world for the first time. Some times hard.
Oh the number of discussions I've had with folks over the last ~8 years that amount to: No you really aren't worth that much money yet, yes I know you graduated from xyz cse program. However doing good academically does not mean you are going to be as good in 2 years as the dev with 10 years experience that graduated from abc school's mid-tier cse program. In particular when he's spent that working here and understands the business in addition to the technology now.
You haven't said anything about *what* kind of company you want to work for? Established? Startup? Tech? Non-Tech?
There are half a dozen fortune 500 companies that are *not* regular old tech companies that are either head quartered or have major operations within 20 miles of downtown Seattle. Many of these companies have huge IT departments running their ecommerce sites or internal systems (think Nordstrom's, Costco, Starbucks, Expeditors, PACCAR, Boeing). And that doesn't count a dozen or so other major regional companies such as the local hospital systems and insurers. Many of these companies have a multitude of openings and often times opportunities for quick advancement because Amazon and several other local companies have hired away many of their employees over the last 2 - 3 years by throwing gobs of money at them.
Also as several people have noted the unemployment rate in Seattle is low but not so low that people will pay for your relocations, unless your skills are phenomenal.
Buy the necessary equipment. Learn how to do it and learn how to do it well. Enough said. This will be better than any technology. Ensure you have a good barometer and comprehensive paper charts also. You never know what will happen.
Those people suggesting an EPIRB are on track. There are several good books that will give you the basics on the sailing technology you need. I would add a laptop computer with satcom as a backup also.
Finally, a skerry cruiser is a long slender and most importantly low freeboard boat. I know the "best boat arguement" for sailing around the world is touchy, but this might not be the best boat for offshore sailing in heavy seas. Have you done a careful evaluation of the vessel as well as your relative skill level and experience as a sailor and where exactly you plan on sailing to? I'm assuming yes as you are having it built but I just wanted to check. I for example in the Pacific Northwest would *not* take this type of boat into the North Pacific or out of our sheltered waters.
Don't miss the Imperial War Museum's air branch at Duxford. Harder to get to but still doable.
I also would recommend the navy dockyard at Portsmouth. It's a 2 hour train ride from London and is about a 2 minute walk from the train station. Includes HMS Victory, HMS Warrior, Mary Rose numerous exhibits and so on and about 1/2 of the Royal Navy's current ships. Easy day trip.
I've really enjoyed the game and am still playing, I used to PvP quite a bit but the last month or two I have been predominately doing PvE stuff and finishing off mission arcs.
A few thoughts on the game... Most obviously it was released prematurely. Several critical aspects of the game such as port governorship were not in place, the RvR aspect needed a great deal of polish as well. The upcoming 1.4 patch finally gets RvR to where it should have been 6 months ago. The continued and repeated tinkering with the skill trees is another indication of these problems.
FLS's beta community cross-section was also flawed in that they played the game as FLS intended, not as how it was actually played after release. You need only look at the number of "fairness" issues after release such as econ-bombing then the Triton and then MC Tigre gank squads and so forth. The beta community failed to find critical in game balance issues, not just bugs. They had over a year to do it and such major things should have been ferretted out IMO.
Additionally the early inclusion of ships obtained by pennant (reward recieved when you defeat a ship) turnins rather than from player crafting crippled the economy early on (at least on my server). The economy was one of the major features of the game and doing this basically ripped it out for a lot of people.
Crafting is a viable XP tool but only for the "final assembler" of a societies ships. I gained probably 3 - 5 levels of XP through simply assembly and building of other high end outfittings. But only because as the sole high level trader in my society I was the logical person to do the finally assembly and hauling of the goods.
So if you go to any port on the westcoast and look at the docks you will see that they are packed. Why is this? Because we on slashdot love our electronics and the rest of the country loves thier cheap crap from Walmart. As a result nearly all US (esp westcoast ports like Long Beach, Seattle, San Franciso, Portland) are operating at or capacity. Most ports have massive expansions underway already. Sure they found a dock in San Fran but long term there is no way a port would give up insanely valuable deep water dock space for a large ship for this venture. Nor is there a way that the tourist related businesses are gonna accept a rusting retired container ship next to thier cruise ship terminal. Hell in Seattle they were unhappy about modern cargo ships being by it. You might of course get some smaller space a a secondary or tertiary dock on a barge though.... Or one of the small west coast ports.
Many of these seem to be just plain bugs, not broad features that would warrant a major version # jump. I'll be the first to admit that is these days always in the eye of the beholder (marketer) though. I also see a fair # of requests for add-ons that are not really part of the core operating system and we would more likely see as services or are available from a 3rd party.
If I were to take a wild guess I would say that this was a list related to a service pack, not "Windows 7".
Frankly, I'd be more worried about other people having it. Not just for the stuff listed above, but for neighbors watching to see if I were to call and other uses like that which I wouldn't be big on. A particularly savvy criminal (or group) could rob houses and track local 911 calls to see when the cops have been tipped off about them so they know when to split.
That is why the information posted is for fire and medical units only. The location of police calls are not posted. Although if it is a police call involving injuries (i.e a shooting) you'll see the calls go out for the appropriate medical units.
I worked and also volunteered for a large school district (20K+ students) when I was in high school and college. My experience jives with others, kids will do NASTY things to the computers, all the cases will need to be locked and even then they will still get into them. If you enjoy working with kids and the district is structured right it can be rewarding, especially when you get a kid interested in productive use of a computer vs say just gaming or the 'net. But most of your work will be pretty mundane, with below average pay.
When I was doing this job I was more of a general "do it all" tech because of some of my skills and some interesting things I did:
1) Quite a bit of basic forensics. So just how did the porn get on the school computers? What user did it originate from? Who installed that keystroke recorder and what information did it obtain? What teacher gave out the password that allowed it to happen in the first places so they could get "help" from a computer savvy student. In other words A LOT of time spent reviewing logs because kids wouldn't rat.
2) Writing reports and documents outlining what student x did for the inevitable parent/principal meetings and subsequent discipline was an interesting part of my job, at least several hours per week.
3) Assisting in small criminal investigations. Theft is going to be common. Depending on your job description you could spend time inventorying equipment to determine what is missing or even directly assisting the cops by gathering logs and the like. I know at least one sys-admin who got to work with the FBI after kids jacking the computers from the school were transporting them several states away in order to sell them. His installing some "call home" software on random machines in the school with the problem helped a great deal when someone was stupid enough to boot the machine on the 'net before wiping it.
North Korea's subs are based on technology from the mid to late 1950s, specifically the Soviet Romeo and Whiskey classes and some possibly from the Foxtrot. These were in turn derived from the German type XXI u-boat which was deployed in the last days of WWII. The basic design is over 50 years old. How many of these subs are even capable of operating is a matter of some conjecture but that they lack fuel for even basic training operations is well known. Add to the fact that the North Koreans have no experience whatsoever at handling missiles on a sub at sea. Although they could of course if it was "Hollywood Style", but whether that would work even as a one off is debatable.
To put just how far the US is ahead, even China's "top of the line" subs which are nuclear are on technology from the 1960s are so far behind the US that we apparently do not assign attack subs to follow them full time as we did to Russian subs during the cold war. They can be found easily at any time, case in point: US subs have followed Soviet/Russian SSBNs for thier entire patrols (90+ days without being detected), read Blind Man's Bluff for a fascinating overview of US Sub operations & espionage.
There is one caveat to asking about financials. You should *NEVER* ask about the fundamental financials (i.e net income, total revenue) of a publicly traded company. Doing so shows you didn't even do basic research on them. If some information you want is not available through the standard disclosures be very specific about what you are asking for and make it clear that you have already done some basic research on the matter. But remember most interviewers (unless it is a very high level interview) will not disclose any financial data already not publicly available.
What you can ask and what I strongly urge is ask about is the competitive structure of the industry if you are not familiar with it. Who are the biggest competitors? Then you can go home and do research. If you can get easy access to whom your potential competitors do it before the interview. I have gone so far as to approach a competitor of the company I interviewed with pretending to be a prospective sale in order to get thier software and look at it prior to interviewing/accepting.
In Opportunity's case you land in a 5ft deep crater, then you drive to one that is 40ft deep and find out that you have 40ft of rock, instead of the 5 you only new about for sure before. That is huge, it tells you a lot about the time and amount of water and other materials involved. So checking that those rocks were all largely the same for almost a year in Endurance was a big deal. And as Steve Squyres recently noted in his update "blog" on Cornell's website the blueberries have largely disappeared where Opportunity is now. They don't know why but the going theory is that they have encountered yet another new rock strata they had not previously seen, they started to look for a good exposure to investigate a few days ago. Soon you'll be approaching Victoria crater, and you'll get to find out if you have hundreds of feet of sulfates, which would imply possibly millions of years of the presence of water at the location.
Spirit has seen several VERY interesting rocks that are sulfates as well as layered bedrock. To say that the same slightly basaltic rocks are all it has seen is an innacurate statement, although the vast amount of material in gusev appears to be basaltic in origin.
The monorail was largely killed because it was going to be more expensive to build than originally thought and revenues from the licensing tax for cars were lower than anticipated and were not growing as fast as projected I heard that it turns out the models given by the state to the authority in order to calculate car ownership, growth of car ownership and the value of the cars purchased did not consider a purely urban area, where fewer people per capita own cars. (Seattle already has an excellent bus system, I have a car but don't really need it except to visit family that lives elsewhere.) Because of the shortage in tax revenues the bond life length was going to have to be extended. What was originally going to be a $2B project with a couple of billion in interest balloned to over $11 billion.
Aside from city residents who opposed for cost, aestetic, losing thier property or other reasons the organized resistence consisted of gov't agencies that were in favor of the already underway regional light rail project and amusingly anti-tax activists who were of course in this case were largely not from Seattle and were not paying the tax in the first place, but still complained.
I find the comment from George Colony at Forrester that it was a mistake for MS to drop stock options hilarious! WTF! MS was FORCED to drop stock options because thier stock was not climbing anymore therefore options were not as attractive to prospective employees. It wasn't a mistake on thier part, unless you are going to argue the whole business model is flawed because they weren't growing as fast anymore. It was beyond thier control, what do you expect? Indefinite growth? In fact if anything they compensated with options for TO long they now have unhappy employees (my friends included) who are on cash poor option rich employement and are leaving in droves after believing they got "screwed" by MS.
When I interviewed with MS out of college I (and many others) specifically refused option loaded offers. Simply put we could get a better return investing more cash elsewhere in place of those options.
All of us here on Slashdot know is just downright economically IMPOSSIBLE for MS to get the kind of growth that Google can and will over the next several years, the market is simply not that big! Therfore options as MS has traditionally granted are not really even a CHOICE for MS. They will have to resort to ane ESPP style structure. Any changes in MS stock price from now on will be small potatoes compared to the past, options will make no more money for MS than they can for any other large company. And eventually Google will reach this point also. This is just another marketer who has lost all touch with reality. *end rant*
Back to the whole marketing thing. Think about it, slashdot has been inundated by 360 reports lately and things are drying up, so they release just a tad bit more information to keep people coming back.
Based on the pathetic amount of comments on this article obviously it isn't working.
Seriously though I doubt MS wants this info released this far out from ship, where the design possibly isn't finalized (as someone else observed). Heck it isn't even time for Christmas marketing for a few weeks yet!:-P
Um hello. You need to block out more than that. Most remaining numbers are part#s but there are several that are likely unique identifiers for the part. Anything not easily identified as a general part # needs to be removed. Notably the SIS chip for example.
Microsoft if they are smart (and they are) for quality purposes is going to know the serial num/batch number whatever of every part that goes into that box. It helps them quickly identify bad batches which saves them money. It's all in the name of quality but it has wonderful secondary uses.:-) Now that said I will admit here is a chance they aren't doing this for the pre-production boxes yet though.
And the reason we didn't photoshop out all the serial numbers on the pictures is what? To make it as easy as possible for MS to potentially backtrack how you got your hardware and eliminate your source or possibly cost them thier job/contract? Smart.
I'll have to take the opportunity (pathetic pun intended) to plug Steve Squyres new book Roving Mars. Steve gives a good history of the rovers development and he doesn't hold back, he even touches upon things such as a yelling match between him and the Engineering lead at JPL which would normally not be in such a book. He goes over all the drama involved in designing and testing the airbags, parachutes, and other landing equipment. He also spends a fair amount of time on how MER was nearly killed several times by close calls at NASA design reviews.
Once on Mars you'll find out how a function left over from the frustration of early software development together with a programmer's backdoor helped save Spirit. There is a great deal about learning to operate the rovers on Mars and how tough it was to make the call to run for the hills with Spirit at the risk of dying enroute with virtually no science return. The book is also filled with many little known tidbits including how debris from the WTC was used on the rovers, and things NASA might not want you to know about such as the supreme importance of beer as a motivational tool in ensuring the success of the project.
Is reflected in today's cartoon by David Horsey in the Seattle-PI.
We need to come up with something more agressive and effective. I for one am a fan of the much discussed idea DOS attacks against the spammers websites, despite the moral and ethical issues people have raised. A nice side effect is that it will somewhat discourage ISPs from hosting them also.
I fondly remember 'fish tales' from grandpa and his friends as a kid regarding the White Sturgeon of the Columbia river. Stories of fish so big they could not be pulled into the boat. Records wise a fish pulled out of the water near Vancouver by a gill net was over 1,200 pounds. And the largest ever caught was a white sturgeon supposedly weighing in at over 1,500 pounds, but that was the 1800s and must be regarded appropriately. Now you rarely get larger than 400 pounds.
On a side note a 640 pound sturgeon was found dead in Lake Washington (yes this is the lake largely IN the city of Seattle) in the mid 1980s. This caused quite a hubbub that even I recall as a kid. A 5 1/2 foot long sturgeon was recently caught in the lake by a University of Washington team studying the fish stocks.
The drive that you are seeing in these images that supposedly did not get the rover out of the dune is in reality a short test drive performed on Sol 463. The response from the rover was roughly what was expected by the MER engineers as you can read on the JPL site.
Considering that the wheels spun the equivalent of a 60 meter drive when they got stuck in the first place. (according to Dr. Albert Haldemann, Deputy Project Scientist for MER) they anticipate a fair amount of driving/spinning to get out. Also obviously if thier testing at JPL was wrong they did not want to worsen the situation to the point of no return on thier first try.
There was recently a case in Washington State where a suspicious mother had picked up the phone to listen to her daughter's conversation with one of her friends. Well it turns out the friend was a suspect in a robbery and the mother was called to testify. Now the testemony has been ruled inadmissible for similar reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this in particular with millennials and those who had helicopter parents getting hit by the real world for the first time. Some times hard.
Oh the number of discussions I've had with folks over the last ~8 years that amount to: No you really aren't worth that much money yet, yes I know you graduated from xyz cse program. However doing good academically does not mean you are going to be as good in 2 years as the dev with 10 years experience that graduated from abc school's mid-tier cse program. In particular when he's spent that working here and understands the business in addition to the technology now.
You haven't said anything about *what* kind of company you want to work for? Established? Startup? Tech? Non-Tech?
There are half a dozen fortune 500 companies that are *not* regular old tech companies that are either head quartered or have major operations within 20 miles of downtown Seattle. Many of these companies have huge IT departments running their ecommerce sites or internal systems (think Nordstrom's, Costco, Starbucks, Expeditors, PACCAR, Boeing). And that doesn't count a dozen or so other major regional companies such as the local hospital systems and insurers. Many of these companies have a multitude of openings and often times opportunities for quick advancement because Amazon and several other local companies have hired away many of their employees over the last 2 - 3 years by throwing gobs of money at them.
Also as several people have noted the unemployment rate in Seattle is low but not so low that people will pay for your relocations, unless your skills are phenomenal.
Buy the necessary equipment. Learn how to do it and learn how to do it well. Enough said. This will be better than any technology. Ensure you have a good barometer and comprehensive paper charts also. You never know what will happen.
Those people suggesting an EPIRB are on track. There are several good books that will give you the basics on the sailing technology you need. I would add a laptop computer with satcom as a backup also.
Finally, a skerry cruiser is a long slender and most importantly low freeboard boat. I know the "best boat arguement" for sailing around the world is touchy, but this might not be the best boat for offshore sailing in heavy seas. Have you done a careful evaluation of the vessel as well as your relative skill level and experience as a sailor and where exactly you plan on sailing to? I'm assuming yes as you are having it built but I just wanted to check. I for example in the Pacific Northwest would *not* take this type of boat into the North Pacific or out of our sheltered waters.
Good luck!
Don't miss the Imperial War Museum's air branch at Duxford. Harder to get to but still doable.
I also would recommend the navy dockyard at Portsmouth. It's a 2 hour train ride from London and is about a 2 minute walk from the train station. Includes HMS Victory, HMS Warrior, Mary Rose numerous exhibits and so on and about 1/2 of the Royal Navy's current ships. Easy day trip.
I've really enjoyed the game and am still playing, I used to PvP quite a bit but the last month or two I have been predominately doing PvE stuff and finishing off mission arcs.
A few thoughts on the game... Most obviously it was released prematurely. Several critical aspects of the game such as port governorship were not in place, the RvR aspect needed a great deal of polish as well. The upcoming 1.4 patch finally gets RvR to where it should have been 6 months ago. The continued and repeated tinkering with the skill trees is another indication of these problems.
FLS's beta community cross-section was also flawed in that they played the game as FLS intended, not as how it was actually played after release. You need only look at the number of "fairness" issues after release such as econ-bombing then the Triton and then MC Tigre gank squads and so forth. The beta community failed to find critical in game balance issues, not just bugs. They had over a year to do it and such major things should have been ferretted out IMO.
Additionally the early inclusion of ships obtained by pennant (reward recieved when you defeat a ship) turnins rather than from player crafting crippled the economy early on (at least on my server). The economy was one of the major features of the game and doing this basically ripped it out for a lot of people.
Crafting is a viable XP tool but only for the "final assembler" of a societies ships. I gained probably 3 - 5 levels of XP through simply assembly and building of other high end outfittings. But only because as the sole high level trader in my society I was the logical person to do the finally assembly and hauling of the goods.
So if you go to any port on the westcoast and look at the docks you will see that they are packed. Why is this? Because we on slashdot love our electronics and the rest of the country loves thier cheap crap from Walmart. As a result nearly all US (esp westcoast ports like Long Beach, Seattle, San Franciso, Portland) are operating at or capacity. Most ports have massive expansions underway already. Sure they found a dock in San Fran but long term there is no way a port would give up insanely valuable deep water dock space for a large ship for this venture. Nor is there a way that the tourist related businesses are gonna accept a rusting retired container ship next to thier cruise ship terminal. Hell in Seattle they were unhappy about modern cargo ships being by it. You might of course get some smaller space a a secondary or tertiary dock on a barge though.... Or one of the small west coast ports.
Many of these seem to be just plain bugs, not broad features that would warrant a major version # jump. I'll be the first to admit that is these days always in the eye of the beholder (marketer) though. I also see a fair # of requests for add-ons that are not really part of the core operating system and we would more likely see as services or are available from a 3rd party.
If I were to take a wild guess I would say that this was a list related to a service pack, not "Windows 7".
Frankly, I'd be more worried about other people having it. Not just for the stuff listed above, but for neighbors watching to see if I were to call and other uses like that which I wouldn't be big on. A particularly savvy criminal (or group) could rob houses and track local 911 calls to see when the cops have been tipped off about them so they know when to split. That is why the information posted is for fire and medical units only. The location of police calls are not posted. Although if it is a police call involving injuries (i.e a shooting) you'll see the calls go out for the appropriate medical units.
As far as I can see the submitter did not provide a link to the actual press release announcing the details so here it is.
I worked and also volunteered for a large school district (20K+ students) when I was in high school and college. My experience jives with others, kids will do NASTY things to the computers, all the cases will need to be locked and even then they will still get into them. If you enjoy working with kids and the district is structured right it can be rewarding, especially when you get a kid interested in productive use of a computer vs say just gaming or the 'net. But most of your work will be pretty mundane, with below average pay.
When I was doing this job I was more of a general "do it all" tech because of some of my skills and some interesting things I did:
1) Quite a bit of basic forensics. So just how did the porn get on the school computers? What user did it originate from? Who installed that keystroke recorder and what information did it obtain? What teacher gave out the password that allowed it to happen in the first places so they could get "help" from a computer savvy student. In other words A LOT of time spent reviewing logs because kids wouldn't rat.
2) Writing reports and documents outlining what student x did for the inevitable parent/principal meetings and subsequent discipline was an interesting part of my job, at least several hours per week.
3) Assisting in small criminal investigations. Theft is going to be common. Depending on your job description you could spend time inventorying equipment to determine what is missing or even directly assisting the cops by gathering logs and the like. I know at least one sys-admin who got to work with the FBI after kids jacking the computers from the school were transporting them several states away in order to sell them. His installing some "call home" software on random machines in the school with the problem helped a great deal when someone was stupid enough to boot the machine on the 'net before wiping it.
North Korea's subs are based on technology from the mid to late 1950s, specifically the Soviet Romeo and Whiskey classes and some possibly from the Foxtrot. These were in turn derived from the German type XXI u-boat which was deployed in the last days of WWII. The basic design is over 50 years old. How many of these subs are even capable of operating is a matter of some conjecture but that they lack fuel for even basic training operations is well known. Add to the fact that the North Koreans have no experience whatsoever at handling missiles on a sub at sea. Although they could of course if it was "Hollywood Style", but whether that would work even as a one off is debatable.
To put just how far the US is ahead, even China's "top of the line" subs which are nuclear are on technology from the 1960s are so far behind the US that we apparently do not assign attack subs to follow them full time as we did to Russian subs during the cold war. They can be found easily at any time, case in point: US subs have followed Soviet/Russian SSBNs for thier entire patrols (90+ days without being detected), read Blind Man's Bluff for a fascinating overview of US Sub operations & espionage.
Which also contains virtually no useful information also other than the obligatory "more information coming soon".
There is one caveat to asking about financials. You should *NEVER* ask about the fundamental financials (i.e net income, total revenue) of a publicly traded company. Doing so shows you didn't even do basic research on them. If some information you want is not available through the standard disclosures be very specific about what you are asking for and make it clear that you have already done some basic research on the matter. But remember most interviewers (unless it is a very high level interview) will not disclose any financial data already not publicly available.
What you can ask and what I strongly urge is ask about is the competitive structure of the industry if you are not familiar with it. Who are the biggest competitors? Then you can go home and do research. If you can get easy access to whom your potential competitors do it before the interview. I have gone so far as to approach a competitor of the company I interviewed with pretending to be a prospective sale in order to get thier software and look at it prior to interviewing/accepting.
Things have changed quite a bit from landing.
In Opportunity's case you land in a 5ft deep crater, then you drive to one that is 40ft deep and find out that you have 40ft of rock, instead of the 5 you only new about for sure before. That is huge, it tells you a lot about the time and amount of water and other materials involved. So checking that those rocks were all largely the same for almost a year in Endurance was a big deal. And as Steve Squyres recently noted in his update "blog" on Cornell's website the blueberries have largely disappeared where Opportunity is now. They don't know why but the going theory is that they have encountered yet another new rock strata they had not previously seen, they started to look for a good exposure to investigate a few days ago. Soon you'll be approaching Victoria crater, and you'll get to find out if you have hundreds of feet of sulfates, which would imply possibly millions of years of the presence of water at the location.
Spirit has seen several VERY interesting rocks that are sulfates as well as layered bedrock. To say that the same slightly basaltic rocks are all it has seen is an innacurate statement, although the vast amount of material in gusev appears to be basaltic in origin.
The monorail was largely killed because it was going to be more expensive to build than originally thought and revenues from the licensing tax for cars were lower than anticipated and were not growing as fast as projected I heard that it turns out the models given by the state to the authority in order to calculate car ownership, growth of car ownership and the value of the cars purchased did not consider a purely urban area, where fewer people per capita own cars. (Seattle already has an excellent bus system, I have a car but don't really need it except to visit family that lives elsewhere.) Because of the shortage in tax revenues the bond life length was going to have to be extended. What was originally going to be a $2B project with a couple of billion in interest balloned to over $11 billion.
Aside from city residents who opposed for cost, aestetic, losing thier property or other reasons the organized resistence consisted of gov't agencies that were in favor of the already underway regional light rail project and amusingly anti-tax activists who were of course in this case were largely not from Seattle and were not paying the tax in the first place, but still complained.
I find the comment from George Colony at Forrester that it was a mistake for MS to drop stock options hilarious! WTF! MS was FORCED to drop stock options because thier stock was not climbing anymore therefore options were not as attractive to prospective employees. It wasn't a mistake on thier part, unless you are going to argue the whole business model is flawed because they weren't growing as fast anymore. It was beyond thier control, what do you expect? Indefinite growth? In fact if anything they compensated with options for TO long they now have unhappy employees (my friends included) who are on cash poor option rich employement and are leaving in droves after believing they got "screwed" by MS.
When I interviewed with MS out of college I (and many others) specifically refused option loaded offers. Simply put we could get a better return investing more cash elsewhere in place of those options.
All of us here on Slashdot know is just downright economically IMPOSSIBLE for MS to get the kind of growth that Google can and will over the next several years, the market is simply not that big! Therfore options as MS has traditionally granted are not really even a CHOICE for MS. They will have to resort to ane ESPP style structure. Any changes in MS stock price from now on will be small potatoes compared to the past, options will make no more money for MS than they can for any other large company. And eventually Google will reach this point also. This is just another marketer who has lost all touch with reality. *end rant*
Back to the whole marketing thing. Think about it, slashdot has been inundated by 360 reports lately and things are drying up, so they release just a tad bit more information to keep people coming back.
:-P
Based on the pathetic amount of comments on this article obviously it isn't working.
Seriously though I doubt MS wants this info released this far out from ship, where the design possibly isn't finalized (as someone else observed). Heck it isn't even time for Christmas marketing for a few weeks yet!
Um hello. You need to block out more than that. Most remaining numbers are part#s but there are several that are likely unique identifiers for the part. Anything not easily identified as a general part # needs to be removed. Notably the SIS chip for example.
:-) Now that said I will admit here is a chance they aren't doing this for the pre-production boxes yet though.
Microsoft if they are smart (and they are) for quality purposes is going to know the serial num/batch number whatever of every part that goes into that box. It helps them quickly identify bad batches which saves them money. It's all in the name of quality but it has wonderful secondary uses.
And the reason we didn't photoshop out all the serial numbers on the pictures is what? To make it as easy as possible for MS to potentially backtrack how you got your hardware and eliminate your source or possibly cost them thier job/contract? Smart.
I'll have to take the opportunity (pathetic pun intended) to plug Steve Squyres new book Roving Mars. Steve gives a good history of the rovers development and he doesn't hold back, he even touches upon things such as a yelling match between him and the Engineering lead at JPL which would normally not be in such a book. He goes over all the drama involved in designing and testing the airbags, parachutes, and other landing equipment. He also spends a fair amount of time on how MER was nearly killed several times by close calls at NASA design reviews.
Once on Mars you'll find out how a function left over from the frustration of early software development together with a programmer's backdoor helped save Spirit. There is a great deal about learning to operate the rovers on Mars and how tough it was to make the call to run for the hills with Spirit at the risk of dying enroute with virtually no science return. The book is also filled with many little known tidbits including how debris from the WTC was used on the rovers, and things NASA might not want you to know about such as the supreme importance of beer as a motivational tool in ensuring the success of the project.
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Is reflected in today's cartoon by David Horsey in the Seattle-PI.
We need to come up with something more agressive and effective. I for one am a fan of the much discussed idea DOS attacks against the spammers websites, despite the moral and ethical issues people have raised. A nice side effect is that it will somewhat discourage ISPs from hosting them also.
I fondly remember 'fish tales' from grandpa and his friends as a kid regarding the White Sturgeon of the Columbia river. Stories of fish so big they could not be pulled into the boat. Records wise a fish pulled out of the water near Vancouver by a gill net was over 1,200 pounds. And the largest ever caught was a white sturgeon supposedly weighing in at over 1,500 pounds, but that was the 1800s and must be regarded appropriately. Now you rarely get larger than 400 pounds.
On a side note a 640 pound sturgeon was found dead in Lake Washington (yes this is the lake largely IN the city of Seattle) in the mid 1980s. This caused quite a hubbub that even I recall as a kid. A 5 1/2 foot long sturgeon was recently caught in the lake by a University of Washington team studying the fish stocks.
The drive that you are seeing in these images that supposedly did not get the rover out of the dune is in reality a short test drive performed on Sol 463. The response from the rover was roughly what was expected by the MER engineers as you can read on the JPL site.
Considering that the wheels spun the equivalent of a 60 meter drive when they got stuck in the first place. (according to Dr. Albert Haldemann, Deputy Project Scientist for MER) they anticipate a fair amount of driving/spinning to get out. Also obviously if thier testing at JPL was wrong they did not want to worsen the situation to the point of no return on thier first try.
In order to even the wear on the drive motors on the rovers SteveS and crew have been alternating between driving forward and backwards.
There was recently a case in Washington State where a suspicious mother had picked up the phone to listen to her daughter's conversation with one of her friends. Well it turns out the friend was a suspect in a robbery and the mother was called to testify. Now the testemony has been ruled inadmissible for similar reasons.