According to the census bureau, "Real median household income in the United States climbed 1.3 percent between 2006 and 2007, reaching $50,233". So 50K and below would cover 150 million people. The same press release notes that "the weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2007 was $21,203; for a family of three, $16,530; for a family of two, $13,540; and for unrelated individuals, $10,590." Of course, poverty and 'low income' are not synonymous, and the US definition of poverty is... quite poor. But for those folks who might not have any idea of the value of a dollar (and if you work in tech, that might be you), here's a measuring stick of sorts.
I've had mixed results with Vista - on my Lenovo T61 laptop it was a total flop. On the gaming system I built a while back (2GHz processor and 2GB RAM) it runs great. It does seem to hit the disk an _awful_ lot though. I certainly don't think it is in any way better than XP. But then, I'm running Ubuntu and Mac OSX as well, and the only thing I've seen that speaks to me about any of them is the stability of OSX. But then, I imagine if Ubuntu came on custom built hardware it would be pretty darned reliable too....
I just don't understand it when people say DVD is "good enough". You can see the compression artifacts! (and that's on a low resolution display)
I hear the compression in my mp3s, but I haven't seen a run by the masses to FLAC and SACDs. For mass market crap, who cares how it looks or sounds? People eat instant noodles too, and I wouldn't call them a culinary experience. Instant gratification and ease of use will trump 'quality' every time.
I've been in this situation more than once, as I have some very specialized skills that lead people to hire me despite my lack of experience in other areas.
Very often, things may be running 'well enough' - the web page loads, users can query the DB, whatever. If that's the case, move on - identify those areas that really are problem areas. Then duplicate the setup on your test machine (which will make you comfortable with the install process, and thus hopefully the upgrade process), then start breaking things. If possible, recruit some users to help you break things - users are always better at breaking things.
I like the O'Reilly books too, as a general rule, but I usually find the books are more helpful when I have a specific question to ask - thus the test environment first, books second.
Also, don't forget the international organizations. Many of them have English as one of their official languages, and a desire to hire Americans (because we help foot the bill). Examples include UNESCO, the OECD, and the IEA. It helps to have a more well rounded education than just programming, but definitely have a look.
When I used to have a bank account with Soc Gen, you entered your PIN on a virtual keypad which had a 4x4 grid, of which ten slots were the numbers 0-9. Each time you went to the page, the numbers appeared in a random location. Is there a piece of software which does a similar thing as a virtual keyboard?
Not that it would help - I would assume everything is being logged anyway - just curious.
I'm a little fuzzy on your '3-4 year' lifecycle. Looks like Office 2003 came out late Oct, 2003. We're well on our way to Oct, 2008. I will confess some places have gone to 2007 - we have not. Thus we are looking at a 5 year lifespan.
More important, however, is the question of how the updates happen - the reason we haven't gone to 2007 isn't a licensing issue - it's training. Is MS going to force you to accept those updates? Are they going to overhaul the UI while you weren't looking?
We've had a variation on this discussion a lot, as both my wife and I were at liberal arts schools, but I got my MA and she got her PhD at state schools.
Probably your top-end tech school is going to be massive - tens of thousands of people, of which you'll be one. You'll have access to every toy under the sun, and be able to take classes in every possible subject imaginable. You'll also be a number. A cog in a machine more interested in their grad students than their undergrad. You'll see the prof from a distance, occasionally.
At a liberal arts school, there are maybe 3K students, tops. You work directly with the prof. And the class selection and resources are more limited.
In our opinion, you can get an equal education at either place. If you work your tail off to utilise every resource at the big tech school you'll come out having experience with things the liberal arts student will not have seen. If you work your tail off at the liberal arts school you'll spend four years working directly with the professors on high-end projects, probably publish a paper or two.
On the other hand, if you coast, the liberal arts school will often hold your hand and try to get you back on track. The big tech school will eat your lunch and leave you at the side of the road.
The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World
It was pretty good, a sort of murder mystery for grapevines. Lots of people in denial, until it's too late. A few scientists trying to figure out what's going on, and then formulate a response.
It didn't change my life, but I'm a pretty big wine geek, and it was interesting from that perspective. Also from the perspective of the political situation in France in the latter half of the 1800s.
Exactly. While the US media (and the UK media, and etc.) may be regionally petrifying, we now have the option to go to other regions virtually. I use the BBC as my primary news source, and Le Monde for stories the BBC does a bad job with. Add in the New York Times and a twist of Al Jazeera and you have a relatively broad coverage.
According to the NPR interview I heard with some science-type person on this, the monoculture we've bred was resistant to rust, so you would expect to see numbers going down... until a version of the fungus able to overcome that resistance comes along. Which is what has happened here.
I just finished a book on phylloxera, and I find it interesting to see some of the parallels. Apparently 100 years is not enough time to learn from mistakes....
I think you'll lose that bet (or rather, I think you just lost that bet).
I would concur that you can hire any experienced web developer to fill any web development position. For enough money I'd re-learn Fortran and support the site posited earlier in the comments.
The trouble with that route is the time it takes to get someone up to speed. If you have a live website, and you want it to work -now-, hiring someone who will take six months to get up to speed is a difficult sell.
But what if hiring the right person is going to take more than six months?
In fact, we don't have a jack-of-all-trades setup. We have one OS, one DB, and one language the site is written in. The setup hasn't changed in eight years (not counting, of course, upgrades!)
And, thank the heavens, we don't have EZ Publish.
But pretend for a moment that I come from a (choose one: commercial / open source) background. And I find myself working with the opposite. How do I know if the people talking about this 'Ruby on Rails' thing, or this 'Silverlight' thing, or whatever, are talking about what will become (or is) a de facto standard, or are just fanatics supporting a dying religion?
While it's not perfect, the mac mini is certainly an easy option for those who want to reduce power consumption. We use ours as the home server, and it draws significantly less power than its predecessor, a mac g4.
Through the magic of the kill-a-watt, I measured the draw of the mini under its usual workload (which was near idle, as this is a home server that doesn't really need much horsepower to run its processes, but does need to run them 24/7) and found it to be around 35 watts. Which is roughly equal to my laptop, which makes sense, since it's all laptop parts anyhow.
I don't think you should call it a 'green' option, but it might be a 'greener' option than what you're using now. And it comes all nicely pre-built, with lots of warm friendly mac-y goodness inside.
If that's what you're into.
I'm sure someone has noted it by now, but it's worth pointing out that turning off the power using a power strip (or just unplugging from the wall) is also a good idea. The old g4 server I mentioned earlier actually drew 10 watts when turned off, due to some weirdness with the power supply. Also, if you don't need it, pull the discrete video card - those suckers eat electricity like it's going out of style.
You know, this has always been about locking a barn door after the horses have left.
We don't need to 'prevent another 9/11', not because we've made it impossible, but because the next attack will be completely different, just as devious, and just as unexpected.
And real IDs won't stop it.
I have recently purchased the original Sony Reader (the PRS-500). I have been an ebook reader for some time, first on Palm, then Handspring, then Sony (Clie), then Palm, then HTC (I had the PPC-6700 and now have the PPC-6800 (Mogul on Sprint)). I do like the small form factor of the PDAs, but would appreciate something larger for certain documents (PDFs for example). The Sony Reader, sadly, is not the something larger I was waiting for. I find the design shockingly bad - it looks quite sleek, but holding it is quite unpleasant. And given how much time you'll spend holding it if you read much, that's a serious flaw.
I was very pleased to find the PPC-6800 has a jog wheel - that actually sold me on the device. Page turning is the other 'killer app' of these devices, and for me, a scroll wheel is the way to do it. Others may feel otherwise.
I think I'm probably the target audience for the kindle, but I just cannot justify the purchase price - especially not on a device I've never even held. As I read newspapers as much as I read books, the fact that you can subscribe to them via Amazon's wireless service is a real draw. But again, $400 up front is a show stopper.
Speaking as someone who had to deal with a myriad of CMSs in my previous role, the best answer is 'none of the above'. As a system admin with other things to do, I didn't find a single one of them to be intuitive and user friendly enough. Often, as another person commented, you can dig six levels deep in documentation and still have no idea what people are talking about. Implementation of basic features is often haphazard and illogical (except, of course, to the developer, who also often writes the hard-to-understand documentation).
Don't get me wrong - these are tools with a great deal of power. But by and large they're a lot like many linux distros - if they don't work straight off you're in a world of hurt.
There are several CMS comparison sites, many with useful feature lists and details on implementation. If you must put something up, use these to save yourself some hassles later on.
4.) This is probably the biggest reason... It requires the purchase of new equipment just to recieve the crap that is regular broadcast TV. It is an expense that many see as unnecessary for the quality of programming local TV has to offer.
I sometimes feel like I'm wasting my time pointing this out to folks, but I still feel the need to note that, more than 'unnecessary', the cost of replacing a TV is beyond many people's means. I don't know what the cheapest TV with an ATSC tuner costs, but I suspect it's at least a day's wage for some people.
Perhaps all of you reading this can drop money at will. A lot of people can't.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the your comments about 'not being a jerk', the assertion that someone has no interest in their own cultural patrimony is problematic, to say the least. In the same way we have an 'interest' in seeing our children grow up in a better world than we ourselves did, we have an interest in ensuring that they have at least as much access to cultural artifacts as we ourselves have had. In locking things up, or denying access to them for purposes of further creation, we stunt their intellectual and cultural growth. Arguing that 'they will do it anyway' creates a false sense of entitlement, which will come to crashing halt when the rules are actually enforced - we are beginning to see that now, with patent trolls for example.
And France has 20MB symmetric. The numbers are somewhat irrelevant when you start talking about orders of magnitude. The fact is that the US is behind in ways that are staggering, and it's hurting us economically. How many more small businesses would buy a server if they could actually get the pipe to host their own apps? How much more software/multimedia would be sold if it came in seconds, instead of hours.
At least in France, many of the problems were solved by local loop unbundling. I imagine the same would work here.
If (if!) the numbers are right, there are a number of places the electricity could go:
I presume you can't shut off the PCIe slot, which means the card is powered. Which probably means electricity running through a whole bunch of circuits, generating heat (i.e. using power). If the card is generating heat, the fan is on, and fans are never, ever winners in the efficiency game. If the fan isn't designed to step very well, that would add to the problem (i.e. if the settings are 'fast' and 'faster' rather than 'slow' 'fast' and 'faster').
Anybody else have an idea where all that tasty electricity goes?
Given most people's expected load during non-gaming periods, it makes a lot more sense to have a second computer for your 24/7 machine.
I use a mac G4/dual 500 (i.e. an OLD old machine) as my 24/7 box - cost about $200 bucks, and does just fine quietly humming away in the corner drawing 75 watts.
If your idle numbers are right, you'd better have a good friend at the power company if you plan on leaving that machine running 24/7.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the census bureau, "Real median household income in the United States climbed 1.3 percent between 2006 and 2007, reaching $50,233". So 50K and below would cover 150 million people. The same press release notes that "the weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2007 was $21,203; for a family of three, $16,530; for a family of two, $13,540; and for unrelated individuals, $10,590." Of course, poverty and 'low income' are not synonymous, and the US definition of poverty is... quite poor. But for those folks who might not have any idea of the value of a dollar (and if you work in tech, that might be you), here's a measuring stick of sorts.
I've had mixed results with Vista - on my Lenovo T61 laptop it was a total flop. On the gaming system I built a while back (2GHz processor and 2GB RAM) it runs great. It does seem to hit the disk an _awful_ lot though. I certainly don't think it is in any way better than XP. But then, I'm running Ubuntu and Mac OSX as well, and the only thing I've seen that speaks to me about any of them is the stability of OSX. But then, I imagine if Ubuntu came on custom built hardware it would be pretty darned reliable too....
I just don't understand it when people say DVD is "good enough". You can see the compression artifacts! (and that's on a low resolution display)
I hear the compression in my mp3s, but I haven't seen a run by the masses to FLAC and SACDs. For mass market crap, who cares how it looks or sounds? People eat instant noodles too, and I wouldn't call them a culinary experience. Instant gratification and ease of use will trump 'quality' every time.
I absolutely agree -
I've been in this situation more than once, as I have some very specialized skills that lead people to hire me despite my lack of experience in other areas.
Very often, things may be running 'well enough' - the web page loads, users can query the DB, whatever. If that's the case, move on - identify those areas that really are problem areas. Then duplicate the setup on your test machine (which will make you comfortable with the install process, and thus hopefully the upgrade process), then start breaking things. If possible, recruit some users to help you break things - users are always better at breaking things.
I like the O'Reilly books too, as a general rule, but I usually find the books are more helpful when I have a specific question to ask - thus the test environment first, books second.
Also, don't forget the international organizations. Many of them have English as one of their official languages, and a desire to hire Americans (because we help foot the bill). Examples include UNESCO, the OECD, and the IEA. It helps to have a more well rounded education than just programming, but definitely have a look.
s/99 to life/18 and life/
s/Social Distortion/Skid Row/
one sided flux capacitors?! I know exactly what you can do with them, if you happen to have some uranium....
When I used to have a bank account with Soc Gen, you entered your PIN on a virtual keypad which had a 4x4 grid, of which ten slots were the numbers 0-9. Each time you went to the page, the numbers appeared in a random location. Is there a piece of software which does a similar thing as a virtual keyboard?
Not that it would help - I would assume everything is being logged anyway - just curious.
I'm a little fuzzy on your '3-4 year' lifecycle. Looks like Office 2003 came out late Oct, 2003. We're well on our way to Oct, 2008. I will confess some places have gone to 2007 - we have not. Thus we are looking at a 5 year lifespan.
More important, however, is the question of how the updates happen - the reason we haven't gone to 2007 isn't a licensing issue - it's training. Is MS going to force you to accept those updates? Are they going to overhaul the UI while you weren't looking?
We've had a variation on this discussion a lot, as both my wife and I were at liberal arts schools, but I got my MA and she got her PhD at state schools.
Probably your top-end tech school is going to be massive - tens of thousands of people, of which you'll be one. You'll have access to every toy under the sun, and be able to take classes in every possible subject imaginable. You'll also be a number. A cog in a machine more interested in their grad students than their undergrad. You'll see the prof from a distance, occasionally.
At a liberal arts school, there are maybe 3K students, tops. You work directly with the prof. And the class selection and resources are more limited.
In our opinion, you can get an equal education at either place. If you work your tail off to utilise every resource at the big tech school you'll come out having experience with things the liberal arts student will not have seen. If you work your tail off at the liberal arts school you'll spend four years working directly with the professors on high-end projects, probably publish a paper or two.
On the other hand, if you coast, the liberal arts school will often hold your hand and try to get you back on track. The big tech school will eat your lunch and leave you at the side of the road.
The book was:
The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World
It was pretty good, a sort of murder mystery for grapevines. Lots of people in denial, until it's too late. A few scientists trying to figure out what's going on, and then formulate a response.
It didn't change my life, but I'm a pretty big wine geek, and it was interesting from that perspective. Also from the perspective of the political situation in France in the latter half of the 1800s.
Exactly. While the US media (and the UK media, and etc.) may be regionally petrifying, we now have the option to go to other regions virtually. I use the BBC as my primary news source, and Le Monde for stories the BBC does a bad job with. Add in the New York Times and a twist of Al Jazeera and you have a relatively broad coverage.
According to the NPR interview I heard with some science-type person on this, the monoculture we've bred was resistant to rust, so you would expect to see numbers going down... until a version of the fungus able to overcome that resistance comes along. Which is what has happened here.
I just finished a book on phylloxera, and I find it interesting to see some of the parallels. Apparently 100 years is not enough time to learn from mistakes....
Wait - they used a competitor's TV signal to test the speed of their lines? They must realize they're in bad shape, bandwidth-wise.
I think you'll lose that bet (or rather, I think you just lost that bet).
I would concur that you can hire any experienced web developer to fill any web development position. For enough money I'd re-learn Fortran and support the site posited earlier in the comments.
The trouble with that route is the time it takes to get someone up to speed. If you have a live website, and you want it to work -now-, hiring someone who will take six months to get up to speed is a difficult sell.
But what if hiring the right person is going to take more than six months?
In fact, we don't have a jack-of-all-trades setup. We have one OS, one DB, and one language the site is written in. The setup hasn't changed in eight years (not counting, of course, upgrades!)
And, thank the heavens, we don't have EZ Publish.
But pretend for a moment that I come from a (choose one: commercial / open source) background. And I find myself working with the opposite. How do I know if the people talking about this 'Ruby on Rails' thing, or this 'Silverlight' thing, or whatever, are talking about what will become (or is) a de facto standard, or are just fanatics supporting a dying religion?
While it's not perfect, the mac mini is certainly an easy option for those who want to reduce power consumption. We use ours as the home server, and it draws significantly less power than its predecessor, a mac g4.
Through the magic of the kill-a-watt, I measured the draw of the mini under its usual workload (which was near idle, as this is a home server that doesn't really need much horsepower to run its processes, but does need to run them 24/7) and found it to be around 35 watts. Which is roughly equal to my laptop, which makes sense, since it's all laptop parts anyhow.
I don't think you should call it a 'green' option, but it might be a 'greener' option than what you're using now. And it comes all nicely pre-built, with lots of warm friendly mac-y goodness inside.
If that's what you're into.
I'm sure someone has noted it by now, but it's worth pointing out that turning off the power using a power strip (or just unplugging from the wall) is also a good idea. The old g4 server I mentioned earlier actually drew 10 watts when turned off, due to some weirdness with the power supply. Also, if you don't need it, pull the discrete video card - those suckers eat electricity like it's going out of style.
If I recall correctly, it is outlawed as a sect in at least one european country (Germany)
You know, this has always been about locking a barn door after the horses have left. We don't need to 'prevent another 9/11', not because we've made it impossible, but because the next attack will be completely different, just as devious, and just as unexpected. And real IDs won't stop it.
I have recently purchased the original Sony Reader (the PRS-500). I have been an ebook reader for some time, first on Palm, then Handspring, then Sony (Clie), then Palm, then HTC (I had the PPC-6700 and now have the PPC-6800 (Mogul on Sprint)). I do like the small form factor of the PDAs, but would appreciate something larger for certain documents (PDFs for example). The Sony Reader, sadly, is not the something larger I was waiting for. I find the design shockingly bad - it looks quite sleek, but holding it is quite unpleasant. And given how much time you'll spend holding it if you read much, that's a serious flaw.
I was very pleased to find the PPC-6800 has a jog wheel - that actually sold me on the device. Page turning is the other 'killer app' of these devices, and for me, a scroll wheel is the way to do it. Others may feel otherwise.
I think I'm probably the target audience for the kindle, but I just cannot justify the purchase price - especially not on a device I've never even held. As I read newspapers as much as I read books, the fact that you can subscribe to them via Amazon's wireless service is a real draw. But again, $400 up front is a show stopper.
Speaking as someone who had to deal with a myriad of CMSs in my previous role, the best answer is 'none of the above'. As a system admin with other things to do, I didn't find a single one of them to be intuitive and user friendly enough. Often, as another person commented, you can dig six levels deep in documentation and still have no idea what people are talking about. Implementation of basic features is often haphazard and illogical (except, of course, to the developer, who also often writes the hard-to-understand documentation). Don't get me wrong - these are tools with a great deal of power. But by and large they're a lot like many linux distros - if they don't work straight off you're in a world of hurt. There are several CMS comparison sites, many with useful feature lists and details on implementation. If you must put something up, use these to save yourself some hassles later on.
4.) This is probably the biggest reason... It requires the purchase of new equipment just to recieve the crap that is regular broadcast TV. It is an expense that many see as unnecessary for the quality of programming local TV has to offer.
I sometimes feel like I'm wasting my time pointing this out to folks, but I still feel the need to note that, more than 'unnecessary', the cost of replacing a TV is beyond many people's means. I don't know what the cheapest TV with an ATSC tuner costs, but I suspect it's at least a day's wage for some people.
Perhaps all of you reading this can drop money at will. A lot of people can't.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the your comments about 'not being a jerk', the assertion that someone has no interest in their own cultural patrimony is problematic, to say the least. In the same way we have an 'interest' in seeing our children grow up in a better world than we ourselves did, we have an interest in ensuring that they have at least as much access to cultural artifacts as we ourselves have had. In locking things up, or denying access to them for purposes of further creation, we stunt their intellectual and cultural growth. Arguing that 'they will do it anyway' creates a false sense of entitlement, which will come to crashing halt when the rules are actually enforced - we are beginning to see that now, with patent trolls for example.
And France has 20MB symmetric. The numbers are somewhat irrelevant when you start talking about orders of magnitude. The fact is that the US is behind in ways that are staggering, and it's hurting us economically. How many more small businesses would buy a server if they could actually get the pipe to host their own apps? How much more software/multimedia would be sold if it came in seconds, instead of hours.
At least in France, many of the problems were solved by local loop unbundling. I imagine the same would work here.
I presume you can't shut off the PCIe slot, which means the card is powered. Which probably means electricity running through a whole bunch of circuits, generating heat (i.e. using power). If the card is generating heat, the fan is on, and fans are never, ever winners in the efficiency game. If the fan isn't designed to step very well, that would add to the problem (i.e. if the settings are 'fast' and 'faster' rather than 'slow' 'fast' and 'faster').
Anybody else have an idea where all that tasty electricity goes?
I use a mac G4/dual 500 (i.e. an OLD old machine) as my 24/7 box - cost about $200 bucks, and does just fine quietly humming away in the corner drawing 75 watts.
If your idle numbers are right, you'd better have a good friend at the power company if you plan on leaving that machine running 24/7.