I think the effectiveness of ocean fertilization has been studied and debunked.
If you are too lazy to click on the PDF, the short version is that while iron stimulates plankton growth, keeping carbon in the ocean is a different matter.
http://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/OceanusIron_Will_It_Work_30747.pdf
I am beginning to worry about this trend to have an online coding portfolio.
I think open source is great, but once I got done with my day job coding, I never want to touch another line of code until work the next day. Adding to that, what about the basic need to socialize, spend time with the family, and spend time on hobbies?
I have definitely seen SF job postings for people with extensive open-source commits. Those posts are biased towards a few people who are lucky enough that their company pays them to work on open-source products, are unemployed and doing open-source thing until hired, or the very few people who code for 16 hours a day. Personally, I wouldn't hire the person that codes for 16 hours a day, but that is who I need to be to get noticed these days?
The scenario of airlines handling security is scary. Government regulation makes it more convenient for the travelers actually. You now know what not to bring to the airport. Imagine having to know the rules for each individual airport or carrier. More delays, more frustration. I think airlines would rather not have that.
One problem with any commercialization or privatization is the communication asymmetry problem. How do you know how well each airline is handling security? How can you trust that they are honestly reporting the measures they are doing (or not doing)? It is in the airline's best interest to spend the least amount possible while appearing to do the most. That alone scares me.
What about the intelligence each airline will have invariably collected? Should they share that with other airlines? It is not in their best interest to do so (hey this guy is kind of suspicious, but let's not warn other airlines. If he blows another carrier's plane up, we get more business, win!)
Those republicans that want to privatize everything never progress beyond econ 101 (if at all) and learned about market distortions and externalities.
My roommate at a large research university in the Midwest is getting his masters in EE but wants to work as a programmer when he graduates. Me? I was laid off in 2009 so I went back for my masters in something different. I asked him why he is here and his response was "to make the most money possible." Strange, because my naive 23 years-old self would have said, "because I love technology and to create things and understand how computers work." A few months living together he comes to me for help to get an internship. He says he is screwing up technical interviews and wants help with preparing. So we talk and I ask him simple questions. Keep in mind I haven't programmed in 4 years. He doesn't know how C++ templates work, nor what would happen if you return a pointer to an object created on the stack. No concept of virtual memory and a poor communicator overall (he refers to everything "that", "this"). He has no problem listing C++ on his resume though.
Don't we have exceptions to the H1B quota for US graduates? I am pretty sure he will be able to get a job when he graduates. For comparison, I know that all of my college friends would have been able to blow his socks off in terms of knowledge, intelligence, and competency. The only redeeming quality he brings is that he is willing to work for whatever wage he can get. Contrary to what he believes, he is not going to be rich by this country's standards.
But I feel bad for him at the same time that he is stealing jobs from US citizens. He told me his mom and dad mortgaged their home to have enough to send him here. He has a loan with 18% interest rate form an Indian bank and need to start paying it back in 2014. He was giddy about working in San Francisco and switching employers every few years and getting top dollars until I popped his bubble that he has to stay his sponsor for at least 3 years on the H1B. He is getting a real life lesson at how professors also treat engineering students like slaves with no pay, etc.
I do not have anything against Indians in general, but they keep to themselves, are not interested in integrating with the rest of society, and have no concerns for any social issues that are occurring in this country. They work insane hours and play politics to advance and in some cases are becoming CEOs and VPs, calling for more visa workers (after all, they have made it). And they are far from being smarter than US citizens.
The technological improvements are noteworthy, like a noticeably faster boot time and user experience, support for more devices out of the box, and a better battery management. The UI lift on the desktop is also very pleasing to me; I hated the rounded corners and much prefer the minimalistic flat right-angled corners in 8. But it is not the engineers that are failing to deliver, but business requirements make what they deliver a poor experience.
"Modern" requires rewriting code for a new UI paradigm and there isn't really any compelling reason to do it especially when you have limited developer resources. So, Microsoft forces "Modern" down everyone's throats to get it installed on enough computers to make it an attractive platform for developers. It has worked for them before to bundle venues into new markets with their operating system so they are doing it again. It might work again. Maybe. It may end up taking off as eventually all PCs will have Windows RT installed. But how many people actually use "Modern" is another question. Apple was very happy to publish their app download rates. I wonder when "Modern" will reach 1 billion downloads? Probably a very long time.
I don't know about Russia, but I can offer this observation. When I visited Beijing in 2011, there were signs plastered all over the place about "living a low carbon life, improve your community," or something to that effect. I do not believe that the Chinese government actually denies that CO2 releases is causing climate change. They certainly do not try to hide it from their citizens. I think their argument for not enacting any sort of carbon reduction is because a) the U.S. isn't doing it, and b) the industrialized nations (the West) have been polluting for much longer and their emissions are responsible for causing this problem so why should China have to cut down on emission when they are just now getting organized and industrializing, when the West has already had its run and are reaping the economic benefits. That to me shows that the Chinese government recognizes that AGW is real as opposed to the U.S. which is still at the stage of denial. The first step to treating a problem is recognizing that the problem exists. China is there and the U.S. isn't.
Also, if options are not treated as an expense and is taxed, you are effectively taxing it twice when the employee cashes it. I think why the rule is in place.
The H1B visa only benefits the corporations and the universities.
At the university that I attended, everyone in my 400 level computer science class was from India or China. The only natives were undergrads. The university isn't given the students a scholarship and they charge the full tuition for each person, thereby providing the university with a lot of revenue. I'd bet that if we had less H1Bs the universities would be the first to bitch and complain too. Incidentally, the H1Bs drive up tuition for all students (because they can't be seen charging a different rate for foreigners) so students here pay more. On top of that, you face depressed wages upon graduation. Fun fact: corporations like to hire H1B holders first because they know they cannot negotiate their salary or leave after 2 years to pursue other opportunities. Fun fact #2: during bad times American workers are laid off first because they just love an excuse to hire cheap labor.
I just recently received my masters (not in computer science) and I regret my decision to go to school, a bit. Sure I learned things but it is also 2 years away from the fast moving technology world. My experience and skills are ancient, relatively speaking, to those who have worked the last two years. Only go to school if you want to switch fields or if you cannot advance your career without a more advanced degree. Plus, the education may not be that great, considering professors (at large research universities) are there to do research and not teach; you could be getting shitty professors who do not care about providing good instructions and its not like you can get a refund. Try networking, go to career fairs, and whatever you can to get interviews before you give up and go to school. I suspect you will be able to find something before you need to go to school.
Charitable givings gets you an equal amount in tax deduction if your income is high enough that you need to itemize. Most people don't fall into that category. I don't know if the charitable givings mostly come from wealthy people or mostly middle class.
People in this country are selfish. I was born in another country and my family moved here when I was little so I can tell a difference. Back then if someone borrowed money from me they would bring up the fact that they owe me money whenever we bumped into each other. They would pay me back when they got the money and be very grateful for helping him out. In America, when someone borrowed money from me, I never heard about it again when I saw him. I had to bring up the issue after a while. This isn't just one or two people; it's the entire culture.
Divorce rates are sky high because people never learned to make self sacrifices for others when growing up, so when they hit a small bump in the marriage they divorce rather than working at it and trying to fix it. Women are using men for their money and men are using women for status. When they get tired of each other they leave. All of my friends (who are white) in their late 20s are from divorced families. Back where I was born, it's a social stigma to be divorced.
America is a place where you can fulfill all of your animistic desires: infidelity, murder, thievery, dishonesty, and when people try to change that you get cries of infringing on freedom and liberty. People don't care about their fellow men, they donate money to make themselves feel better and leave social problem to the government. But they turn a blind eye to all the extreme rights trying to reduce government's power to fulfill basic social needs for its citizens.
Honestly, I wish U.S. and Canada would swap places geographically. If it was warmer I'd move to Canada in a heart beat.
You should also try to control for the population density of CA, NY, and NH. You will find that density is correlated with gun murder rates and you can't argue that the different gun control policies are not important until you have reasonably corrected for all the other variables. This is what makes social science research hard.
Urgh. A lot of assumptions you made about intern programmers moving up, etc. Is that the speech you give to someone who you just hired? Promising them management within 5 years? There are probably 10 programmers all being promised that management position, but only one will get it. The ones that don't make it you say they lack motivation and fire them. Of course, it's never the manager's fault, right?
So what would you propose, that the web go back to the days where all the pages are static? It may be that this whole internet apps is a trend that will go away, but I don't think that will be the case. With more and more people accessing the web from handheld devices, and with the recent announcement that Windows will work on ARM, the traditional idea of a desktop is rapidly becoming obsolete. Desktop linux is also obsolete, or at least I see it, a futile effort. Linux developers shouldn't be working on the iTunes clone, or OpenOffice or GIMP. Try grooveshark, pixlr, and google docs (or any number of web office suites). Linux is great elsewhere, but just not on the desktop. Ironically, if Linux can get a web browser that can support all the latest web technologies, it might remain relevant because as more people transition to using web apps, the desktop platform will matter less. Example is the CR-48 laptop and Chrome OS, just a web browsers running Linux underneath. That may be the future of Linux on the desktop (not necessarily chrome OS, but some sort of basic OS to get people on the web that Linux fulfills nicely). So yeah, as you can see, getting hardware accelerated web browser for Linux is important, and you shouldn't dismiss it so casually.
yup. I'd love to see some siggraph paper on how it is implemented. But yeah, it seems like this was doable years ago. Were there technical limitations, like hardware not mature or flexible enough that got in the way?
If I understand what megatexture is, it is like a paging system for textures so that the amount of vram used can be minimized and unnecessary texture paged out. If this is the case, what took so long for this idea to be developed? It seems obvious to me and actually I thought this was already done in all games already? I'm just curious to learn more about the technology and development behind it, and understanding how it works.
ONE HUNDRED MILLION LINES? Excuse me, but that seems excessive. At the previous job I worked on a CAD software suite for windows for a company that rhymes with "desk" and that was only 12 million lines of code. Even if counting the real-time OS, which shouldn't need to have any UI or that much other stuff, I think you'd be far off from 100 million. Sure the operations are complex but 100 million and you are talking about a dev team that rivals the army that Microsoft has and that's for each model on the market. Sorry, I don't think that is realistic.
I believe you can use it today. I haven't tried the 3d plug-in (one more thing that needs to be installed) but the photsynth integration seems to be working well in places that have them. It's not as flashy as the one shown in video but that's probably because I haven't figured out all the controls and the power I have with it.
I think google just wants to make sure it's chrome os and cloud based apps can succeed and compete with MS's traditional desktop offerings.
I mean, making these AJAX based apps are relatively easy but not going to work if the user experience is horrible. Google is investing in the future, and not many companies are doing that.
I read somewhere that google's china market accounts for 2% of their revenue. I was in Shanghai when the news broke and I read it in their papers. I don't think there is a big uproar about their departure. Most people can use baidu for search but maps and gmail will be harder to replace. Google actually has less market share than baidu in China, which is surprising. Maybe they are not used to playing catchup in their own business. Maybe the Chinese government is secretly (or not) favoring baidu and hacking google causing google to feel the market is a lost cause, and fighting an uphill battle with ball and chains tied around the ankles doesn't help. I think it's a bluff from google to tell the chinese government to stop the bullshit and let them operate equally. I don't think they are going to give up the market to Microsoft and others that easily.
"Disclaimer: This is NOT a tip on how to get Vim to run inside of MS Visual Studio.NET. I have not yet found anyone who can make that work, so this is the next best thing. VisVim.dll seems to only work with VS6."
And that had been my experience as well - it is not possible to "embed" vim into the editor window like I had thought and wanted. It is not possible at the moment. The best I did was the create an external tools shortcut to vim and had a hot key assigned to it but I quickly found that to be more counter productive than helpful.
I also tried the Komodo editor the grandparent mentioned and the vim mode is a bastardized version of vim. It is basically so stripped down that you only have the very basic like jklh working and i mode. Really not worth the effort.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the effectiveness of ocean fertilization has been studied and debunked. If you are too lazy to click on the PDF, the short version is that while iron stimulates plankton growth, keeping carbon in the ocean is a different matter. http://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/OceanusIron_Will_It_Work_30747.pdf
Do you regret doing it? Do you think you will launch a company again?
I am beginning to worry about this trend to have an online coding portfolio.
I think open source is great, but once I got done with my day job coding, I never want to touch another line of code until work the next day. Adding to that, what about the basic need to socialize, spend time with the family, and spend time on hobbies?
I have definitely seen SF job postings for people with extensive open-source commits. Those posts are biased towards a few people who are lucky enough that their company pays them to work on open-source products, are unemployed and doing open-source thing until hired, or the very few people who code for 16 hours a day. Personally, I wouldn't hire the person that codes for 16 hours a day, but that is who I need to be to get noticed these days?
The scenario of airlines handling security is scary. Government regulation makes it more convenient for the travelers actually. You now know what not to bring to the airport. Imagine having to know the rules for each individual airport or carrier. More delays, more frustration. I think airlines would rather not have that. One problem with any commercialization or privatization is the communication asymmetry problem. How do you know how well each airline is handling security? How can you trust that they are honestly reporting the measures they are doing (or not doing)? It is in the airline's best interest to spend the least amount possible while appearing to do the most. That alone scares me. What about the intelligence each airline will have invariably collected? Should they share that with other airlines? It is not in their best interest to do so (hey this guy is kind of suspicious, but let's not warn other airlines. If he blows another carrier's plane up, we get more business, win!) Those republicans that want to privatize everything never progress beyond econ 101 (if at all) and learned about market distortions and externalities.
A thousand times yes. Finally some truth.
My roommate at a large research university in the Midwest is getting his masters in EE but wants to work as a programmer when he graduates. Me? I was laid off in 2009 so I went back for my masters in something different. I asked him why he is here and his response was "to make the most money possible." Strange, because my naive 23 years-old self would have said, "because I love technology and to create things and understand how computers work." A few months living together he comes to me for help to get an internship. He says he is screwing up technical interviews and wants help with preparing. So we talk and I ask him simple questions. Keep in mind I haven't programmed in 4 years. He doesn't know how C++ templates work, nor what would happen if you return a pointer to an object created on the stack. No concept of virtual memory and a poor communicator overall (he refers to everything "that", "this"). He has no problem listing C++ on his resume though.
Don't we have exceptions to the H1B quota for US graduates? I am pretty sure he will be able to get a job when he graduates. For comparison, I know that all of my college friends would have been able to blow his socks off in terms of knowledge, intelligence, and competency. The only redeeming quality he brings is that he is willing to work for whatever wage he can get. Contrary to what he believes, he is not going to be rich by this country's standards.
But I feel bad for him at the same time that he is stealing jobs from US citizens. He told me his mom and dad mortgaged their home to have enough to send him here. He has a loan with 18% interest rate form an Indian bank and need to start paying it back in 2014. He was giddy about working in San Francisco and switching employers every few years and getting top dollars until I popped his bubble that he has to stay his sponsor for at least 3 years on the H1B. He is getting a real life lesson at how professors also treat engineering students like slaves with no pay, etc.
I do not have anything against Indians in general, but they keep to themselves, are not interested in integrating with the rest of society, and have no concerns for any social issues that are occurring in this country. They work insane hours and play politics to advance and in some cases are becoming CEOs and VPs, calling for more visa workers (after all, they have made it). And they are far from being smarter than US citizens.
The technological improvements are noteworthy, like a noticeably faster boot time and user experience, support for more devices out of the box, and a better battery management. The UI lift on the desktop is also very pleasing to me; I hated the rounded corners and much prefer the minimalistic flat right-angled corners in 8. But it is not the engineers that are failing to deliver, but business requirements make what they deliver a poor experience.
"Modern" requires rewriting code for a new UI paradigm and there isn't really any compelling reason to do it especially when you have limited developer resources. So, Microsoft forces "Modern" down everyone's throats to get it installed on enough computers to make it an attractive platform for developers. It has worked for them before to bundle venues into new markets with their operating system so they are doing it again. It might work again. Maybe. It may end up taking off as eventually all PCs will have Windows RT installed. But how many people actually use "Modern" is another question. Apple was very happy to publish their app download rates. I wonder when "Modern" will reach 1 billion downloads? Probably a very long time.
Doesn't make sense? Who manages the virtual memory and schedules the threads in the games?
I don't know about Russia, but I can offer this observation. When I visited Beijing in 2011, there were signs plastered all over the place about "living a low carbon life, improve your community," or something to that effect. I do not believe that the Chinese government actually denies that CO2 releases is causing climate change. They certainly do not try to hide it from their citizens. I think their argument for not enacting any sort of carbon reduction is because a) the U.S. isn't doing it, and b) the industrialized nations (the West) have been polluting for much longer and their emissions are responsible for causing this problem so why should China have to cut down on emission when they are just now getting organized and industrializing, when the West has already had its run and are reaping the economic benefits. That to me shows that the Chinese government recognizes that AGW is real as opposed to the U.S. which is still at the stage of denial. The first step to treating a problem is recognizing that the problem exists. China is there and the U.S. isn't.
Also, if options are not treated as an expense and is taxed, you are effectively taxing it twice when the employee cashes it. I think why the rule is in place.
The H1B visa only benefits the corporations and the universities. At the university that I attended, everyone in my 400 level computer science class was from India or China. The only natives were undergrads. The university isn't given the students a scholarship and they charge the full tuition for each person, thereby providing the university with a lot of revenue. I'd bet that if we had less H1Bs the universities would be the first to bitch and complain too. Incidentally, the H1Bs drive up tuition for all students (because they can't be seen charging a different rate for foreigners) so students here pay more. On top of that, you face depressed wages upon graduation. Fun fact: corporations like to hire H1B holders first because they know they cannot negotiate their salary or leave after 2 years to pursue other opportunities. Fun fact #2: during bad times American workers are laid off first because they just love an excuse to hire cheap labor.
I just recently received my masters (not in computer science) and I regret my decision to go to school, a bit. Sure I learned things but it is also 2 years away from the fast moving technology world. My experience and skills are ancient, relatively speaking, to those who have worked the last two years. Only go to school if you want to switch fields or if you cannot advance your career without a more advanced degree. Plus, the education may not be that great, considering professors (at large research universities) are there to do research and not teach; you could be getting shitty professors who do not care about providing good instructions and its not like you can get a refund. Try networking, go to career fairs, and whatever you can to get interviews before you give up and go to school. I suspect you will be able to find something before you need to go to school.
Charitable givings gets you an equal amount in tax deduction if your income is high enough that you need to itemize. Most people don't fall into that category. I don't know if the charitable givings mostly come from wealthy people or mostly middle class. People in this country are selfish. I was born in another country and my family moved here when I was little so I can tell a difference. Back then if someone borrowed money from me they would bring up the fact that they owe me money whenever we bumped into each other. They would pay me back when they got the money and be very grateful for helping him out. In America, when someone borrowed money from me, I never heard about it again when I saw him. I had to bring up the issue after a while. This isn't just one or two people; it's the entire culture. Divorce rates are sky high because people never learned to make self sacrifices for others when growing up, so when they hit a small bump in the marriage they divorce rather than working at it and trying to fix it. Women are using men for their money and men are using women for status. When they get tired of each other they leave. All of my friends (who are white) in their late 20s are from divorced families. Back where I was born, it's a social stigma to be divorced. America is a place where you can fulfill all of your animistic desires: infidelity, murder, thievery, dishonesty, and when people try to change that you get cries of infringing on freedom and liberty. People don't care about their fellow men, they donate money to make themselves feel better and leave social problem to the government. But they turn a blind eye to all the extreme rights trying to reduce government's power to fulfill basic social needs for its citizens. Honestly, I wish U.S. and Canada would swap places geographically. If it was warmer I'd move to Canada in a heart beat.
You should also try to control for the population density of CA, NY, and NH. You will find that density is correlated with gun murder rates and you can't argue that the different gun control policies are not important until you have reasonably corrected for all the other variables. This is what makes social science research hard.
Without a good instrument variable and lots of other controls, the correlation is probably meaningless.
Urgh. A lot of assumptions you made about intern programmers moving up, etc. Is that the speech you give to someone who you just hired? Promising them management within 5 years? There are probably 10 programmers all being promised that management position, but only one will get it. The ones that don't make it you say they lack motivation and fire them. Of course, it's never the manager's fault, right?
So what would you propose, that the web go back to the days where all the pages are static? It may be that this whole internet apps is a trend that will go away, but I don't think that will be the case. With more and more people accessing the web from handheld devices, and with the recent announcement that Windows will work on ARM, the traditional idea of a desktop is rapidly becoming obsolete. Desktop linux is also obsolete, or at least I see it, a futile effort. Linux developers shouldn't be working on the iTunes clone, or OpenOffice or GIMP. Try grooveshark, pixlr, and google docs (or any number of web office suites). Linux is great elsewhere, but just not on the desktop. Ironically, if Linux can get a web browser that can support all the latest web technologies, it might remain relevant because as more people transition to using web apps, the desktop platform will matter less. Example is the CR-48 laptop and Chrome OS, just a web browsers running Linux underneath. That may be the future of Linux on the desktop (not necessarily chrome OS, but some sort of basic OS to get people on the web that Linux fulfills nicely). So yeah, as you can see, getting hardware accelerated web browser for Linux is important, and you shouldn't dismiss it so casually.
yup. I'd love to see some siggraph paper on how it is implemented. But yeah, it seems like this was doable years ago. Were there technical limitations, like hardware not mature or flexible enough that got in the way?
If I understand what megatexture is, it is like a paging system for textures so that the amount of vram used can be minimized and unnecessary texture paged out. If this is the case, what took so long for this idea to be developed? It seems obvious to me and actually I thought this was already done in all games already? I'm just curious to learn more about the technology and development behind it, and understanding how it works.
Have to agree. I hated the shade of brown with default Ubuntu. I could never stand it and that stop me from using Ubuntu.
Now that I have found LinuxMint I will never go back (Ubuntu with a much more pleasant color).
ONE HUNDRED MILLION LINES? Excuse me, but that seems excessive. At the previous job I worked on a CAD software suite for windows for a company that rhymes with "desk" and that was only 12 million lines of code. Even if counting the real-time OS, which shouldn't need to have any UI or that much other stuff, I think you'd be far off from 100 million. Sure the operations are complex but 100 million and you are talking about a dev team that rivals the army that Microsoft has and that's for each model on the market. Sorry, I don't think that is realistic.
I believe you can use it today. I haven't tried the 3d plug-in (one more thing that needs to be installed) but the photsynth integration seems to be working well in places that have them. It's not as flashy as the one shown in video but that's probably because I haven't figured out all the controls and the power I have with it.
I think google just wants to make sure it's chrome os and cloud based apps can succeed and compete with MS's traditional desktop offerings.
I mean, making these AJAX based apps are relatively easy but not going to work if the user experience is horrible. Google is investing in the future, and not many companies are doing that.
I read somewhere that google's china market accounts for 2% of their revenue. I was in Shanghai when the news broke and I read it in their papers. I don't think there is a big uproar about their departure. Most people can use baidu for search but maps and gmail will be harder to replace. Google actually has less market share than baidu in China, which is surprising. Maybe they are not used to playing catchup in their own business. Maybe the Chinese government is secretly (or not) favoring baidu and hacking google causing google to feel the market is a lost cause, and fighting an uphill battle with ball and chains tied around the ankles doesn't help. I think it's a bluff from google to tell the chinese government to stop the bullshit and let them operate equally. I don't think they are going to give up the market to Microsoft and others that easily.
according to the wikia page for vim ole:
"Disclaimer: This is NOT a tip on how to get Vim to run inside of MS Visual Studio .NET. I have not yet found anyone who can make that work, so this is the next best thing. VisVim.dll seems to only work with VS6."
And that had been my experience as well - it is not possible to "embed" vim into the editor window like I had thought and wanted. It is not possible at the moment. The best I did was the create an external tools shortcut to vim and had a hot key assigned to it but I quickly found that to be more counter productive than helpful.
I also tried the Komodo editor the grandparent mentioned and the vim mode is a bastardized version of vim. It is basically so stripped down that you only have the very basic like jklh working and i mode. Really not worth the effort.