Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.
Management people have always sought to devalue programmers. It makes them uncomfortable to think that some of their subordinates can do things that they can't. The current situation is no doubt making those people very happy indeed. Because now a programmer is, it seems, just a low-value job - like telesales - that can be cheaply and easily farmed out to some third-world sweatshop. The manager is once again demonstrably superior to all his subordinates.
the cheapest way (just off the top of my head) would be to update the Saturn 5
I doubt it. For two reasons.
First, most of the engineers who built the Saturn V, and all of the senior ones, are long retired or even dead by now. In other words even if we only wanted to rebuild the Saturn V as it was in the early 1970's, by the time any such program gets started there is very little expertise on the particulars of the Saturn V booster system, and everything needs to be worked out all over again pretty much from scratch.
Second, it's more difficult than you think to uprate an existing booster system that's already working near its maximum theoretical performance. A lot of fine tuning went into those big F-1 engines. If you try to change the design at all you have a whole new load of tuning tweaks to work out, just to stop the thing from exploding on the test rig.
Having said that I have no doubt that the new booster program will borrow heavily from whatever documented experience of the Saturn program still exists.
The Saturn V was surely the most awesome engineering feat ever accomplished. I would give up just about anything I own just to see one of those babies take off. There are very few sights in the world able to reduce a grown man to tears but that is one of them.
It lasted 150 years before it finished coming out (good arse!) but now it's finally over. It probably belongs in the "Silent But Violent" class since nobody heard anything, apparently.
CO2 levels are rising
She held her breath, duh. Who doesn't, when they let loose a big one?
It has nothing to do with Kang or Kodos. It was from the episode where Homer goes on the Space Shuttle, and the hero of the episode was an "inanimate carbon rod". As far as I recall, neither Kang nor Kodos made an appearance in this episode.
BTW both those alien names are from Star Trek (TOS)...Kang was a Klingon (natch) played by Michael Ansara and Kodos was "Kodos the Executioner", the unfortunate-governor-of-Tarsus-IV-turned-Shakespea rean-actor.
If it's shortish text files you're looking for, Reiserfs isn't so amenable to this type of treatment because it doesn't just store file contents in nice neat blocks like older file systems do. It stuffs shorter files into the spaces between bigger chunks of data. I think it even stores some small files in structured usually used for filesystem metadata.
The current UK government is a dead loss in everything it does. There's no point in hoping for any positive changes anywhere until they have gone away.
The cost isn't the only factor to be considered. In any case, if freight were forced to return to the railways, we could expect efficiencies of scale there which currently aren't available.
I wish to God somebody would mod that up. I agree 100%. Lorries are a fucking nuisance and a menace to all other road users. There are enough laws about how lorries should be driven (eg keeping to their own lane, keeping below 60mph) but lorry drivers *never* obey those laws.
Also they tend to rely on their size to intimidate. In theory nobody is supposed to pull any sort of maneuver without looking first to make sure it won't force another road user to change speed or direction. But lorry drivers just don't give a damn. You'd better keep your wits about you when you're driving behind one of those things.
Taking long distance freight off the roads and putting it back onto rail where it belongs would be a major vote winner I reckon.
Anyone who can give proper tech support at an ISP is probably a Linux user anyway.
Almost true. I worked at the most "techy-oriented" ISP in the UK for a few months just over three years ago; the guys in the team supporting the back-end services were mostly *BSD users, and laughed at me because I used Linux. Don't know if that would still be the case, though.
There's no doubt about the fact that you are an ignorant, opinionated fool prone to shooting his mouth off without prior consideration.
Let me spell it out for you since you are clearly incapable of spelling for yourself. Leaving aside entirely the question of correctness in Latin, and concentrating on modern English usage: IF AND ONLY IF all words ending in -us are to gain an ending of -i in the plural, THEN "virus" would pluralize as "viri". But "virii" would have to come from "virius" which isn't even a word.
Endings of -us with no preceding "i" NEVER pluralize as -ii. There is not one single example.
...a search for anything that people are trying to sell, like "ceiling fans", mostly returned links to web stores selling that product. The newest ranking for "ceiling fans" includes other links as well [...] So it seems like an improvement to me.
It's not the genuine online store sites that are the problem; often a genuine place to buy is just what you are looking for and such links are at least genuine and relevant. No, the big problem is "link aggregators" and shopping comparison sites. Search for terms common to some consumer product and these links will often dominate the first few pages. I am talking about sites with names like dealtime, bestbuy etc. There are several things about these that render them less than worthless:
1. The links on any given aggregator will tend to be dominated by one or two retailers. Often the same retailers will dominate more than one of these sites, or even most of them. So you have tewo or three pages of google links all pointing at pages filled with replicated links to the same handful of deals.
2. The deals advertised in this way are themselves never competitive enough to be interesting. The retailers that advertise using these methods are looking for dumb buyers who don't really know how to shop around. More competitive retailers rely on good karma spread by word of mouth, "recommended" links from other unrelated sites and repeat business.
3. The "content" on these aggregators and "deal comparison" sites is by its nature so ephemeral that by the time you get served the link, the terms that led to its ranking have often vanished from the page. And there is little point looking in Google's cached version if the advertiser is no longer offering the item.
For these reasons, Google is rapidly becoming useless as a web shopping search tool. Which is more than annoying, as I haven't managed to find a useful replacement. In many cases I find myself reduced to using a combination of my own carefully collected bookmarks, and eBay. In my opinion Google ought to specifically exclude all sites of this type as they are utterly useless to everybody and are cluttering up many search results so completely, that when you are going shopping, you now might hesitate to bother googling at all.
That's a red herring. Corporations do not generally owe any loyalty to any country, they are only there to make money and are prone to outsource, "off-shore", or relocate completely whenever it suits them to do so.
Sure, but that demo page isn't the PDA-friendly version. He's saying that all you'd need is a separate set of static, PDA-friendly style sheets to present the same content in PDA-friendly fashion. In mozilla you can select alternate style sheets from the menu. In other browsers you just go to a different URL - kind of like the BBC news website where you have e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/default.st m
for modem users in a hurry. I think Slashdot does have a "low graphics" version buried away somewhere, but Cascading Style Sheets allows you to maintain as many different views as you like with very little effort.
It this plane ever flies that route, the smaller ozone hole over the North Pole will soon be the bigger ozone hole over the North Pole. Stratospheric jets destroy ozone.
Only a stupid law is so arbitrary and "off the wall" that people could break it unknowingly. I'm reminded of the Star Trek episode where Wesley is sentenced to death for walking on the grass.
Suffice it to say, this issue was decided for me long ago: I'll not be spending any vacation time in the United Corporations of America, now or ever. Too risky.
They are no doubt also gagging at the opportunity to demonize "hackers" by associating them with child pornography once again. I must say this is a worldwide campaign that has been very effective already.Even my mum thinks hackers == paedophiles now.
The article suggests as a consequence of the CSS-based implementation that printer-friendly and handheld-friendly views would be available. Now that's surely going to be the killer argument for many of us. How much time would I save if I could read slashdot comfortably on the way to and from work? I'd get my life back finally after five years of being glued to my desk every evening...
Slashdot Mirror
Management people have always sought to devalue programmers. It makes them uncomfortable to think that some of their subordinates can do things that they can't. The current situation is no doubt making those people very happy indeed. Because now a programmer is, it seems, just a low-value job - like telesales - that can be cheaply and easily farmed out to some third-world sweatshop. The manager is once again demonstrably superior to all his subordinates.
I doubt it. For two reasons.
First, most of the engineers who built the Saturn V, and all of the senior ones, are long retired or even dead by now. In other words even if we only wanted to rebuild the Saturn V as it was in the early 1970's, by the time any such program gets started there is very little expertise on the particulars of the Saturn V booster system, and everything needs to be worked out all over again pretty much from scratch.
Second, it's more difficult than you think to uprate an existing booster system that's already working near its maximum theoretical performance. A lot of fine tuning went into those big F-1 engines. If you try to change the design at all you have a whole new load of tuning tweaks to work out, just to stop the thing from exploding on the test rig.
Having said that I have no doubt that the new booster program will borrow heavily from whatever documented experience of the Saturn program still exists.
The Saturn V was surely the most awesome engineering feat ever accomplished. I would give up just about anything I own just to see one of those babies take off. There are very few sights in the world able to reduce a grown man to tears but that is one of them.
...Gaia farted.
It lasted 150 years before it finished coming out (good arse!) but now it's finally over. It probably belongs in the "Silent But Violent" class since nobody heard anything, apparently.
CO2 levels are rising
She held her breath, duh. Who doesn't, when they let loose a big one?
It has nothing to do with Kang or Kodos. It was from the episode where Homer goes on the Space Shuttle, and the hero of the episode was an "inanimate carbon rod". As far as I recall, neither Kang nor Kodos made an appearance in this episode.
a rean-actor.
BTW both those alien names are from Star Trek (TOS)...Kang was a Klingon (natch) played by Michael Ansara and Kodos was "Kodos the Executioner", the unfortunate-governor-of-Tarsus-IV-turned-Shakespe
If it's shortish text files you're looking for, Reiserfs isn't so amenable to this type of treatment because it doesn't just store file contents in nice neat blocks like older file systems do. It stuffs shorter files into the spaces between bigger chunks of data. I think it even stores some small files in structured usually used for filesystem metadata.
The cost of track upgrades and maintenance would be covered by revenue from the new freight business going to the rail companies.
The current UK government is a dead loss in everything it does. There's no point in hoping for any positive changes anywhere until they have gone away.
The cost isn't the only factor to be considered. In any case, if freight were forced to return to the railways, we could expect efficiencies of scale there which currently aren't available.
I wish to God somebody would mod that up. I agree 100%. Lorries are a fucking nuisance and a menace to all other road users. There are enough laws about how lorries should be driven (eg keeping to their own lane, keeping below 60mph) but lorry drivers *never* obey those laws.
Also they tend to rely on their size to intimidate. In theory nobody is supposed to pull any sort of maneuver without looking first to make sure it won't force another road user to change speed or direction. But lorry drivers just don't give a damn. You'd better keep your wits about you when you're driving behind one of those things.
Taking long distance freight off the roads and putting it back onto rail where it belongs would be a major vote winner I reckon.
Almost true. I worked at the most "techy-oriented" ISP in the UK for a few months just over three years ago; the guys in the team supporting the back-end services were mostly *BSD users, and laughed at me because I used Linux. Don't know if that would still be the case, though.
Oh irony of ironies. Bizrate is just the type of site I am complaining about.
There's no doubt about the fact that you are an ignorant, opinionated fool prone to shooting his mouth off without prior consideration.
Let me spell it out for you since you are clearly incapable of spelling for yourself. Leaving aside entirely the question of correctness in Latin, and concentrating on modern English usage: IF AND ONLY IF all words ending in -us are to gain an ending of -i in the plural, THEN "virus" would pluralize as "viri". But "virii" would have to come from "virius" which isn't even a word.
Endings of -us with no preceding "i" NEVER pluralize as -ii. There is not one single example.
It's not the genuine online store sites that are the problem; often a genuine place to buy is just what you are looking for and such links are at least genuine and relevant. No, the big problem is "link aggregators" and shopping comparison sites. Search for terms common to some consumer product and these links will often dominate the first few pages. I am talking about sites with names like dealtime, bestbuy etc. There are several things about these that render them less than worthless:
1. The links on any given aggregator will tend to be dominated by one or two retailers. Often the same retailers will dominate more than one of these sites, or even most of them. So you have tewo or three pages of google links all pointing at pages filled with replicated links to the same handful of deals.
2. The deals advertised in this way are themselves never competitive enough to be interesting. The retailers that advertise using these methods are looking for dumb buyers who don't really know how to shop around. More competitive retailers rely on good karma spread by word of mouth, "recommended" links from other unrelated sites and repeat business.
3. The "content" on these aggregators and "deal comparison" sites is by its nature so ephemeral that by the time you get served the link, the terms that led to its ranking have often vanished from the page. And there is little point looking in Google's cached version if the advertiser is no longer offering the item.
For these reasons, Google is rapidly becoming useless as a web shopping search tool. Which is more than annoying, as I haven't managed to find a useful replacement. In many cases I find myself reduced to using a combination of my own carefully collected bookmarks, and eBay. In my opinion Google ought to specifically exclude all sites of this type as they are utterly useless to everybody and are cluttering up many search results so completely, that when you are going shopping, you now might hesitate to bother googling at all.
step 5: profit !!!
Shit! This one actually works!
That's a red herring. Corporations do not generally owe any loyalty to any country, they are only there to make money and are prone to outsource, "off-shore", or relocate completely whenever it suits them to do so.
Sure, but that demo page isn't the PDA-friendly version. He's saying that all you'd need is a separate set of static, PDA-friendly style sheets to present the same content in PDA-friendly fashion. In mozilla you can select alternate style sheets from the menu. In other browsers you just go to a different URL - kind of like the BBC news website where you have e.g.
t m
s tm
;o)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/default.s
for broadband users and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/default.
for modem users in a hurry. I think Slashdot does have a "low graphics" version buried away somewhere, but Cascading Style Sheets allows you to maintain as many different views as you like with very little effort.
Plus the code *looks* better...
It this plane ever flies that route, the smaller ozone hole over the North Pole will soon be the bigger ozone hole over the North Pole. Stratospheric jets destroy ozone.
Only a stupid law is so arbitrary and "off the wall" that people could break it unknowingly. I'm reminded of the Star Trek episode where Wesley is sentenced to death for walking on the grass.
Suffice it to say, this issue was decided for me long ago: I'll not be spending any vacation time in the United Corporations of America, now or ever. Too risky.
There seems to be another similar service up and running now however.
They are no doubt also gagging at the opportunity to demonize "hackers" by associating them with child pornography once again. I must say this is a worldwide campaign that has been very effective already.Even my mum thinks hackers == paedophiles now.
What to do?
The article suggests as a consequence of the CSS-based implementation that printer-friendly and handheld-friendly views would be available. Now that's surely going to be the killer argument for many of us. How much time would I save if I could read slashdot comfortably on the way to and from work? I'd get my life back finally after five years of being glued to my desk every evening...
Only if we can try it on you first. And then we'll think about the other part.
Only if we get to shoot you first. And then we'll think about the other part.
Actually there was something on but and it was great, but you missed it while you were surfing slashdot.