Yeah and part time jobs tend to want you to keep your schedule free so that they can move you around at their whim. My sister worked both at Walmart and as a hair dresser. Neither job wanted to give her full time hours. But if you ever turned down a shift you got black listed and they would go to everyone else first if another shift opened up. Expecting flexibility when you aren't willing to hire people for enough hours to be able to live is ridiculous IMHO.
P.S. I think they purposely tried to screw your schedule up so that you'd not try working another job. They'd have 3 people each working 4hrs a day 6 days a week rather than have them come in say say 3 for 8 even if they could work out the schedule so the same number of staff would be around at any given time. So you make peanuts and have to go back and forth to work more frequently than someone working full time... nice.
I agree with the commuting thing. I don't own a car but think I should pay (and my work should afford me the ability to pay) the full cost of my transportation but that it should still be costly enough that people tend to live were the work. At least were I leave public transit is hugely subsidized (~60% of the cost paid by the government). People still whine about the $3.75 it costs to get on a bus. Does seem steep and I don't think a typical inner city ride is really worth ~$10. But the thing is our bus drivers are getting $60k plus a killer pension. So the government subsidizes the "Walmart employees/students" riding the bus while at the same time making sure that the bus drivers are really well taken care of. Perhaps $40k a year for the bus drivers and less subsidizes would make both the government spend less and Walmart have to pay more in order for anyone to work for them.
There is also the incentivizing nature of public transit: people are willing to commute because it is cheap but they will whine and moan if buses run less frequently than say ~20min so you end up with a lot of demand for long range transit but an even larger demand for frequent runs so commuters that get out of work at 4:30 don't have to wait till 5pm to go with the rest of us.
I work in Toronto, think it is number 2 next to LA in north america for commutes (average commute is > 1.5hr). But a single room apartment goes for about $1000 on the bottom end and you can get a 3-4 bedroom house with that kind of monthly payment with the commute. So: live like a college student till you die, or be able to afford a family and give up 3hrs a day to get to the city to work.
Funny how hard it is to live on one of these 'good, high wage jobs'. Working in tech obviously I'm used to high compensation for my time, but I've done military, machining, making packaging for frozen dinners, etc etc. It's funny how the more physically demanding the job is the harder they want you to work to have to joy of keeping your job while at the same time paying you 1/4th what you make with a desk job. There is a skill difference in the work obviously but I don't think anyone should go home after a 40+ hr week with too little money to live. You can get by on 11 in the burbs but what if your job is in the city? Somehow Starbucks employees are just supposed to "get by". Getting by usually means 25+ year olds still living with their parents because their full time job isn't enough to be able to afford a place of their own.
Funny how Walmart offered suggestions on budgeting recently that excluded the cost of heating (don't remember if transportation was on there or not, but heck bus both ways to a 5 day a week job will probably run you $80 a month at least so you'd be working for your first day and a half of the month just to get to work).
At 3.5Ghz light travels 8.6cm per clock cycle. A thousand time performance improvement would mean ~86 micrometers. Ie roughly 400 transistor widths at current feature size. Since there are about a billion transistors in a chip assuming a square configuration you'd have ~31600 transistors on a side. Ie your 1000X chip would take ~75 cycles just to cross from one side of the CPU to the other. That is assuming speed of light which electrons definitely don't achieve. You still have to get electrons from RAM, disk drives, GPU etc. In short you'd need a massive pipeline to keep the CPU busy. The CPU might get 1000X faster but it will just be similar to (Amhdal's Law) parallelism given an infinite number of CPUs you are limited to the serial execution time, instead you are limited to the time needed to load and store back your program. Might get a 10X improvement with a 1000X faster CPU still nice but diminishing returns.
What value do they bring to society? They are famous/inspirational because they can run fast jump high or whatever. Do you think if a drug comes out that would make your doctor smarter/better at diagnosis but had equivalent health risks and you had the choice you'd go with the "natural" doctor? Wouldn't want him/her to be taking unnecessary risks after all. People that define themselves by their career will do whatever it takes to be the best. That is what it means to be competitive.
And where does that push come from? From it slowing you down on the down stroke. You'll never get all that energy back. It is more of a matter of the timing I think not the energy it gives you but that it gives it to you when you are trying to move against gravity and takes it away when you are moving with gravity. It levels the max effort a bit across the whole stride.
As well there is some limit to the pain/strain that you can take. If you can expand the duration of the push just enough to make it not painful but not so much that it changes your pace/balance too much you might be better off. Muscle has a static and dynamic strength. It would all be a matter of what point in your stride you make contact and how far forward you fall before your flesh/shoes catch you enough to push you up off the bottom.
What software does RT not work with? Web apps, check, most mainstream games and tools, check. I think it is that people expect more when they by Windows. They say: "I bought a Windows tablet and now you are telling me I can't run Photoshop?" If people are really looking for a tablet they need to expect craplets: single purpose really small apps not full featured menu mazes that they get on the desktop.
Umm I bet a lot of people are compiling for ARM. The default in VS I think is Any CPU which I'd bet 90% of people don't bother changing.
Legacy: that is the tombstone. Companies like uranium have a half life. MS might have come to the point of diminishing returns. They have this legacy baggage that they must have to convince people it is really windows but people don't actually want windows at this form factor. All those great "network affects" they had going for them keeps them making products for the shrinking market instead of dropping that market and moving to the other one in a breaking change way.
take the hit and dump them. Might help build an ecosystem. Can't hurt. If giving someone a $200 discount gets them into windows tablets the next phone might be an easier sell, the next laptop might be a shinny touch enabled win 8.1 device, etc. But this is MS they aren't always rational, they'll hang on to them for 2 years then try to dump them for -$200 when they are completely useless even at that price.
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing.
My thoughts exactly. When you are old enough to want to see it you are old enough to see it IMHO. We need to discover another continent again so we can ship off the all the Puritans to it again.
Dude this is from the 80's. Not only were TVs standard def (and lower quality than a current generation standard def set), but the computer screens were what 20dpi? Modern eReaders are high enough resolution you don't see the pixels so they are effectively the printed page. Might be a slight factor of plastic screen verses slightly duller paper surface but nothing compared to TV vs printed page.
Could be. I find a good paperback more enjoyable but ebooks more consistent. With real books there are so many ways for a publisher to "express themselves" that they can screw up the experience: too small text, strange fonts, for larger books they can be unwieldy (in my opinion anything longer than ~400pgs or so it is really think on one side and thin on the other and wants to flip out of your hand), similarly hardcover tombs can weigh so much they are a pain in the ass. The beauty of ebooks even the longest book is the same weight, you can read several large books at the same time without a suitcase to bring to work etc. If you could get the big books in several volumes of ideally sized paperbacks that might be different but I don't think it would ever beat free which is what books currently cost me.
They might not have been first to the punch but:.Net, Azure, significant UI redesign (for good or bad) of windows and Office, XBox. Yep they've been pretty stagnant.
I don't know if I like him or not I think Bill would be more of a fun guy to have a nerdy chat with. But I think this is the common scenario where the CEO that is in charge when a company goes from rapid growth to Blue Chip slow and steady gets blamed for "breaking" the company. Think of MS like a corner store. In this case you can by the corner store for 67B and it pays 17B a year in profits. 25% return on your money per annum with no growth is still a deal I'll take.
There is targets of opportunity. But when attacking a "technologically advanced" adversary as this thread has wandered down there are tons of infrastructure targets. Your technologically advanced adversary probably isn't hanging out around a mud hut, they probably are being moved around in APCs, in tunnels etc. Heck Iraq wasn't that advanced but it still took a long time to hunt down Saddam Insane.
There were exceptions but they were few and usually in segregated regiments but keeping the pilots as officers let the army keep the riff raff and blacks out of command roles. The rather crappy job that the airforce did in Vietnam doing close air support lead the army to push back for their own air capacity and sargents are easier to come by than officers. I think desperate need won out over some sort of snobbery about how high class someone has to be to be a pilot.
For major ops line of sight could be quite practical I'd imagine just run a constant stream of planes to and from the target. Also you can't jam everywhere so given enough targets... The beauty with the drones is their duration the ability to switch pilots mid op etc means you could brief a few pilots each on a few different targets. Ones not available "Bob" takes over and hits the one he has been briefed on instead. Also most likely the weapons will be being used against the random crackpot dictatorships using 1970's era soviet equipment. Any technologically advanced enemy will likely be a 5+ year war and a whole new generation of weapons could be stamped out (well at least the old F35s dusted off and given an electronics upgrade).
My understanding from my management course is that IT people are considered "self directed professionals" so... if you schedule a lot of meetings during the day and have to work late in the evening to actually get stuff done... that was your choice. Somehow magically a server having a hardware failure and getting a page in the middle in the night is also "your choice".
That said: my solution is just to refuse to work for free. Once in a blue moon I'll stay late to get the build working again or something but the day it becomes a regular expectation is the day I start sending my resume out again. I've also been lucky to have employers that didn't want overtime or that did pay for it for most of my career so I guess I'm a bit spoiled.
Bad admins will be bad admins. In my experience it cuts both ways. Linux is considered rock solid so only touched when a functionality needs to be added to the server or a major update of a package (say apache or samba) comes out. The rest of the time the server is left alone so "we don't break anything". Windows admins in my experience at least are much more tolerant of taking systems down for maintenance. Everyone might be at the same patch level post patch Tuesday but the patches in my experience actually happen. They just send emails out saying something will be unavailable for a couple hours in an evening and life goes on. In my *nix admin days it was much more important to see that the 393 day up time of server X make it to 400 then to worry about silly things like upgrades or patches: the firewall was allknowing and wise and will protect us from everything after all.
Yeah where as flaws in OSS is just time you are cheated out of.
My phliosophy, your mileage might very, is that for boring stuff I get the paid solution for interesting stuff I look for a OSS (torrent clients, media players, games etc). My thinking: a boring project will only get updates while there is a reason for the developer to be interested in it. Once a boring project becomes "close enough" contributors tend to go away. But with paid software they have an incentive to do the dull bugfix workflow optimization part of the thing.
Conversely, interesting projects will have oddles of people wanting to contribute and can pick and chose the best contributors, probably won't die out any time soon etc. vs a paid for solution which will generally suffer from limited staff, other reasons why a rockstar might not want to work there (can't get the proper work visa, doesn't want to live in a dull town, company is known for dictatorship style management, unwilling to try new technologies etc). Generally once something is good enough to attract a lot of attention it all becomes milking it for revenue: new features will get added only if they add to the bottom line and integration with others almost always will not be something that is thought to add to the bottom line so you'll end up with lots of little islands of fuctionality.
Political sovereignty is a crappy metric. Does anyone really think Egypt is only 150-70 years old? Conquering a country and then releasing it again does mean you "recreated" it. People still would have called themselves Egyptian, I'm pretty sure they didn't have as much rights of movement as a white British subject, had a different government hierachy (sure the queen is the queen but colonies generally get governors or military commanders with defacto soverign rights) etc. Similarly with Ethopia, geez both of these are mentioned in the bible and as far as I know were pretty well defined chunks of real estate back then.
I think culture, geography and to a lesser extent language are better metrics.Korea is still Korea whether it is currently (and probably temporarily over the long term hundreds of years you judge kingdoms/eras by) divided in 2 or not. Racist Koreans likely will still consider someone on the 5km on the other side of the NK SK border as "acceptable" were as 5km across any other border would be an abomination.
Lastly was July 4th really Americas sovereignty? I would argue that. The colonies declared independence but they still had to fight for it. Anyone in NK is free to declare the Koreas unified but until the other side agrees (or at least stops shooting you when you cross the bordrer) it doesn't matter.
Totally agree would mod you up to 6 if I could. I have a 27" iMac so 1440 high and I just though of losing ~30% of that screen height... and cried. Not everything is for watching movies. My work I have a good setup a 24" vertical and a 22 horizontal. Still find when programming I have more things I'd like in the vertical orientation but nice to have the choice. They could still give you the choice here but the screens would be so narrow that chances are your IDE tools on the side will take up the remaining "width" in the vertical orientation.
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Yeah and part time jobs tend to want you to keep your schedule free so that they can move you around at their whim. My sister worked both at Walmart and as a hair dresser. Neither job wanted to give her full time hours. But if you ever turned down a shift you got black listed and they would go to everyone else first if another shift opened up. Expecting flexibility when you aren't willing to hire people for enough hours to be able to live is ridiculous IMHO.
P.S. I think they purposely tried to screw your schedule up so that you'd not try working another job. They'd have 3 people each working 4hrs a day 6 days a week rather than have them come in say say 3 for 8 even if they could work out the schedule so the same number of staff would be around at any given time. So you make peanuts and have to go back and forth to work more frequently than someone working full time ... nice.
I agree with the commuting thing. I don't own a car but think I should pay (and my work should afford me the ability to pay) the full cost of my transportation but that it should still be costly enough that people tend to live were the work. At least were I leave public transit is hugely subsidized (~60% of the cost paid by the government). People still whine about the $3.75 it costs to get on a bus. Does seem steep and I don't think a typical inner city ride is really worth ~$10. But the thing is our bus drivers are getting $60k plus a killer pension. So the government subsidizes the "Walmart employees/students" riding the bus while at the same time making sure that the bus drivers are really well taken care of. Perhaps $40k a year for the bus drivers and less subsidizes would make both the government spend less and Walmart have to pay more in order for anyone to work for them.
There is also the incentivizing nature of public transit: people are willing to commute because it is cheap but they will whine and moan if buses run less frequently than say ~20min so you end up with a lot of demand for long range transit but an even larger demand for frequent runs so commuters that get out of work at 4:30 don't have to wait till 5pm to go with the rest of us.
I work in Toronto, think it is number 2 next to LA in north america for commutes (average commute is > 1.5hr). But a single room apartment goes for about $1000 on the bottom end and you can get a 3-4 bedroom house with that kind of monthly payment with the commute. So: live like a college student till you die, or be able to afford a family and give up 3hrs a day to get to the city to work.
Canadian = close enough ;)
Funny how hard it is to live on one of these 'good, high wage jobs'. Working in tech obviously I'm used to high compensation for my time, but I've done military, machining, making packaging for frozen dinners, etc etc. It's funny how the more physically demanding the job is the harder they want you to work to have to joy of keeping your job while at the same time paying you 1/4th what you make with a desk job. There is a skill difference in the work obviously but I don't think anyone should go home after a 40+ hr week with too little money to live. You can get by on 11 in the burbs but what if your job is in the city? Somehow Starbucks employees are just supposed to "get by". Getting by usually means 25+ year olds still living with their parents because their full time job isn't enough to be able to afford a place of their own.
Funny how Walmart offered suggestions on budgeting recently that excluded the cost of heating (don't remember if transportation was on there or not, but heck bus both ways to a 5 day a week job will probably run you $80 a month at least so you'd be working for your first day and a half of the month just to get to work).
At 3.5Ghz light travels 8.6cm per clock cycle. A thousand time performance improvement would mean ~86 micrometers. Ie roughly 400 transistor widths at current feature size. Since there are about a billion transistors in a chip assuming a square configuration you'd have ~31600 transistors on a side. Ie your 1000X chip would take ~75 cycles just to cross from one side of the CPU to the other. That is assuming speed of light which electrons definitely don't achieve. You still have to get electrons from RAM, disk drives, GPU etc. In short you'd need a massive pipeline to keep the CPU busy. The CPU might get 1000X faster but it will just be similar to (Amhdal's Law) parallelism given an infinite number of CPUs you are limited to the serial execution time, instead you are limited to the time needed to load and store back your program. Might get a 10X improvement with a 1000X faster CPU still nice but diminishing returns.
What value do they bring to society? They are famous/inspirational because they can run fast jump high or whatever. Do you think if a drug comes out that would make your doctor smarter/better at diagnosis but had equivalent health risks and you had the choice you'd go with the "natural" doctor? Wouldn't want him/her to be taking unnecessary risks after all. People that define themselves by their career will do whatever it takes to be the best. That is what it means to be competitive.
And where does that push come from? From it slowing you down on the down stroke. You'll never get all that energy back. It is more of a matter of the timing I think not the energy it gives you but that it gives it to you when you are trying to move against gravity and takes it away when you are moving with gravity. It levels the max effort a bit across the whole stride.
As well there is some limit to the pain/strain that you can take. If you can expand the duration of the push just enough to make it not painful but not so much that it changes your pace/balance too much you might be better off. Muscle has a static and dynamic strength. It would all be a matter of what point in your stride you make contact and how far forward you fall before your flesh/shoes catch you enough to push you up off the bottom.
Yeah because he is a slow runner.
What software does RT not work with? Web apps, check, most mainstream games and tools, check. I think it is that people expect more when they by Windows. They say: "I bought a Windows tablet and now you are telling me I can't run Photoshop?" If people are really looking for a tablet they need to expect craplets: single purpose really small apps not full featured menu mazes that they get on the desktop.
Umm I bet a lot of people are compiling for ARM. The default in VS I think is Any CPU which I'd bet 90% of people don't bother changing.
Legacy: that is the tombstone. Companies like uranium have a half life. MS might have come to the point of diminishing returns. They have this legacy baggage that they must have to convince people it is really windows but people don't actually want windows at this form factor. All those great "network affects" they had going for them keeps them making products for the shrinking market instead of dropping that market and moving to the other one in a breaking change way.
take the hit and dump them. Might help build an ecosystem. Can't hurt. If giving someone a $200 discount gets them into windows tablets the next phone might be an easier sell, the next laptop might be a shinny touch enabled win 8.1 device, etc. But this is MS they aren't always rational, they'll hang on to them for 2 years then try to dump them for -$200 when they are completely useless even at that price.
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing.
My thoughts exactly. When you are old enough to want to see it you are old enough to see it IMHO. We need to discover another continent again so we can ship off the all the Puritans to it again.
Dude this is from the 80's. Not only were TVs standard def (and lower quality than a current generation standard def set), but the computer screens were what 20dpi? Modern eReaders are high enough resolution you don't see the pixels so they are effectively the printed page. Might be a slight factor of plastic screen verses slightly duller paper surface but nothing compared to TV vs printed page.
Could be. I find a good paperback more enjoyable but ebooks more consistent. With real books there are so many ways for a publisher to "express themselves" that they can screw up the experience: too small text, strange fonts, for larger books they can be unwieldy (in my opinion anything longer than ~400pgs or so it is really think on one side and thin on the other and wants to flip out of your hand), similarly hardcover tombs can weigh so much they are a pain in the ass. The beauty of ebooks even the longest book is the same weight, you can read several large books at the same time without a suitcase to bring to work etc. If you could get the big books in several volumes of ideally sized paperbacks that might be different but I don't think it would ever beat free which is what books currently cost me.
ffaaa fall ggaaa Oh My Godddd yeah. Never mind I'm good for now.
They might not have been first to the punch but: .Net, Azure, significant UI redesign (for good or bad) of windows and Office, XBox. Yep they've been pretty stagnant.
I don't know if I like him or not I think Bill would be more of a fun guy to have a nerdy chat with. But I think this is the common scenario where the CEO that is in charge when a company goes from rapid growth to Blue Chip slow and steady gets blamed for "breaking" the company. Think of MS like a corner store. In this case you can by the corner store for 67B and it pays 17B a year in profits. 25% return on your money per annum with no growth is still a deal I'll take.
There is targets of opportunity. But when attacking a "technologically advanced" adversary as this thread has wandered down there are tons of infrastructure targets. Your technologically advanced adversary probably isn't hanging out around a mud hut, they probably are being moved around in APCs, in tunnels etc. Heck Iraq wasn't that advanced but it still took a long time to hunt down Saddam Insane.
There were exceptions but they were few and usually in segregated regiments but keeping the pilots as officers let the army keep the riff raff and blacks out of command roles. The rather crappy job that the airforce did in Vietnam doing close air support lead the army to push back for their own air capacity and sargents are easier to come by than officers. I think desperate need won out over some sort of snobbery about how high class someone has to be to be a pilot.
For major ops line of sight could be quite practical I'd imagine just run a constant stream of planes to and from the target. Also you can't jam everywhere so given enough targets ... The beauty with the drones is their duration the ability to switch pilots mid op etc means you could brief a few pilots each on a few different targets. Ones not available "Bob" takes over and hits the one he has been briefed on instead. Also most likely the weapons will be being used against the random crackpot dictatorships using 1970's era soviet equipment. Any technologically advanced enemy will likely be a 5+ year war and a whole new generation of weapons could be stamped out (well at least the old F35s dusted off and given an electronics upgrade).
My understanding from my management course is that IT people are considered "self directed professionals" so ... if you schedule a lot of meetings during the day and have to work late in the evening to actually get stuff done ... that was your choice. Somehow magically a server having a hardware failure and getting a page in the middle in the night is also "your choice".
That said: my solution is just to refuse to work for free. Once in a blue moon I'll stay late to get the build working again or something but the day it becomes a regular expectation is the day I start sending my resume out again. I've also been lucky to have employers that didn't want overtime or that did pay for it for most of my career so I guess I'm a bit spoiled.
Bad admins will be bad admins. In my experience it cuts both ways. Linux is considered rock solid so only touched when a functionality needs to be added to the server or a major update of a package (say apache or samba) comes out. The rest of the time the server is left alone so "we don't break anything". Windows admins in my experience at least are much more tolerant of taking systems down for maintenance. Everyone might be at the same patch level post patch Tuesday but the patches in my experience actually happen. They just send emails out saying something will be unavailable for a couple hours in an evening and life goes on. In my *nix admin days it was much more important to see that the 393 day up time of server X make it to 400 then to worry about silly things like upgrades or patches: the firewall was allknowing and wise and will protect us from everything after all.
Yeah where as flaws in OSS is just time you are cheated out of.
My phliosophy, your mileage might very, is that for boring stuff I get the paid solution for interesting stuff I look for a OSS (torrent clients, media players, games etc). My thinking: a boring project will only get updates while there is a reason for the developer to be interested in it. Once a boring project becomes "close enough" contributors tend to go away. But with paid software they have an incentive to do the dull bugfix workflow optimization part of the thing.
Conversely, interesting projects will have oddles of people wanting to contribute and can pick and chose the best contributors, probably won't die out any time soon etc. vs a paid for solution which will generally suffer from limited staff, other reasons why a rockstar might not want to work there (can't get the proper work visa, doesn't want to live in a dull town, company is known for dictatorship style management, unwilling to try new technologies etc). Generally once something is good enough to attract a lot of attention it all becomes milking it for revenue: new features will get added only if they add to the bottom line and integration with others almost always will not be something that is thought to add to the bottom line so you'll end up with lots of little islands of fuctionality.
Political sovereignty is a crappy metric. Does anyone really think Egypt is only 150-70 years old? Conquering a country and then releasing it again does mean you "recreated" it. People still would have called themselves Egyptian, I'm pretty sure they didn't have as much rights of movement as a white British subject, had a different government hierachy (sure the queen is the queen but colonies generally get governors or military commanders with defacto soverign rights) etc. Similarly with Ethopia, geez both of these are mentioned in the bible and as far as I know were pretty well defined chunks of real estate back then.
I think culture, geography and to a lesser extent language are better metrics.Korea is still Korea whether it is currently (and probably temporarily over the long term hundreds of years you judge kingdoms/eras by) divided in 2 or not. Racist Koreans likely will still consider someone on the 5km on the other side of the NK SK border as "acceptable" were as 5km across any other border would be an abomination.
Lastly was July 4th really Americas sovereignty? I would argue that. The colonies declared independence but they still had to fight for it. Anyone in NK is free to declare the Koreas unified but until the other side agrees (or at least stops shooting you when you cross the bordrer) it doesn't matter.
Totally agree would mod you up to 6 if I could. I have a 27" iMac so 1440 high and I just though of losing ~30% of that screen height ... and cried. Not everything is for watching movies. My work I have a good setup a 24" vertical and a 22 horizontal. Still find when programming I have more things I'd like in the vertical orientation but nice to have the choice. They could still give you the choice here but the screens would be so narrow that chances are your IDE tools on the side will take up the remaining "width" in the vertical orientation.