Well, I get paid well, but I haven't had a vacation in ages. I think they keep dumping enough emergencies on me that it ties me up. If I leave for two weeks I come back to 5 weeks worth of piled up urgent email. Meanwhile when soemone who doesn't provide much value says "I'm on vacation for 3 weeks" then no one minds too much.
No, this site is strongly of the intolerant social conservative for a long time now. Anti women, anti minorities, just a whole lotta anti. Mix that in with the heavy number of trolls just looking to stir up a fight from whatever angle. Maybe this is the minority, but they are in the majority of early posts for sure.
Why pay attention to this crazy guy? Every election he does the same thing. Having this guy show up in the feed is the equivalent of seeing a Slashdot story about a rich guy who thinks the earth is flat.
And yet, most of those rural states have voted to deforest their mountains and dig big holes in the ground:-)
Today, most of the states have large cities that still dominate the rural vote. The weird part is that many of the state governments want to have total power, they express the concern about not being dominated by other states while turning around and dominating their own counties and municipalities. They don't want control to be as local as possible, they just want to keep the 18th century notion of independent states that are free to impose arbitrary rules in their own borders while being free of arbitrary rules coming from the feds.
It was less weird back when states were much more independent from each other. Today though there's pretty much a uniformity across the states and total interdependence.
It does bring up a problem I had with the books. The ability to predict the big picture of the future seemed off to me. The Mule definitely put that in prespective. However there are many Mules in history, or as people say it these days, Black Swans
For instance, if the new world had not had tobacco, it would have greatly changed the history of many countries. This accelerated the colonization of the new world. Similarly, a small change in negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles could have prevented WWII, which changed the entire world. And most big changes in history can be tracked back to earlier changes in history (did Martin Luther indirectly lead to Napoleon's campaigns, and this Napoleon indirectly lead to WWI, etc).
The difference with the Foundation series is that it suggests that in the long term all these small changes in history will smooth out and result in essentially the predicted result. But since those books were written there was the increased interest in chaos theory that took a very different view, that the small changes end up causing large and unpredictable long term changes.
So ya, in real life, tobacco was a huge plot point.
I got a background check done at me at one company, and I got the results. It lists addresses for me where I never lived. As in my friend's house was listed although I never lived there or got mail sent there. And a place I never heard of, probalby just someone else with the same name lived there once. I think they just did a quick google search to pad it out past the "no criminal convictions" part.
I have maybe 4 or 5 sites where I really care what happens. The majority of passwords I store however are for pointless sites that insist you must first register with an account before you can go further (getting support documents from vendors, adding my 2cents to a blog post, etc). I don't really mind so much of every single one of those pointless accounts was hacked or not, there's no useful information there and if somone pretends to be my alias on some random wordpress forum, who cares?
The thing is, for a time the bank had the weakest passwords and the Hello Kitty Island Adventure game forums would have the really complicated password rules.
I'm looking at the list now and... why the hell do I have or need an account at Office Depot? scifi.com? Excite? Hallmark???
One of my friends had one of his friends post a spoof of these questions. The "What's Gangster Nickname?" style of web sites, where you enter your first name and birth month and it spits out "Squinty McGee" or some such. So the person asked one of these on Facebook and the first question was your social security number. He quickly deleted the post because a few people actually started answering it instead of realizing it was a joke.
Make stuff up for the questions, then write down your answers somewhere securely (preferably encrypted or on a removable thumb drive). Then look it up later when needed.
Even in the old days when only your bank would ask this and only in person when you were in front of a teller, it wasn't secure. Half the town probably knew your mother's maiden name. It wasn't even remotely a secret or difficult to find out.
And for some of the questions it's going to be vague, so you have to write it down or you'll get it wrong. As in, what was your first automobile? Well, the first one I was allowed to drive on my own, the first car registered to me, the first used car I bought, or the first new car I bought, or? Which high school did I go to, well, what if I went to more than one high school? And my first pet's name, would that be Hassenpfeffer or Sir Poopsalot?
Also note that several million people in the world have the same IT skills that the company wants. That makes it very hard to make yourself indispensible and keep the salary up. When all you have to show to get the job is a paid-for certificate from Microsoft, then don't be surprised when someone cheaper gets the job. The trick I think is to turn it around and prove that you're more than just a replaceable cog, by doing more than the minimum 9 to 5 grunt stuff.
My coworker has one and he loves it. It does have a good design, it's nicer than iOS in some ways, and the metro startscreen style works well with touch on a phone or tablet where it fails on a PC.
IT in many companies is not a revenue generator, they're just the support staff. R&D gets the money instead. So stop saying "IT" when you describe what you do and say "developer" instead and maybe the connection will be made that many of the skills overlap.
Not everybody who votes shows up to vote. And you don't need 100% of the vote in a state to get all of its electoral votes. You also don't need to sway the state very far because most of the states are in a statistical tie. So find 4 or 5 hotbutton issues, sway those voters with absurd claims, and you get more votes and more campaign donations. Then the more people pay attention to you, the more the media pays attention to you, which causes even more people to pay attention to you, etc.
The country is essentially split down the middle at 49% to 49%, when they can be bothered to vote. So it does not take much to sway a state and start shifting around electoral votes.
Everyone's been convinced that apps are the new gold rush. Everyone wants in. Almost nobody makes any appreciable money from it, unless you're doing this on salary. And the vast majority of apps are nothing more than a sliver of wrappers around a URL that goes to a back office server or an existing web site making them trivial to write (which fuels the gold rush mentality). And for the sorts of apps I want, I can't find any good ones anyway.
So declining numbers of apps, maybe that's the light at the end of the tunnel?
The base conditions of the argument has changed too. It used to be about what you could do with a fixed number of transistors or fixed cost. But as prices of everything went down, the rules changed. So Intel decided they could keep their PC market share by just shoving in more and more transistors. Make this chip do instruction decoding and translating, then pair with another compute engine chip with modern super-scalar designs, add in some chips for caches, and shove it all in a CPU bundle the size of a deck of cards. It's not RISC or CISC, though it certainly uses design concepts popularized by RISC, and ccompatible with CISC, and speedups from supercomputing concepts.
I think RISC and CISC dominate arguments today is because that's where undergraduate CS architecture classes usually end, more advanced concepts show up in graduate courses or on the job.
At the time of RISC, the instruction decoding and micro engine was often one of the largest and most complex parts of a computer. The design of so many computers and chips in those days was all about the instruction decoding and microengine, if they wanted to speed up their processing then they worked on faster clock speeds (work harder, not smarter). So the idea of RISC is to minimize those parts of the chip and replace them with components that can speed up the processing. Ie, more registers, concurrent ALUs, etc. Faster computer but with lesser or equal cost.
Of course what could have happened instead was just add the extra stuff to improve processing speed without reducing the complexity. That is, just add more stuff into the computer, making it more expensive. That's essentially the approach Intel is using now, a brute force architecture. They are borrowing ideas from RISC and using them in the back end but keeping a strict dogmatic backwards compatibility in the front end. And add caches everywhere. Today's modern PC processor is incredibly complicated and is certainly what no one would ever design if they had to do it from scratch without worrying about being compatible. No one has ever called the modern Pentium and higher designs "elegant".
Intel knows this. They have designed several chips to try to break out of this rut, using RISC design and abandoning compatibility with PCs, and they have flopped. Such as the i860 and i960. Even their first 64-bit cpu intended for the CPU market floundered because it didn't provide enough 32-bit compatibility.
There's a big market however for cheaper and less power hungry computer chips these days. Even stuff that runs off of a coin cell. The brute-force PC chip designs can't cut it so easily in this market. But ARM was popular there, because it was very much RISC like in most places (ok, the added on Thumb modes aren't, but the amount of chip space necessary for that is orders of magnitudes less than what's in your PC). Also older 8 and 16-bit architectures are working well in that space, as well as 32 and 64-bit RISC processors like PowerPC and MIPS. A lot of complexity is added not to speed things up but to enable reducing power usage and ability to turn off components that aren't in use.
In America these days, I am astounded by how many cashiers can't do the simple math of counting back change to you. These are very often part time minimum wage workers (because full time means you get union benefits). They've got a machine that tells them how much change to return and they follow that slavishly, even if they typed in the wrong amount and you have to argue to tell them that the machine is wrong and you should get back more than a dollar in change when you gave them a $20. I see cashiers even struggle counting the coins that I gave them.
They make mistakes, if I used a credit card they make mistakes on that also. Always get the receipt, if you just tap a phone and go, how do you knew whether it screwed up or not?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I get paid well, but I haven't had a vacation in ages. I think they keep dumping enough emergencies on me that it ties me up. If I leave for two weeks I come back to 5 weeks worth of piled up urgent email. Meanwhile when soemone who doesn't provide much value says "I'm on vacation for 3 weeks" then no one minds too much.
No, this site is strongly of the intolerant social conservative for a long time now. Anti women, anti minorities, just a whole lotta anti. Mix that in with the heavy number of trolls just looking to stir up a fight from whatever angle. Maybe this is the minority, but they are in the majority of early posts for sure.
Why pay attention to this crazy guy? Every election he does the same thing. Having this guy show up in the feed is the equivalent of seeing a Slashdot story about a rich guy who thinks the earth is flat.
And yet, most of those rural states have voted to deforest their mountains and dig big holes in the ground :-)
Today, most of the states have large cities that still dominate the rural vote. The weird part is that many of the state governments want to have total power, they express the concern about not being dominated by other states while turning around and dominating their own counties and municipalities. They don't want control to be as local as possible, they just want to keep the 18th century notion of independent states that are free to impose arbitrary rules in their own borders while being free of arbitrary rules coming from the feds.
It was less weird back when states were much more independent from each other. Today though there's pretty much a uniformity across the states and total interdependence.
It does bring up a problem I had with the books. The ability to predict the big picture of the future seemed off to me. The Mule definitely put that in prespective. However there are many Mules in history, or as people say it these days, Black Swans
For instance, if the new world had not had tobacco, it would have greatly changed the history of many countries. This accelerated the colonization of the new world. Similarly, a small change in negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles could have prevented WWII, which changed the entire world. And most big changes in history can be tracked back to earlier changes in history (did Martin Luther indirectly lead to Napoleon's campaigns, and this Napoleon indirectly lead to WWI, etc).
The difference with the Foundation series is that it suggests that in the long term all these small changes in history will smooth out and result in essentially the predicted result. But since those books were written there was the increased interest in chaos theory that took a very different view, that the small changes end up causing large and unpredictable long term changes.
So ya, in real life, tobacco was a huge plot point.
Wait, that's the name of my first pet too!
If you get shot in the ass by your own duck, and you usually learn your lesson and go buy a gun safe.
I got a background check done at me at one company, and I got the results. It lists addresses for me where I never lived. As in my friend's house was listed although I never lived there or got mail sent there. And a place I never heard of, probalby just someone else with the same name lived there once. I think they just did a quick google search to pad it out past the "no criminal convictions" part.
I have maybe 4 or 5 sites where I really care what happens. The majority of passwords I store however are for pointless sites that insist you must first register with an account before you can go further (getting support documents from vendors, adding my 2cents to a blog post, etc). I don't really mind so much of every single one of those pointless accounts was hacked or not, there's no useful information there and if somone pretends to be my alias on some random wordpress forum, who cares?
The thing is, for a time the bank had the weakest passwords and the Hello Kitty Island Adventure game forums would have the really complicated password rules.
I'm looking at the list now and... why the hell do I have or need an account at Office Depot? scifi.com? Excite? Hallmark???
One of my friends had one of his friends post a spoof of these questions. The "What's Gangster Nickname?" style of web sites, where you enter your first name and birth month and it spits out "Squinty McGee" or some such. So the person asked one of these on Facebook and the first question was your social security number. He quickly deleted the post because a few people actually started answering it instead of realizing it was a joke.
Make stuff up for the questions, then write down your answers somewhere securely (preferably encrypted or on a removable thumb drive). Then look it up later when needed.
Even in the old days when only your bank would ask this and only in person when you were in front of a teller, it wasn't secure. Half the town probably knew your mother's maiden name. It wasn't even remotely a secret or difficult to find out.
And for some of the questions it's going to be vague, so you have to write it down or you'll get it wrong. As in, what was your first automobile? Well, the first one I was allowed to drive on my own, the first car registered to me, the first used car I bought, or the first new car I bought, or? Which high school did I go to, well, what if I went to more than one high school? And my first pet's name, would that be Hassenpfeffer or Sir Poopsalot?
Your mother's maiden name was Cowboy Neal? Interesting family...
Also note that several million people in the world have the same IT skills that the company wants. That makes it very hard to make yourself indispensible and keep the salary up. When all you have to show to get the job is a paid-for certificate from Microsoft, then don't be surprised when someone cheaper gets the job. The trick I think is to turn it around and prove that you're more than just a replaceable cog, by doing more than the minimum 9 to 5 grunt stuff.
My coworker has one and he loves it. It does have a good design, it's nicer than iOS in some ways, and the metro startscreen style works well with touch on a phone or tablet where it fails on a PC.
IT in many companies is not a revenue generator, they're just the support staff. R&D gets the money instead. So stop saying "IT" when you describe what you do and say "developer" instead and maybe the connection will be made that many of the skills overlap.
Not everybody who votes shows up to vote. And you don't need 100% of the vote in a state to get all of its electoral votes. You also don't need to sway the state very far because most of the states are in a statistical tie. So find 4 or 5 hotbutton issues, sway those voters with absurd claims, and you get more votes and more campaign donations. Then the more people pay attention to you, the more the media pays attention to you, which causes even more people to pay attention to you, etc.
The country is essentially split down the middle at 49% to 49%, when they can be bothered to vote. So it does not take much to sway a state and start shifting around electoral votes.
Hurray, we can finally bring back all those lost whaling jobs that dried up when people stopped wanting whale oil lamps in their houses!
Everyone's been convinced that apps are the new gold rush. Everyone wants in. Almost nobody makes any appreciable money from it, unless you're doing this on salary. And the vast majority of apps are nothing more than a sliver of wrappers around a URL that goes to a back office server or an existing web site making them trivial to write (which fuels the gold rush mentality). And for the sorts of apps I want, I can't find any good ones anyway.
So declining numbers of apps, maybe that's the light at the end of the tunnel?
Keep it away from your dog then.
The base conditions of the argument has changed too. It used to be about what you could do with a fixed number of transistors or fixed cost. But as prices of everything went down, the rules changed. So Intel decided they could keep their PC market share by just shoving in more and more transistors. Make this chip do instruction decoding and translating, then pair with another compute engine chip with modern super-scalar designs, add in some chips for caches, and shove it all in a CPU bundle the size of a deck of cards. It's not RISC or CISC, though it certainly uses design concepts popularized by RISC, and ccompatible with CISC, and speedups from supercomputing concepts.
I think RISC and CISC dominate arguments today is because that's where undergraduate CS architecture classes usually end, more advanced concepts show up in graduate courses or on the job.
At the time of RISC, the instruction decoding and micro engine was often one of the largest and most complex parts of a computer. The design of so many computers and chips in those days was all about the instruction decoding and microengine, if they wanted to speed up their processing then they worked on faster clock speeds (work harder, not smarter). So the idea of RISC is to minimize those parts of the chip and replace them with components that can speed up the processing. Ie, more registers, concurrent ALUs, etc. Faster computer but with lesser or equal cost.
Of course what could have happened instead was just add the extra stuff to improve processing speed without reducing the complexity. That is, just add more stuff into the computer, making it more expensive. That's essentially the approach Intel is using now, a brute force architecture. They are borrowing ideas from RISC and using them in the back end but keeping a strict dogmatic backwards compatibility in the front end. And add caches everywhere. Today's modern PC processor is incredibly complicated and is certainly what no one would ever design if they had to do it from scratch without worrying about being compatible. No one has ever called the modern Pentium and higher designs "elegant".
Intel knows this. They have designed several chips to try to break out of this rut, using RISC design and abandoning compatibility with PCs, and they have flopped. Such as the i860 and i960. Even their first 64-bit cpu intended for the CPU market floundered because it didn't provide enough 32-bit compatibility.
There's a big market however for cheaper and less power hungry computer chips these days. Even stuff that runs off of a coin cell. The brute-force PC chip designs can't cut it so easily in this market. But ARM was popular there, because it was very much RISC like in most places (ok, the added on Thumb modes aren't, but the amount of chip space necessary for that is orders of magnitudes less than what's in your PC). Also older 8 and 16-bit architectures are working well in that space, as well as 32 and 64-bit RISC processors like PowerPC and MIPS. A lot of complexity is added not to speed things up but to enable reducing power usage and ability to turn off components that aren't in use.
Kid gamers. They want exactly what they friends are playing, which means first day of release, and they will stop playing it in two weeks.
In America these days, I am astounded by how many cashiers can't do the simple math of counting back change to you. These are very often part time minimum wage workers (because full time means you get union benefits). They've got a machine that tells them how much change to return and they follow that slavishly, even if they typed in the wrong amount and you have to argue to tell them that the machine is wrong and you should get back more than a dollar in change when you gave them a $20. I see cashiers even struggle counting the coins that I gave them.
They make mistakes, if I used a credit card they make mistakes on that also. Always get the receipt, if you just tap a phone and go, how do you knew whether it screwed up or not?