My finance professor gave us a great quote (I have no idea who said it first):
"Borrow a dollar and the bank owns you. Borrow a million dollars and you own the bank."
Paying a consultant more gives the company more leverage with that company. Anyone can walk away from a $10,000 per year contract since you probably have other contracts, but it is a whole hell of a lot tougher to walk away from a $100,000 per year contract. The company can threaten you with cancelling the contract to get you to do things not in the original deal. I've personally had that happen. I've also worked for a company that finished a project before the contract was signed. The client never knew it was done because we had to get them to pay for it first. It was 80% paid before the contract negotiations were even finished.
As a trainer/consultant, I recommend people just buy the books as study material and reference all the time, but some people just want/need to get out of the office to learn.
Different people learn different ways. Some people learn by doing. Some by reading. Some by conceptualizing.
As I mentioned, I am a trainer, but I am a terrible student. I have a great deal of patience when teaching, but very little patience as a student for instructors that don't know what the hell they are doing. I have even less patience for my fellow students that don't take the time to read the friggin book. I think I am like you, in that I prefer to read the book and practice the skills on the job or in a lab environment. Going to class is often a waste for me.
The one time that I absolutely advocate going away to a class is if it is a bootcamp type certification class. It must be at a remote location (no work related interruptions) and be all day every day until the exams are taken. The reason I advocate this method is that it is very effective at achieving it's goals; to pass the exams. How much you take away from that is another matter all together.
banned in Atlantic City
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
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· Score: 4, Interesting
One of the guys I used to work for was a statistics professor at Farleigh Dickenson University a while back. He has been banned from most (if not all) the casinos in Atlantic City. He goes out to Reno and Las Vegas every once in a while for a business trip and plays. When I told him where I was going for my honeymoon (St. Lucia), he asked me to find out if they had casinos.
The trick with most predictive statistics based winning is that there is also significant losing involved. He told me not to bother unless I have several thousand dollars to lose.
"The act required the Postal Service to âoepromote modern and efficient operations and [avoid] any practiceâ¦which restricts the user of new equipment or devices which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of postal services...â"
What I love about this is that I know someone who works for the USPS and came up with US Patent 5,339,734. It is a small hand bar code stamper. Simple idea that would save tens of MILLIONS of dollars, if the USPS would promote the use of it.
The address (ZIP code) on the front of an envelope is read by some OCR machines. If the OCR thinks it has a pretty good match (which it usually does) then it sends the letter on its way. This is very little problem for the majority of machine printed addresses and ZIP codes. Hand written addresses however cause more problems for OCR, which is why there is a secondary step of humans sitting in front of computer screens checking the addresses of the mail that the OCR machines did not like. The people watching the screens are doing the high speed assembly line equivalent of hand sorting mail.
None of this comes into play, however, if the ZIP (or ZIP+4) is BAR CODED onto the envelope. Check out some bulk mail for the bar code on the envelope. That step eliminates the OCR and human mail sorter from the equation. Since the machines look for the bar code anyway, less steps = less money.
The hand held bar coder would cost less than a few stamps if produced in bulk, but the USPS is unwilling to even consider the idea, because it would put hundreds of USPS employees out of work.
The difference is that the plan was created in 1982, when the only people that had even *heard* about email were geeks working for the government, large universities, or large corps.
It also provides the opportunity to have legally binding email. Todays email can be forged on either end without digital signatures (I won't get in to crypto here), but the penalties for doing so are relatively meek if they are even enforced. Whereas, messing with the USPS is mail fraud, which is what they sent Al Capone to jail for.
Yeah. If you drive by the high school, they have some big NASA-looking sign in front of the school. I skied against them in high school and the first time I saw the school, I thought it was some sort of high tech engineering company because of the sign out front.
I thought there was a DJ equipment/music store there, but my memory may be a little hazy. I lived up near Woodbridge a few years ago, but I hardly ever get back that way.
I don't know what kind of engineering you had in school, but my profs only put numbers in the tests to try and screw with us. It was all about the equations. Knowing the laws of thermodynamics was the key to getting the right answer rather than plugging numbers into equations.
Some (all new) DLT drives use optional hardware compression. This is important because regardless of how much compression is achieved on disk or through software, the DLT drive might compress it more.
The compression on hard drives is done in software since it would be done by the backup program or the OS.
Your reference to the old/. poll would be a hell of a lot more relevant if it were asked today. There were only 1666 people voting in that poll. The 'Legend of the Rangers' poll from 1/19/2002 currently has over 13000 votes. When there were only a few thousand readers, a dozen moderators may have made sense, but with the tens of thousands of readers it becomes problematic just to set a number on them.
I do like the idea of meta moderation. I meta-moderate all the time (as well as moderate) and I find that on some days, all the moderation that I meta-moderate is downward. I usually follow my own meta-moderation rules of NOT meta-moderating posts that I would have responded too. It keeps me from meta-moderating based on the post rather than the original moderation.
I generally only moderate up since I find modding down to be a waste of points. It's just a personal preference of the moderator I guess.
My wife and I were discussing the finer points of selling this concept. It would have to be a huge list, as you said, and it would also have to be better than PPV and Blockbuster prices.
Todays PPV TV tends to show movies that are not yet out on DVD so they fall between the theater and Blockbuster for both releases and pricing. If this deal with Real and TiVo could pull off release times and prices to compete with either PPV or Blockbuster, they could make big bucks.
Content on demand that costs less than pay-per-view would be nice. I would even be willing to wait for the content to cache so that I could get the best signal resolution.
ROFL!! I have not laughed this hard in a while. I have been reading that website and the comments for the last 45 minutes. I can't get any more work done today. I can't stop laughing.
Velocity is a function of both distance and time v=d/t. When applying this to collisions of moving objects on the same vector(such as cars on a one lane highway) it is true that both the distance between objects (the difference of positions p0-p1) as well as the negative acceleration time to match velocities is the cause of collisions.
To put this in numeric terms, the distance between two cars is 10m. Car0 is in front of car1. Car0 is traveling at 30 m/s while car1 is traveling at 35m/s. If car1 can not match velocities in two seconds, they will collide.
If the distance is 100m then car1 would have 20 seconds to match velocities.
If the distance is 10000m then car2 would have 2000 seconds to match velocities.
In other words, speed (velocity) does not cause collitions, but rather the inability to slow down (negative acceleration) does.
Of course it gets a bit more complicated when you have multiple lanes and allow the objects to change lanes.
So you're one of the people that actually got all five seasons of B5 on tape. I got one full season before the local place stopped carrying them. I tried to get them online when I remembered but they are only to be found on ebay for a gajillion $$$.
My New Years wish is for all 5 seasons of B5 to come out in DVDs box sets. Then let the marathon begin.
Slashdot Mirror
My finance professor gave us a great quote (I have no idea who said it first):
"Borrow a dollar and the bank owns you. Borrow a million dollars and you own the bank."
Paying a consultant more gives the company more leverage with that company. Anyone can walk away from a $10,000 per year contract since you probably have other contracts, but it is a whole hell of a lot tougher to walk away from a $100,000 per year contract. The company can threaten you with cancelling the contract to get you to do things not in the original deal. I've personally had that happen. I've also worked for a company that finished a project before the contract was signed. The client never knew it was done because we had to get them to pay for it first. It was 80% paid before the contract negotiations were even finished.
As a trainer/consultant, I recommend people just buy the books as study material and reference all the time, but some people just want/need to get out of the office to learn.
Different people learn different ways. Some people learn by doing. Some by reading. Some by conceptualizing.
As I mentioned, I am a trainer, but I am a terrible student. I have a great deal of patience when teaching, but very little patience as a student for instructors that don't know what the hell they are doing. I have even less patience for my fellow students that don't take the time to read the friggin book. I think I am like you, in that I prefer to read the book and practice the skills on the job or in a lab environment. Going to class is often a waste for me.
The one time that I absolutely advocate going away to a class is if it is a bootcamp type certification class. It must be at a remote location (no work related interruptions) and be all day every day until the exams are taken. The reason I advocate this method is that it is very effective at achieving it's goals; to pass the exams. How much you take away from that is another matter all together.
One of the guys I used to work for was a statistics professor at Farleigh Dickenson University a while back. He has been banned from most (if not all) the casinos in Atlantic City. He goes out to Reno and Las Vegas every once in a while for a business trip and plays. When I told him where I was going for my honeymoon (St. Lucia), he asked me to find out if they had casinos.
The trick with most predictive statistics based winning is that there is also significant losing involved. He told me not to bother unless I have several thousand dollars to lose.
"The act required the Postal Service to âoepromote modern and efficient operations and [avoid] any practiceâ¦which restricts the user of new equipment or devices which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of postal services...â"
What I love about this is that I know someone who works for the USPS and came up with US Patent 5,339,734. It is a small hand bar code stamper. Simple idea that would save tens of MILLIONS of dollars, if the USPS would promote the use of it.
The address (ZIP code) on the front of an envelope is read by some OCR machines. If the OCR thinks it has a pretty good match (which it usually does) then it sends the letter on its way. This is very little problem for the majority of machine printed addresses and ZIP codes. Hand written addresses however cause more problems for OCR, which is why there is a secondary step of humans sitting in front of computer screens checking the addresses of the mail that the OCR machines did not like. The people watching the screens are doing the high speed assembly line equivalent of hand sorting mail.
None of this comes into play, however, if the ZIP (or ZIP+4) is BAR CODED onto the envelope. Check out some bulk mail for the bar code on the envelope. That step eliminates the OCR and human mail sorter from the equation. Since the machines look for the bar code anyway, less steps = less money.
The hand held bar coder would cost less than a few stamps if produced in bulk, but the USPS is unwilling to even consider the idea, because it would put hundreds of USPS employees out of work.
The difference is that the plan was created in 1982, when the only people that had even *heard* about email were geeks working for the government, large universities, or large corps.
It also provides the opportunity to have legally binding email. Todays email can be forged on either end without digital signatures (I won't get in to crypto here), but the penalties for doing so are relatively meek if they are even enforced. Whereas, messing with the USPS is mail fraud, which is what they sent Al Capone to jail for.
Yeah. If you drive by the high school, they have some big NASA-looking sign in front of the school. I skied against them in high school and the first time I saw the school, I thought it was some sort of high tech engineering company because of the sign out front.
I agree with your statement, but what does morality have to do with MS discontinuing support for Win2k?
I thought there was a DJ equipment/music store there, but my memory may be a little hazy. I lived up near Woodbridge a few years ago, but I hardly ever get back that way.
I'll check it out when I get the chance.
What was the other word besides 'cromulant' from the Jebediah Springfield episode? I can never remember.
I don't know what kind of engineering you had in school, but my profs only put numbers in the tests to try and screw with us. It was all about the equations. Knowing the laws of thermodynamics was the key to getting the right answer rather than plugging numbers into equations.
You'll be even happier once you have a Taco Jr!!
.
On the compression question:
Some (all new) DLT drives use optional hardware compression. This is important because regardless of how much compression is achieved on disk or through software, the DLT drive might compress it more.
The compression on hard drives is done in software since it would be done by the backup program or the OS.
My wife and I decided to combine our DNA as an experiment. It took a little while to cook, but I think the results are good.
i nd ex.htm
http://members.bellatlantic.net/~dbbowser/baby/
We'll probably try a few more combinations just to make sure the results are consistent.
.
Too bad there is no moderation for '+1 Corny'
;)
.
Your reference to the old /. poll would be a hell of a lot more relevant if it were asked today. There were only 1666 people voting in that poll. The 'Legend of the Rangers' poll from 1/19/2002 currently has over 13000 votes. When there were only a few thousand readers, a dozen moderators may have made sense, but with the tens of thousands of readers it becomes problematic just to set a number on them.
I do like the idea of meta moderation. I meta-moderate all the time (as well as moderate) and I find that on some days, all the moderation that I meta-moderate is downward. I usually follow my own meta-moderation rules of NOT meta-moderating posts that I would have responded too. It keeps me from meta-moderating based on the post rather than the original moderation.
I generally only moderate up since I find modding down to be a waste of points. It's just a personal preference of the moderator I guess.
Sweeet!!!
The first thing that came to mind was the Knight Rider truck with the tricked out combo data center and auto maintenance bay.
Think Anthrax.
My wife and I were discussing the finer points of selling this concept. It would have to be a huge list, as you said, and it would also have to be better than PPV and Blockbuster prices.
Todays PPV TV tends to show movies that are not yet out on DVD so they fall between the theater and Blockbuster for both releases and pricing. If this deal with Real and TiVo could pull off release times and prices to compete with either PPV or Blockbuster, they could make big bucks.
Content on demand that costs less than pay-per-view would be nice. I would even be willing to wait for the content to cache so that I could get the best signal resolution.
I swear I got it on one of the email addresses that I use for registering domain names. I have to check when I get home.
I just told this to some Russian co-workers. They thought it was hilarious.
ROFL!! I have not laughed this hard in a while. I have been reading that website and the comments for the last 45 minutes. I can't get any more work done today. I can't stop laughing.
I wish I had some Mod points because THAT was funny!!!
To hopefully end this argument:
Velocity is a function of both distance and time v=d/t. When applying this to collisions of moving objects on the same vector(such as cars on a one lane highway) it is true that both the distance between objects (the difference of positions p0-p1) as well as the negative acceleration time to match velocities is the cause of collisions.
To put this in numeric terms, the distance between two cars is 10m. Car0 is in front of car1. Car0 is traveling at 30 m/s while car1 is traveling at 35m/s. If car1 can not match velocities in two seconds, they will collide.
If the distance is 100m then car1 would have 20 seconds to match velocities.
If the distance is 10000m then car2 would have 2000 seconds to match velocities.
In other words, speed (velocity) does not cause collitions, but rather the inability to slow down (negative acceleration) does.
Of course it gets a bit more complicated when you have multiple lanes and allow the objects to change lanes.
So you're one of the people that actually got all five seasons of B5 on tape. I got one full season before the local place stopped carrying them. I tried to get them online when I remembered but they are only to be found on ebay for a gajillion $$$.
My New Years wish is for all 5 seasons of B5 to come out in DVDs box sets. Then let the marathon begin.