I'm surprised the EPA is even allowed to use the term "global warming" anymore.
Frontline had a piece on the other day talking about "the art of persuasion." They specifically mentioned this guy republicans use who coined the phrase "global climate change" and told republican leadership to use it instead of "global warming" since it was less alarming. Soon after the term started being used almost exclusively and notice that it even appeared in this slashdot story.
Perhaps instead of demanding more money, schools should evaluate how they are spending the money they already get.
And perhaps instead of spending 30% of our education budget on "special" people who will never score well on tests we should just ignore them and focus on the smart ones.
Just because they spend less and get more doesn't mean we should follow their example. In the US we have decided to spend serious resources educating a segment of the population that other countries would simply ignore. This is expensive and causes our numbers to look horrible. Are you willing to tell those kids and their parents that they don't deserve an education? Simple things are also more expensive in the US. Salaries, healthcare, land, transportation, building quality, all factor in to a more expensive educational system.
Also. The ESEA act aka No Child (Education) Left Behind is serving to make this situation dramatically worse. If a problem can't be put on a standardized test, a school can lose money for teaching it instead of something that will be.
But I don't think you need to conform to the One True Perl style to write legible Perl; heck, a One True Perl style is antithetical to the whole Perl philosophy of Many Ways To Do It.
The perl style guide is not exactly strict. The reason to have it is that perl code needs to be interpreted by two distinctly different parsers, the perl parser and the human code reader. Rules like "No space before the semicolon" are for us humans who have a hard time parsing code written the other way.
There is a benefit to letting people code in the style they like. There is also a benefit to making them code in the style the person who comes along next, likes. The key is balancing those two benefits. Most people underestimate the amount of re-use their code will get. If you use 4 character tabs in all your code and the rest of the world uses 8 character tabs, your code will look horrible to them (I really loved my 4 character tabs. sniffle.) but, if you want to be able to work well with others, you need to be able to pick up other people's code and have other people pick up your code.
If you are looking to do something that Bash can do but probably shouldn't (most things people use Bash for fall into that category) use perl, not python. Perl is very bash-like and porting things to perl is easy.
Of course, this is why so many perl programs look like a complete mess, people do quick ports and don't learn how to properly use the language. Do the next guy a favor and do "man perlstyle" early on.
QuickTime is annoying but MOV is still the best quality low bit rate format. What I do is install QuickTime, disable it's system tray icon and then have Media Player Classic take over all it's file associations. MPC can use the libraries that QuickTime installs to play MOV files but is much lighter weight and has better playback controls (And doesn't ask you to upgrade to the pro version every time). It can replace QuickTime, real player, and windows media player (apparently, it uses their libraries) and is better than all of them.
Check out the "Touch Window from Outside" feature: View -> Video Frame -> Touch Window from Outside. It's great for video with black bands on top and bottom.
I agree with everything in the parent post. I'd add some more:
Remember, you're job is important. Doing it well will make everyone's lives easier.
Work hard but don't get buried. If you are too busy you can't do your job right.
You're a coordinator. Just like in a real-time device, things break if they get overloaded. Managers are often ridiculed for not doing real work but this is actually important. All my good bosses had free time in their day. All my bad ones have seemed overworked. It's ok to get involved in doing actual work but it's best to say away from the deep projects (ones that require a lot of time to wrap your head around and pick back up if you get interrupted) and remember to keep a little time in your day to sit around and just let whatever's going on stew in your mind. Part of a project manager's job is to see obstacles that will show up in the future. It's hard to do that when you are head down working.
If they are trying to lowball you on your hourly rate, don't take it. Otherwise, don't worry about getting stuck contracting. If you price yourself properly it doesn't matter.
Some previous posts said take your hourly rate as a salary and go 2.5 - 3x as much as a contractor. That's wrong. You need to bump it up some because of the extra 7% self employment tax you have to pay as a 1099 and you have to look at your medical benefits situation (can you jump on your wife's companies plan?) but in reality you don't need to go much more than about 10-20% higher to break even if the job is stable.
The 2.5-3x thing is appropriate if you are doing spotty contracting work with lots of down time or when you are working though someone else who is taking a big cut. The rules are different for a contract-to-perm position like this. Contract-to-perm isn't all that uncommon. I really like it when my employer hires people this way. It makes it much easier to get rid of someone if they turn out to be useless.
First, I'd decide what salary I want to have while you work there (nobody gives real raises anymore). Aim a little high, It sounds like you are early in you're career so I'd look for about a 10K jump. Then add on the 20% and divide by 2000 hrs/year for your hourly rate. eg, $50k salary -> $60k contractor -> $30/hour. Feel free to feel them out. Ask what range they were looking for and ask for a little more than that.
Remember, you are trying to build a relationship with these people and coming in and asking for huge money won't impress people. Ask for enough so that you will be comfortable with it and yet there is a little pressure to make you full time. Make it so that you'll be fine if they don't take you full time and so will they. The perpetual contractor gig isn't bad as long as you are making enough money. Also, make a good impression. Work hard for at least the first month. They say "jump", you say "how high?". The great thing about this is if you end up working long hours, it's big money because you are hourly. Plus you end up making an impression of a hard worker right off that will last.
Some basic contracting tips: Remember to save a bit over 1/3 of your income for taxes. The taxes are only about 7% higher than when you work for a company but if you are 1099 your employer won't take anything out, you have to do it. Start squirreling it away right from the start, somewhere separate from your spendable money so you don't feel richer than you are. Don't forget quarterly estimated taxes. Every 3 months the IRS expects you to send in what you owe. You can just guess, as long as you don't get it too far off you're fine. Everything gets settled up when you do your taxes at the end of the year. There's a reasonably small penalty for underpaying, nothing for overpaying. You can skip this but it costs more than it's worth.
Also, keep track of your business related expenses. If you buy a laptop for work, it's expense gets deducted from your income. In a lot of cases you can also write internet service and cell phone service off too. These are powerful deductions, much better than itemized deductions. They come right out of your income, you actually count as making less. This makes work related expenses 30% off for the year since you pay no tax on any money you spend on business expenses. Things you buy, you have to be using for work only though, so don't count that new Radeon X800 XT. It may not fly if you get audited. The business expense thing is rather simple but there are rules so if you want to take full advantage of it, talk to someone who's dealt with it before. Try to lump hardware together into big purchases since every purchase will have to be listed and named on your tax return. A co-worker who's done it before or even just H&R Block would be able to point you in the right direction.
When you are talking salary, once they come back with a number it's negotiation time. Vacation time, monster computer,
Well said, except this seems like a bad idea. Not everything should be run by governments and the internet is something which I suspect would be horrible if run by a government.
I think Verizon's argument is despicable though and should not work. That's like a company that made private toll rods saying the government shouldn't be able to create highways or private schools saying that public education should be banned since then they'd be out of business. Sometimes, as in the case of public education, it's wildly more beneficial to offer the services to everyone for free than it is to have companies profiting from them. I don't believe that internet access currently falls into that category though. I think the free internet access thing is a bad idea. We need to wait 10 or so years before we try that.
What I would like to see instead is a law passed that says if you offer internet service, you cannot prohibit reselling/sharing of that connection. That would probably do more to create free/cheap internet access for people at no cost to the taxpayers.
The massive amounts of debt incurred by the average American is an indication as to how pervasive this mentality is
Like it or not, debt is very important to the health of the economy. It's where money comes from and it is what motivates us to work. "If I don't work, I'll lose my house" is a wildly powerful economic force. It seems counter-intuitive that debt is good but look at the lifestyles of wealthy people. Now imagine a world where everyone behaved like that. We'd get no real work done. We'd all sit around enjoying our wealth. Now, don't get me wrong, I want to be one of those wealthy people, and getting rid of MY debt is good for ME but when the guy next to me has lots of debt, that's great because then I can get him to work to earn my money to keep from losing his house.:)
It's way too late and rarely effective because few people have the will or the discipline to actually do it.
Let me guess: You do have the will, which, in one small way, makes you a better person than most other people. It's just like better eating habits. Skinny people love to blame fat people's obvious mental inferiority (the lack of willpower or determination or whatever) for their obesity. It's the grown up's form of teasing others to make themselves feel better. Everyone does it. It's a big part of the secret to perpetual happiness: A constantly inflated sense of self worth.
Before you prop yourself up on a pedestal to separate yourself from the bourgeois masses who lack self control, try to reign in your arrogant contempt for others, unless, of course, you lack the self control to do so.:)
Asking people to make financial choices that are bad for their financial well being is as dumb as expecting CEO's to make business decisions that are bad for their companies. It's their job to make the decisions they make, you bet they are going to do it. Every financial decision we make has repercussions. While we can know something about some of them, (oh no, those Nike's are made by children in sweat shops) you can't know everything about all of them (uh, we aren't using the sweat shop children to make shoes anymore, now they are starving). Economies are complicated things. In the US, we happen to live in an economy where the structure of our ecnonomy enclosed companies in a great set of rules that basically made it so they could do what they do best, struggle for wealth and power, and it would benefit the general public. The problem is that, over time, they have found holes in the rules and they are now well documented and regularly exploited. Companies are now racing to move out of the crucible of competition into the lazy backwater's of monopoly, customer lock-in, exploitation and corruption. We need to plug the holes to get our companies back into honest competition for our business. Anything short of that is a weak band-aid of a temporary solution and is a distraction from the real work that needs to be done. Before you go off half cocked trying to convince people to alter their shopping habits, remember who *really* benefits from us chasing our tails in trying to solve this problem.
I certainly wouldn't describe X86 as toy though. It has it's quirks but X86 server hardware is quite capable as can be seen by the steady erosion of Sun's market share. The sparc motherboard/boot archtecture is much more flexible than the wintel one but X86 CPU's are faster and cheeper than sparcs. In the end, the future lies in improving the boot architecture for X86, not in Sun's platform.
Takes all of about 2 minutes to write a for loop that installs all the ones that come with the OS.
How fast can you get KDE running on a Solaris system?
I bet I could do it faster!
Step 1: Install Linux.
Done.:)
Seriously, Solaris has it's strong points, especially as far as the kernel goes, but the user space stuff is trash. The high-functioning powerful tools like vim, bash, and all the gnu versions of make, ftp, tar, etc. all need to be the default, not just available. If you can count on them being on every machine, things just get easier.
The same thing goes for all the commercial Unix's. Moving to Linux was like going out of the pool into the hot tub. It doesn't seem that different until you experience the pain of going back. "What do you mean there's no -z switch to tar?" "What are all these stupid characters that show up in the file I'm VI'ing when I try to move around with the arrow keys" "What do you mean I had the same file open in two different vi windows and my changes in one clobbered the changes in the other without any type of warning so I lost 2 hours work?"
They can have my Linux when they pry it from my cold dead hands...or, really, any time before that. It's free. Here, take 2.
you're clearly not aware of the world around you if you don't think the self driving car needs a massive infrastructure, too.
Why? Do you need massive infrastructure to drive a car? Is there something magical that every blonde bimbo in California with a license can do, that a computer couldn't possibly be able to? A self piloting car will be able to benefit from optimizations provided by infrastructure that will no doubt be put in certain places but for wide spread adoption, it would need to be able to operate without it.
In fact if we could put all or at least most freight back on railways and use systems like this to do the short runs from the rail station to the places where the goods are needed we could cut down on road maintenance dramatically, because large trucks cause the vast majority of damage - something you ought to have learned in the discussion on self-driving cars.
I only partially buy that argument. Trucks do damage to roads but so does time and weather and all those cars.
Regardless, removing cars from the road (which is what this system is meant to do) means you don't need as many lanes, which means your cost of road maintenance is reduced.
The question isn't whether this would do no good, the question is would this be a wise investment or is our money better spent elsewhere. Would it save more money than it costs.
Because this is a metal structure rather than a composite of sand, gravel, and asphalt, it will last longer than roads with less maintenance.
That must be why bridges are the cheapest maintenance items for our highway systems, much cheaper than regular road.:)
Again, the big question is, would we save more money than we spend?
The answer is no f'ing way. How many lanes of traffic would a system like this replace. 2? 1? 0.5? Studies of existing train systems show they handle about half as much traffic as one highway lane. How much more would this system handle than the subways we have now? Also, what's the cost? Is it as much as building 1 new lane? 2 new lanes? A whole new highway? When it comes to rail based mass transit the answer is usually that you could build enough highways to end anything resembling a traffic jam and instead people piss the money into under-utilized boondoggles that, while very cool, don't make sense.
Most people's roads suck and need maintenance badly. Because of this they think of road construction and maintenance as ridiculously expensive. It's not. The reason your roads suck is that people aren't increasing the gas tax in proportion to the expense of repairing roads so they don't get the regular maintenance they need. Part of the reason for that is because the general public seems to think that roads are a thing of the past and it's not worth investing money in them. It's a vicious catch 22. Also, nobody wants to raise taxes any more because the federal government takes ludicrous amounts of money and pisses it away.
Also, these things don't require a filling station, so you don't need as many gas stations either
There's a down side to this though. You incur transmission losses when dealing with electric power, usually 7-9%. A hybrid car is actually more efficient than a power plant when you factor in transmission loss. Also, in cold climates the waste heat from combustion is used to heat the vehicle. There's no way to make use of the waste heat when dealing with electrical power since it's at the power plant and you aren't.
I'd like to know why you think that wheels work better on tar roads than on rails, though. I can't come up with any reason why you might believe that. Why would all that friction be a good thing?
Are you asking about traction or rolling resistance because they are completely separate things?
Tires have much better traction. They are safer at high speed, they can operate over any terrain regardless of whether it was intended on bei
Let's not forget that WE, as consumers, as humans capable of exercising various degress of discipline, hold the key as to whether or not ANY of these policies and/or practices will survive.
No no no! Watch the South Park about Wallmart for a good humorous discussion of that topic. When people shop they act in their best interest, as they should. Trying to do inject some sort of ethics at the cash register is WAY too late and rarely effective.
The real power to fix these issues lies in our ability to vote. Let me be clear on this though: This power does not lie in your ability to elect someone who will do what you want and then walking away. Most people falsely believe that's what voting is all about. It's not! The power of the vote is the ability to organize, to band together, build consensus and convince whoever is in office *now* that you will vote them out of office if they don't do what you want. That's where the real power of the vote lies. Corporations know this. They wield that power to amazing effect. Do you?
If you are dissatisfied with the way things are going, never vote for the incumbent no matter how bad the challenger is. At the very least, it will make your next vote seem more important to the incumbent and make them pay more attention to your issues.
..but it is becoming evident that the amoral progress towards global capitalism are shattering our freedoms..
This is not capitalism. Capitalism requires a system of supports and limits to keep it functioning properly. There are many roads companies can take out of capitalist competition and in order for a capitalist economy to work properly these roads must be controlled. These routes out of competition include monopoly, government corruption, poisoning of competition, displacement of expenses as well as many others. We've left these roads open and now companies that abused, lied, cheated, and bought the system are the winners. This is a horrible thing and has resulted in generations of businessmen who think that's the right way to do business instead of simply delivering the best product to the consumer you can.
Reforming this system will require us to reign in these rogue non-competing companies and limit their power. Is there an anti-corruption PAC that I could join that would tell me who of my representatives is taking money in exchange for favorable laws and would support their opponent?
One advantage of this system is that it eliminate these inefficiencies by having everything controlled by a central computer.
True. Because you can run a centralized scheduling agent you can make things quite efficient.
That said, when you compare this fragile, limited application, closed system to the modular, flexible, redundant realty of the interstate highway system you see how remarkably un-scalable and simplistic the train approach is. Cars that automatically drive you places is a much harder problem to solve, because of it's open ended nature but the implications of solving it are much more important for exactly the same reason.
I for one find driving a 2800+ LBS car five miles to get to work.
How much more efficient would driving a 2800 LB car 3 miles to the train station, then taking a little POS train thingy to your office?
Now you need to maintain tracks, maintain the train thingies, light and heat stations, run a power grid, pay people to do all kinds of infrastructure things and you take space and money away from roads which will stil be handling 95% of the traffic.
It's not energy efficient. It's not resource efficient. It's not time efficient. It's not space efficient. It's not efficient.
How easy is a Linux distro at detecting software you added yourself outside of its package base?... I know, its not fair, but I guess its assumed you knew how to install it, you might be able to install a patch for it.
My point is that most important software IS inside Linux distribution's package management system which is a major advantage over Solaris. Most of what I do with Linux systems involves things that are included in Linux distributions but not part of Solaris. The funny thing is that a lot of time the "corporate supported" Solaris ends up being the roll your own, unsupported, high maintenance OS, while the "unsupported free" Linux ends up being well tested, highly polished, and easy to maintain.
This ability to take disparate software projects and meld them together into one cohesive system is a big part of the huge power of open source. I hope, for the sake of all the people suffering through the pain of Solaris administration, Sun allows other distributions of open source Solaris.
If you dislike the city so much, why work there? If it's just about the money, that's sad.
We live in a highly specialized rapidly changing economy. Companies need to draw on a huge population of people to find workers with the talent to fill their needs. That's why they are in cities. Many of them can't even be in the medium sized cities, they must be in the really big ones. It's not about what people want, it's about what companies require.
I live in the suburbs of a small city in New Hampshire (US) and I keep an agent looking on Monster for jobs near me. In general there arent any in my part of state. I'm working for a company that's 90 miles from my house down in the Boston area. I'm so far away and my job can be done remotely so they let me work from home most of the time but if that wasn't the case, I'd probably be driving 90 miles a day. It's not about making less money, it's about making ANY money. I know people in high tech in this area who've lost their houses because they just can't find a job. Would I drive 90 miles a day if I was about to lose my house and they were offering good money? F yea! In a heartbeat.
As far as living in the city, I hate living in cities. Mostly it's the constant exposure to strangers that bothers me. Personally, I think I'd like to live on a 100 acre farm that's maintained by robots.
It's about balance, and commuting is not a scalable solution - despite what these technophiles suggest with their inventions.
Commuting is a scalable solution. Just because the problem is hard, doesn't mean it's impossible. Look at commuting in New York. You'd think by the attitudes of most cities that it's near impossible for them to accommodate any more people commuting. The plain fact is that there is no point coming in the near future at which we can't build enough roads to accommodate traffic. It's just that people refuse to rip out buildings to build new roads. They spent 40 billion dollars digging a tunnel under Boston to replace one small highway with another. In the end we ended up with a crappy little 40 billion dollar tunnel and traffic jams just as bad as they were before. Rip a new hole in the city and build a new highway. It's the right way.
Cities should be zoning strips of land "future highway" and forbidding any new construction there. New York did it long ago and it worked great. Granted, traffic sucks at places in NY but it's amazing how many people can get from point a to point b if you just build the capacity. The problem is, like everyone else, they stopped building. If smaller cities had the kind of infrastructure NY does they'd have no traffic issues.
People these days talk about "controlling sprawl" as if people getting what they want is something that needs to be stopped. They used to "manage growth". We need to go back to finding clever solutions to hard problems instead of trying to make the problems stop existing.
It's like the self driving car except it needs a massive infrastructure to make it work less efficiently.
Trains are cool, but why do people automatically see rails and assume they are looking at efficient transportation. When are people going to realize that wheels simply work better on tar roads than they do on metal rails.
That said, this could be a great alternative in smaller cities that typically make the mistake of dumping huge money into insolvent inefficient subway systems that do little to help any traffic congestion.
Let me get this straight: Once you spend hours building your own distribution on top of the one Sun provides that's custom and untested you have some of the same goodness that Linux users enjoy right out of the box.
What was your point about ease of use?
Part of using a system, is setting it up. Another part, is upgrading to a new OS. How is Sloaris about detecting your GNU software and installing the appropriate new version when you upgrade your OS? What kind of package management do you get with that? How are updates distributed?
A Linux distribution's entire reason for being is making that whole mess more reliable and convenient ("yum -y update" "apt-get update"). I'm constantly amazed at how easy it is to install Fedora.
It will be interesting to see if the "open source" license Sun distributes Solaris under allows for people to create new Solaris distributions. I imagine if it does, that will rapidly happen since Sun's distribution is so awful. I wonder how Sun would feel about losing control of Solaris?
Electric trains are lighter and therefor use less energy per passenger when measured at the train but the 7-9% loss from electrical power transmission makes up for it and it ends up not making much of a difference.
The big benefit of electric is really logisitical not fuel efficiency. They are faster, more modular, and easier to maintain.
One current problem is that people want to LIVE in rural areas
No. The problem is people are getting what they want. People have always wanted a little elbow room and space of their own. Now their getting it. You want to make everyone suffer so you don't have to deal with traffic. And you call them selfish! Bah!
Actually, trains aren't economically feasible most places they exist. Modern traffic patterns show a railroad line being capable of caring about as many people as half a highway lane at many times the cost. One study showed it would be cheaper for the city to lease a Lexus for every person who road the rails than to keep dumping money into supporting it's subway system. It's only in the most densely populated places (New York, Tokyo, London, Paris) where trains make economic sense.
Trains are cool. People love to love them but they are:
environmentally horrible because of their massive weight, per passenger they use more fuel than an SUV
economically unsound They cost more per passenger than an expensive car while providing worse service. Riders don't see that high cost because most train systems are heavily subsidized by tax money so the general population ends up paying for transportation for the train riding people as well as their own.
they waste riders time When's the last time you got out of a train at your doorstep?
it's impossible for them to be a complete transportation solution "I'm sorry sir but the hoses from the fire train won't reach your house. It'll just have to burn. Hopefully the EMTs from the ambulance train will be able to walk here in time to save your wife though."
We need to stop blindly looking to those cool train things (aka mass transit) to solve our transportation problems. They can't do it.
The right solution to most traffic problems is to simply build more highways (not expand existing ones, build new ones between the old ones.) It's politically difficult because it requires government to pry people from their homes but it's a realistic way to create an efficient economical transportation system. States should build the roads, then increase gas taxes to pay off the construction costs. Your children will thank you.
Or, we can stick our heads back in the sand an pretend the issue will go away. Trains will make the traffic jams go away. People in the future will probably drive less. Flying cars will solve everything! There, don't we all feel better now, nice and comfy warm in the sand.
With the gas tax, people who drive gas guzzling SUV's pay more than people who drive efficient vehicles. It's a very efficient tax to collect and is generally quite fair. Heavy SUV's and trucks do more damage than their light efficient counterparts and they pay more. That just makes sense.
If the revenue isn't high enough to cover expenses, make the gas tax higher. People get all nutzoid about raising gas taxes but it makes much more sense than this crazy plan. Gas tax ends up being somewhere around $100 per year for the average car (10,000 miles/year, 20 MPG, $0.20/gallon gas tax.) That's nothing compared to the rest of the taxes we get slammed with. Raising the gas tax will cover the gap without the $100 per car wasted expenditure and it gives people incentive to drive more efficient cars.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised the EPA is even allowed to use the term "global warming" anymore.
Frontline had a piece on the other day talking about "the art of persuasion." They specifically mentioned this guy republicans use who coined the phrase "global climate change" and told republican leadership to use it instead of "global warming" since it was less alarming. Soon after the term started being used almost exclusively and notice that it even appeared in this slashdot story.
Perhaps instead of demanding more money, schools should evaluate how they are spending the money they already get.
And perhaps instead of spending 30% of our education budget on "special" people who will never score well on tests we should just ignore them and focus on the smart ones.
Just because they spend less and get more doesn't mean we should follow their example. In the US we have decided to spend serious resources educating a segment of the population that other countries would simply ignore. This is expensive and causes our numbers to look horrible. Are you willing to tell those kids and their parents that they don't deserve an education? Simple things are also more expensive in the US. Salaries, healthcare, land, transportation, building quality, all factor in to a more expensive educational system.
Also. The ESEA act aka No Child (Education) Left Behind is serving to make this situation dramatically worse. If a problem can't be put on a standardized test, a school can lose money for teaching it instead of something that will be.
But I don't think you need to conform to the One True Perl style to write legible Perl; heck, a One True Perl style is antithetical to the whole Perl philosophy of Many Ways To Do It.
The perl style guide is not exactly strict. The reason to have it is that perl code needs to be interpreted by two distinctly different parsers, the perl parser and the human code reader. Rules like "No space before the semicolon" are for us humans who have a hard time parsing code written the other way.
There is a benefit to letting people code in the style they like. There is also a benefit to making them code in the style the person who comes along next, likes. The key is balancing those two benefits. Most people underestimate the amount of re-use their code will get. If you use 4 character tabs in all your code and the rest of the world uses 8 character tabs, your code will look horrible to them (I really loved my 4 character tabs. sniffle.) but, if you want to be able to work well with others, you need to be able to pick up other people's code and have other people pick up your code.
If you are looking to do something that Bash can do but probably shouldn't (most things people use Bash for fall into that category) use perl, not python. Perl is very bash-like and porting things to perl is easy.
Of course, this is why so many perl programs look like a complete mess, people do quick ports and don't learn how to properly use the language. Do the next guy a favor and do "man perlstyle" early on.
QuickTime is annoying but MOV is still the best quality low bit rate format. What I do is install QuickTime, disable it's system tray icon and then have Media Player Classic take over all it's file associations. MPC can use the libraries that QuickTime installs to play MOV files but is much lighter weight and has better playback controls (And doesn't ask you to upgrade to the pro version every time). It can replace QuickTime, real player, and windows media player (apparently, it uses their libraries) and is better than all of them.
Get Media Player Classic from sourceforge.
Check out the "Touch Window from Outside" feature: View -> Video Frame -> Touch Window from Outside. It's great for video with black bands on top and bottom.
I'd add some more:
You're a coordinator. Just like in a real-time device, things break if they get overloaded. Managers are often ridiculed for not doing real work but this is actually important. All my good bosses had free time in their day. All my bad ones have seemed overworked. It's ok to get involved in doing actual work but it's best to say away from the deep projects (ones that require a lot of time to wrap your head around and pick back up if you get interrupted) and remember to keep a little time in your day to sit around and just let whatever's going on stew in your mind. Part of a project manager's job is to see obstacles that will show up in the future. It's hard to do that when you are head down working.
If they are trying to lowball you on your hourly rate, don't take it. Otherwise, don't worry about getting stuck contracting. If you price yourself properly it doesn't matter.
Some previous posts said take your hourly rate as a salary and go 2.5 - 3x as much as a contractor. That's wrong. You need to bump it up some because of the extra 7% self employment tax you have to pay as a 1099 and you have to look at your medical benefits situation (can you jump on your wife's companies plan?) but in reality you don't need to go much more than about 10-20% higher to break even if the job is stable.
The 2.5-3x thing is appropriate if you are doing spotty contracting work with lots of down time or when you are working though someone else who is taking a big cut. The rules are different for a contract-to-perm position like this. Contract-to-perm isn't all that uncommon. I really like it when my employer hires people this way. It makes it much easier to get rid of someone if they turn out to be useless.
First, I'd decide what salary I want to have while you work there (nobody gives real raises anymore). Aim a little high, It sounds like you are early in you're career so I'd look for about a 10K jump. Then add on the 20% and divide by 2000 hrs/year for your hourly rate. eg, $50k salary -> $60k contractor -> $30/hour. Feel free to feel them out. Ask what range they were looking for and ask for a little more than that.
Remember, you are trying to build a relationship with these people and coming in and asking for huge money won't impress people. Ask for enough so that you will be comfortable with it and yet there is a little pressure to make you full time. Make it so that you'll be fine if they don't take you full time and so will they. The perpetual contractor gig isn't bad as long as you are making enough money. Also, make a good impression. Work hard for at least the first month. They say "jump", you say "how high?". The great thing about this is if you end up working long hours, it's big money because you are hourly. Plus you end up making an impression of a hard worker right off that will last.
Some basic contracting tips: Remember to save a bit over 1/3 of your income for taxes. The taxes are only about 7% higher than when you work for a company but if you are 1099 your employer won't take anything out, you have to do it. Start squirreling it away right from the start, somewhere separate from your spendable money so you don't feel richer than you are. Don't forget quarterly estimated taxes. Every 3 months the IRS expects you to send in what you owe. You can just guess, as long as you don't get it too far off you're fine. Everything gets settled up when you do your taxes at the end of the year. There's a reasonably small penalty for underpaying, nothing for overpaying. You can skip this but it costs more than it's worth.
Also, keep track of your business related expenses. If you buy a laptop for work, it's expense gets deducted from your income. In a lot of cases you can also write internet service and cell phone service off too. These are powerful deductions, much better than itemized deductions. They come right out of your income, you actually count as making less. This makes work related expenses 30% off for the year since you pay no tax on any money you spend on business expenses. Things you buy, you have to be using for work only though, so don't count that new Radeon X800 XT. It may not fly if you get audited. The business expense thing is rather simple but there are rules so if you want to take full advantage of it, talk to someone who's dealt with it before. Try to lump hardware together into big purchases since every purchase will have to be listed and named on your tax return. A co-worker who's done it before or even just H&R Block would be able to point you in the right direction.
When you are talking salary, once they come back with a number it's negotiation time. Vacation time, monster computer,
Well said, except this seems like a bad idea. Not everything should be run by governments and the internet is something which I suspect would be horrible if run by a government.
I think Verizon's argument is despicable though and should not work. That's like a company that made private toll rods saying the government shouldn't be able to create highways or private schools saying that public education should be banned since then they'd be out of business. Sometimes, as in the case of public education, it's wildly more beneficial to offer the services to everyone for free than it is to have companies profiting from them. I don't believe that internet access currently falls into that category though. I think the free internet access thing is a bad idea. We need to wait 10 or so years before we try that.
What I would like to see instead is a law passed that says if you offer internet service, you cannot prohibit reselling/sharing of that connection. That would probably do more to create free/cheap internet access for people at no cost to the taxpayers.
The massive amounts of debt incurred by the average American is an indication as to how pervasive this mentality is
:)
:)
Like it or not, debt is very important to the health of the economy. It's where money comes from and it is what motivates us to work. "If I don't work, I'll lose my house" is a wildly powerful economic force. It seems counter-intuitive that debt is good but look at the lifestyles of wealthy people. Now imagine a world where everyone behaved like that. We'd get no real work done. We'd all sit around enjoying our wealth. Now, don't get me wrong, I want to be one of those wealthy people, and getting rid of MY debt is good for ME but when the guy next to me has lots of debt, that's great because then I can get him to work to earn my money to keep from losing his house.
It's way too late and rarely effective because few people have the will or the discipline to actually do it.
Let me guess: You do have the will, which, in one small way, makes you a better person than most other people. It's just like better eating habits. Skinny people love to blame fat people's obvious mental inferiority (the lack of willpower or determination or whatever) for their obesity. It's the grown up's form of teasing others to make themselves feel better. Everyone does it. It's a big part of the secret to perpetual happiness: A constantly inflated sense of self worth.
Before you prop yourself up on a pedestal to separate yourself from the bourgeois masses who lack self control, try to reign in your arrogant contempt for others, unless, of course, you lack the self control to do so.
Asking people to make financial choices that are bad for their financial well being is as dumb as expecting CEO's to make business decisions that are bad for their companies. It's their job to make the decisions they make, you bet they are going to do it. Every financial decision we make has repercussions. While we can know something about some of them, (oh no, those Nike's are made by children in sweat shops) you can't know everything about all of them (uh, we aren't using the sweat shop children to make shoes anymore, now they are starving). Economies are complicated things. In the US, we happen to live in an economy where the structure of our ecnonomy enclosed companies in a great set of rules that basically made it so they could do what they do best, struggle for wealth and power, and it would benefit the general public. The problem is that, over time, they have found holes in the rules and they are now well documented and regularly exploited. Companies are now racing to move out of the crucible of competition into the lazy backwater's of monopoly, customer lock-in, exploitation and corruption. We need to plug the holes to get our companies back into honest competition for our business. Anything short of that is a weak band-aid of a temporary solution and is a distraction from the real work that needs to be done. Before you go off half cocked trying to convince people to alter their shopping habits, remember who *really* benefits from us chasing our tails in trying to solve this problem.
Yes. Sun hardware is good stuff.
I certainly wouldn't describe X86 as toy though. It has it's quirks but X86 server hardware is quite capable as can be seen by the steady erosion of Sun's market share. The sparc motherboard/boot archtecture is much more flexible than the wintel one but X86 CPU's are faster and cheeper than sparcs. In the end, the future lies in improving the boot architecture for X86, not in Sun's platform.
Takes all of about 2 minutes to write a for loop that installs all the ones that come with the OS.
:)
How fast can you get KDE running on a Solaris system?
I bet I could do it faster!
Step 1: Install Linux.
Done.
Seriously, Solaris has it's strong points, especially as far as the kernel goes, but the user space stuff is trash. The high-functioning powerful tools like vim, bash, and all the gnu versions of make, ftp, tar, etc. all need to be the default, not just available. If you can count on them being on every machine, things just get easier.
The same thing goes for all the commercial Unix's. Moving to Linux was like going out of the pool into the hot tub. It doesn't seem that different until you experience the pain of going back. "What do you mean there's no -z switch to tar?" "What are all these stupid characters that show up in the file I'm VI'ing when I try to move around with the arrow keys" "What do you mean I had the same file open in two different vi windows and my changes in one clobbered the changes in the other without any type of warning so I lost 2 hours work?"
They can have my Linux when they pry it from my cold dead hands...or, really, any time before that. It's free. Here, take 2.
Are you actually arguing that hardware support is Solaris's strong point when comparing it to Linux?
Solaris has strong points. That's not one of them.
you're clearly not aware of the world around you if you don't think the self driving car needs a massive infrastructure, too.
:)
Why? Do you need massive infrastructure to drive a car? Is there something magical that every blonde bimbo in California with a license can do, that a computer couldn't possibly be able to? A self piloting car will be able to benefit from optimizations provided by infrastructure that will no doubt be put in certain places but for wide spread adoption, it would need to be able to operate without it.
In fact if we could put all or at least most freight back on railways and use systems like this to do the short runs from the rail station to the places where the goods are needed we could cut down on road maintenance dramatically, because large trucks cause the vast majority of damage - something you ought to have learned in the discussion on self-driving cars.
I only partially buy that argument. Trucks do damage to roads but so does time and weather and all those cars.
Regardless, removing cars from the road (which is what this system is meant to do) means you don't need as many lanes, which means your cost of road maintenance is reduced.
The question isn't whether this would do no good, the question is would this be a wise investment or is our money better spent elsewhere. Would it save more money than it costs.
Because this is a metal structure rather than a composite of sand, gravel, and asphalt, it will last longer than roads with less maintenance.
That must be why bridges are the cheapest maintenance items for our highway systems, much cheaper than regular road.
Again, the big question is, would we save more money than we spend?
The answer is no f'ing way. How many lanes of traffic would a system like this replace. 2? 1? 0.5? Studies of existing train systems show they handle about half as much traffic as one highway lane. How much more would this system handle than the subways we have now? Also, what's the cost? Is it as much as building 1 new lane? 2 new lanes? A whole new highway? When it comes to rail based mass transit the answer is usually that you could build enough highways to end anything resembling a traffic jam and instead people piss the money into under-utilized boondoggles that, while very cool, don't make sense.
Most people's roads suck and need maintenance badly. Because of this they think of road construction and maintenance as ridiculously expensive. It's not. The reason your roads suck is that people aren't increasing the gas tax in proportion to the expense of repairing roads so they don't get the regular maintenance they need. Part of the reason for that is because the general public seems to think that roads are a thing of the past and it's not worth investing money in them. It's a vicious catch 22. Also, nobody wants to raise taxes any more because the federal government takes ludicrous amounts of money and pisses it away.
Also, these things don't require a filling station, so you don't need as many gas stations either
There's a down side to this though. You incur transmission losses when dealing with electric power, usually 7-9%. A hybrid car is actually more efficient than a power plant when you factor in transmission loss. Also, in cold climates the waste heat from combustion is used to heat the vehicle. There's no way to make use of the waste heat when dealing with electrical power since it's at the power plant and you aren't.
I'd like to know why you think that wheels work better on tar roads than on rails, though. I can't come up with any reason why you might believe that. Why would all that friction be a good thing?
Are you asking about traction or rolling resistance because they are completely separate things?
Tires have much better traction. They are safer at high speed, they can operate over any terrain regardless of whether it was intended on bei
Let's not forget that WE, as consumers, as humans capable of exercising various degress of discipline, hold the key as to whether or not ANY of these policies and/or practices will survive.
No no no! Watch the South Park about Wallmart for a good humorous discussion of that topic. When people shop they act in their best interest, as they should. Trying to do inject some sort of ethics at the cash register is WAY too late and rarely effective.
The real power to fix these issues lies in our ability to vote. Let me be clear on this though: This power does not lie in your ability to elect someone who will do what you want and then walking away. Most people falsely believe that's what voting is all about. It's not! The power of the vote is the ability to organize, to band together, build consensus and convince whoever is in office *now* that you will vote them out of office if they don't do what you want. That's where the real power of the vote lies. Corporations know this. They wield that power to amazing effect. Do you?
If you are dissatisfied with the way things are going, never vote for the incumbent no matter how bad the challenger is. At the very least, it will make your next vote seem more important to the incumbent and make them pay more attention to your issues.
..but it is becoming evident that the amoral progress towards global capitalism are shattering our freedoms..
This is not capitalism. Capitalism requires a system of supports and limits to keep it functioning properly. There are many roads companies can take out of capitalist competition and in order for a capitalist economy to work properly these roads must be controlled. These routes out of competition include monopoly, government corruption, poisoning of competition, displacement of expenses as well as many others. We've left these roads open and now companies that abused, lied, cheated, and bought the system are the winners. This is a horrible thing and has resulted in generations of businessmen who think that's the right way to do business instead of simply delivering the best product to the consumer you can.
Reforming this system will require us to reign in these rogue non-competing companies and limit their power. Is there an anti-corruption PAC that I could join that would tell me who of my representatives is taking money in exchange for favorable laws and would support their opponent?
One advantage of this system is that it eliminate these inefficiencies by having everything controlled by a central computer.
True. Because you can run a centralized scheduling agent you can make things quite efficient.
That said, when you compare this fragile, limited application, closed system to the modular, flexible, redundant realty of the interstate highway system you see how remarkably un-scalable and simplistic the train approach is. Cars that automatically drive you places is a much harder problem to solve, because of it's open ended nature but the implications of solving it are much more important for exactly the same reason.
I for one find driving a 2800+ LBS car five miles to get to work.
How much more efficient would driving a 2800 LB car 3 miles to the train station, then taking a little POS train thingy to your office?
Now you need to maintain tracks, maintain the train thingies, light and heat stations, run a power grid, pay people to do all kinds of infrastructure things and you take space and money away from roads which will stil be handling 95% of the traffic.
It's not energy efficient. It's not resource efficient. It's not time efficient. It's not space efficient. It's not efficient.
How easy is a Linux distro at detecting software you added yourself outside of its package base? ... I know, its not fair, but I guess its assumed you knew how to install it, you might be able to install a patch for it.
My point is that most important software IS inside Linux distribution's package management system which is a major advantage over Solaris. Most of what I do with Linux systems involves things that are included in Linux distributions but not part of Solaris. The funny thing is that a lot of time the "corporate supported" Solaris ends up being the roll your own, unsupported, high maintenance OS, while the "unsupported free" Linux ends up being well tested, highly polished, and easy to maintain.
This ability to take disparate software projects and meld them together into one cohesive system is a big part of the huge power of open source. I hope, for the sake of all the people suffering through the pain of Solaris administration, Sun allows other distributions of open source Solaris.
If you dislike the city so much, why work there? If it's just about the money, that's sad.
We live in a highly specialized rapidly changing economy. Companies need to draw on a huge population of people to find workers with the talent to fill their needs. That's why they are in cities. Many of them can't even be in the medium sized cities, they must be in the really big ones. It's not about what people want, it's about what companies require.
I live in the suburbs of a small city in New Hampshire (US) and I keep an agent looking on Monster for jobs near me. In general there arent any in my part of state. I'm working for a company that's 90 miles from my house down in the Boston area. I'm so far away and my job can be done remotely so they let me work from home most of the time but if that wasn't the case, I'd probably be driving 90 miles a day. It's not about making less money, it's about making ANY money. I know people in high tech in this area who've lost their houses because they just can't find a job. Would I drive 90 miles a day if I was about to lose my house and they were offering good money? F yea! In a heartbeat.
As far as living in the city, I hate living in cities. Mostly it's the constant exposure to strangers that bothers me. Personally, I think I'd like to live on a 100 acre farm that's maintained by robots.
It's about balance, and commuting is not a scalable solution - despite what these technophiles suggest with their inventions.
Commuting is a scalable solution. Just because the problem is hard, doesn't mean it's impossible. Look at commuting in New York. You'd think by the attitudes of most cities that it's near impossible for them to accommodate any more people commuting. The plain fact is that there is no point coming in the near future at which we can't build enough roads to accommodate traffic. It's just that people refuse to rip out buildings to build new roads. They spent 40 billion dollars digging a tunnel under Boston to replace one small highway with another. In the end we ended up with a crappy little 40 billion dollar tunnel and traffic jams just as bad as they were before. Rip a new hole in the city and build a new highway. It's the right way.
Cities should be zoning strips of land "future highway" and forbidding any new construction there. New York did it long ago and it worked great. Granted, traffic sucks at places in NY but it's amazing how many people can get from point a to point b if you just build the capacity. The problem is, like everyone else, they stopped building. If smaller cities had the kind of infrastructure NY does they'd have no traffic issues.
People these days talk about "controlling sprawl" as if people getting what they want is something that needs to be stopped. They used to "manage growth". We need to go back to finding clever solutions to hard problems instead of trying to make the problems stop existing.
It's like the self driving car except it needs a massive infrastructure to make it work less efficiently.
Trains are cool, but why do people automatically see rails and assume they are looking at efficient transportation. When are people going to realize that wheels simply work better on tar roads than they do on metal rails.
That said, this could be a great alternative in smaller cities that typically make the mistake of dumping huge money into insolvent inefficient subway systems that do little to help any traffic congestion.
Let me get this straight: Once you spend hours building your own distribution on top of the one Sun provides that's custom and untested you have some of the same goodness that Linux users enjoy right out of the box.
What was your point about ease of use?
Part of using a system, is setting it up. Another part, is upgrading to a new OS. How is Sloaris about detecting your GNU software and installing the appropriate new version when you upgrade your OS? What kind of package management do you get with that? How are updates distributed?
A Linux distribution's entire reason for being is making that whole mess more reliable and convenient ("yum -y update" "apt-get update"). I'm constantly amazed at how easy it is to install Fedora.
It will be interesting to see if the "open source" license Sun distributes Solaris under allows for people to create new Solaris distributions. I imagine if it does, that will rapidly happen since Sun's distribution is so awful. I wonder how Sun would feel about losing control of Solaris?
Electric trains are lighter and therefor use less energy per passenger when measured at the train but the 7-9% loss from electrical power transmission makes up for it and it ends up not making much of a difference.
The big benefit of electric is really logisitical not fuel efficiency. They are faster, more modular, and easier to maintain.
One current problem is that people want to LIVE in rural areas
No. The problem is people are getting what they want. People have always wanted a little elbow room and space of their own. Now their getting it. You want to make everyone suffer so you don't have to deal with traffic. And you call them selfish! Bah!
Trains are cool. People love to love them but they are:
because of their massive weight, per passenger they use more fuel than an SUV
They cost more per passenger than an expensive car while providing worse service. Riders don't see that high cost because most train systems are heavily subsidized by tax money so the general population ends up paying for transportation for the train riding people as well as their own.
When's the last time you got out of a train at your doorstep?
"I'm sorry sir but the hoses from the fire train won't reach your house. It'll just have to burn. Hopefully the EMTs from the ambulance train will be able to walk here in time to save your wife though."
We need to stop blindly looking to those cool train things (aka mass transit) to solve our transportation problems. They can't do it.
The right solution to most traffic problems is to simply build more highways (not expand existing ones, build new ones between the old ones.) It's politically difficult because it requires government to pry people from their homes but it's a realistic way to create an efficient economical transportation system. States should build the roads, then increase gas taxes to pay off the construction costs. Your children will thank you.
Or, we can stick our heads back in the sand an pretend the issue will go away. Trains will make the traffic jams go away. People in the future will probably drive less. Flying cars will solve everything! There, don't we all feel better now, nice and comfy warm in the sand.
With the gas tax, people who drive gas guzzling SUV's pay more than people who drive efficient vehicles. It's a very efficient tax to collect and is generally quite fair. Heavy SUV's and trucks do more damage than their light efficient counterparts and they pay more. That just makes sense.
If the revenue isn't high enough to cover expenses, make the gas tax higher. People get all nutzoid about raising gas taxes but it makes much more sense than this crazy plan. Gas tax ends up being somewhere around $100 per year for the average car (10,000 miles/year, 20 MPG, $0.20/gallon gas tax.) That's nothing compared to the rest of the taxes we get slammed with. Raising the gas tax will cover the gap without the $100 per car wasted expenditure and it gives people incentive to drive more efficient cars.