Damn, that sucks... I'm sorry you were so ill-served by the educational system. Good luck as you make your journey of re-connection with that ineffable thing, that spark that can jump from fiction to the reader. I too had kind of a terrible time getting started reading (I had a seriously suckoid first grade teacher; e.g. she told my left-handed friend Doug that he was stupid and wrong and she didn't have time to teach a left-hander how to write... Doug was a smart kid who never really got over that initial stumble of disconnection with the educational system. Wherever you are, you stupid bitch, I hope you rot in hell for that alone.); but at some point it just *clicked* and I haven't been able to put down books sense, either for purely functional reading or for pleasure. For me it was the summer of my second or third grade year (I think) when I got a pack of Heinlein's "kid's books" (Rocket Ship Galileo was the first one, followed by others) and something about them, I don't know what, but it struck that spark and I was just hooked. I hope some novel manages to do the same for you, that you find that joy, because there's so much to be had out there in the worlds beyond reading for function or plain information. Even today I find myself relating to code in my career as a software engineer in some ways like it was a story or an essay, with the blocks or what have you of the logical model forming a visual picture or space in my mind as I read the lines of text. (This visualization has helped me put together more than one tricky thing or deduce where a disconnect/bug might be... it's really hard to explain in words and not something I've talked about often.)
I got pinged once (not SSI/BI) , turned them down.
on
Bringing Bandwidth To Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A company that shall remain nameless once pinged me about a role providing linux cluster admin and field engineer/developer support for a visualization project designed for military use. I would have been stationed in central Baghdad and paid on the order of two hundred and fifty thousand base pay plus hazard pay, full relocation, etc. etc. etc. amounting to probably on the order of four hundred thousand to half a million a year after all the calculations were done.
I turned them down.
Yes, it sounded like a technically sweet gig. Yes, the pay and benefits were very, very solid. Could I handle a morning and evening commute that includes pitched gun fights and car bombs? Would the security where I sleep be as good as where I would work? Would I adapt well to wearing body armor and carrying at least one if not several weapons to do something as simple as buying toilet paper? Would I want to get beheaded for my troubles? Would I want my next of kin to profit from blood money should I bite it; would I feel comfortable accepting money for supporting something I found morally abhorrent? Would I have gone through those paranoid years of deployment without becoming irrevocably changed in ways that would make it difficult to reintegrate to mainstream society (PTSD is No Fucking Joke)? I asked myself questions like that and got too many negative answers to feel comfortable taking them up on their offer. Maybe other people would have a different situational calculus, I don't look down on them for asking themselves questions and coming up with different answers.
It was a near thing for me. I almost said yes. That money could have put my SO through grad school without loans. It could have bought my ailing mother a house. It could have done a lot of things. I still sometimes wonder if I made the right choice.
Sir, first things first: I frequently disagree with your positions as posted here, but I'm glad you keep coming back to stir up a good discussion.
It's a common perception amongst people with, how to put it, a bottom-line focus or business perspective to question the value of funding for things like the pure sciences. It's not even a particularly, within that limited frame of reference, a bad position to take. However, I think that examples can easily be found that point to the value of funding even highly speculative scientific endeavors, that even though the pay-off time-frames are immense thus making ROI calculations almost a crap shoot... every now and then one pays off so hugely that it changes the entire world (and in the process, opens up vast new fields of business opportunity, which the original investing entity might even benefit from if they're sufficiently quick on their feet). The prime example that comes to mind is James Clerk Maxwell and his funding on behalf of the British government. Without Maxwell's fundamental work on electromagnetism whole swaths of industries as we know them today would not exist (or wouldn't exist in their well-characterized form). A few pounds sterling 150 years ago, and now the British (and the rest of us) get to apply that work product of pure science (at that time, almost pure science fiction) for incalculable gains here in the commercial world. Putting it another way, I seem to recall you had a sporting goods/skating store at one point (currently?). Do you think you'd have (would have had?) that business had not some crazy Germans and Russians in the mid-1800s fooled around in their state-funded university labs with this new-fangled "organic chemistry" stuff (polyurethane and all the other wonders of petroproduct/elastomer/plastic chemistry and chemical engineering)? Would the colorful dyes in all those materials be possible and indeed easily produced had Kekulé not fallen into a drunken stupor before his fireplace one night and dreamed up a coherent explanation for resonance structures (and in particular rings; much of modern dye chemistry is influenced by these resonance structures which interact as you might expect with the UV/Visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum)? Of course in hindsight it is hard to play what-if games, but it is inarguable that pure science has contributed to commercial gain.
Naturally there has to be a linkage of some sort to allow advances in the pure sciences to be translated to the commercial world, but the field of research commercialization is an active one at most universities. I think you would find a busy R&D commercialization office at any major research institution, eager to license their discoveries to commercial suitors. Sometimes that linkage is long or indirect (how could JCM have anticipated the Internet, or e-commerce? Even more recent theoreticians like V. Bush in the 40s were wildly off the mark, more remarkable for the scant bits they got right than the majority they got wrong.), but it exists!
...as all three sell (or resell, in the case of IBM) commercial distributions including support. I know RedHat has an extensive training and certification program as well; haven't bothered to look into the other two I mentioned but I would be shocked if they didn't have some similar resources. These vendors also usually cut schools deep, deep discounts (I can't quote specific numbers but think campus-wide unlimited licenses for less than you might have currently spent for a 2003 server license and associated swarm of CALs). Just for grins, here's the link to RedHat's "landing page" targeted at the education market: http://www.redhat.com/solutions/education/ and here's the page for training and certification: https://www.redhat.com/training/.
Good luck as you explore linux. You may well find your first six months a "down the rabbit hole"/"not in Kansas anymore" experience, but I guarantee you that if you stick with it in a year or two you'll wonder how you ever got along without it. It's one hell of a great tool to have in your solutions toolbox.
how is this really news? Every approach to qc that I'm aware of uses spin setting/reading (via NMR in every case that's coming to mind). Bringing this back to the g33k/slashdot crew, check out the work done around 2001 to implement Shor's Algorithm at IBM (by Vandersypen et. al.) The wikipedia summary is a bit dense, but the original paper (cryptome appears to have a mirror) is a bit better.
(NB: I'm far from being an expert in this field, it's just something I was interested in a while back when I was wrapping up my chemistry bachelors. There could also certainly be something newsworthy in the present article that I can't presently see.)
Linux is a buzzword. BSD is not.
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You see, the people who BUY oracle are not in the vast majority of cases the people who USE oracle. Mixing magic buzzword pixie dust into oracle lets some C-level bumblefuck put on his resume that he "bravely integrated cutting edge solutions with the whitespace of synergistic proven data management technolgies in the enterprise to improve our core competencies and effiencies for increased shareholder value" or similar. Linux, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, anything new and Shiny will do. Journalists for eWEEK or whatever other industry rag will write glowing articles, POs will be written, and a great round of back-patting will ensue. Somewhere a poor bastard will have to figure out how to actually manage/integrate/use the terrible bloat to do something useful for the business, but fuck him anyway, he's expendable.
Or I'm just blind because on closer inspection there are some earthquakes reported in NK, it's just that they're all nearly the same indicator color as the mountains in that area on the map. In any case, they all seem to be sub-3.0 on the richter scale, so 4.2 would be a bit higher than normal. *shrug* Ultimately how this plays out doesn't really depend on whether they actually got something to work, but rather whether they act like it and whether the rest of the worlds believes them.
I wondered the same thing, but the historical activity (post-1990) in that area seems to be all off the coast in the Sea of Japan and not on the north Korean mainland. It's possible they meant "no airborne radiation", i.e. an underground test.
This page (scroll down to the header "Seismic Energy") lists richter 4.0 as corresponding to 1kT and 4.5 as 5.1kT (richter is a log scale). So kind of a pissy sub-tactical range yield (i.e. nothing you'd want to be close to, but not a city killer either). For comparison's sake, Trinity, Fat Man, and Little Boy were all in the 12-22kT range.
It's been in common usage for thirty years as a suffix indicating scandal-and-coverup-in-Washington on the topic of X in Xgate. Given the average age of the slashdot poster, that probably means its common entrance into the English (or at least American) language likely predates your existence on this orbiting mudball of ours. In other words, if you want to bitch about it effectively you're going to have to invent a time machine.
If you can beat "15 years of really smart people", then your work product probably has more than a million dollars in value if you were to license it out to places like Amazon, eBay, Netflix, etc. Even a 1% improvement in revenues from a 1% improvement in recommendation accuracy is probably worth more than 50K, if sold to the major e-tailers. On the other hand, if you just want an interesting problem to screw around with in your spare time and don't want to go through the bother of forming a company in order to monetize that work, this is a pretty cool opportunity.
Hmm, ad sales slowing down in sectors that are strongly sensitive to interest rate changes, at a time when interest rates have been ramped up by the Federal Reserve (who are only now starting to talk about slowing this rate hike campaign)? Color me somewhat unsurprised. A sharp dip in a few sectors is less worrisome to me than a shallower dip across the board. If the broader ad market begins to slump and does so for a few quarters in a row, yeah, it might be time to rethink all those old-but-new-again ad revenue dependent business models out there.
(from the article): "About 36% of MySpace users are people aged 35-54, as are 30% of Facebook users."
;)
Or, as Matthew McConnahguguadgwrhwrhwrhweugh's character (wooderson) said in Dazed and Confused "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age."
On their patches page, under "Google Search Appliance", there's a note that the linked patches include the kernel information for those machines (e.g. linux-2.4.26-google.tar.gz from their latest GSA distribution. Whether or not the GSA is running the same code as their own search cluster is anyone's guess [aside, of course, from those of you reading this that do work there, heh]. I'd say that they're probably pretty close if they aren't identical because otherwise tracking multiple trees would be kind of a pain in the ass (on the other hand, they do have many developers and an incentive to make their machines scream...). It should be noted that if their search pool servers ARE running changes that aren't being made public, it is perfectly within their rights to do so, as the GPL stipulates (in short) that your customers should have access to your source code (and if you are your only customer, then it's perfectly legit to keep changes in-house; if you start shipping those binaries elsewhere however, then it's time to cough up the src).
Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!??!?!! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!!!!!Christ, are you getting paid per-mention of their fucking drive or something? God damn it! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!!
Saturated market? Please. There's lots of cell phones out there, sure. And they all pretty much suck ass. Choose one, several, or all of: Poor build quality. Poor integration with the other information sources/sinks in your life. Poor user interface. Poor performance (battery life, RF reception, sound reproduction). Apple can't do much about RF reception and has limited freedom with respect to battery life, but every other thing is either a software issue or an industrial design issue. Guess what two things Apple kicks ass at?
Cell phones are a saturated market much like digital audio players were a saturated market.
All they'd have to do is roll out a GSM-based phone and they'd have access to most of the world's market. Combine that with something like iCal and Addressbook for windows much like they've already ported iTunes to support iPod use on non-Apple platforms and they'd be printing money.
Heh. Funny that you should say that, given that my last two jobs involved (among other things) building Really Big web apps using LAMP for places like Dell (internal but vast amounts of data and traffic) and Dun and Bradstreet (publically facing information service that was frequently in the top 500 busiest sites according to alexa, for what their stats are worth). I know we weren't alone in those projects, either. It really depends on where you are looking, different cities have vastly different characters. If you're in a place with lots of startup/R&D/academia, you'll see a higher % of listings using open source toolchains. If you're in a place where most of the openings are from "traditional"/old-line businesses (say shipping or insurance) you'll see a much higher % listing of things like AS/400, MSFT, etc. Java's the one toolchain that seems to do a reasonable job of thriving in both of those environments (Tomcat/Jboss for the startups, WebLogic for the megacorps, etc. etc.).
So fwiw if you're looking to do large corp/site LAMP work all I can say is look around a bit more. You may end up moving to a different metropolis, but sometimes that's a big win from the career/job pool standpoint anyway.
*shrug* sometimes the uncertainty is refreshing
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 1
Anyone who trusts a single source for all their information has problems editorial oversight can never fix. Having to cross-reference, check facts, look at alternate sources, etc. is *basic good scholarship*, and to overly rely on *any* source is purely lazy.
Besides, something tells me that the humor value of opening the entry on "Bushido" and finding every occurence of "honor" or "duty" replaced with "penis" would be lost on the old fuddy-duddies at Britannica.;)
Priceline is still around, fwiw. I've used it a couple of times in the last year for really good prices on hotel stays. I don't know if their current business model differs from what it was six or so years ago (I wasn't a customer then), but they are still around and doing (afaict) good business.
As an interested outsider (USian looking at a possible move to the UK in a year), what's the situation outside of BT? From what minimal research I've done, the cable folks seem like a reasonable bunch (heck, they offer way more bandwidth for less cost than I'm currently paying the AT&T extortionists [my apt building signed a contract granting exclusivity to AT I am so happy about that!].). Is there something about them that rules them out as a packet provider? I seem to recall there being WISPs, at least around london, are they a reasonable option?
(More generally, how is the IT climate in the UK? I can read the job sites and look at colo prices and so on from afar, but that doesn't give me the pulse of the place like being there would. I'm a sw engineer and sometimes *nix admin, to give you an idea of the sorts of things I'm looking at.)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, that sucks... I'm sorry you were so ill-served by the educational system. Good luck as you make your journey of re-connection with that ineffable thing, that spark that can jump from fiction to the reader. I too had kind of a terrible time getting started reading (I had a seriously suckoid first grade teacher; e.g. she told my left-handed friend Doug that he was stupid and wrong and she didn't have time to teach a left-hander how to write... Doug was a smart kid who never really got over that initial stumble of disconnection with the educational system. Wherever you are, you stupid bitch, I hope you rot in hell for that alone.); but at some point it just *clicked* and I haven't been able to put down books sense, either for purely functional reading or for pleasure. For me it was the summer of my second or third grade year (I think) when I got a pack of Heinlein's "kid's books" (Rocket Ship Galileo was the first one, followed by others) and something about them, I don't know what, but it struck that spark and I was just hooked. I hope some novel manages to do the same for you, that you find that joy, because there's so much to be had out there in the worlds beyond reading for function or plain information. Even today I find myself relating to code in my career as a software engineer in some ways like it was a story or an essay, with the blocks or what have you of the logical model forming a visual picture or space in my mind as I read the lines of text. (This visualization has helped me put together more than one tricky thing or deduce where a disconnect/bug might be... it's really hard to explain in words and not something I've talked about often.)
A company that shall remain nameless once pinged me about a role providing linux cluster admin and field engineer/developer support for a visualization project designed for military use. I would have been stationed in central Baghdad and paid on the order of two hundred and fifty thousand base pay plus hazard pay, full relocation, etc. etc. etc. amounting to probably on the order of four hundred thousand to half a million a year after all the calculations were done.
I turned them down.
Yes, it sounded like a technically sweet gig. Yes, the pay and benefits were very, very solid. Could I handle a morning and evening commute that includes pitched gun fights and car bombs? Would the security where I sleep be as good as where I would work? Would I adapt well to wearing body armor and carrying at least one if not several weapons to do something as simple as buying toilet paper? Would I want to get beheaded for my troubles? Would I want my next of kin to profit from blood money should I bite it; would I feel comfortable accepting money for supporting something I found morally abhorrent? Would I have gone through those paranoid years of deployment without becoming irrevocably changed in ways that would make it difficult to reintegrate to mainstream society (PTSD is No Fucking Joke)? I asked myself questions like that and got too many negative answers to feel comfortable taking them up on their offer. Maybe other people would have a different situational calculus, I don't look down on them for asking themselves questions and coming up with different answers.
It was a near thing for me. I almost said yes. That money could have put my SO through grad school without loans. It could have bought my ailing mother a house. It could have done a lot of things. I still sometimes wonder if I made the right choice.
Sir, first things first: I frequently disagree with your positions as posted here, but I'm glad you keep coming back to stir up a good discussion.
It's a common perception amongst people with, how to put it, a bottom-line focus or business perspective to question the value of funding for things like the pure sciences. It's not even a particularly, within that limited frame of reference, a bad position to take. However, I think that examples can easily be found that point to the value of funding even highly speculative scientific endeavors, that even though the pay-off time-frames are immense thus making ROI calculations almost a crap shoot ... every now and then one pays off so hugely that it changes the entire world (and in the process, opens up vast new fields of business opportunity, which the original investing entity might even benefit from if they're sufficiently quick on their feet). The prime example that comes to mind is James Clerk Maxwell and his funding on behalf of the British government. Without Maxwell's fundamental work on electromagnetism whole swaths of industries as we know them today would not exist (or wouldn't exist in their well-characterized form). A few pounds sterling 150 years ago, and now the British (and the rest of us) get to apply that work product of pure science (at that time, almost pure science fiction) for incalculable gains here in the commercial world. Putting it another way, I seem to recall you had a sporting goods/skating store at one point (currently?). Do you think you'd have (would have had?) that business had not some crazy Germans and Russians in the mid-1800s fooled around in their state-funded university labs with this new-fangled "organic chemistry" stuff (polyurethane and all the other wonders of petroproduct/elastomer/plastic chemistry and chemical engineering)? Would the colorful dyes in all those materials be possible and indeed easily produced had Kekulé not fallen into a drunken stupor before his fireplace one night and dreamed up a coherent explanation for resonance structures (and in particular rings; much of modern dye chemistry is influenced by these resonance structures which interact as you might expect with the UV/Visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum)? Of course in hindsight it is hard to play what-if games, but it is inarguable that pure science has contributed to commercial gain.
Naturally there has to be a linkage of some sort to allow advances in the pure sciences to be translated to the commercial world, but the field of research commercialization is an active one at most universities. I think you would find a busy R&D commercialization office at any major research institution, eager to license their discoveries to commercial suitors. Sometimes that linkage is long or indirect (how could JCM have anticipated the Internet, or e-commerce? Even more recent theoreticians like V. Bush in the 40s were wildly off the mark, more remarkable for the scant bits they got right than the majority they got wrong.), but it exists!
As I understand it, it's already common slang in some fields for sending data via satellite ("squirt the bird").
...as all three sell (or resell, in the case of IBM) commercial distributions including support. I know RedHat has an extensive training and certification program as well; haven't bothered to look into the other two I mentioned but I would be shocked if they didn't have some similar resources. These vendors also usually cut schools deep, deep discounts (I can't quote specific numbers but think campus-wide unlimited licenses for less than you might have currently spent for a 2003 server license and associated swarm of CALs). Just for grins, here's the link to RedHat's "landing page" targeted at the education market: http://www.redhat.com/solutions/education/
and here's the page for training and certification: https://www.redhat.com/training/.
Good luck as you explore linux. You may well find your first six months a "down the rabbit hole"/"not in Kansas anymore" experience, but I guarantee you that if you stick with it in a year or two you'll wonder how you ever got along without it. It's one hell of a great tool to have in your solutions toolbox.
how is this really news? Every approach to qc that I'm aware of uses spin setting/reading (via NMR in every case that's coming to mind). Bringing this back to the g33k/slashdot crew, check out the work done around 2001 to implement Shor's Algorithm at IBM (by Vandersypen et. al.) The wikipedia summary is a bit dense, but the original paper (cryptome appears to have a mirror) is a bit better.
(NB: I'm far from being an expert in this field, it's just something I was interested in a while back when I was wrapping up my chemistry bachelors. There could also certainly be something newsworthy in the present article that I can't presently see.)
You see, the people who BUY oracle are not in the vast majority of cases the people who USE oracle. Mixing magic buzzword pixie dust into oracle lets some C-level bumblefuck put on his resume that he "bravely integrated cutting edge solutions with the whitespace of synergistic proven data management technolgies in the enterprise to improve our core competencies and effiencies for increased shareholder value" or similar. Linux, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, anything new and Shiny will do. Journalists for eWEEK or whatever other industry rag will write glowing articles, POs will be written, and a great round of back-patting will ensue. Somewhere a poor bastard will have to figure out how to actually manage/integrate/use the terrible bloat to do something useful for the business, but fuck him anyway, he's expendable.
Or I'm just blind because on closer inspection there are some earthquakes reported in NK, it's just that they're all nearly the same indicator color as the mountains in that area on the map. In any case, they all seem to be sub-3.0 on the richter scale, so 4.2 would be a bit higher than normal. *shrug* Ultimately how this plays out doesn't really depend on whether they actually got something to work, but rather whether they act like it and whether the rest of the worlds believes them.
I wondered the same thing, but the historical activity (post-1990) in that area seems to be all off the coast in the Sea of Japan and not on the north Korean mainland. It's possible they meant "no airborne radiation", i.e. an underground test.
This page (scroll down to the header "Seismic Energy") lists richter 4.0 as corresponding to 1kT and 4.5 as 5.1kT (richter is a log scale). So kind of a pissy sub-tactical range yield (i.e. nothing you'd want to be close to, but not a city killer either). For comparison's sake, Trinity, Fat Man, and Little Boy were all in the 12-22kT range.
It's been in common usage for thirty years as a suffix indicating scandal-and-coverup-in-Washington on the topic of X in Xgate. Given the average age of the slashdot poster, that probably means its common entrance into the English (or at least American) language likely predates your existence on this orbiting mudball of ours. In other words, if you want to bitch about it effectively you're going to have to invent a time machine.
It seems that the Foleygate scandal has the Republican House leadership in such disarray that they're having problems staying on the same Page.
If you can beat "15 years of really smart people", then your work product probably has more than a million dollars in value if you were to license it out to places like Amazon, eBay, Netflix, etc. Even a 1% improvement in revenues from a 1% improvement in recommendation accuracy is probably worth more than 50K, if sold to the major e-tailers. On the other hand, if you just want an interesting problem to screw around with in your spare time and don't want to go through the bother of forming a company in order to monetize that work, this is a pretty cool opportunity.
Hmm, ad sales slowing down in sectors that are strongly sensitive to interest rate changes, at a time when interest rates have been ramped up by the Federal Reserve (who are only now starting to talk about slowing this rate hike campaign)? Color me somewhat unsurprised. A sharp dip in a few sectors is less worrisome to me than a shallower dip across the board. If the broader ad market begins to slump and does so for a few quarters in a row, yeah, it might be time to rethink all those old-but-new-again ad revenue dependent business models out there.
;)
Or, as Matthew McConnahguguadgwrhwrhwrhweugh's character (wooderson) said in Dazed and Confused "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age."
On their patches page, under "Google Search Appliance", there's a note that the linked patches include the kernel information for those machines (e.g. linux-2.4.26-google.tar.gz from their latest GSA distribution. Whether or not the GSA is running the same code as their own search cluster is anyone's guess [aside, of course, from those of you reading this that do work there, heh]. I'd say that they're probably pretty close if they aren't identical because otherwise tracking multiple trees would be kind of a pain in the ass (on the other hand, they do have many developers and an incentive to make their machines scream...). It should be noted that if their search pool servers ARE running changes that aren't being made public, it is perfectly within their rights to do so, as the GPL stipulates (in short) that your customers should have access to your source code (and if you are your only customer, then it's perfectly legit to keep changes in-house; if you start shipping those binaries elsewhere however, then it's time to cough up the src).
Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!??!?!! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!!!!!Christ, are you getting paid per-mention of their fucking drive or something? God damn it! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive! Maxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard DriveMaxtor OneTouch External Hard Drive!!!
[sets of iExplosives]
Whooo, set theory and high explosives AND a shiny aqua interface?
That sound you may have heard is every set of ears belonging to a computer science student on Earth perking up.
Saturated market? Please. There's lots of cell phones out there, sure. And they all pretty much suck ass. Choose one, several, or all of: Poor build quality. Poor integration with the other information sources/sinks in your life. Poor user interface. Poor performance (battery life, RF reception, sound reproduction). Apple can't do much about RF reception and has limited freedom with respect to battery life, but every other thing is either a software issue or an industrial design issue. Guess what two things Apple kicks ass at?
Cell phones are a saturated market much like digital audio players were a saturated market.
All they'd have to do is roll out a GSM-based phone and they'd have access to most of the world's market. Combine that with something like iCal and Addressbook for windows much like they've already ported iTunes to support iPod use on non-Apple platforms and they'd be printing money.
Heh. Funny that you should say that, given that my last two jobs involved (among other things) building Really Big web apps using LAMP for places like Dell (internal but vast amounts of data and traffic) and Dun and Bradstreet (publically facing information service that was frequently in the top 500 busiest sites according to alexa, for what their stats are worth). I know we weren't alone in those projects, either. It really depends on where you are looking, different cities have vastly different characters. If you're in a place with lots of startup/R&D/academia, you'll see a higher % of listings using open source toolchains. If you're in a place where most of the openings are from "traditional"/old-line businesses (say shipping or insurance) you'll see a much higher % listing of things like AS/400, MSFT, etc. Java's the one toolchain that seems to do a reasonable job of thriving in both of those environments (Tomcat/Jboss for the startups, WebLogic for the megacorps, etc. etc.).
So fwiw if you're looking to do large corp/site LAMP work all I can say is look around a bit more. You may end up moving to a different metropolis, but sometimes that's a big win from the career/job pool standpoint anyway.
Anyone who trusts a single source for all their information has problems editorial oversight can never fix. Having to cross-reference, check facts, look at alternate sources, etc. is *basic good scholarship*, and to overly rely on *any* source is purely lazy.
Besides, something tells me that the humor value of opening the entry on "Bushido" and finding every occurence of "honor" or "duty" replaced with "penis" would be lost on the old fuddy-duddies at Britannica. ;)
They needed all that infrastructure to disprove trousers? Heck, I can do that to myself with just a few shots of tequila. ;)
Priceline is still around, fwiw. I've used it a couple of times in the last year for really good prices on hotel stays. I don't know if their current business model differs from what it was six or so years ago (I wasn't a customer then), but they are still around and doing (afaict) good business.
If you are not pround enough to call yourself an American, then you need to leave.
Now why would I want to go lowering myself by adopting the American label?
I'm a Texan ! :D
As an interested outsider (USian looking at a possible move to the UK in a year), what's the situation outside of BT? From what minimal research I've done, the cable folks seem like a reasonable bunch (heck, they offer way more bandwidth for less cost than I'm currently paying the AT&T extortionists [my apt building signed a contract granting exclusivity to AT I am so happy about that!].). Is there something about them that rules them out as a packet provider? I seem to recall there being WISPs, at least around london, are they a reasonable option?
:)
(More generally, how is the IT climate in the UK? I can read the job sites and look at colo prices and so on from afar, but that doesn't give me the pulse of the place like being there would. I'm a sw engineer and sometimes *nix admin, to give you an idea of the sorts of things I'm looking at.)
Sorry to bombard you with questions.