>1. Technology makes job obsolete >2. Move to technology job instead >3. Outsourced >4. Move to outsourcing company >5. Outsourcing company downsizes you out >6. BANKRUPTCY! >7. ??? 8. PROFIT
I don't think that's necessarily true. Sure, in the middle of major cities, etc., where you won't even touch a townhouse for under 300k, but there are plenty of areas where you can buy a house for under 100K. And even then, if you are a first time buyer, good credit, etc., and don't make *too* much money, you can qualify for programs that further reduce your downpayment. I have a friend who makes about 30K per year and just purchased a 170K house with only about 3-5k down. It can be done.
>I guess momma provided a nice down payment, eh? >"Nearly $40K" doesn't give you a down payment on a >decent carboard box within 50 miles of some cities >(ie, Boston).
It wouldn't take 600 seconds...
From
this table, it shows Mars being about 1.524 AU from the Sun. This equates to about 227,940,000 km from the Sun, vs. 149,600,000 km for the Earth. The difference is 78,340,000 km.
At 300,000 km per second, light would travel that distance in about 261 seconds.
This is about 4.3 minutes, not the ten minutes indicated by the 600 second figure.
Personally, I think CompactFlash cards are an ideal replacement for the floppy. Pricewatch shows an 8MB card going for $9, and I'm sure in volume you can get the 4MB cards for even less. They're re-writeable, albeit a limited number of times, but then, so is the floppy for all practical purposes. It's solid state, no moving parts, relatively low power consumption compared to a floppy with the motor & head actuator. Also, it's 'compact' (literally), IMO, approaches the usable limit for storage miniaturization meant for humans. Much smaller than a CF card and it becomes more of a liability, prone to being lost. CF is somewhat fast, using an ATA standard interface, allowing it to be plugged in to a standard ATA bus with the proper adapter. Also, some cards, notably those from Lexar Media contain built-in USB circuitry, allowing for a dual-purpose device (ATA / USB). All we need now are the hot-swap capabilities for non-PCMCIA uses, i.e., a hot-swap ATA bus on the desktop. They work fine in laptops, and I have booted PCs from them. I think this is far superior to any other type of medium because it's a somewhat open standard, and the capacity isn't fixed or locked in by the interface. You can plug a 1GB microdrive into the same Type II slot that will hold a 4MB solid state card. If desktops came equipped with these, you'd be able to take advantage of improvements in capacity. I think we'll see 2GB solid state CF in the next 18 months. In five years? Imagine if you could use your old floppy drive to read a 500MB disk that was the same form factor and used the same interface, etc...
Has anyone seen the site? Why would anyone want to pirate *their* software? Not that it probably isn't good software, but other than the value of collecting it? It's all pretty high-level engineering stuff. I can't imagine any use for it outside of specialized fields, and those people would probably purchase anyway, as stated previously, for the support, training, documentation, etc.
Strange...
Obviously it's profitable for the [illicit] drug manufacturers. In fact, if *I* was manufacturing and selling illegal narcotics, a not-insignificant portion of my budget would fund lobbyists to keep it illegal, thus ensuring a higher price for the product. The risks of being caught are far outweighed by the sheer amount of profit to be obtained from trafficking in something illegal, vis a vis something legal. How much does coffee cost? Now imagine if it was illegal and went for 10 or 20x the current price. There's a lot of money to be made there...
I understand that Google was using large numbers of IDE drives in lieu of more expensive but individually faster SCSI devices. What prompted the decision, and how have the concerns of reliability and performance been mitigated. What special technology, if any, was used to implement such a system
However, a very big 'BUT'...The heat is dissipated over a smaller surface area, hence the heat sink needs to be more efficient - they're now requiring, IIRC, a copper diffuser plate on the bottom of certified heat sinks.
FYI - I just purchased a Viewsonic 20" LCD, VP201MB (in black) for about $1700. It is *amazing* it's not quite the IBM monitor, but it's about $6000 cheaper. I was looking for 1600 x 1200 resolution and this was the best thing I was able to find for the price.
I haven't seen *any* bad pixels on it - YMMV. It works great under X and has std. & DVI connectors.
I just emailed the author of the article and I'm going to try to get in touch with the heads of the information department at the districts in Portland and Beaverton. I'm willing to donate my time and expertise to help them migrate systems where possible.
If anyone else in the Portland metro area is interested, send email to linux-school[at]zerog.net
It would be great to be able to line up a team of people to do migrations / training / auditing. I think there are few reasons why the district couldn't switch a majority of their machines over, leaving only the Windows machines that they absolutely require.
If nothing else, you have the opportunity to possibly reduce your tax burden, both as a resident, and as a deduction for your time.
I just downloaded last night's build (20020204), and it seems noticeably faster than the previous version I was running (0.97). Haven't noticed any less stability with this version (yet). Good work guys. It's slowly getting there. I've been using it as my only browser for a number of months now, and it's getting less and less painful:) Actually, it's a pleasure to use, and would be my choice, even over ie for Linux, if there existed such a thing.
One of the very useful (to me) aspects of MPlayer is that it can run console-only. This is very useful on a slow machine with a hardware decoder: I have a P5-133 with a Hollywood+ MPEG2 decoder which can actually playback video, including DVDs. Not bad for a machine that was 'slow' about four or five years ago.
I don't believe the Challenger disaster was related to the hydrogen specifically. IIRC it was a problem with one of the _solid fuel_ boosters that caused the initial problem. Certainly the hydrogen would have been a factor, but so would large amounts of an excellent oxidizer - the liquid oxygen stored with it.
I've read a few things here which only help to spread the myths about hydrogen. Here are some of the common misconceptions and why they are untrue.
1. Hydrogen is extremely explosive - Hydrogen is not *extremely* explosive. It can be explosive, but it needs a certain amount of oxygen in order to explode.
2. The Hindenburg explosion was caused by the hydrogen. - It is widely believe that the explosion was caused by the flammable fabric covering of the ill-fated airship.
3. Myth#1 is why we don't have Hydrogen-powered cars - Actually, the biggest problem is that hydrogen is, for lack of a better term, sparse. (Opposite of dense). It's difficult to package a sufficient amount of it in a reasonable volume. There is ongoing work to change this by combining it / embedding it in other materials or packages, i.e. Carbon nanotubes.
4. Hydrogen is hazardous flammable substance - Because of its being the lightest (least dense) gas, a hydrogen fire will bascially burn in an upward direction. In addition, the gas will dissipate quite rapidly - imagine what would happen if you 'spilled' some Helium - it would just float straight up, even if it was on fire. Hydrogen does the same.
5. The fire was not a significant part of the tower collapse - While the kinetic energy of a fully loaded 757 / 767 cannot be ignored, if that was *all* there was, the towers would be standing today, and probably repairable as well. The collapse was caused by the extremely hot (1500+ degree) fires burning long enough to weaken the steel structure. The beams were rated for 1 hour of fire resistance. They held for at least that long, and then gave way, causing the 6 million lb. floor to fall and begin the domino effect.
>In the case of CDs, the image is pressed into
>some aluminum foil which is then covered with
>more plastic to protect it
Actually not...The plastic beads are melted into a disk which is pressed with the master. Then the aluminum coating is applied through vapor deposition (you melt the aluminum and the vapor condenses on the plastic). Finally, it's coated with a lacquer or another layer of plastic to protect it.
(A few friends of mine work in the CD creation / duplication industry - They have a single machine that does all of this...Plastic beads go in, stacks of CDs come out)
This is one of the things that Alvin Toffler predicted way back in the 70s in Future Shock or The 3rd Wave (I can't remember which, both excellent books btw). In any case, I think it is something that we'll be seeing a lot more of, for good or ill (maybe a little bit of both). From Zippo to bic, from Silverware to sporks, more and more things are becoming temporary, disposed of when they are no longer useful, in fashion, or functional. There are of course some very good reasons to own things - perceived control, equity, and prestige. Gradually, these benefits are decreasing - * Control - Ever buy a house in a subdivision? Most of the new ones have covenants or other types of contracts which can prohibit the parking of vehicles on the street, dictate the colors you may paint your house and the height of your fence. Perhaps not as restrictive as most apartments, but still a far cry from the days of "I own it, it's mine, and I'll do whatever I want with it". * Equity...Okay, in theory that's nice, but with housing prices increasing, there is a limit to how much a buyer can come up with for a down payment - In most home loans, during the early years virtually all of the money goes towards paying the interest on the loan, not to principal. Maybe you'd be better off getting a nice apartment, or renting a house, and investing the rest. Maybe not. * Prestige - Can your friends / boss / the public tell the difference between the brand new Lexus you bought with $1500 payments and the leased Lexus with the $700 payment? No. Most people don't really care anymore. Yes, maybe you are getting shafted with some leases. Others are at least somewhat benign. It all depends. In theory, when you lease a car, you're paying for the depreciation and the interest on the money that's tied up by the owner of the car (the bank / leasing co.). Renting is not all it's cracked up to be either though...Especially depending on from whom you are renting. Some leases are unnecessarily restrictive, others simply cost too much for the value you receive. There are already disposable cameras and cellular phones. Eventually we'll have disposable computers, storage devices, display devices, and any number of other things. As with everything, the technology is advancing faster than we can evolve our culture in order to cope properly with it. Many people are still overly attached to 'ownership'. This is not necessarily bad, but increasingly, we'll need to let go of attachment to particular material things in a world where many of the tangible things we now take for granted will become disposable, single-use items.
I find it hard to believe that so many people seem to think that because WinCE came from Microsoft that it is crap. Are all of you that much better than any programmer at Microsoft? Yes, it may be a marketing gimmick, and no, it's not the crown jewels, but I'm sure that there is *something* in that code that could be of use to someone. Even if as an anti-microsoft zealot, you can use it to see ways not to do something. In any case, I think it's detrimental to disparage this code just because of its source. If you are pro- open system, then you should welcome this - obviously if you have the source, it makes it much easier to develop applications that interoperate. Why not take this opportunity to allow people to use their Windows CE devices with Linux boxes, including more advanced functionality that hasn't yet been developed. Anything can be a resource.
I finally ordered mine directly from NetPliance. The Circuit City locations in Portland and all the way up to Seattle were sold out and had them backordered. Apparently when the price dropped to $99, everyone and their dog decided to buy one. BTW - Does anyone else think that their shipping charge is a little steep? $38.00 to ship a 5lb. package!? And it's not even next day or 2nd day.
I think this law may be either a good or bad...Like many things, it depends on the implementation.
I am currently working for one of the major online pharmacies, and I think there are some misconceptions out there:
All *legitimate* e-pharmacies currently require a verfified prescription in order to ship any type of controlled medication.
This verification can take several forms - an original prescription mailed in (not advisable if you are currently suffering some sort of acute condition), having your doctor call it it, or electronic transmission from your doctor's office.
This law will probably not affect the major players - CVS.COM, PlanetRX, etc., because they already comply with these types of regulation.
It may add another layer of bureaucracy, it's hard to say just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
>1. Technology makes job obsolete
>2. Move to technology job instead
>3. Outsourced
>4. Move to outsourcing company
>5. Outsourcing company downsizes you out
>6. BANKRUPTCY!
>7. ???
8. PROFIT
I don't think that's necessarily true. Sure, in the middle of major cities, etc., where you won't even touch a townhouse for under 300k, but there are plenty of areas where you can buy a house for under 100K. And even then, if you are a first time buyer, good credit, etc., and don't make *too* much money, you can qualify for programs that further reduce your downpayment. I have a friend who makes about 30K per year and just purchased a 170K house with only about 3-5k down. It can be done.
>I guess momma provided a nice down payment, eh? >"Nearly $40K" doesn't give you a down payment on a >decent carboard box within 50 miles of some cities >(ie, Boston).
> If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing.
That sounds funny now, but just wait...
To paraphrase an old saying...
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a space shuttle loaded with DLT tapes
It wouldn't take 600 seconds... From this table, it shows Mars being about 1.524 AU from the Sun. This equates to about 227,940,000 km from the Sun, vs. 149,600,000 km for the Earth. The difference is 78,340,000 km. At 300,000 km per second, light would travel that distance in about 261 seconds. This is about 4.3 minutes, not the ten minutes indicated by the 600 second figure.
Personally, I think CompactFlash cards are an ideal replacement for the floppy. Pricewatch shows an 8MB card going for $9, and I'm sure in volume you can get the 4MB cards for even less. They're re-writeable, albeit a limited number of times, but then, so is the floppy for all practical purposes.
It's solid state, no moving parts, relatively low power consumption compared to a floppy with the motor & head actuator. Also, it's 'compact' (literally), IMO, approaches the usable limit for storage miniaturization meant for humans. Much smaller than a CF card and it becomes more of a liability, prone to being lost.
CF is somewhat fast, using an ATA standard interface, allowing it to be plugged in to a standard ATA bus with the proper adapter. Also, some cards, notably those from Lexar Media contain built-in USB circuitry, allowing for a dual-purpose device (ATA / USB).
All we need now are the hot-swap capabilities for non-PCMCIA uses, i.e., a hot-swap ATA bus on the desktop. They work fine in laptops, and I have booted PCs from them.
I think this is far superior to any other type of medium because it's a somewhat open standard, and the capacity isn't fixed or locked in by the interface. You can plug a 1GB microdrive into the same Type II slot that will hold a 4MB solid state card. If desktops came equipped with these, you'd be able to take advantage of improvements in capacity. I think we'll see 2GB solid state CF in the next 18 months. In five years? Imagine if you could use your old floppy drive to read a 500MB disk that was the same form factor and used the same interface, etc...
Has anyone seen the site? Why would anyone want to pirate *their* software? Not that it probably isn't good software, but other than the value of collecting it? It's all pretty high-level engineering stuff. I can't imagine any use for it outside of specialized fields, and those people would probably purchase anyway, as stated previously, for the support, training, documentation, etc. Strange...
Obviously it's profitable for the [illicit] drug manufacturers. In fact, if *I* was manufacturing and selling illegal narcotics, a not-insignificant portion of my budget would fund lobbyists to keep it illegal, thus ensuring a higher price for the product. The risks of being caught are far outweighed by the sheer amount of profit to be obtained from trafficking in something illegal, vis a vis something legal. How much does coffee cost? Now imagine if it was illegal and went for 10 or 20x the current price. There's a lot of money to be made there...
I understand that Google was using large numbers of IDE drives in lieu of more expensive but individually faster SCSI devices. What prompted the decision, and how have the concerns of reliability and performance been mitigated. What special technology, if any, was used to implement such a system
However, a very big 'BUT'...The heat is dissipated over a smaller surface area, hence the heat sink needs to be more efficient - they're now requiring, IIRC, a copper diffuser plate on the bottom of certified heat sinks.
FYI - I just purchased a Viewsonic 20" LCD, VP201MB (in black) for about $1700. It is *amazing* it's not quite the IBM monitor, but it's about $6000 cheaper. I was looking for 1600 x 1200 resolution and this was the best thing I was able to find for the price.
I haven't seen *any* bad pixels on it - YMMV. It works great under X and has std. & DVI connectors.
I just emailed the author of the article and I'm going to try to get in touch with the heads of the information department at the districts in Portland and Beaverton. I'm willing to donate my time and expertise to help them migrate systems where possible.
If anyone else in the Portland metro area is interested, send email to linux-school[at]zerog.net
It would be great to be able to line up a team of people to do migrations / training / auditing. I think there are few reasons why the district couldn't switch a majority of their machines over, leaving only the Windows machines that they absolutely require.
If nothing else, you have the opportunity to possibly reduce your tax burden, both as a resident, and as a deduction for your time.
I just downloaded last night's build (20020204), and it seems noticeably faster than the previous version I was running (0.97). Haven't noticed any less stability with this version (yet). Good work guys. It's slowly getting there. I've been using it as my only browser for a number of months now, and it's getting less and less painful :) Actually, it's a pleasure to use, and would be my choice, even over ie for Linux, if there existed such a thing.
One of the very useful (to me) aspects of MPlayer is that it can run console-only. This is very useful on a slow machine with a hardware decoder: I have a P5-133 with a Hollywood+ MPEG2 decoder which can actually playback video, including DVDs. Not bad for a machine that was 'slow' about four or five years ago.
I don't believe the Challenger disaster was related to the hydrogen specifically. IIRC it was a problem with one of the _solid fuel_ boosters that caused the initial problem. Certainly the hydrogen would have been a factor, but so would large amounts of an excellent oxidizer - the liquid oxygen stored with it.
I've read a few things here which only help to spread the myths about hydrogen. Here are some of the common misconceptions and why they are untrue.
1. Hydrogen is extremely explosive - Hydrogen is not *extremely* explosive. It can be explosive, but it needs a certain amount of oxygen in order to explode.
2. The Hindenburg explosion was caused by the hydrogen. - It is widely believe that the explosion was caused by the flammable fabric covering of the ill-fated airship.
3. Myth#1 is why we don't have Hydrogen-powered cars - Actually, the biggest problem is that hydrogen is, for lack of a better term, sparse. (Opposite of dense). It's difficult to package a sufficient amount of it in a reasonable volume. There is ongoing work to change this by combining it / embedding it in other materials or packages, i.e. Carbon nanotubes.
4. Hydrogen is hazardous flammable substance - Because of its being the lightest (least dense) gas, a hydrogen fire will bascially burn in an upward direction. In addition, the gas will dissipate quite rapidly - imagine what would happen if you 'spilled' some Helium - it would just float straight up, even if it was on fire. Hydrogen does the same.
5. The fire was not a significant part of the tower collapse - While the kinetic energy of a fully loaded 757 / 767 cannot be ignored, if that was *all* there was, the towers would be standing today, and probably repairable as well. The collapse was caused by the extremely hot (1500+ degree) fires burning long enough to weaken the steel structure. The beams were rated for 1 hour of fire resistance. They held for at least that long, and then gave way, causing the 6 million lb. floor to fall and begin the domino effect.
>In the case of CDs, the image is pressed into >some aluminum foil which is then covered with >more plastic to protect it Actually not...The plastic beads are melted into a disk which is pressed with the master. Then the aluminum coating is applied through vapor deposition (you melt the aluminum and the vapor condenses on the plastic). Finally, it's coated with a lacquer or another layer of plastic to protect it. (A few friends of mine work in the CD creation / duplication industry - They have a single machine that does all of this...Plastic beads go in, stacks of CDs come out)
This is one of the things that Alvin Toffler predicted way back in the 70s in Future Shock or The 3rd Wave (I can't remember which, both excellent books btw). In any case, I think it is something that we'll be seeing a lot more of, for good or ill (maybe a little bit of both). From Zippo to bic, from Silverware to sporks, more and more things are becoming temporary, disposed of when they are no longer useful, in fashion, or functional. There are of course some very good reasons to own things - perceived control, equity, and prestige. Gradually, these benefits are decreasing - * Control - Ever buy a house in a subdivision? Most of the new ones have covenants or other types of contracts which can prohibit the parking of vehicles on the street, dictate the colors you may paint your house and the height of your fence. Perhaps not as restrictive as most apartments, but still a far cry from the days of "I own it, it's mine, and I'll do whatever I want with it". * Equity...Okay, in theory that's nice, but with housing prices increasing, there is a limit to how much a buyer can come up with for a down payment - In most home loans, during the early years virtually all of the money goes towards paying the interest on the loan, not to principal. Maybe you'd be better off getting a nice apartment, or renting a house, and investing the rest. Maybe not. * Prestige - Can your friends / boss / the public tell the difference between the brand new Lexus you bought with $1500 payments and the leased Lexus with the $700 payment? No. Most people don't really care anymore. Yes, maybe you are getting shafted with some leases. Others are at least somewhat benign. It all depends. In theory, when you lease a car, you're paying for the depreciation and the interest on the money that's tied up by the owner of the car (the bank / leasing co.). Renting is not all it's cracked up to be either though...Especially depending on from whom you are renting. Some leases are unnecessarily restrictive, others simply cost too much for the value you receive. There are already disposable cameras and cellular phones. Eventually we'll have disposable computers, storage devices, display devices, and any number of other things. As with everything, the technology is advancing faster than we can evolve our culture in order to cope properly with it. Many people are still overly attached to 'ownership'. This is not necessarily bad, but increasingly, we'll need to let go of attachment to particular material things in a world where many of the tangible things we now take for granted will become disposable, single-use items.
I find it hard to believe that so many people seem to think that because WinCE came from Microsoft that it is crap. Are all of you that much better than any programmer at Microsoft? Yes, it may be a marketing gimmick, and no, it's not the crown jewels, but I'm sure that there is *something* in that code that could be of use to someone. Even if as an anti-microsoft zealot, you can use it to see ways not to do something. In any case, I think it's detrimental to disparage this code just because of its source. If you are pro- open system, then you should welcome this - obviously if you have the source, it makes it much easier to develop applications that interoperate. Why not take this opportunity to allow people to use their Windows CE devices with Linux boxes, including more advanced functionality that hasn't yet been developed. Anything can be a resource.
I finally ordered mine directly from NetPliance. The Circuit City locations in Portland and all the way up to Seattle were sold out and had them backordered. Apparently when the price dropped to $99, everyone and their dog decided to buy one. BTW - Does anyone else think that their shipping charge is a little steep? $38.00 to ship a 5lb. package!? And it's not even next day or 2nd day.
I think this law may be either a good or bad...Like many things, it depends on the implementation.
I am currently working for one of the major online pharmacies, and I think there are some misconceptions out there:
All *legitimate* e-pharmacies currently require a verfified prescription in order to ship any type of controlled medication.
This verification can take several forms - an original prescription mailed in (not advisable if you are currently suffering some sort of acute condition), having your doctor call it it, or electronic transmission from your doctor's office.
This law will probably not affect the major players - CVS.COM, PlanetRX, etc., because they already comply with these types of regulation.
It may add another layer of bureaucracy, it's hard to say just yet.