I looked into Xohm, the one in my area. Verizon beat their monthly deal at 3Mbps, and has free equipment sorry to say (Xohm's is $40-90). It's funny. Since their physical infrastructure costs so much less you'd think they would try to be competitive:-/
meh
It'd be nice to be wireless but I have so much better stuff to do than to get any use out of a wireless MAN. My laptop never leaves my desk at work.
Depends on what you do. There are some roles which are in demand no matter what because the company is legally required to have the role covered.
Security and compliance in hospitals, banks, and HR systems are like this, unless of course the company goes out of business and closes down...
That being said I'm a coder who got into code security and I've been through 2 recessions without being laid off, and during one, I found a better job.
I have to agree with the parent but change it to "If you are good and have a skill which is in demand, you can always find a new job no matter what, especially if you make long term friends wherever you work". IT is a small world and burning bridges will always screw you. Keep your friends close and you'll never be unemployed. Your network is very important for finding good paying jobs.
I'm 40 and have never been unemployed. I never stop learning new (and old) stuff either. I could jump into a new job right now if I wanted to. Just had someone tell me they wanted me. I had to turn them down because I love my current job.
This happened where I work. A project got cut so the PM was let go. Luckily coding on this was only part time for me, my main projects had nothing to do with this one/PHEW
It wasn't a reflection on him or me, they just did some deeper market research once it was in beta and found that no one was interested in such a product.
Yea see how India, Thailand, or anywhere else feels about bringing in US labor at any price;) Everyone else but us are protectionists, but it's politically incorrect for us to feel the same way. That argument is getting old and it's patently wrong. Globalization is great for everyone but the people of the country who is importing workers and exporting the jobs to 3rd world countries. People should be brought in as needed, not out of habit.
I know there are some Americans in India but it's grossly lopsided and they only do it when there is no other way. So many tech and call center workers have been laid off here, that the need is gone to import talent/export jobs. It should be cut off _now_ and people sent home.
At the end of the day you need to put your own interests ahead of the world's, in the name of survival. You can't pay your debt off if you don't have a job, and isn't that what caused this mess in the first place? Everything from factory jobs to call center jobs to engineering are gone. What's left, Fast Food jobs? Cleaning?
Welcome to globalization, where you can be replaced by cheaper labor, no matter what the cost to the economy, human rights, and environment. The only way it can work is if every country involved is held to the same standard of working conditions and environmental responsibility, and that's not happening, so it's time to level the playing field and take care of our own. We can't compete against that because our laws are so restrictive and expensive that it's impossible to have a factory here now.
An entire nation of consumers with no production is not sustainable. I don't know what the answer is but having a country full of jobless people, hence globalization, isn't working.
That was kinda my point. With native ternary (or better storage) it might make sense to develop ternary (or better) semiconductors since you'd need fewer components and the power consumption goes down. Going quaternary might give a similar improvement over ternary to going ternary over binary. In the mean time you could take advantage of having 4 states per particle to improve the storage density of binary data enabling the storage tech to be usable to it's potential (and profitable!) in the mean time;)
Prolly won't happen though, it's a binary world and with the state of the world economy, developing earth shaking tech probably isn't in anyone's budgetary capability and risk tolerance. This is star trek stuff;) You'd need a completely new instruction set, architecture etc. people would have to develop an OS, compiler (language?) etc for that kind of processor. We'd be starting over from scratch.
For anyone confused about what ternary and quaternary states are, here's a paper on a ternary machine... There actually was a couple of ternary computers built but they never left the university stage...
With this storage it would become more practical to build ternary machines which greatly simplify computing.
The ramifications for artificial intelligence are astounding... Think of the number of transistors required to be reduced by a factor of 7, and look at what we could do with current chip manufacturing methods, and you can see the advantages of ternary design over binary. The power requirements are also sharply reduced.
It's pretty crazy... Check out the references at the bottom of the link. One is in English, the other is in Russian.
quaternary bits that would contain data written as a 0, 1, 2, or 3 ----- This would open the door for double density binary storage per magnetic bit as well as adding ternary/quaternary capability.
a 0 on top of a 0 could be 0, a 0 on top of 1 could be 1, a 1 on top of 0 could be 2, and a 1 on top of 1 could be 3.
And ternary/quaternary data would be the usual one bit per particle.
Lil secret for you, DRM doesn't work. It only works on and screws people that legitimately paid for their software and music and are honest. The people that illegally download it, don't need to deal with it because they are using cracked software or non DRM files.
The one's that legitimately paid lose all their stuff when the "certificate" expires.
That's why it's fundamentally flawed, doesn't do ANY good and is destined to go away.
In this case all it's going to do is guarantee that anyone who bought this game from Epic will never buy another from them because Epic screwed them. Or they'll just download the cracked version because that one will still be working when the certificate expires.
If they have to do that, to use the software they paid for, why pay for it? If they get caught they'll get treated just like any other illegal down loader and fined. Only they'll get fined more because they paid the price of the software + fine, the thief only pays the fine.
Why not? The banks should be out of business anyway. New banks will rise to take their place and we, the tax payers, are the ones keeping them on life support.
If they choose to buy 7bln euro foreign construction companies and new jets with the bailout money, they deserve to die.
...they aren't part of the media buying population now are they;) And pirates *sell* illegally copied stuff. People that don't steal and sell, but simply illegally download really aren't pirates, they are the beneficiaries of copyright violation perpetrated by the person they downloaded from. Pirates are in it for profit.
by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months
------------- BZZZZ wrong answer Moore's original law states that: the number of transistors we are able to pack into a given size of silicon real estate inexpensively, doubles every 18 months. He changed this prediction to every 2 years in 1975, which bolstered the perceived accuracy of his prediction.
Number of transistors for a particular price is a moving target which is entirely dependent on the supply and demand of said silicon, how much the R&D for the die cost, perfecting the process, how much waste there is etc etc etc. This is a subtle, yet very important, distinction.
You can pay $1200 for a bleeding edge CPU, or you can wait a few months and pay $400.
While the raw silicon has a relatively stable price, the process and it's requirements are a variable cost which is depreciated over the life of the process. This is why finished retail CPUs drop rapidly in cost over time.
The r&d and manufacturing cost per unit area actually goes up over time.
Blade Runner made $4,749 average per theater opening weekend, which in inflated dollars (as of 1992 when Reservoir Dogs opened) is $6899.50, less than Quentin Tarantino's pet project, per theatre.
However it went on to gross 32m over it's lifetime (domestically), but cost 14m to make. At release it was considered a spectacular failure.
Theater by theater RD was more profitable. I don't believe that the idea that Ridley Scott would make this his pet project and do it right is very far fetched at all. The bar is set pretty damn high though... The effects STILL look good, the acting was great, and the music is out of this world. It's a stunning, hypnotic film. I have the director's cut and still watch it periodically.
One of the most beautiful movies ever made... I have the feeling that the only way a sequel would get made is if Ridley Scott financed it. No studio in their right mind would touch it, as is often the case with the most worthwhile movies.
Cannabis was outlawed at the same time as cocaine and opiates, in most states, and thrown in with them as a narcotic.
Harry Anslinger went after Cannabis federally with the same zeal that J.Edgar Hoover went after communists and eventually got it banned.
That's only the how, the why is because there were legends surrounding it of it causing violence. All of them were false but they were used by the people that had it made illegal.
in my state CCTV isn't admissible in court unless there's a prominent sign telling you that you are on camera. Doesn't matter if it's a business or not.
The cameras the police put up have bright blue flashing lights, however red light cameras don't, which begs the question...
There are already laws in place which forbid filming people without their knowledge, unless you are photographing under special situations (a news story etc). If this law passes people will just disable the noise maker and keep on doing what they are doing.
As well, there are traditional film cameras that have silent shutters. The iris shutter of the Leica viewfinder cameras are a perfect example. They are whisper quiet, which makes them great cameras for wildlife photography. They'd better get these too.../sarcasm off
Ubuntu doesn't really need traditional marketing. There are so many rabid fans that there is a grassroots thing happening.
Word of mouth and grassroots is far more powerful than a huge advertising budget. If you go to a LUG, there is almost guaranteed to be at least a few people who are putting Ubuntu on recycled PC's for schools, senior centers, on their friends PC's who can't afford Windows.
It's almost epidemic the way it's spreading and I hear a lot of success stories. All you see on forums are the people that have problems, which are a fairly small number of people compared to the installed base. Everyone else is just using it. Some of the kids who get a box with Ubuntu will grow up with it, then suggest it to their boss if they end up in IT.
That's what I'm seeing down here in the "trenches". If it's not Ubuntu, it's Fedora or even Gentoo (in my case).
There is a rather large contingent of people that will just be more comfortable on a unix-like os and one day they'll be calling the shots.
IMHO that's how linux distros will gain favor. You can't really market "linux" because the market is just too fragmented. Most people realize that at the core all linux distros are largely the same software. The only real differences being administration tools, packaging methods, configuration, package sets, and the odd patch.
So lets say you want to do an ad to promote linux. Who's going to pay for it? Red Hat? Novell? Canonical? Someone has to and by doing so they will also promote their competition, which is not in their best interest. I say it's not even needed... If it was, there would be a lot of ads.
The last time I was in a team leader position I hired an intern. He turned out to be a great worker, unusually good unix skills and very self motivated. ------------------- Ditto except the UNIX skills but she was an excellent listener and picked it up really fast, did her own googling, and that makes her better than 90% of people with 10 years of experience.
...all the crumbling bridges in the country? That would put a lot more people to work and is actually needed.
We are already critically shortstaffed on IT workers and this would send more IT jobs overseas, which when the health record stuff is done, wouldn't come back./sigh
I've noticed this too and it's definitely capable of inducing a headache.
I got stuck on the tarmac once at Atlanta because my plane was taxiing out to take off when a really bad storm hit. Sit in that cabin for 3 hours and I bet you'll smell it.
It's more than possible LOL. I smell it every time I get on a plane and it's not a slight odor I feel like I'm standing next to a bus when it takes off at a red light.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked into Xohm, the one in my area. Verizon beat their monthly deal at 3Mbps, and has free equipment sorry to say (Xohm's is $40-90). It's funny. Since their physical infrastructure costs so much less you'd think they would try to be competitive :-/
meh
It'd be nice to be wireless but I have so much better stuff to do than to get any use out of a wireless MAN. My laptop never leaves my desk at work.
-Viz
Depends on what you do. There are some roles which are in demand no matter what because the company is legally required to have the role covered.
Security and compliance in hospitals, banks, and HR systems are like this, unless of course the company goes out of business and closes down...
That being said I'm a coder who got into code security and I've been through 2 recessions without being laid off, and during one, I found a better job.
I have to agree with the parent but change it to "If you are good and have a skill which is in demand, you can always find a new job no matter what, especially if you make long term friends wherever you work". IT is a small world and burning bridges will always screw you. Keep your friends close and you'll never be unemployed. Your network is very important for finding good paying jobs.
I'm 40 and have never been unemployed. I never stop learning new (and old) stuff either. I could jump into a new job right now if I wanted to. Just had someone tell me they wanted me. I had to turn them down because I love my current job.
-Viz
This happened where I work. A project got cut so the PM was let go. Luckily coding on this was only part time for me, my main projects had nothing to do with this one /PHEW
It wasn't a reflection on him or me, they just did some deeper market research once it was in beta and found that no one was interested in such a product.
Why don't all the people that keep complaining about the variety of distros, simply pick one and unite behind it, then help out?
FOSS = Choice. Make one.
-Viz
Yea see how India, Thailand, or anywhere else feels about bringing in US labor at any price ;) Everyone else but us are protectionists, but it's politically incorrect for us to feel the same way. That argument is getting old and it's patently wrong. Globalization is great for everyone but the people of the country who is importing workers and exporting the jobs to 3rd world countries. People should be brought in as needed, not out of habit.
I know there are some Americans in India but it's grossly lopsided and they only do it when there is no other way. So many tech and call center workers have been laid off here, that the need is gone to import talent/export jobs. It should be cut off _now_ and people sent home.
At the end of the day you need to put your own interests ahead of the world's, in the name of survival. You can't pay your debt off if you don't have a job, and isn't that what caused this mess in the first place? Everything from factory jobs to call center jobs to engineering are gone. What's left, Fast Food jobs? Cleaning?
Welcome to globalization, where you can be replaced by cheaper labor, no matter what the cost to the economy, human rights, and environment. The only way it can work is if every country involved is held to the same standard of working conditions and environmental responsibility, and that's not happening, so it's time to level the playing field and take care of our own. We can't compete against that because our laws are so restrictive and expensive that it's impossible to have a factory here now.
An entire nation of consumers with no production is not sustainable. I don't know what the answer is but having a country full of jobless people, hence globalization, isn't working.
-Viz
That was kinda my point. With native ternary (or better storage) it might make sense to develop ternary (or better) semiconductors since you'd need fewer components and the power consumption goes down. Going quaternary might give a similar improvement over ternary to going ternary over binary. In the mean time you could take advantage of having 4 states per particle to improve the storage density of binary data enabling the storage tech to be usable to it's potential (and profitable!) in the mean time ;)
Prolly won't happen though, it's a binary world and with the state of the world economy, developing earth shaking tech probably isn't in anyone's budgetary capability and risk tolerance. This is star trek stuff ;) You'd need a completely new instruction set, architecture etc. people would have to develop an OS, compiler (language?) etc for that kind of processor. We'd be starting over from scratch.
For anyone confused about what ternary and quaternary states are, here's a paper on a ternary machine... There actually was a couple of ternary computers built but they never left the university stage...
http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm
With this storage it would become more practical to build ternary machines which greatly simplify computing.
The ramifications for artificial intelligence are astounding... Think of the number of transistors required to be reduced by a factor of 7, and look at what we could do with current chip manufacturing methods, and you can see the advantages of ternary design over binary. The power requirements are also sharply reduced.
It's pretty crazy... Check out the references at the bottom of the link. One is in English, the other is in Russian.
-Viz
quaternary bits that would contain data written as a 0, 1, 2, or 3
-----
This would open the door for double density binary storage per magnetic bit as well as adding ternary/quaternary capability.
a 0 on top of a 0 could be 0, a 0 on top of 1 could be 1, a 1 on top of 0 could be 2, and a 1 on top of 1 could be 3.
And ternary/quaternary data would be the usual one bit per particle.
That's just amazing flexibility...
-Viz
Unless other labs can corroborate that date, it didn't happen.
Sony who?
You don't get it.
Lil secret for you, DRM doesn't work. It only works on and screws people that legitimately paid for their software and music and are honest. The people that illegally download it, don't need to deal with it because they are using cracked software or non DRM files.
The one's that legitimately paid lose all their stuff when the "certificate" expires.
That's why it's fundamentally flawed, doesn't do ANY good and is destined to go away.
In this case all it's going to do is guarantee that anyone who bought this game from Epic will never buy another from them because Epic screwed them. Or they'll just download the cracked version because that one will still be working when the certificate expires.
If they have to do that, to use the software they paid for, why pay for it? If they get caught they'll get treated just like any other illegal down loader and fined. Only they'll get fined more because they paid the price of the software + fine, the thief only pays the fine.
-Viz
Why not? The banks should be out of business anyway. New banks will rise to take their place and we, the tax payers, are the ones keeping them on life support.
If they choose to buy 7bln euro foreign construction companies and new jets with the bailout money, they deserve to die.
...they aren't part of the media buying population now are they ;) And pirates *sell* illegally copied stuff. People that don't steal and sell, but simply illegally download really aren't pirates, they are the beneficiaries of copyright violation perpetrated by the person they downloaded from. Pirates are in it for profit.
-Viz
Roger, thx for info.
I am not a photography expert by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not even a mac freak, but this review strikes me as unfair.
Can't you calibrate any display to make it accurate?
Just wonderin'...
-Viz
by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months
-------------
BZZZZ wrong answer
Moore's original law states that: the number of transistors we are able to pack into a given size of silicon real estate inexpensively, doubles every 18 months. He changed this prediction to every 2 years in 1975, which bolstered the perceived accuracy of his prediction.
Number of transistors for a particular price is a moving target which is entirely dependent on the supply and demand of said silicon, how much the R&D for the die cost, perfecting the process, how much waste there is etc etc etc. This is a subtle, yet very important, distinction.
You can pay $1200 for a bleeding edge CPU, or you can wait a few months and pay $400.
While the raw silicon has a relatively stable price, the process and it's requirements are a variable cost which is depreciated over the life of the process. This is why finished retail CPUs drop rapidly in cost over time.
The r&d and manufacturing cost per unit area actually goes up over time.
-Viz
Blade Runner made $4,749 average per theater opening weekend, which in inflated dollars (as of 1992 when Reservoir Dogs opened) is $6899.50, less than Quentin Tarantino's pet project, per theatre.
However it went on to gross 32m over it's lifetime (domestically), but cost 14m to make. At release it was considered a spectacular failure.
Theater by theater RD was more profitable. I don't believe that the idea that Ridley Scott would make this his pet project and do it right is very far fetched at all. The bar is set pretty damn high though... The effects STILL look good, the acting was great, and the music is out of this world. It's a stunning, hypnotic film. I have the director's cut and still watch it periodically.
One of the most beautiful movies ever made... I have the feeling that the only way a sequel would get made is if Ridley Scott financed it. No studio in their right mind would touch it, as is often the case with the most worthwhile movies.
-Viz
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/77339/
Cannabis was outlawed at the same time as cocaine and opiates, in most states, and thrown in with them as a narcotic.
Harry Anslinger went after Cannabis federally with the same zeal that J.Edgar Hoover went after communists and eventually got it banned.
That's only the how, the why is because there were legends surrounding it of it causing violence. All of them were false but they were used by the people that had it made illegal.
-Viz
in my state CCTV isn't admissible in court unless there's a prominent sign telling you that you are on camera. Doesn't matter if it's a business or not.
The cameras the police put up have bright blue flashing lights, however red light cameras don't, which begs the question...
There are already laws in place which forbid filming people without their knowledge, unless you are photographing under special situations (a news story etc). If this law passes people will just disable the noise maker and keep on doing what they are doing.
As well, there are traditional film cameras that have silent shutters. The iris shutter of the Leica viewfinder cameras are a perfect example. They are whisper quiet, which makes them great cameras for wildlife photography. They'd better get these too... /sarcasm off
What a stupid law.
-Viz
HAHA mutually assured destruction. They wouldn't be messin with you LAWL
-Viz
Um, mark your profile as private so that only your friends can see it ; )
You can even set up groups of friends and limit the content they see based on the group they are in.
If you have incriminating stuff just mark it for the group of superclose friends and the rest will never see it.
-Viz
Ubuntu doesn't really need traditional marketing. There are so many rabid fans that there is a grassroots thing happening.
Word of mouth and grassroots is far more powerful than a huge advertising budget. If you go to a LUG, there is almost guaranteed to be at least a few people who are putting Ubuntu on recycled PC's for schools, senior centers, on their friends PC's who can't afford Windows.
It's almost epidemic the way it's spreading and I hear a lot of success stories. All you see on forums are the people that have problems, which are a fairly small number of people compared to the installed base. Everyone else is just using it. Some of the kids who get a box with Ubuntu will grow up with it, then suggest it to their boss if they end up in IT.
That's what I'm seeing down here in the "trenches". If it's not Ubuntu, it's Fedora or even Gentoo (in my case).
There is a rather large contingent of people that will just be more comfortable on a unix-like os and one day they'll be calling the shots.
IMHO that's how linux distros will gain favor. You can't really market "linux" because the market is just too fragmented. Most people realize that at the core all linux distros are largely the same software. The only real differences being administration tools, packaging methods, configuration, package sets, and the odd patch.
So lets say you want to do an ad to promote linux. Who's going to pay for it? Red Hat? Novell? Canonical? Someone has to and by doing so they will also promote their competition, which is not in their best interest. I say it's not even needed... If it was, there would be a lot of ads.
-Viz
The last time I was in a team leader position I hired an intern. He turned out to be a great worker, unusually good unix skills and very self motivated.
-------------------
Ditto except the UNIX skills but she was an excellent listener and picked it up really fast, did her own googling, and that makes her better than 90% of people with 10 years of experience.
-Viz
...all the crumbling bridges in the country? That would put a lot more people to work and is actually needed.
We are already critically shortstaffed on IT workers and this would send more IT jobs overseas, which when the health record stuff is done, wouldn't come back. /sigh
I've noticed this too and it's definitely capable of inducing a headache.
I got stuck on the tarmac once at Atlanta because my plane was taxiing out to take off when a really bad storm hit. Sit in that cabin for 3 hours and I bet you'll smell it.
It's more than possible LOL. I smell it every time I get on a plane and it's not a slight odor I feel like I'm standing next to a bus when it takes off at a red light.
-Viz