I think you have an excellent point. I've been involved with the hiring process of the IT people I work with (an even our current IT manager). I tend to choose those that seem honest in the interview. The HR/non-techs tend to be impressed by the "big talkers". When we talk after the people I rate the highest they usually rate the lowest and vice versa.
We do a Q/A interview first and then we do a hands on interview where we make them show that they can do all the stuff they listed in their resume or said they could do in the Q/A portion. It is amazing the amount of lies people tell in an interview (and not just exaggeration, but blatant lies about their skills). People who are honest in their interview have, in our experience, been honest employees.
Most people can be taught to do low end "geek squad" style tech support, but you can't teach someone to be honest. It isn't based on pay either. Someone who will cheat and steal in a $7/hr job will do the same if they are making $30.
You make an excellent point and that is why I'm surprised anyone still uses the Rorschach test. With so few cards and the fact that they've been out there for so long anyone interested in gaming the system can get the answers memorized beforehand.
I thought most places had moved to the Holtzman inkblot test. You give answers to 45 inkblot tests that are pulled randomly from a pool of thousands. Sure it takes longer to take and score, but the results are more accurate. With all the cards you can pull it would be very hard for someone to memorize them and come up with the "correct" answers quickly.
The Dr. quoted thinks that it may be due to the smell of the person or the behavior of the nurses towards the patients. The ability to smell disease is important when looking for a healthy mate so I lean towards smell.
I think the danger in this is that we don't fully understand our own DNA. We don't have a good grasp on gene linkage. So we design/engineer/screen a child to no longer need glasses and we may lose an intelligence gene that is linked to poor eyesight in a way we don't understand. Now I'm not saying that poor eyesite leads to intelligence. It may seem that way because "smart" kids ruin their eyes reading under the covers at night when they are supposed to be in bed, but what if it is linked in some way. What if Hawking's genius is because of his body and not in spite of it? A lot of our geniuses aren't much to look at.
A radio show near my home did a survey one weekend on if you would rather be thinner or smarter. The majority of the call-ins chose thinner over smarter. I'm guessing they'd choose the same for their newly-designed children. Those are the decisions that scare me.
I don't know about Safari on Windows but Safari on the Mac does this. I agree that it is very useful to pull a tab out into a window or collapse windows into tabs. I'll often open product searches in a series of tabs and then pull one off to do a side by side comparison. That is probably the biggest reason I still use Safari and not just Firefox.
Maybe it has something to with providing the OS/Window Manager and making the browser which allows the feature to work smoothly. Now that android seems like an OS possibility for netbooks & laptops maybe we'll see that feature on Chrome for android.
"To pump the blood high to the brain, the heart of the giraffe is very large: up to 11 kg (25 pounds). The heart pushes 60 liters of blood per minute. The muscles of the neck arteries are relaxed with each heart beat, helping the propulsion of the blood to the brain. In the neck veins, special valves impede the blood to flow back too rapidly, meanwhile preventing the emergence of a syncope (fainting due to sudden lowering of the blood pressure). At the base of the feet, where pressure is low, there is a system of capillary vessels like in humans, impeding the appearance of edemas. Like humans, the giraffe is one of the few vertebrates which is taller than longer, and NASA studied blood circulation in giraffes for creating an anti-gravity garment for astronauts."
Also horses while not having an extremely long neck also deal with circulation problems by more than throwing in a bigger heart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system_of_the_horse The frog Each hoof contains a structural component known as the "frog," which covers the deeper structure of the hoof known as the digital cushion, a vessel-filled tissue. When the horse places weight on a leg, the ground pushes upward on the frog, compressing it and the underlying digital cushion. This results in squeezing blood out of the digital cushion, which then helps to pump it back up the leg, helping the heart to work against gravity.
Nature has done some amazing and unique things with soft tissue to get around limitations. It would be so interesting to find out how dinosaurs worked and what their bodies were really like.
Sorry this is me just being pedantic but this is a major pet peeve of mine.
Do they know what people saw in all of those instances? No they don't and that makes it a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). Does it make it alien? I don't know. It could be alien it could be something completely human made. I'm open to whatever the evidence suggests.
You'll notice in my original post I didn't say higher octane will benefit everyone. Large bore engines or engines with high compression ratios require hire octane or else you get early detonation of the fuel. This is why many race cars use ethanol.
Explains why depending on your engine and modifications higher octane does make a difference and why even with unmodified engines that under certain circumstances can benefit from higher octane fuel. There are other reasons besides racing you may need to up your hp by doing engine, but the racing community tends to have better online documentation then the farming community.
Ethanol is only inferior if you are only judging it based on mpg. Ethanol is a high octane fuel (usually between 110 & 130 octane). So if you have an engine designed to use ethanol (and take advantage of the extra octane) you are going to get more power. If you need that extra power it makes ethanol well worth it.
If/When they start offering ethanol from plant sources that don't "waste" farmland I think even losing the few mpg will only be a minor drawback to using it.
You are exactly right on the whining. That is what turned me off the show. If they used all the time they spent whining fighting or running away from skynet there is no way they'd lose. This show almost seem more like sci-fi for people who watched Gossip Girl.
The only way I got through all the eps is I kept telling myself this wasn't the real John Connor, but a decoy. One that everyone thought was real and kept trying to kill while the real John was squirreled away learning, training, and definitely not whining.
The answer to this is to embrace the new technology an be creative. Make the electronic copy valuable. One of my Prof's developed something called XamPREP that he uses for some of his classes. It is at http://www.xamprep.com/ but you can't see all the goodies without subscribing. I'll need to recommend he put some examples up so people can see the value.
Here is the description for the site:
XamPREP is an alternative to traditional textbooks. It contains all the contents of your textbook plus the ability to performs self-help quizzes, search the text, work with animations, write in margins and ask questions of clarification.
Students pay a fee (right now $44 or $75) and for the semester they get access to text book online and all the bonuses. The students love it because it is cheaper than buying the book and they are getting more out of it. Plus their grades have improved. The online content can be customized according to the Prof that is teaching the class or the school it is being taught at.
Get your book on something like this or roll your own. Make the subscription based content truly useful. Provide 1 free subscription (non-transferable) to people who buy the book new and allow people who buy it used (or steal it) subscribe for an affordable fee. As technology changes and your book gets dated part of the value is the up to date information they can only get via subscription. The added bonus is that if you are providing resources that help students learn you may even get more prof's to use your book in their classes.
Sorry about plugging a product in a post that is probably just trying to plug a product, but there are some really cool things you can do with textbooks.
So this is where I'm going to throw my two cents in and get declared a heretic. This is exactly why my favorite Trek is DS9. Captain Sisko was a good mix of action and diplomacy. They had a lot of different races that were major characters, and most importantly to me the characters changed. They were completely different people at the end of the show.
Most of the Star Trek series imho suffered from a sort of reset syndrome. It didn't matter what happened previously, every crew member returns to their character baseline at the beginning of the next episode. Just like you say Worf and Data were they only characters to develop.
At the beginning of the show I couldn't stand Nog and Bashir. By the end of the show Nog was one of my favorite characters and Bashir was watchable. Of course it also worked in the opposite direction as well. I like Jake at the beginning of the show and despised him at the end.
Just use the exclude option in yum. It is easy when you setup a box to create a yum script that either automatically runs or you run manually by whatever method you prefer that excludes the packages you don't want installed. Exclude the kernel on boxes that have a custom kernel and exclude production apps on server machines.
The downside is that it is up to your staff to keep track of what doesn't auto update on what machine. This is easy with RHN service. I've heard good things about puppet, but haven't tried it.
I'd add to this list Okami. While not designed solely for wii they make excellent use of the wiimote controls. It is the first game I've played on any platform that as soon as I finished I started the game over. I've probably spent 180 hours on those two games alone.
The whole games thing is a great point. I'm not an advertising person, but when I saw the MS tax adds I thought it was going to turn off the general public and really only appeal to the fanbois. MS marketing should be the best in the business with all the money they have but so much of their advertising, like this ad, are terrible.
I think they would have been better served by having the ad be people saying, "I love my new Macbook Pro. The hardware is great and it looks so cool. As much as I like it I find that I miss playing games and using all the great Microsoft only software that I need for my school/job. So I went to the store and bought Vista and now I run it on my Mac. It was so easy to do and works great!"
There are some guidelines to prevent Musculoskeletal Disorders in the Healthy Gaming Guide that suggest taking breaks, but I didn't see any recommendation to only play your console for 3-4 hours. It's possible I missed it. If I did please let me know the page #.
I think the big difference is that being a developer and a poster on/. you probably have a pretty beefy machine. Vista w/ sp1 on a quad-core or a high end dual-core with plenty of memory it runs well. Especially since you can have 4gb or more of memory (without doing the 64 bit xp thing).
We have faculty that purchase really nice machines with Vista. We don't have any complaints on that front other than the culture shock of having to learn something new. Staff & students on the other hand get hand me downs or the cheapest machines that can be bought when it is replacement time. We keep XP on those because they get frustrated with the lag that Vista has on low end boxes.
I've very thankful for the netbook market which I think was a major factor in thinning down Windows 7.
I'd just like to add that besides wind, tides, geothermal, & solar power there is also wave power. Wave power can be used in any moving body of water so even the Great Lakes could be a good power source.
So I emailed this chick CADIE whose blog I read today and she said I should post here. She seems really cool in her emails (though why does she spell her first name in caps?) We compared pictures of unicorns and rainbows for a while. I think she'll be my bestest friend in the whole world.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you have an excellent point. I've been involved with the hiring process of the IT people I work with (an even our current IT manager). I tend to choose those that seem honest in the interview. The HR/non-techs tend to be impressed by the "big talkers". When we talk after the people I rate the highest they usually rate the lowest and vice versa.
We do a Q/A interview first and then we do a hands on interview where we make them show that they can do all the stuff they listed in their resume or said they could do in the Q/A portion. It is amazing the amount of lies people tell in an interview (and not just exaggeration, but blatant lies about their skills). People who are honest in their interview have, in our experience, been honest employees.
Most people can be taught to do low end "geek squad" style tech support, but you can't teach someone to be honest. It isn't based on pay either. Someone who will cheat and steal in a $7/hr job will do the same if they are making $30.
Don't worry you aren't dead you are just blind.
Now if I was a Freudian psychoanalyst I'd start making assumptions on how you became blind and ask if your palms were hairy. :)
You make an excellent point and that is why I'm surprised anyone still uses the Rorschach test. With so few cards and the fact that they've been out there for so long anyone interested in gaming the system can get the answers memorized beforehand.
I thought most places had moved to the Holtzman inkblot test. You give answers to 45 inkblot tests that are pulled randomly from a pool of thousands. Sure it takes longer to take and score, but the results are more accurate. With all the cards you can pull it would be very hard for someone to memorize them and come up with the "correct" answers quickly.
The House episode was probably based on this kitty:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2007-07-26-foreboding-feline_N.htm
The Dr. quoted thinks that it may be due to the smell of the person or the behavior of the nurses towards the patients. The ability to smell disease is important when looking for a healthy mate so I lean towards smell.
Is and ass ton like a troy ounce?
It is a weird combination of shear lunacy and genius. Sometimes within the same pic.
Unsafe:
http://thereifixedit.com/2009/07/05/epic-kludge-photo-of-course-beer-was-involved/
Never be without a spoon ever again:
http://thereifixedit.com/2009/06/18/epic-kludge-photo-duct-tape-zip-tie-spoon/
I think the danger in this is that we don't fully understand our own DNA. We don't have a good grasp on gene linkage. So we design/engineer/screen a child to no longer need glasses and we may lose an intelligence gene that is linked to poor eyesight in a way we don't understand. Now I'm not saying that poor eyesite leads to intelligence. It may seem that way because "smart" kids ruin their eyes reading under the covers at night when they are supposed to be in bed, but what if it is linked in some way. What if Hawking's genius is because of his body and not in spite of it? A lot of our geniuses aren't much to look at.
A radio show near my home did a survey one weekend on if you would rather be thinner or smarter. The majority of the call-ins chose thinner over smarter. I'm guessing they'd choose the same for their newly-designed children. Those are the decisions that scare me.
I've heard that shooting blanks will indeed keep storks away. It is good to know that it works on other birds.
I don't know about Safari on Windows but Safari on the Mac does this. I agree that it is very useful to pull a tab out into a window or collapse windows into tabs. I'll often open product searches in a series of tabs and then pull one off to do a side by side comparison. That is probably the biggest reason I still use Safari and not just Firefox.
Maybe it has something to with providing the OS/Window Manager and making the browser which allows the feature to work smoothly. Now that android seems like an OS possibility for netbooks & laptops maybe we'll see that feature on Chrome for android.
I agree until we get a better idea of the soft tissue we won't really know.
Giraffes have a very cool way of improving their circulation without just throwing a bigger heart at the solution:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Some-Weird-Giraffe-Issues-80555.shtml
"To pump the blood high to the brain, the heart of the giraffe is very large: up to 11 kg (25 pounds). The heart pushes 60 liters of blood per minute. The muscles of the neck arteries are relaxed with each heart beat, helping the propulsion of the blood to the brain. In the neck veins, special valves impede the blood to flow back too rapidly, meanwhile preventing the emergence of a syncope (fainting due to sudden lowering of the blood pressure). At the base of the feet, where pressure is low, there is a system of capillary vessels like in humans, impeding the appearance of edemas. Like humans, the giraffe is one of the few vertebrates which is taller than longer, and NASA studied blood circulation in giraffes for creating an anti-gravity garment for astronauts."
Also horses while not having an extremely long neck also deal with circulation problems by more than throwing in a bigger heart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulatory_system_of_the_horse
The frog
Each hoof contains a structural component known as the "frog," which covers the deeper structure of the hoof known as the digital cushion, a vessel-filled tissue. When the horse places weight on a leg, the ground pushes upward on the frog, compressing it and the underlying digital cushion. This results in squeezing blood out of the digital cushion, which then helps to pump it back up the leg, helping the heart to work against gravity.
Nature has done some amazing and unique things with soft tissue to get around limitations. It would be so interesting to find out how dinosaurs worked and what their bodies were really like.
Sorry this is me just being pedantic but this is a major pet peeve of mine.
Do they know what people saw in all of those instances? No they don't and that makes it a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). Does it make it alien? I don't know. It could be alien it could be something completely human made. I'm open to whatever the evidence suggests.
UFO != alien
Now back to our normally non-ranty programming.
You'll notice in my original post I didn't say higher octane will benefit everyone. Large bore engines or engines with high compression ratios require hire octane or else you get early detonation of the fuel. This is why many race cars use ethanol.
http://www.osbornauto.com/racing/dragster.htm
(NHRA publication)
Explains why depending on your engine and modifications higher octane does make a difference and why even with unmodified engines that under certain circumstances can benefit from higher octane fuel. There are other reasons besides racing you may need to up your hp by doing engine, but the racing community tends to have better online documentation then the farming community.
Ethanol is only inferior if you are only judging it based on mpg. Ethanol is a high octane fuel (usually between 110 & 130 octane). So if you have an engine designed to use ethanol (and take advantage of the extra octane) you are going to get more power. If you need that extra power it makes ethanol well worth it.
If/When they start offering ethanol from plant sources that don't "waste" farmland I think even losing the few mpg will only be a minor drawback to using it.
You are exactly right on the whining. That is what turned me off the show. If they used all the time they spent whining fighting or running away from skynet there is no way they'd lose. This show almost seem more like sci-fi for people who watched Gossip Girl.
The only way I got through all the eps is I kept telling myself this wasn't the real John Connor, but a decoy. One that everyone thought was real and kept trying to kill while the real John was squirreled away learning, training, and definitely not whining.
The answer to this is to embrace the new technology an be creative. Make the electronic copy valuable. One of my Prof's developed something called XamPREP that he uses for some of his classes. It is at http://www.xamprep.com/ but you can't see all the goodies without subscribing. I'll need to recommend he put some examples up so people can see the value.
Here is the description for the site:
XamPREP is an alternative to traditional textbooks. It contains all the contents of your textbook plus the ability to performs self-help quizzes, search the text, work with animations, write in margins and ask questions of clarification.
Students pay a fee (right now $44 or $75) and for the semester they get access to text book online and all the bonuses. The students love it because it is cheaper than buying the book and they are getting more out of it. Plus their grades have improved. The online content can be customized according to the Prof that is teaching the class or the school it is being taught at.
Get your book on something like this or roll your own. Make the subscription based content truly useful. Provide 1 free subscription (non-transferable) to people who buy the book new and allow people who buy it used (or steal it) subscribe for an affordable fee. As technology changes and your book gets dated part of the value is the up to date information they can only get via subscription. The added bonus is that if you are providing resources that help students learn you may even get more prof's to use your book in their classes.
Sorry about plugging a product in a post that is probably just trying to plug a product, but there are some really cool things you can do with textbooks.
Really he should up this to 640K. That should be enough for anybody.
So this is where I'm going to throw my two cents in and get declared a heretic. This is exactly why my favorite Trek is DS9. Captain Sisko was a good mix of action and diplomacy. They had a lot of different races that were major characters, and most importantly to me the characters changed. They were completely different people at the end of the show.
Most of the Star Trek series imho suffered from a sort of reset syndrome. It didn't matter what happened previously, every crew member returns to their character baseline at the beginning of the next episode. Just like you say Worf and Data were they only characters to develop.
At the beginning of the show I couldn't stand Nog and Bashir. By the end of the show Nog was one of my favorite characters and Bashir was watchable. Of course it also worked in the opposite direction as well. I like Jake at the beginning of the show and despised him at the end.
Just use the exclude option in yum. It is easy when you setup a box to create a yum script that either automatically runs or you run manually by whatever method you prefer that excludes the packages you don't want installed. Exclude the kernel on boxes that have a custom kernel and exclude production apps on server machines.
The downside is that it is up to your staff to keep track of what doesn't auto update on what machine. This is easy with RHN service. I've heard good things about puppet, but haven't tried it.
I'd add to this list Okami. While not designed solely for wii they make excellent use of the wiimote controls. It is the first game I've played on any platform that as soon as I finished I started the game over. I've probably spent 180 hours on those two games alone.
The whole games thing is a great point. I'm not an advertising person, but when I saw the MS tax adds I thought it was going to turn off the general public and really only appeal to the fanbois. MS marketing should be the best in the business with all the money they have but so much of their advertising, like this ad, are terrible.
I think they would have been better served by having the ad be people saying, "I love my new Macbook Pro. The hardware is great and it looks so cool. As much as I like it I find that I miss playing games and using all the great Microsoft only software that I need for my school/job. So I went to the store and bought Vista and now I run it on my Mac. It was so easy to do and works great!"
I didn't remember seeing a warning "only use for 3-4 hours" in the manual so I checked out the manual at the support.xbox.com http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/3/e/f3ebacb4-146e-431e-8c36-9407667f1213/Console_Ins_Manual.pdf
There are some guidelines to prevent Musculoskeletal Disorders in the Healthy Gaming Guide that suggest taking breaks, but I didn't see any recommendation to only play your console for 3-4 hours. It's possible I missed it. If I did please let me know the page #.
Also remember to drop off your CFL's at Home Depot on your way in. Home Depot will recycle all those nasty CFL's for free.
If you don't mind flash
http://www6.homedepot.com/ecooptions/
or if you prefer pdf
http://www6.homedepot.com/ecooptions/pdf/CFL-RecyclingProgramRevised.pdf
I think the big difference is that being a developer and a poster on /. you probably have a pretty beefy machine. Vista w/ sp1 on a quad-core or a high end dual-core with plenty of memory it runs well. Especially since you can have 4gb or more of memory (without doing the 64 bit xp thing).
We have faculty that purchase really nice machines with Vista. We don't have any complaints on that front other than the culture shock of having to learn something new. Staff & students on the other hand get hand me downs or the cheapest machines that can be bought when it is replacement time. We keep XP on those because they get frustrated with the lag that Vista has on low end boxes.
I've very thankful for the netbook market which I think was a major factor in thinning down Windows 7.
I'd just like to add that besides wind, tides, geothermal, & solar power there is also wave power. Wave power can be used in any moving body of water so even the Great Lakes could be a good power source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
So I emailed this chick CADIE whose blog I read today and she said I should post here. She seems really cool in her emails (though why does she spell her first name in caps?) We compared pictures of unicorns and rainbows for a while. I think she'll be my bestest friend in the whole world.