This guy knows what he is talking about. Working for yourself is always better than being a pawn in someone else's political game. It's not easy money though.
It is only better if you are good at and actually like the business aspect. Many of us don't.
Look at Austin Meyers, he wrote the X-Plane flight simulator, beat Microsoft at it, and made millions of dollars. If you're smart, start your own business. It's not less work but you'll be your own boss and can choose your own work time and pace. In any case don't go for big stock market companies, they might sack you any time, managers will boss you around, the company gets all the copyright and credits, and it might get sold out at any time (see e.g. Sun).
"Smart" is not a simple scaler quantity. Brilliant engineers are not usually brilliant businessmen and visa versa. Rarely, they do and, even more rarely, these unicorns get lucky and these success stories are held up as the examples that all of us smart people should be able to if we would just stop complaining.
And, let me guess: You've never found yourself unemployed in a recessionary period. Let me tell you, it doesn't matter how good your are if the company you work for shuts down and lays off everybody. And there is no one hiring because all the companies in your field are laying off. When the hiring starts to slow pick up again, our resumes get filtered out by people like you who think: "Anybody who is any good would have a job: this person must not be any good." And the extra stinker is that years down the line, after you have clawed your way back, you can still be blocked by some bozo who sees an an earlier gap and declares you must not be very good because *he's* never been unemployed.
Can't use the tablet while driving, have wifi in the coffee shop while on a driving break.
Can't use the tablet with G3 on the plane, when lucky the in-air wifi is working.
Which it won't be unless you pay $$$$ to fly first class.
Have wifi in the airport terminal.
Yes, you spend half your time there signing up for the privilege of paying outrageous charges for the few minutes you have left to use the service. Maybe you get smart and signup for one of those "universal" wifi services. At your next layover you find that the universal wifi service from the first airport doesn't work here.
Go to the conference and find out that Wifi, if you can get a strong enough signal to use it, comes with the same hefty charges and awkward login system you get at the airport. No, that's not quite right. It's a different login, and a separate charge.
Go outside. If you are very lucky, you might get a weak signal.
Have wifi at home.
Have wifi at work.
That is about where I would have the need for a tablet, so wifi will do, thank you I will keep the $50/month in pocket.
At home and at work, I have more convenient devices with keyboards and larger screens. I suppose the coffee shop would still make sense if ever went there.
I've got kicked out of school with an EE degree, gone into software business (yeah, I know), and never looked back.
Do they ship products, other than dev kits, with FPGA?
All the time. They tend to be low volume items with high unit cost. Cisco has been a big consumer FPGAs forever. It's not even all that uncommon to find FPGA's in consumer electronics, though they tend to be very small parts used a glue logic.
You phrase the question differently than I would. I would ask why is perl not the default shell language.
I have a hard time understand the need for bash when perl is around.
[snip] Larry's mantra: simple things should be simple, and hard things possible.
Perl isn't simple enough for basic scripting. Most shell scripts are little more that lists of commands with minimal control flow. For that, Perl is too verbose. The extra syntax means more places for bugs and it gets extra messy if you are generating scripts programatically. Now, I agree that more complex scripting should be done is something like Perl. "Advanced Bash" makes about as much sense to me as "Advanced duck tape application"
It's too bad that Unix shell scripting languages are so dreadful. They didn't have to be. REXX was/is an awesome scripting language for VM/CMS. Negligible syntax overhead for simple operations and you could still do complex things with a clean syntax. Perl is better for bigger things but REXX effortlessly spanned the zone from simple list to substantial program. REXX is available for Unix but it doesn't really have the same effect because the close coupling between language syntax and the default shell isn't there.
US/UK/French/German workers are best placed doing skilled work. The average western worker is more skilled than the average developing world worker. So they can earn more, and create/produce more, than others.
It is the simple theory of comparative advantage.
The policy implication is that western economies should focus on moving as many people as possible into (highly) skilled employment. Complaining about the fact that they can't compete with unskilled labour is just pissing in the wind.
You're a couple of decades behind. The low skill manufacturing jobs are long gone, along with the high skill expertise involved with running these factories. Now the knowledge worker jobs are being shipped overseas. These were the jobs that smart people were supposed to get into to save them from the inevitable loss of manufacturing. Where do we go now? There's no more "up".
Localized services are a "circle the drain" idea. You may be able to skim off enough of the wealth that remains to temporarily keep yourself out of the hole but nothing you do even reduces the flow. Somebody still has to produce exportable goods and services to offset the imported things you buy.
Some say smartphones did in the Flip, but when it first came out, cheap digital cameras were already able to do what the Flip did and more (and with better quality), in addition to being expandable with SD card memory.
I'm not sure that is exactly true. My 2007 vintage P&S did have better optics, including optical zoom, but video was stored inefficiently and for limited duration as motion JPEG. That meant there was some advantage to using the Flip for longer but less demanding video. Pretty weak market position though, and it's totally gone now. Current P&S cameras record H.264
Funny, though, those 'open' Macs only appeared after Jobs was gone!
Funny? I'm have trouble finding citation but, as I recall, one of the points of friction between Jobs and Scully at the time of Job's departure was over whether to open up the Macintosh. Jobs was against it. Despite putting slots in the NeXT cubes, I think he still prefers Macs be closed. The first Macs to show the Jobs influence after his return to Apple were the iMacs. Closed again.
Two things bear heavily on the difficulty of being admitted to a school:
1) The reputation of the school at the time of application. 2) The pool of qualified students with the means to attend.
1869 was a time when most people in the US made their living through manual labor or subsistence farming. Neither occupation offers the means or the motivation for higher education.
And I have to wonder just how prestigious the Ivy League schools were in 1869. This was just 90 years after the revolution. I expect that "schooled in Europe" carried more weight than any kind of degree from Harvard. What did it take to get into Cambridge in 1869?
While I appreciate the apparent absurdity, unemployment insurance is actually a state responsibility. It's only when you get into extensions that Federal money is used. So, you aren't collecting unemployment from the same government that can't pay you. If you live in California, you collect from a different government that can't pay you.
When you take the clock away from a static CMOS device, you pretty much remove all significant power consumption..
That's the idea with CMOS but it doesn't work out so well at recent process nodes. Leakage can easily be 30% of total power. To put a block to sleep you need to actually shut off the power rails. It gets messy if you need to maintain state.
I had more fun with computers back then. Nowadays, my quad-core desktop mostly sits idle unless I'm reading Slashdot, and I'm far less impressed with the speed of my 12Mbps VDSL circuit today than I was with v.32bis back in the day...
In those days, getting online was an adventure. There was gold out there. You just had the figure out the right mix of technical and social engineering to get to it. I wrote layers of terminal and REXX scripts to automate the retrieval of freeware and Usenet articles and work around connection destroying misfeatures in the 7171 protocol converters. I used Kermit because nothing else could transfer through 7E1, even if it were available for EBCDIC machines. I wrote a DOS based terminal server to run on a friendly staff member's PC so I could get the sort of clean text interface Unix and VMS people took for granted.
Nowadays, Internet connectivity is something that you buy and it mostly just works. It's a lot more useful but not nearly as much fun.
I'd like to hear about how the decision was made to cut cables at move-out.
From a purely economic standpoint, it makes no sense.
Cutting cables is unnecessary extra work, which means unnecessary extra expense for the company moving out. There is no direct revenue generated and, unless the next tenant is a competitor, there is no indirect revenue either.
Which leads me to suspect either weird messed up liability issues or that the contracted electricians do the job pro bono and by default so they can sell a full rewire job to the incoming tenant.
A very high quality lens will only help if the scene is very bright. At other times, the small aperture means you get stuck with excessive noise or motion blur regardless of the quality of the lens.
TFA is very clear about this: the ISP was responsible for making backups, and failed to do so.
Yes, but anyone who relies on ISP backups for important data, on an ftp site, no less, is an idiot.
The only way this story makes any sense is if all they managed to trash all their local copies, including backups (if any), and then looked to the ftp site as a backup of last resort. The ftp site files were almost certainly not in condition to broadcast. Their loss means that the creators can blame someone else for the screwup and not have to redo all their work.
The "netbooks" that ASUS is selling now are *huge* compared to the eeepc's that started it all. It might be a 10" screen but that's just because of the wide bezel. You could stuff a 12.1" in there. I could easily cradle my eeepc 900 in one hand and type with the other. Not really viable with a 1005ha and later machines.
Netbooks were killed by the simple fact that I can now get a full-size notebook for $350, so why would I want a DVD-less netbook for the same price?
Because full size notebook are too bulky and heavy to carry. Small form factor conventional notebooks are too expensive and fragile. Netbooks are the answer to a prayer for long duration travelers. Space is at a premium, conditions are rough, and you can't just write off and replace if the laptop is damaged. The current crop of netbooks could stand to be more durable though.
This means that there is a dearth of very good engineers in the technical fields, which destroys the potential investments you would like to make!
But there isn't a dearth of very good engineers. There is a dearth of engineering jobs and ineffective means are used to select candidates for the jobs that exist. While I am not happy with so much brain power being used to find better ways to steal, I think the impact on talent applied to real engineering is negligible.
I love the fact that no one seems to remember that the whole "test ban treaty" against nukes in space is what made the funding dry up, in turn killing this project. I'm sure if we could do it today there would be money put to it. It doesn't matter if you have all the money in the world, you can't do the impossible.
The treaty ban on nuclear explosives in space made Orion impossible. However, there is no issue with nuclear thermal rockets like NERVA.
Most of the subscriber base is locked into a two year contract. How convenient that this happens only one month after T-Mobile's "free smartphone" promo.
It's enough to make me consider paying the penalty to break contract, despite being unemployed. Only thing is, I want a GSM carrier so I can use the same phone when I travel overseas. After the merger, AT&T will be the only GSM carrier serving the Bay Area. Can we get an exception to the Justice Department's standard rubber stamp policy on corporate mega mergers?
Slashdot Mirror
"Had a contract" is not unemployed.
This guy knows what he is talking about. Working for yourself is always better than being a pawn in someone else's political game. It's not easy money though.
It is only better if you are good at and actually like the business aspect. Many of us don't.
Look at Austin Meyers, he wrote the X-Plane flight simulator, beat Microsoft at it, and made millions of dollars. If you're smart, start your own business. It's not less work but you'll be your own boss and can choose your own work time and pace. In any case don't go for big stock market companies, they might sack you any time, managers will boss you around, the company gets all the copyright and credits, and it might get sold out at any time (see e.g. Sun).
"Smart" is not a simple scaler quantity. Brilliant engineers are not usually brilliant businessmen and visa versa. Rarely, they do and, even more rarely, these unicorns get lucky and these success stories are held up as the examples that all of us smart people should be able to if we would just stop complaining.
Unemployment is closer to 2% for tech workers. Basically, anyone who's reasonably good and wants to has a job.
2% was 2007, a 7 year low, before the economy started to tank. I'm not finding current numbers for "tech unemployment" but the 10.8% unemployment rate in Silicon Valley is pretty suggestive. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2011/03/25/silicon-valley-unemployment-rate-falls.html
And, let me guess: You've never found yourself unemployed in a recessionary period. Let me tell you, it doesn't matter how good your are if the company you work for shuts down and lays off everybody. And there is no one hiring because all the companies in your field are laying off. When the hiring starts to slow pick up again, our resumes get filtered out by people like you who think: "Anybody who is any good would have a job: this person must not be any good." And the extra stinker is that years down the line, after you have clawed your way back, you can still be blocked by some bozo who sees an an earlier gap and declares you must not be very good because *he's* never been unemployed.
Can't use the tablet while driving, have wifi in the coffee shop while on a driving break.
Can't use the tablet with G3 on the plane, when lucky the in-air wifi is working.
Which it won't be unless you pay $$$$ to fly first class.
Have wifi in the airport terminal.
Yes, you spend half your time there signing up for the privilege of paying outrageous charges for the few minutes you have left to use the service. Maybe you get smart and signup for one of those "universal" wifi services. At your next layover you find that the universal wifi service from the first airport doesn't work here.
Go to the conference and find out that Wifi, if you can get a strong enough signal to use it, comes with the same hefty charges and awkward login system you get at the airport. No, that's not quite right. It's a different login, and a separate charge.
Go outside. If you are very lucky, you might get a weak signal.
Have wifi at home.
Have wifi at work.
That is about where I would have the need for a tablet, so wifi will do, thank you I will keep the $50/month in pocket.
At home and at work, I have more convenient devices with keyboards and larger screens. I suppose the coffee shop would still make sense if ever went there.
I would have thought you would need more than 625 pixels. Must have been some interesting research.
What? What do you mean: RTFA? I get all the information I need from the titles!
I've got kicked out of school with an EE degree, gone into software business (yeah, I know), and never looked back.
Do they ship products, other than dev kits, with FPGA?
All the time. They tend to be low volume items with high unit cost. Cisco has been a big consumer FPGAs forever. It's not even all that uncommon to find FPGA's in consumer electronics, though they tend to be very small parts used a glue logic.
You phrase the question differently than I would. I would ask why is perl not the default shell language.
I have a hard time understand the need for bash when perl is around.
[snip] Larry's mantra: simple things should be simple, and hard things possible.
Perl isn't simple enough for basic scripting. Most shell scripts are little more that lists of commands with minimal control flow. For that, Perl is too verbose. The extra syntax means more places for bugs and it gets extra messy if you are generating scripts programatically. Now, I agree that more complex scripting should be done is something like Perl. "Advanced Bash" makes about as much sense to me as "Advanced duck tape application"
It's too bad that Unix shell scripting languages are so dreadful. They didn't have to be. REXX was/is an awesome scripting language for VM/CMS. Negligible syntax overhead for simple operations and you could still do complex things with a clean syntax. Perl is better for bigger things but REXX effortlessly spanned the zone from simple list to substantial program. REXX is available for Unix but it doesn't really have the same effect because the close coupling between language syntax and the default shell isn't there.
US/UK/French/German workers are best placed doing skilled work. The average western worker is more skilled than the average developing world worker. So they can earn more, and create/produce more, than others.
It is the simple theory of comparative advantage.
The policy implication is that western economies should focus on moving as many people as possible into (highly) skilled employment. Complaining about the fact that they can't compete with unskilled labour is just pissing in the wind.
You're a couple of decades behind. The low skill manufacturing jobs are long gone, along with the high skill expertise involved with running these factories. Now the knowledge worker jobs are being shipped overseas. These were the jobs that smart people were supposed to get into to save them from the inevitable loss of manufacturing. Where do we go now? There's no more "up".
Localized services are a "circle the drain" idea. You may be able to skim off enough of the wealth that remains to temporarily keep yourself out of the hole but nothing you do even reduces the flow. Somebody still has to produce exportable goods and services to offset the imported things you buy.
Some say smartphones did in the Flip, but when it first came out, cheap digital cameras were already able to do what the Flip did and more (and with better quality), in addition to being expandable with SD card memory.
I'm not sure that is exactly true. My 2007 vintage P&S did have better optics, including optical zoom, but video was stored inefficiently and for limited duration as motion JPEG. That meant there was some advantage to using the Flip for longer but less demanding video. Pretty weak market position though, and it's totally gone now. Current P&S cameras record H.264
Funny, though, those 'open' Macs only appeared after Jobs was gone!
Funny? I'm have trouble finding citation but, as I recall, one of the points of friction between Jobs and Scully at the time of Job's departure was over whether to open up the Macintosh. Jobs was against it. Despite putting slots in the NeXT cubes, I think he still prefers Macs be closed. The first Macs to show the Jobs influence after his return to Apple were the iMacs. Closed again.
Two things bear heavily on the difficulty of being admitted to a school:
1) The reputation of the school at the time of application.
2) The pool of qualified students with the means to attend.
1869 was a time when most people in the US made their living through manual labor or subsistence farming. Neither occupation offers the means or the motivation for higher education.
And I have to wonder just how prestigious the Ivy League schools were in 1869. This was just 90 years after the revolution. I expect that "schooled in Europe" carried more weight than any kind of degree from Harvard. What did it take to get into Cambridge in 1869?
While I appreciate the apparent absurdity, unemployment insurance is actually a state responsibility. It's only when you get into extensions that Federal money is used. So, you aren't collecting unemployment from the same government that can't pay you. If you live in California, you collect from a different government that can't pay you.
When you take the clock away from a static CMOS device, you pretty much remove all significant power consumption. .
That's the idea with CMOS but it doesn't work out so well at recent process nodes. Leakage can easily be 30% of total power. To put a block to sleep you need to actually shut off the power rails. It gets messy if you need to maintain state.
I had more fun with computers back then. Nowadays, my quad-core desktop mostly sits idle unless I'm reading Slashdot, and I'm far less impressed with the speed of my 12Mbps VDSL circuit today than I was with v.32bis back in the day...
In those days, getting online was an adventure. There was gold out there. You just had the figure out the right mix of technical and social engineering to get to it. I wrote layers of terminal and REXX scripts to automate the retrieval of freeware and Usenet articles and work around connection destroying misfeatures in the 7171 protocol converters. I used Kermit because nothing else could transfer through 7E1, even if it were available for EBCDIC machines. I wrote a DOS based terminal server to run on a friendly staff member's PC so I could get the sort of clean text interface Unix and VMS people took for granted.
Nowadays, Internet connectivity is something that you buy and it mostly just works. It's a lot more useful but not nearly as much fun.
I'd like to hear about how the decision was made to cut cables at move-out.
From a purely economic standpoint, it makes no sense.
Cutting cables is unnecessary extra work, which means unnecessary extra expense for the company moving out.
There is no direct revenue generated and, unless the next tenant is a competitor, there is no indirect revenue either.
Which leads me to suspect either weird messed up liability issues or that the contracted electricians do the job pro bono and by default so they can sell a full rewire job to the incoming tenant.
Yes, but it is just as likely to splatter your atoms across the galaxy.
A very high quality lens will only help if the scene is very bright. At other times, the small aperture means you get stuck with excessive noise or motion blur regardless of the quality of the lens.
TFA is very clear about this: the ISP was responsible for making backups, and failed to do so.
Yes, but anyone who relies on ISP backups for important data, on an ftp site, no less, is an idiot. The only way this story makes any sense is if all they managed to trash all their local copies, including backups (if any), and then looked to the ftp site as a backup of last resort. The ftp site files were almost certainly not in condition to broadcast. Their loss means that the creators can blame someone else for the screwup and not have to redo all their work.
I guess they didn't hear that it was World Backup Day
The "netbooks" that ASUS is selling now are *huge* compared to the eeepc's that started it all. It might be a 10" screen but that's just because of the wide bezel. You could stuff a 12.1" in there. I could easily cradle my eeepc 900 in one hand and type with the other. Not really viable with a 1005ha and later machines.
Netbooks were killed by the simple fact that I can now get a full-size notebook for $350, so why would I want a DVD-less netbook for the same price?
Because full size notebook are too bulky and heavy to carry. Small form factor conventional notebooks are too expensive and fragile. Netbooks are the answer to a prayer for long duration travelers. Space is at a premium, conditions are rough, and you can't just write off and replace if the laptop is damaged. The current crop of netbooks could stand to be more durable though.
This means that there is a dearth of very good engineers in the technical fields, which destroys the potential investments you would like to make!
But there isn't a dearth of very good engineers. There is a dearth of engineering jobs and ineffective means are used to select candidates for the jobs that exist. While I am not happy with so much brain power being used to find better ways to steal, I think the impact on talent applied to real engineering is negligible.
I love the fact that no one seems to remember that the whole "test ban treaty" against nukes in space is what made the funding dry up, in turn killing this project. I'm sure if we could do it today there would be money put to it. It doesn't matter if you have all the money in the world, you can't do the impossible.
The treaty ban on nuclear explosives in space made Orion impossible. However, there is no issue with nuclear thermal rockets like NERVA.
Most of the subscriber base is locked into a two year contract. How convenient that this happens only one month after T-Mobile's "free smartphone" promo.
It's enough to make me consider paying the penalty to break contract, despite being unemployed. Only thing is, I want a GSM carrier so I can use the same phone when I travel overseas. After the merger, AT&T will be the only GSM carrier serving the Bay Area. Can we get an exception to the Justice Department's standard rubber stamp policy on corporate mega mergers?