She has a Galaxy Tab 10.1, and doesn't see it as a good platform for web browsing. I agree. I like my Nexus 7, but not for e-mail, etc. It's a great entertainment device, book reader, etc.
You two need to get yourselves bluetooth keyboards and tablet stands.
You *do* realize you can get Chrome for Android now, right?
All these arguments fail to account for increasing US oil demand.
Yes, everyone is ignoring tha... I mean, the issue is absolutely not, for instance, mentioned in the SECOND PARAGRAPH of TFA:
That increased oil production, combined with new American policies to improve energy efficiency, means that the United States will become âoeall but self-sufficientâ in meeting its energy needs in about two decades
That sentence doesn't exist at all. And we're all in your debt for bringing it up.
Their oil and gas prices jumped significantly after the hurricane in the gulf, yet they are a major exporter and producer. Why? Because supply went down after the storm, so prices had to go up. It didnt matter that they got all their own oil, the world markets made the prices go up.
The US market was the one feeling the pressure from losing that capacity, causing prices to rise. World markets need not apply...
You really think switching to "ChromeBook" there won't be any learning-curve, and the applications you know and love will ALL work?
Honestly, as vague as your requirements are, I don't see why one of (eg.) Walmart's several $80 7" Android 4.0 ICS (capacitive screen) tablets won't work for you just as well:
You mean the skirmishes that left Europe doing all the innovating in winged flight for 20 years? The ones that resulted in the US entering World War I with airplanes that weren't much better than the Flyer III?
No, I imagine he means the skirmishes that lead to the development of ailerons (which we use today) to circumvent the patents on "wing warping" (which would be completely impractical for modern jets).
Radios are extremely easy to hide. Just ask the French Resistance... These days they can be microscopic.
And I'd recomend MW over Shortwave. North Koreans don't generally speak English, so the bulk of available shortwave programming will be lost on them. And with the biggest potential international broadcaster right next door, the extra range really isn't necessary.
Nuclear is expensive. It costs a lot to build, a lot to operate safely, a lot to insure, a lot to decommission and a lot to deal with the waste.
Damn near ALL of those are "sunk costs" which they've already paid for (or are already commited to paying for, whatever they do) and does NOT make it profitable to shut down currently operating nuclear power plants.
The operating costs of nuclear power plants have been shown to be minimal through the decades, and easily paid for by the obscene profits from the huge amount of electrical generation they can sustain.
it is that even in a modern first world country you just can't trust the guys running the plants.
The country sets the laws. They can put any regulations into place that they wish, ensuring someone they "trust" will be responsible for the operation of those nuclear power plants.
Certainly, "trust" is not a foreign problem... We run bigger risks with bridge builders, building maintenance personnel, and car manufacturers, but we have laws and regulations in place to manage the risks of people getting complacent, or making mistakes, in those fields, and those generally work just fine.
maybe you should research AND THEN form an opinion?
I know what I'm talking about. You do not. The numbers I gave were specific to Germany, since that's the subject at hand
The Pacific Nothwest is exceptional, in that there's LOTS of hydro to be had, and very few people living there. While it's technically a "renewable", it's completely inelastic, and been fully maxed-out since the 50s. no matter how much demand increases, you'll never get any more energy out of that hydro. California was getting 30% of it's energy from hydro several years back, but demand rose, and hydro could not, so it's becoming an ever-more tiny piece of the electric grid here.
Expanding into other renewables will get very expensive for Oregon. The fact that your electric prices are low, is exactly why you'll never get large-scale development of solar and wind... They're too expensive. California is getting some of this, but only very slowly, and at electric prices of about double what you're talking about.
You'd consider Germany's electric rates to be absolutely astronomical, but that's where they had to raise them to, to fund all this renewable energy generation build-out, and there's no shortcuts, Oregon, that you can take to get there without raising rates.
OTA TV isn't good enough unless you want to be very limited in the shows you can watch.
It's quite the opposite, actually. Basic cable has very, very few original shows that are anything more than reality-TV filler. The overwhelming majority of what they broadcast is syndicated shows that originally aired on the broadcast networks. And the few original shows on basic cable... are usually available for free on Hulu.
And with the transition to digital, the channel count has EXPLODED. NBC broadcasting Universal Sports in a subchannel. Subchannels like MeTV, ThisTV, AntennaTV, etc, broadcasting classic old movies and TV shows, along with some more contemporary programming, which is quite a bit better than found on the basic cable channels which do the same.
Public broadcasters are making even better use of their subchannel capability... A subchannel with all their programming on a different schedule... MHz Networks showing English-language news programs from numerous countries around the world, from Taiwan to Russia to Al Jazeera English, vastly better than CNN all-around, and commercial-free.
At the same time quality is going to hell on cable while providers keep raising your prices, broadcast HDTV is transforming and improving significantly, and all for the one-time cost of an antenna.
And don't get me started on HBO/Showtime/Cinemax... It's mostly crap old movies around the clock to fill all the airtime they don't know what to do with... and anything decent they produce you can get with a Netflix subscription, just a bit later.
If you want to keep paying upwards of $70/mo., be my guest, but your attempt to rationalize it is ridiculous, and clearly most people would be extremely well served with an antenna and a DVR... It's certainly easy to get more high quality original content than you'll have the time to watch.
Is Germany a good example of forward-looking energy policy?
Sure! If you don't mind paying 5X as much for electricity as you do now, you too can help fund the development of renewable energy projects, just like the Germans. Oh what a time to be alive.
If we want to impact global warming we have to use nuclear power. Wind and solar don't have the capacity and it will take a loooooong road of building for them to even come close to replacing other forms of electricity generation.
This is utterly wrong. Solar is one of the ONLY technologies that will make it possible to continue energy usage trends for the next century. We couldn't practically build nuclear power plants fast enough to keep up with growing demand. Wind is also a very good option, which should be exploited as much as possible.
While I support nuclear power plants in general, I'm not so sure Germany made the wrong decision. They made the decision in the wake of the Fukishima disaster, and *if* their investigation determined their own nuclear plants are vulnerable to some natural disaster or another, shutting them down BEFORE a disaster happens is ideal. Waiting until AFTER a disaster happens, and only *then* shutting them down, is the worst possible outcome for everyone.
Could this be an opportunity for South Korea (or any other western government) to send their own daily propaganda text messages to phones in NK?
Why bother? If you want to spread propaganda (or other information) to poor people, radio is the ideal medium. Small radios that can receive AM/MW signals are what westerners would consider nearly free, and MW signals can propagate hundreds of miles. In fact for those near the broadcast can put together AM/MW radios from any scraps of wire, dismantling a pair of headphones is ideal (see: Foxhole Radio).
I still maintain that OpenVMS and NonStop have a lot of life left in them, with no sign of any platform coming along to replace it. And I also believe that running the same OS on a new architecture and only needing to recompile your in-house applications is vastly easier than throwing away decades of work and rewriting everything for an entirely different OS, and Linux (or any other common OS you can name) is in no way even remotely a workable substitute for OpenVMS or NonStop.
I always thought it was a mistake to discontinue Alpha, and embrace Itanium, but that's a decision that is long past and not worth discussing anymore. HP isn't going to throw out their high-paying customers, and Intel doesn't want to continue making Itanium CPUs, so either OpenVMS and NonStop are going to be ported to yet another platform, or HP would have to, with great effort, resurrect the proprietary architectures they previously killed off. They clearly don't have anything lined-up to replace them.
And it's the IDEAL material... It's strong enough for rack-mounting. it flexes and bends under extreme loads instead of cracking. It's naturally an RF shield, and provides electrical grounding in case of an accident with the 200+volt lines coming in. It needs minimal thickness to provide sufficient strength. It's non-flammable. And even conducts away some of the heat. And if you really want to insist that it "bio-degrade" you need only poor some water, chlorine, or other oxidizer on it to very quickly degrade it to sand.
Even if you find something cheaper that's thin and strong enough, you'll still have to wrap it in steel foil...
Lay out your motherboard on a table, then stick a 3" (for 92mm) or 4" (for 120mm) duct from the CPU to the exhaust, and that's all the space you need. Cases are larger because we can't lay a DVD-Burner sideways and assume the mobo wont have huge capacitors sticking up from there...
The PC case really has not changed significantly since the 1980s, since everyone figured out that separate keyboards are better than integrated ones
Only if your definition of "change" is so wide-open that you only care if the SHAPE is different.
Yes, they've all been rectangles since the 80s, but there have been more significant changes in that time. AT's toggle switch gave way to ATX's push-button, and smaller size. MicroATX allows everything to be significantly smaller, to the point that you can mount your computer to the back of your monitor.
Full-height PCI is giving way to half-height cards wherever possible, and smaller cases that are still fully capable are the result. SSDs are shrinking HDD sizes, and smaller cases with fewer fans results.
If anything, cases are changing too fast for companies to keep-up and put them into a standard... Instead, they just keep the screw holes in the same places, and tell you some boards won't fit...
Heck, just give the OP your company's contact info, and let him apply. That might not be a good general solution, but it could help fix this one particular situation.
No mention in TFA about where he lives, or anything more about what he can do. If he's searching job boards at all, he's seen our job listings, and if his resume is online (eg: at Dice.com) and he has Java, PL/SQL and Linux in it, he would have been called by our recruiters... I know that's how I got hired on, a phone call out of the blue. And I know I get absolutely spammed by recruiters because my resume has "Linux" in it, so much so I found it critical to remove my phone number.
There is no dearth of qualified applicants. There is, however, a dearth of HR employees and hiring managers with the skills necessary to judge a qualified applicant.
While I admit the job market is terribly non-optimal, I believe you are quite mistaken. I've seen no end of people with 1-year of experience applying for Sr. level jobs, and believing they can do them.
If someone could learn to to the job well in a timely manner, then that person is a qualified applicant.
I'm sure "timely" is highly subjective. Companies want people who can hit the ground running, and do at least some basic maintenance work on day 1, doing something useful for the first few months while they learn the environment enough to do the complex work they were really hired for.
Employers are finnicky about hiring qualified applicants, rather than training people, because of turn-over rates. There's so many other companies out there, which can pay much better, that may hire away your people at any time.
There are tens of thousands of such people desperately seeking work right now.
I've certainly seen plenty of ENTRY-LEVEL people in IT seeing work and having a difficult time of it, but not the pros. The better people may have taken a pay cut, have to put in more hours, commute further, or just got stuck in a company they don't particularly like for longer than they planned, but I don't believe anyone very good in IT has been out of work for years at a time, unless you've got an unfortunate skill set that doesn't match up with current technologies anymore.
At least in the California job market, there is a dearth of qualified applicants. I've been on both sides of the hiring equation for years. The idea that you can't get a job, with over a decade of PL/SQL, Java and other programming, is just laughable, and tells me we must be missing something, here.
Are you missing all your teeth and refuse to get dentures? Are you only looking for jobs in a 10 mile radius of your house? Are you demanding an astronomical salary? Do you have obvious medical problems that make you incredibly unreliable from day-to-day? Are you just a mediocre programmer?
Your age certainly isn't preventing you from landing a new job. That said, it's certainly possible whatever those issues are, they could be age-related or age-compounded.
Suns would have been a great platform for Linux - a pity that Oracle didn't deem it fit to offer Oracle Linux as an option on their SPARCservers.
It's fortunate that they did not... Linux thrives on commodity hardware, so x64 is the better option all-around. But back before x64 caught on, they might have gotten some traction.
Incidentally, it's not Hitachi, but Fujitsu you were probably thinking about, w/ their SPARC64
Thanks for the correction. Guess I had hard drives on the brain...
OVMS should have remained on the Alpha, and the 2 should have been retired together
The fact that HP saw fit to port OpenVMS to Itanium just demonstrates what a strong following it has. They wouldn't have ported it if they didn't make a lot of money on it. Certainly, recompiling your apps for a different CPU, on the same OS, is vastly easier than rewriting it for a whole new platform. OpenVMS is about the only microkernel OS out there, with incredible stability as a by-product, and some companies are willing to pay obscene amounts of money for that.
Moving OVMS and NonStop to Itanium - any customer would have to be pretty stupid to go for that proposition.
NonStop is also still a very high-availability platform, and customers that need it are willing to pay for it. x64 hardware doesn't have a fraction the RAS features that Itanium and other proprietary platforms do, though it looks like Intel is going to (slowly) take things in that direction.
If you've got another suggestion for other *ridiculously* high-availability hardware, I'm all ears...
just like Irix did w/ the MIPS based SGIs (once SGI switched to Itanium, they also switched to Linux, and didn't bother to port Irix there).
SGI crashed and burned in a hurry. Whatever they were doing, it isn't a model anyone else should follow. Perhaps it's just because they were more of a graphics and workstations company, and didn't have the decades of order processing apps other, more transaction-oriented, systems did.
Slashdot Mirror
You two need to get yourselves bluetooth keyboards and tablet stands.
You *do* realize you can get Chrome for Android now, right?
Yes, everyone is ignoring tha... I mean, the issue is absolutely not, for instance, mentioned in the SECOND PARAGRAPH of TFA:
That sentence doesn't exist at all. And we're all in your debt for bringing it up.
Have you ever stopped to consider the possibility that you might be the one who is wrong? Arrogance plus ignorance is a bad combination.
Yes, it stays here, except in special circumstances where the producers have good reason to request and are granted an export license.
http://cfr.vlex.com/vid/754-2-crude-oil-19634635
The US market was the one feeling the pressure from losing that capacity, causing prices to rise. World markets need not apply...
No it absolutely won't, unless the US Gov sees fit to give them an export license, which in this day and age, they generally don't.
http://cfr.vlex.com/vid/754-2-crude-oil-19634635
This topic has generated discussion that we might need to revisit such policies, but as it currently stands, no, very little of it will be exported.
You really think switching to "ChromeBook" there won't be any learning-curve, and the applications you know and love will ALL work?
Honestly, as vague as your requirements are, I don't see why one of (eg.) Walmart's several $80 7" Android 4.0 ICS (capacitive screen) tablets won't work for you just as well:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Double-Power-T-711-with-WiFi-7-Capacitive-Touchscreen-Tablet-PC-Featuring-Android-4.0-Ice-Cream-Sandwich-Operating-System/21281964
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Maylong-Mobility-M-270-with-WiFi-7-Touchscreen-Tablet-PC-Featuring-Android-4.0-Ice-Cream-Sandwich-Operating-System/21118631
No, I imagine he means the skirmishes that lead to the development of ailerons (which we use today) to circumvent the patents on "wing warping" (which would be completely impractical for modern jets).
Radios are extremely easy to hide. Just ask the French Resistance... These days they can be microscopic.
And I'd recomend MW over Shortwave. North Koreans don't generally speak English, so the bulk of available shortwave programming will be lost on them. And with the biggest potential international broadcaster right next door, the extra range really isn't necessary.
Damn near ALL of those are "sunk costs" which they've already paid for (or are already commited to paying for, whatever they do) and does NOT make it profitable to shut down currently operating nuclear power plants.
The operating costs of nuclear power plants have been shown to be minimal through the decades, and easily paid for by the obscene profits from the huge amount of electrical generation they can sustain.
The country sets the laws. They can put any regulations into place that they wish, ensuring someone they "trust" will be responsible for the operation of those nuclear power plants.
Certainly, "trust" is not a foreign problem... We run bigger risks with bridge builders, building maintenance personnel, and car manufacturers, but we have laws and regulations in place to manage the risks of people getting complacent, or making mistakes, in those fields, and those generally work just fine.
I know what I'm talking about. You do not. The numbers I gave were specific to Germany, since that's the subject at hand
The Pacific Nothwest is exceptional, in that there's LOTS of hydro to be had, and very few people living there. While it's technically a "renewable", it's completely inelastic, and been fully maxed-out since the 50s. no matter how much demand increases, you'll never get any more energy out of that hydro. California was getting 30% of it's energy from hydro several years back, but demand rose, and hydro could not, so it's becoming an ever-more tiny piece of the electric grid here.
Expanding into other renewables will get very expensive for Oregon. The fact that your electric prices are low, is exactly why you'll never get large-scale development of solar and wind... They're too expensive. California is getting some of this, but only very slowly, and at electric prices of about double what you're talking about.
You'd consider Germany's electric rates to be absolutely astronomical, but that's where they had to raise them to, to fund all this renewable energy generation build-out, and there's no shortcuts, Oregon, that you can take to get there without raising rates.
You DO realize that 70k/yr is nowhere close to the 1%ers, right? That's only just in the top 30%.
$100k+ is in the top 15%, and you have to go up over earnings of $250k/yr to hit the top 1%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Household_income
It's quite the opposite, actually. Basic cable has very, very few original shows that are anything more than reality-TV filler. The overwhelming majority of what they broadcast is syndicated shows that originally aired on the broadcast networks. And the few original shows on basic cable... are usually available for free on Hulu.
And with the transition to digital, the channel count has EXPLODED. NBC broadcasting Universal Sports in a subchannel. Subchannels like MeTV, ThisTV, AntennaTV, etc, broadcasting classic old movies and TV shows, along with some more contemporary programming, which is quite a bit better than found on the basic cable channels which do the same.
Public broadcasters are making even better use of their subchannel capability... A subchannel with all their programming on a different schedule... MHz Networks showing English-language news programs from numerous countries around the world, from Taiwan to Russia to Al Jazeera English, vastly better than CNN all-around, and commercial-free.
At the same time quality is going to hell on cable while providers keep raising your prices, broadcast HDTV is transforming and improving significantly, and all for the one-time cost of an antenna.
And don't get me started on HBO/Showtime/Cinemax... It's mostly crap old movies around the clock to fill all the airtime they don't know what to do with... and anything decent they produce you can get with a Netflix subscription, just a bit later.
If you want to keep paying upwards of $70/mo., be my guest, but your attempt to rationalize it is ridiculous, and clearly most people would be extremely well served with an antenna and a DVR... It's certainly easy to get more high quality original content than you'll have the time to watch.
On the new Slashdot... EVERY DAY is a slow news day!
Sure! If you don't mind paying 5X as much for electricity as you do now, you too can help fund the development of renewable energy projects, just like the Germans. Oh what a time to be alive.
This is utterly wrong. Solar is one of the ONLY technologies that will make it possible to continue energy usage trends for the next century. We couldn't practically build nuclear power plants fast enough to keep up with growing demand. Wind is also a very good option, which should be exploited as much as possible.
While I support nuclear power plants in general, I'm not so sure Germany made the wrong decision. They made the decision in the wake of the Fukishima disaster, and *if* their investigation determined their own nuclear plants are vulnerable to some natural disaster or another, shutting them down BEFORE a disaster happens is ideal. Waiting until AFTER a disaster happens, and only *then* shutting them down, is the worst possible outcome for everyone.
Why bother? If you want to spread propaganda (or other information) to poor people, radio is the ideal medium. Small radios that can receive AM/MW signals are what westerners would consider nearly free, and MW signals can propagate hundreds of miles. In fact for those near the broadcast can put together AM/MW radios from any scraps of wire, dismantling a pair of headphones is ideal (see: Foxhole Radio).
I still maintain that OpenVMS and NonStop have a lot of life left in them, with no sign of any platform coming along to replace it. And I also believe that running the same OS on a new architecture and only needing to recompile your in-house applications is vastly easier than throwing away decades of work and rewriting everything for an entirely different OS, and Linux (or any other common OS you can name) is in no way even remotely a workable substitute for OpenVMS or NonStop.
I always thought it was a mistake to discontinue Alpha, and embrace Itanium, but that's a decision that is long past and not worth discussing anymore. HP isn't going to throw out their high-paying customers, and Intel doesn't want to continue making Itanium CPUs, so either OpenVMS and NonStop are going to be ported to yet another platform, or HP would have to, with great effort, resurrect the proprietary architectures they previously killed off. They clearly don't have anything lined-up to replace them.
It's very, very easy to install ducting in PC cases, which works extremely well.
And it's the IDEAL material... It's strong enough for rack-mounting. it flexes and bends under extreme loads instead of cracking. It's naturally an RF shield, and provides electrical grounding in case of an accident with the 200+volt lines coming in. It needs minimal thickness to provide sufficient strength. It's non-flammable. And even conducts away some of the heat. And if you really want to insist that it "bio-degrade" you need only poor some water, chlorine, or other oxidizer on it to very quickly degrade it to sand.
Even if you find something cheaper that's thin and strong enough, you'll still have to wrap it in steel foil...
Not true at all. The airflow is limited by the size of intakes and exhaust ports... Any volume larger than that is wasted.
Servers that used to be 3-4U are now 2U, or even 1U. Manufacturers have long since switched from ATX to microATX, and even a decade ago were aggressively pursuing smaller form factors: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845GV-PB-2R&cat=SYS
Lay out your motherboard on a table, then stick a 3" (for 92mm) or 4" (for 120mm) duct from the CPU to the exhaust, and that's all the space you need. Cases are larger because we can't lay a DVD-Burner sideways and assume the mobo wont have huge capacitors sticking up from there...
Only if your definition of "change" is so wide-open that you only care if the SHAPE is different.
Yes, they've all been rectangles since the 80s, but there have been more significant changes in that time. AT's toggle switch gave way to ATX's push-button, and smaller size. MicroATX allows everything to be significantly smaller, to the point that you can mount your computer to the back of your monitor.
Full-height PCI is giving way to half-height cards wherever possible, and smaller cases that are still fully capable are the result. SSDs are shrinking HDD sizes, and smaller cases with fewer fans results.
If anything, cases are changing too fast for companies to keep-up and put them into a standard... Instead, they just keep the screw holes in the same places, and tell you some boards won't fit...
No mention in TFA about where he lives, or anything more about what he can do. If he's searching job boards at all, he's seen our job listings, and if his resume is online (eg: at Dice.com) and he has Java, PL/SQL and Linux in it, he would have been called by our recruiters... I know that's how I got hired on, a phone call out of the blue. And I know I get absolutely spammed by recruiters because my resume has "Linux" in it, so much so I found it critical to remove my phone number.
While I admit the job market is terribly non-optimal, I believe you are quite mistaken. I've seen no end of people with 1-year of experience applying for Sr. level jobs, and believing they can do them.
I'm sure "timely" is highly subjective. Companies want people who can hit the ground running, and do at least some basic maintenance work on day 1, doing something useful for the first few months while they learn the environment enough to do the complex work they were really hired for.
Employers are finnicky about hiring qualified applicants, rather than training people, because of turn-over rates. There's so many other companies out there, which can pay much better, that may hire away your people at any time.
I've certainly seen plenty of ENTRY-LEVEL people in IT seeing work and having a difficult time of it, but not the pros. The better people may have taken a pay cut, have to put in more hours, commute further, or just got stuck in a company they don't particularly like for longer than they planned, but I don't believe anyone very good in IT has been out of work for years at a time, unless you've got an unfortunate skill set that doesn't match up with current technologies anymore.
At least in the California job market, there is a dearth of qualified applicants. I've been on both sides of the hiring equation for years. The idea that you can't get a job, with over a decade of PL/SQL, Java and other programming, is just laughable, and tells me we must be missing something, here.
Are you missing all your teeth and refuse to get dentures? Are you only looking for jobs in a 10 mile radius of your house? Are you demanding an astronomical salary? Do you have obvious medical problems that make you incredibly unreliable from day-to-day? Are you just a mediocre programmer?
Your age certainly isn't preventing you from landing a new job. That said, it's certainly possible whatever those issues are, they could be age-related or age-compounded.
PAE is a hack. It works, but you should avoid it if you damn-well can. And it sounds like we all can avoid it.
It's fortunate that they did not... Linux thrives on commodity hardware, so x64 is the better option all-around. But back before x64 caught on, they might have gotten some traction.
Thanks for the correction. Guess I had hard drives on the brain...
The fact that HP saw fit to port OpenVMS to Itanium just demonstrates what a strong following it has. They wouldn't have ported it if they didn't make a lot of money on it. Certainly, recompiling your apps for a different CPU, on the same OS, is vastly easier than rewriting it for a whole new platform. OpenVMS is about the only microkernel OS out there, with incredible stability as a by-product, and some companies are willing to pay obscene amounts of money for that.
NonStop is also still a very high-availability platform, and customers that need it are willing to pay for it. x64 hardware doesn't have a fraction the RAS features that Itanium and other proprietary platforms do, though it looks like Intel is going to (slowly) take things in that direction.
If you've got another suggestion for other *ridiculously* high-availability hardware, I'm all ears...
SGI crashed and burned in a hurry. Whatever they were doing, it isn't a model anyone else should follow. Perhaps it's just because they were more of a graphics and workstations company, and didn't have the decades of order processing apps other, more transaction-oriented, systems did.