Isn't it sad that the engineers are the ones who actually do the work, while managers are just overhead, yet the managers are the ones who get the money?
A) Managers certainly can earn their money (though they most often don't). They just need to plan ahead, and remove roadblocks from your path to allow you to be more productive at your "actual work".
B) Managers have scale on their side. If you were a manager's only direct report, you could easily justify him earning much less than you do. But with 20 direct reports, he only needs to find a way to make each of you slightly more productive, and he's saved the company more money than any of those 20 individuals.
My big problem with the system is that it's too damn hard to get rid of a bad manager, while bad employees disappear quickly.
Somehow, millions of people don't use that as an excuse to skip out of going to college. You may have to think of the start of your career as a loss-leader of sorts. Spend money to make money, or be forever paralyzed with fear of losing your low-paying security blanket.
Work prospects are equally dire in the humanities. Better advise your children to not go to college at all and become skilled craftspeople instead.
That's good advice. Student loans are a huge anchor around your neck for a lot of years. You're taking a BIG gamble that the gains from that degree will quickly offset the cost of that debt, plus interest payments, plus the 4 years you spent not earning any income. And what's more, most IT job descriptions I've seen that ask for a degree OR equivalent work experience, meaning earning money for 4 years makes you just as valuable as the guy who got crushing debt for his 4 years of school...
However, there is a middle-ground... Two-year Community Colleges are vastly less expensive options, that can get you an associates degree. And if you choose to pursue education further, it can be a dirt cheap replacement for the first two years of whatever higher degree you wish to pursue. And while tuition is going up, technology has driven the prices of course materials down significantly from the old days, when you were stuck with the single College bookstore selling at full price.
They couldn't 'get the part to fix the problem' despite the fact that you can pretty much see the Boeing Renton plant (where they build 737's) from the SEATAC terminal windows.
Funny... Does Boeing have a drive-thru window?
"Yes, I'd like one 787 vertical stabilizer, well done. To go. And there's an extra C-note in it for you if you make it snappy!"
I don't feel unsafe except on a couple of carriers in the US. First, anything flown by Republic which is a contract carrier for US Airways and others and secondly, Delta.
Funny you'd say you feel unsafe on Delta, when they and Southwest are by far the two safest airlines in the world.
At least since 1989, Delta has had only a single fatal crash, in over 16 million flights.
I strongly suggest you revisit whatever criteria you're using to judge these airlines, because it's pointing in the opposite direction that it should.
My rule-of-thumb advice is that the big carriers are all quite safe these days. But every small commuter airlines (no matter who's logo is painted on the fuselage) has a rather poor safety standards, and a record to match. I'd rather travel on a rusty old Greyhound bus than a commuter flights, no matter how hard the big carrier's system try to put me on one for a leg of my trip.
money that is hoarded is a drag on the economy and does not create wealth.
That's only true if your "savings" is stuffed in your mattress. If your "savings" is in a bank "Saving Account", Money Market Account, Certificate of Deposit, or similar, it's quite beneficial to the economy, as the bank then loans the money out, giving you a cut of the interest.
This should be something you learn when you are 5 years old... The same bank you use for your savings and checking accounts, is where you go to get a mortgage when you want to buy a house.
Ummm IBM iDataplex, and yea it's a PC with infiniband...
That's because it's just a server, definitely NOT a mainframe. Just because IBM sells it doesn't make it a mainframe. IBM's mainframes are under the "z" Series.
And look at the top500 and you'll see them all over the place.
The Top500 is a list of the highest-performing systems. In other word HPC. It's NOT a list of mainframes. The Top 500 doesn't CARE about mainframes at all, as evidenced by their benchmark being purely number-crunching, with NO attempt to record I/O performance, which is the specialty of mainframes.
Slashdot... Lots of fools who know just enough to be dangerous.
PC stands for 'personal computer', at least it did.
No, it stands for "IBM-compatible Personal Computer", and it always has. IBM called their first x86 computer a PC, and the name stuck. It does NOT mean any and every computing device designed for home use.
The laptop was the evolution of the desktop into a more broadly useful form factor.
Laptops are fully compatible with desktops. Same architecture, similar I/O connectors and ports, everything.
The smartphone, and the pad device are precisely the same thing - just other points on the spectrum, not a whole different genus of computer.
Tablets and smartphones are ARM-based devices, not x86-compatible computers. Even if they did have ATOM CPUs, the lack of a BIOS, keyboard, and other legacy cruft would probably break backwards compatibility, and still make it NOT count as a PC.
Of course you CAN make PCs in tablet form-factors. Microsoft and Intel are desperately trying to force manufacturers to do so, which gives us laptops with hinged touch-screens which can be used as ultra-bulky tablets. If those caught on, instead of ARM-based devices, then you could call them PCs.
While blaming IT for their problems may work once or twice, those who do it more often look like idiots themselves. The project manager who delievers on time gets a raise, and the one who never delievers on time gets fired, even if he constantly blames IT.
Best thing to do is put a process in writing... One that will make it clear that last-minute requests will go in the queue behind all others. If you can point to a procedure some sociopath was not following, then they dangle on the hook for the late delivery, while you get off with a minimum of back and forth about it.
And yes, looking for a new job is always a good idea. I stayed at one for a few years, as things were slowly improving, only to have the root cause of the trouble get promoted to the top spot. I left, days later.
Dropbox and similar services are the last-gasp of web hosting. Things will be going the other way, quite soon.
It made sense to have a web hosting provider when people were on dial-up, and could slowly upload a file once, allowing many people to download it quickly from a fast host. But now, we're on the verge of the stars lining-up to make the peer-to-peer distributed internet practical for everyone.
First, internet speeds are getting faster... Google, FIOS, and others have made "gigabit" internet the new "FAST", even while most people can't get 100Mbps internet service yet. Very high speed services like FIOS are expensive, but the price will keep falling, quickly, until everyone can justify the price. Then, downloads from your home box will be just as fast as downloads from Dropbox's servers.
Second, IPv6 is just around the corner. Comcast was practically forced to use IPv6 for their network. 4G LTE networks are natively IPv6. And we're just plain running out of IPv4 address space, and carrier grade NAT is unpleasant enough that it won't win. An IPv6 service is basically a static IP service, so you can buy any DNS name you want, and point it to one of your home servers.
Third, low powered devices are proliferating... With OpenWRT, a number of very low power and dirt cheap WiFi APs/routers can be used as full-fledged Linux systems, and with USB ports, can act as a full-fledged SAN, all with no increase in your electric bill, noise, space, etc.
Finally, SSDs. No longer does keeping a server running mean noisy, spinning rust. Once some form of SSDs are large enough to store your entire media collection, and cheap enough that everyone is buying them, then your home file server can be silent and low power, while performing well enough to rival Dropbox and the like.
It's just over the horizon. As long as all of the above pans out, which all indicators say it will, the internet will become a much more symmetric place, just like originally intended. And all manner of hosted services we have now, will be reduced to a tiny niche, as they stop making sense for most use cases.
Chevy Spark is 84 HP, 1.2L, curb weight ~2,400 lbs. Sticker mpg is 32/34/38.
Yes, but the Spark is a tiny, stubby little ugly piece of crap. The SL1 was an actual car. 4 doors, seats 5, nice big engine compartment, etc.
And what do you think this proves? 20 years later and the best Chevy can do is just BARELY any more efficient at the same curb weight? They're clearly doing something very wrong, if that tiny thing isn't getting much better mileage.
I was specifically referring to an old Saturn SL1.
I have been contemplating buying something larger for a long time. The amount of cargo space is terrible. At least a hatch-back model, instead, would be vastly more versatile, and less constraining and frustrating.
some states do not even have hydro-power. Some thing to to with being flat
That doesn't make it impossible. Water towers already exist in many cities with particularly flat geographies. You can resort to pumping water up off-peak, and turning (very small) turbines when power is needed.
And batteries aren't necessarily the best option. Liquid-sodium solar-thermal power plants are quite compelling. Compressed air seems to be practical, and could perhaps be less expensive than batteries on a large enough scale.
Power is only indirectly related to the efficiency:
Nope. Engines are most efficient running at their highest power level, and the more powerful the engine, the more often you'll be running at lower compression, lower fuel efficiency, higher pumping losses, etc.
What's more, extra power requires larger displacement, or even more cylinders, which wastes fuel. Modern 4-cylinder engines are powerful enough for even fairly large pickups, why don't we have 2-cylinder engines for cars?
Weight factors in with city driving where you're stopping and accelerating all the time. Every extra ounce you have to push around is a penalty.
That's true (if it's not a hybrid), but you waste less fuel if people are forced to accelerate more slowly, and there's also plenty of losses due to idling in city driving, which are reduced with smaller engines.
We have very safe cars but they're also very heavy as a result. Granted gains can be made with expensive and exotic materials, but how about CHEAP and LIGHT cars that could be had for just a few grand, and get 80-100MPG?
Cars don't need to be made much lighter to get incredible gas mileage. I drive a 20 year-old car that has airbags, side-impact beams, crumple zones, etc, terrible aerodynamics, and it gets 37MPG (US) hwy (and drivers report even better real-world results). Why? Because the engine is 85HP. It accelerates onto the freeway just fine, passes most other drivers going up hills, and I've taken it up to 100MPH without breaking a sweat.
These days, engines have improved DRAMATICALLY. Engines 20% smaller, develop DOUBLE the horsepower (just one example I looked up). But instead of selling cars with sub-1.0 litre engines, they sell cars with incredibly excessive power, and terrible fuel economy as a result.
A dirt cheap car should be able to get 80MPG these days. But instead the cheapest, tiniest cars have more HP than you need to tow a 30' travel trailer...
Everything on that wiki says compressed air is far WORSE than batteries in every way. More expensive than batteries. Less energy dense than even lead-acid. Variable speeds requires special engineering. Safety concerns. Etc.
There's no place for rational discourse here, whoever posts the most anti-MS screed gets voted up regardless of facts.
On the plus side, the absolute FLOOD of inflammatory stories about global warming, evolution/intelligent design, has trailed off. Those were almost daily occurrences on the front page when CmdrTaco left, and the anti-XYZ bile in the comments was something to behold. You'd get a dogpile of angry replies and instantly modded down to -2 if you even offered small factual corrections to anti-XYZ rants.
While that was ongoing, I had almost entirely ceased activity on/. for months. Not to say that things are all better, but it had been even worse, or I wouldn't be here at all.
Another cool option is have your laptop open a reverse ssh tunnel right to your server when it boots.
Of course that won't work on WiFi because the network connection hasn't been negotiated at boot-time.
Instead, you should have it check and reestablish the connection every hour or so. And also, SSH connections like to silently die when there's network trouble, while the command will keep running, with no indication of trouble. To keep an SSH tunnel up and working, you want a few options like the following:
Why bother with any kind of expensive, complex, and non-servicable battery? Pumped hydro is proven on a large scale, doesn't need DC/AC conversion, gets 70%+ efficiencies, and more if you seal it to stop evaporation, and is much simpler and cheaper, since it's just a high/low tank, a pump and generator.
If you're anywhere remotely near an existing dam, it's extremely inexpensive to just add pumped hydro storage capabilities to it. Otherwise, just find the nearest mountain, and excavate a lake at the top, as well as one at the bottom, and a few lines between them to turn the generators.
The only place massive batteries make sense is on tiny (off-grid) scales, where you can't afford to have even one person around, monitoring the systems. Maybe this will work for off-grid homes with solar or wind power. Or maybe it'll see some use in large UPSes for cell towers, data centers, etc. But it would be pointless for a grid-tied deployment, where the power company can install a central pumped-hydro peaking/leveling system when renewables begin to supply a significant percentage of base load.
Slashdot Mirror
A) Managers certainly can earn their money (though they most often don't). They just need to plan ahead, and remove roadblocks from your path to allow you to be more productive at your "actual work".
B) Managers have scale on their side. If you were a manager's only direct report, you could easily justify him earning much less than you do. But with 20 direct reports, he only needs to find a way to make each of you slightly more productive, and he's saved the company more money than any of those 20 individuals.
My big problem with the system is that it's too damn hard to get rid of a bad manager, while bad employees disappear quickly.
Somehow, millions of people don't use that as an excuse to skip out of going to college. You may have to think of the start of your career as a loss-leader of sorts. Spend money to make money, or be forever paralyzed with fear of losing your low-paying security blanket.
That's good advice. Student loans are a huge anchor around your neck for a lot of years. You're taking a BIG gamble that the gains from that degree will quickly offset the cost of that debt, plus interest payments, plus the 4 years you spent not earning any income. And what's more, most IT job descriptions I've seen that ask for a degree OR equivalent work experience, meaning earning money for 4 years makes you just as valuable as the guy who got crushing debt for his 4 years of school...
However, there is a middle-ground... Two-year Community Colleges are vastly less expensive options, that can get you an associates degree. And if you choose to pursue education further, it can be a dirt cheap replacement for the first two years of whatever higher degree you wish to pursue. And while tuition is going up, technology has driven the prices of course materials down significantly from the old days, when you were stuck with the single College bookstore selling at full price.
And why not MIPS? It's a pretty popular CPU in China, and has certainly been used in Android based phones and tablets.
PowerPC is a pretty good-performing mobile CPU, too. And I'm sure SuperH CPUs still have their adherents somewhere.
I anxiously await Intel's new "Oregon Trail" CPU.
Funny... Does Boeing have a drive-thru window?
"Yes, I'd like one 787 vertical stabilizer, well done. To go. And there's an extra C-note in it for you if you make it snappy!"
Funny you'd say you feel unsafe on Delta, when they and Southwest are by far the two safest airlines in the world.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130115111507/http://planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20090917114421/http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm
At least since 1989, Delta has had only a single fatal crash, in over 16 million flights.
I strongly suggest you revisit whatever criteria you're using to judge these airlines, because it's pointing in the opposite direction that it should.
My rule-of-thumb advice is that the big carriers are all quite safe these days. But every small commuter airlines (no matter who's logo is painted on the fuselage) has a rather poor safety standards, and a record to match. I'd rather travel on a rusty old Greyhound bus than a commuter flights, no matter how hard the big carrier's system try to put me on one for a leg of my trip.
That's only true if your "savings" is stuffed in your mattress. If your "savings" is in a bank "Saving Account", Money Market Account, Certificate of Deposit, or similar, it's quite beneficial to the economy, as the bank then loans the money out, giving you a cut of the interest.
This should be something you learn when you are 5 years old... The same bank you use for your savings and checking accounts, is where you go to get a mortgage when you want to buy a house.
That's because it's just a server, definitely NOT a mainframe. Just because IBM sells it doesn't make it a mainframe. IBM's mainframes are under the "z" Series.
The Top500 is a list of the highest-performing systems. In other word HPC. It's NOT a list of mainframes. The Top 500 doesn't CARE about mainframes at all, as evidenced by their benchmark being purely number-crunching, with NO attempt to record I/O performance, which is the specialty of mainframes.
Slashdot... Lots of fools who know just enough to be dangerous.
No, it stands for "IBM-compatible Personal Computer", and it always has. IBM called their first x86 computer a PC, and the name stuck. It does NOT mean any and every computing device designed for home use.
Laptops are fully compatible with desktops. Same architecture, similar I/O connectors and ports, everything.
Tablets and smartphones are ARM-based devices, not x86-compatible computers. Even if they did have ATOM CPUs, the lack of a BIOS, keyboard, and other legacy cruft would probably break backwards compatibility, and still make it NOT count as a PC.
Of course you CAN make PCs in tablet form-factors. Microsoft and Intel are desperately trying to force manufacturers to do so, which gives us laptops with hinged touch-screens which can be used as ultra-bulky tablets. If those caught on, instead of ARM-based devices, then you could call them PCs.
While blaming IT for their problems may work once or twice, those who do it more often look like idiots themselves. The project manager who delievers on time gets a raise, and the one who never delievers on time gets fired, even if he constantly blames IT.
Best thing to do is put a process in writing... One that will make it clear that last-minute requests will go in the queue behind all others. If you can point to a procedure some sociopath was not following, then they dangle on the hook for the late delivery, while you get off with a minimum of back and forth about it.
And yes, looking for a new job is always a good idea. I stayed at one for a few years, as things were slowly improving, only to have the root cause of the trouble get promoted to the top spot. I left, days later.
Dropbox and similar services are the last-gasp of web hosting. Things will be going the other way, quite soon.
It made sense to have a web hosting provider when people were on dial-up, and could slowly upload a file once, allowing many people to download it quickly from a fast host. But now, we're on the verge of the stars lining-up to make the peer-to-peer distributed internet practical for everyone.
First, internet speeds are getting faster... Google, FIOS, and others have made "gigabit" internet the new "FAST", even while most people can't get 100Mbps internet service yet. Very high speed services like FIOS are expensive, but the price will keep falling, quickly, until everyone can justify the price. Then, downloads from your home box will be just as fast as downloads from Dropbox's servers.
Second, IPv6 is just around the corner. Comcast was practically forced to use IPv6 for their network. 4G LTE networks are natively IPv6. And we're just plain running out of IPv4 address space, and carrier grade NAT is unpleasant enough that it won't win. An IPv6 service is basically a static IP service, so you can buy any DNS name you want, and point it to one of your home servers.
Third, low powered devices are proliferating... With OpenWRT, a number of very low power and dirt cheap WiFi APs/routers can be used as full-fledged Linux systems, and with USB ports, can act as a full-fledged SAN, all with no increase in your electric bill, noise, space, etc.
Finally, SSDs. No longer does keeping a server running mean noisy, spinning rust. Once some form of SSDs are large enough to store your entire media collection, and cheap enough that everyone is buying them, then your home file server can be silent and low power, while performing well enough to rival Dropbox and the like.
It's just over the horizon. As long as all of the above pans out, which all indicators say it will, the internet will become a much more symmetric place, just like originally intended. And all manner of hosted services we have now, will be reduced to a tiny niche, as they stop making sense for most use cases.
The SW versions were far less popular, and hard to find. Besides, I don't want to inherent 20 years of other people's unmaintained car problems.
You're quite wrong.
Yes, but the Spark is a tiny, stubby little ugly piece of crap. The SL1 was an actual car. 4 doors, seats 5, nice big engine compartment, etc.
And what do you think this proves? 20 years later and the best Chevy can do is just BARELY any more efficient at the same curb weight? They're clearly doing something very wrong, if that tiny thing isn't getting much better mileage.
I was specifically referring to an old Saturn SL1.
I have been contemplating buying something larger for a long time. The amount of cargo space is terrible. At least a hatch-back model, instead, would be vastly more versatile, and less constraining and frustrating.
That doesn't make it impossible. Water towers already exist in many cities with particularly flat geographies. You can resort to pumping water up off-peak, and turning (very small) turbines when power is needed.
And batteries aren't necessarily the best option. Liquid-sodium solar-thermal power plants are quite compelling. Compressed air seems to be practical, and could perhaps be less expensive than batteries on a large enough scale.
Nope. Engines are most efficient running at their highest power level, and the more powerful the engine, the more often you'll be running at lower compression, lower fuel efficiency, higher pumping losses, etc.
What's more, extra power requires larger displacement, or even more cylinders, which wastes fuel. Modern 4-cylinder engines are powerful enough for even fairly large pickups, why don't we have 2-cylinder engines for cars?
That's true (if it's not a hybrid), but you waste less fuel if people are forced to accelerate more slowly, and there's also plenty of losses due to idling in city driving, which are reduced with smaller engines.
Cars don't need to be made much lighter to get incredible gas mileage. I drive a 20 year-old car that has airbags, side-impact beams, crumple zones, etc, terrible aerodynamics, and it gets 37MPG (US) hwy (and drivers report even better real-world results). Why? Because the engine is 85HP. It accelerates onto the freeway just fine, passes most other drivers going up hills, and I've taken it up to 100MPH without breaking a sweat.
These days, engines have improved DRAMATICALLY. Engines 20% smaller, develop DOUBLE the horsepower (just one example I looked up). But instead of selling cars with sub-1.0 litre engines, they sell cars with incredibly excessive power, and terrible fuel economy as a result.
A dirt cheap car should be able to get 80MPG these days. But instead the cheapest, tiniest cars have more HP than you need to tow a 30' travel trailer...
Everything on that wiki says compressed air is far WORSE than batteries in every way. More expensive than batteries. Less energy dense than even lead-acid. Variable speeds requires special engineering. Safety concerns. Etc.
Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
http://nukeitfromorbit.com/
I'd say it was roughly around the time that your account was created, Ratzo...
On the plus side, the absolute FLOOD of inflammatory stories about global warming, evolution/intelligent design, has trailed off. Those were almost daily occurrences on the front page when CmdrTaco left, and the anti-XYZ bile in the comments was something to behold. You'd get a dogpile of angry replies and instantly modded down to -2 if you even offered small factual corrections to anti-XYZ rants.
While that was ongoing, I had almost entirely ceased activity on /. for months. Not to say that things are all better, but it had been even worse, or I wouldn't be here at all.
Well then, you're NEVER buying a laptop, because ALL the major manufacturers include LoJack for Laptops (CompuTrace) in their firmware.
Of course that won't work on WiFi because the network connection hasn't been negotiated at boot-time.
Instead, you should have it check and reestablish the connection every hour or so. And also, SSH connections like to silently die when there's network trouble, while the command will keep running, with no indication of trouble. To keep an SSH tunnel up and working, you want a few options like the following:
ssh -n -N -oConnectTimeout=300 -oServerAliveCountMax=10 -oServerAliveInterval=120
Why bother with any kind of expensive, complex, and non-servicable battery? Pumped hydro is proven on a large scale, doesn't need DC/AC conversion, gets 70%+ efficiencies, and more if you seal it to stop evaporation, and is much simpler and cheaper, since it's just a high/low tank, a pump and generator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
If you're anywhere remotely near an existing dam, it's extremely inexpensive to just add pumped hydro storage capabilities to it. Otherwise, just find the nearest mountain, and excavate a lake at the top, as well as one at the bottom, and a few lines between them to turn the generators.
The only place massive batteries make sense is on tiny (off-grid) scales, where you can't afford to have even one person around, monitoring the systems. Maybe this will work for off-grid homes with solar or wind power. Or maybe it'll see some use in large UPSes for cell towers, data centers, etc. But it would be pointless for a grid-tied deployment, where the power company can install a central pumped-hydro peaking/leveling system when renewables begin to supply a significant percentage of base load.