As a contributor to open source myself (okay, minor, but in quite a few projects) I can say that it is very much a scatch your own itch thing that, in a mature environment with lots of devs/project managers/translators/package maintainers/etc., will gel together to form a nice overall 'product'. Many people do it just for the fun of it and already have another (I assume quite good) source of income. As nice as they are, it is the artists and content people that usually like the micro-payment system -- I suspect because some of them do it in real life?
Have to agree with the senitment here. The company is at fault because he could have gone under a bus or something and there would be no way to recover the data.
I agree in general but still sending a probe to Mars is a political stunt to show India is also coming up, not just China.
Politicians everywhere are largely useless at directing resources to where they need to go. Why complain here when it could have as easily gone into something less useful? Political stunt or not they are doing the right things.
There are million things India could be investing money into that would bring a better return in areas that you mention than this.
Well time and again physics has been shown to be the driver of much of our progress. Just have a look at how long it took biologists to make use of x-rays or scattering of electrons into a microscope, the chemists to see the value of quantum theory in understanding how molecules form and interact, how at CERN Tim Berners Lee invented HTML and how the next super fast cables that will replace gigabit ethernet have been made and tested there, or the origin of duct tape, and I could go on and on. India (and China) in my opinion understand that physics research in particular gives the best bang for the buck. Good on them for not cowering away from hard physics challenges.
Science research and development, engineering, and technical progress is arguably more useful for moving societal issues forwards. The byproduct is better education, a smarter population, and better job opportunities. You can spend money trying to fix social problems all you want, but ultimately people need to know that their future is secure, their bellies can be filled, and they can support themselves beyond any one-off public spending not to be recovered. Claiming that poverty or corruption need be "solved" first is a recipe for disaster and not compatible with what happens in all of the developed world (which still has poverty and corruption to a small but significant extent).
If you really are picking quality articles for submissions, keep it up. Everyone has a joke about the quality of articles here, but this site only works when people put the time in to these things.
From the video (thanks/. for not making another 5 hour video), this was pretty funny: Q: "Do you read/. summaries at least" A: "no I just skim it"
Fractional integrals/differentiation is way more fun and hard to get your head around. Not that it is actually that useful outside niche engineering applications, but hey, it's maths and at least it's not Measure theory -- this was the killer for me in math classes.
The parent post is bullshit. And even if it weren't...
Based on the chart you've linked to and the yearly background radiation levels, the levels for 2 weeks in the Fukushima exclusion zone, you might equally conclude something very different with a bit of extra knowledge. The radiation levels are a bit lower than just after the incident (some due to physics and some due to unrealistic assumptions about soil, etc.) and also vary with distances from the radioactive fuel source.
Japan is still trying to figure out if 1mSv or 20mSv or 5mSv is the appropriate yearly limit extra for anyone who would live in the exclusion zone. From the chart you posted 2mSv is what you get for just having a head scan and 4mSv is what an average person gets from background radiation.
Now for a geek that doesn't play with many radiation emitting toys and lives in insulated basements, receiving little UV exposure from the sun or non-concreted ground, might mean he is missing out on 4 or so mSv per year and it might make sense to stick a uranium rod under your floorboards or move to the Fukushima exclusion zone! Well, that or go outside occasionally and eat bananas.
I know we're gonna get all the "ha ha, it's an evil megacorp anyway", but damn it must be stressful moments to some of the folks at Adobe.:/ Especially if the source code leaks turn out to be true.
Leaking the source will be a big embarrassment for Adobe. I mean given the quality of the applications there will probably be lots of comments on top of functions that say:
We have no idea what this function does. The guy who wrote it left and it is used for backwards capability. It is also tied into main areas of the program and can't be removed.
It isn't just security either; I see lots of jobs advertised at the moment here in London. It is overwhelmingly what they call "DevOps" and Java development. I have been following the market for a long while, and I can see the same roles coming up again and again, so clearly the companies are having trouble finding people.
That doesn't mean you need to fall for these sap stories. It's the companies' own fault if they have incompetant HR or terrible business practises that force people out after short stints. In a free market if it is critical to their business and they stuff it up they should go out of business and good riddens.
On top of that, they don't actually know what they are looking for. Take this new buzzword, "DevOps"; it comes from "development" and "operations", and it means somebody who sits in the middle, between a development department and system administration; ideally this is a person who can do everything a developer does and everything a system administrator does, and such person is probably a developer who has grown into system administration.
I have done this dual job before and trust me, the HR types do not care one iota. If it saves money, great -- screw that guy some more. Who really benefits from a burnt out IT guy? The manager that can then claim that they got so much out of Joe that he had to move on to another job does. Many will unfortunately take all the credit for your hard work and you will be left stranded. Never fall for this (in case you are wondering I have not myself, but I have seen it happen).
I have to agree. I would have worked for Raytheon if they were interested in me as I have all the required study and would work initially for cheap, but they have basically said f*** o** to me in the past with no response. How am I supposed to now be interested in working for a company that only seems to want people with existing experience as well as skills? Sounds like they want to avoid training anybody and have poor HR people, do little advertising at universities, and cry like babies when they "can't find anybody."
I thought the Canadians were considered mostly harmless. Nope, sorry, my mistake (would be the response of a typical Canadian).
Oh and Australia has a much more populated Indonesia next door (on the global map it is almost touching) as the Mexican equivalent (without the tortias or the hats) and a spread out population similar to the US. I don't really know how this got so far off topic that guns are the main focus of this thread, but that is/.
I'm a registered Democrat, who has never owned or fired a gun, yet I'm disgusted at the faith-based gun control laws being advocated, despite all evidence EVER, showing they only have the opposite effects. And worse, exploiting dead children to push for gun control laws that undeniably wouldn't have saved any of those children. Universal background checks are a great idea, but all other gun control laws currently suggested are pure idiocy.
You could compare to Australia, which is very similar to states in the US in other ways, but has had successful gun restrictions put in place for a while now. If you don't want to look at the stats (admittedly hard to do with so much misinformation around) you could just watch The Daily Show's (3 part) take on it. Funniest is the 3rd part that debunks the myths of how long it takes to implement and includes stumbling around in the wilderness as a metaphor for US lawmakers on this issue.
A lot of open source projects have developers that for fun play with code and call themselves 'hackers'. I've done so in the past and often heard the phrase 'happy hacking'. I suppose the media and politicians/lawyers have completely subverted the meaning of this word.
On the other hand, whenever I hear the word 'politician' or 'lawyer' I now think 'scum' or 'on-the-take' by deafult and when I hear 'media' I think of mean old people trying to pull strings. I don't mean to, but this sort of naturally comes to mind. Words can sure change their meaning fast for people.
I bought a couple of OCZ drives over the last few years for different computers and they all work fine. I'm not worried that they will fail and wipe my data because I only put programs and operating system stuff there (as shouldn't all of us here on/.?). I never bought the 'high end' gamer stuff. My data goes on a HDD and when I compile stuff and install it, it then goes on the SSD for fast performance. When I am working on something distributed from SSD it is backed up online through a version controll system so I don't lose anything major in the event of a fire or disk failure. For servers, you should have an RAID array of SSDs and the OCZs have been cheaper, so you should expect that they might fail -- but this should not impact what you do.
Funny thing with Dell support is that the 'pro' support is worse than the Indian support. With the Indian support they usually agree to replace the part without much fuss, whilst the 'pro' support makes you jump through all the hoops to prove that a device is faulty.
Can someone explain to me how this chip could be calculating anything unless the quantum part was working?
D-wave is very secretive about how their machine operates and do not respond to academics who want to know exactly how it works -- this is the source of much of the speculation. On top of that you need to specially code your instructions for it, because it can only do a subset of what a general quantum computer could in theory do.
In a true free market I could offer my doctor services cheap and undercut those other doctors who went to school.
You can already -- it is called alternative medicine. You can even charge 10x as much and people will still buy your crap. Only downside is you might have to leave the country if you upset too many people, so maybe first move overseas to where the most gullible are and move back when they come after you with pitchforks.
Thanks for sharing the links. I'm very happy to be wrong on this, and it's interesting to see the progress made in the last couple of years on exoplanet discovery.
When I was in school the idea that we would ever actually take a physical picture of a planet around another solar system was science fiction. Decades later and we have pictures of many planets around other solar systems and even planets that do not orbit a solar system at all.
I like the sentiment of your post, but we currently don't even have a 1 pixel picture of a planet around another star than our sun. The current methods, at least until we get James-Webb and better telescopes out there, are using the wobble effect from the gravitational effect of the planet on the star, spectral analysis, and such indirect methods of observation.
Still it is pretty cool to look at the current list of habitable exoplanets and think of the types of worlds there are out there. The discovery in the article proves beyond doubt that water can exist like on earth on the surface of a large rocky body.
This should not be accepatable that the US is closing many of its telescopes (temporarily) that were doing long term observations and now doing stupid things like politicizing one of the fronteers of human exploration (the search for other planets like our own). Maybe there need to be more people to write to politicians to let them know that there are voters out there that value these things?
Science research and development, and related technologies, are what drives economies in the long term. Without doing the things you need to do in space science, medical research, geology, AI, philosophy, mathematics, etc. eventually you will be economic and technolgical sitting ducks -- like the indiginous populations around the world were in times of colonization. Many in the US know this, and it is not as stupid a country as it seems. Worrying completely about internal social problems IMO is self-defeating and counter productive for the long term economy.
Your flaw is that you don't think that 'useful' could be redefined. In the future everyone could well be one of: - politician (they aren't going to propose laws to eliminate themselves) - lawyer (they aren't going to pass laws to eliminate themselves) - snake oil salesman (there will always be gullable people) - banker (these guys will survive along with rats a nuclear holocaust)
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As a contributor to open source myself (okay, minor, but in quite a few projects) I can say that it is very much a scatch your own itch thing that, in a mature environment with lots of devs/project managers/translators/package maintainers/etc., will gel together to form a nice overall 'product'. Many people do it just for the fun of it and already have another (I assume quite good) source of income. As nice as they are, it is the artists and content people that usually like the micro-payment system -- I suspect because some of them do it in real life?
Have to agree with the senitment here. The company is at fault because he could have gone under a bus or something and there would be no way to recover the data.
He should have claimed amnesia.
I agree in general but still sending a probe to Mars is a political stunt to show India is also coming up, not just China.
Politicians everywhere are largely useless at directing resources to where they need to go. Why complain here when it could have as easily gone into something less useful? Political stunt or not they are doing the right things.
There are million things India could be investing money into that would bring a better return in areas that you mention than this.
Well time and again physics has been shown to be the driver of much of our progress. Just have a look at how long it took biologists to make use of x-rays or scattering of electrons into a microscope, the chemists to see the value of quantum theory in understanding how molecules form and interact, how at CERN Tim Berners Lee invented HTML and how the next super fast cables that will replace gigabit ethernet have been made and tested there, or the origin of duct tape, and I could go on and on. India (and China) in my opinion understand that physics research in particular gives the best bang for the buck. Good on them for not cowering away from hard physics challenges.
Science research and development, engineering, and technical progress is arguably more useful for moving societal issues forwards. The byproduct is better education, a smarter population, and better job opportunities. You can spend money trying to fix social problems all you want, but ultimately people need to know that their future is secure, their bellies can be filled, and they can support themselves beyond any one-off public spending not to be recovered. Claiming that poverty or corruption need be "solved" first is a recipe for disaster and not compatible with what happens in all of the developed world (which still has poverty and corruption to a small but significant extent).
If you really are picking quality articles for submissions, keep it up. Everyone has a joke about the quality of articles here, but this site only works when people put the time in to these things.
From the video (thanks /. for not making another 5 hour video), this was pretty funny: /. summaries at least"
Q: "Do you read
A: "no I just skim it"
Fractional integrals/differentiation is way more fun and hard to get your head around. Not that it is actually that useful outside niche engineering applications, but hey, it's maths and at least it's not Measure theory -- this was the killer for me in math classes.
The parent post is bullshit. And even if it weren't...
Based on the chart you've linked to and the yearly background radiation levels, the levels for 2 weeks in the Fukushima exclusion zone, you might equally conclude something very different with a bit of extra knowledge. The radiation levels are a bit lower than just after the incident (some due to physics and some due to unrealistic assumptions about soil, etc.) and also vary with distances from the radioactive fuel source.
Japan is still trying to figure out if 1mSv or 20mSv or 5mSv is the appropriate yearly limit extra for anyone who would live in the exclusion zone. From the chart you posted 2mSv is what you get for just having a head scan and 4mSv is what an average person gets from background radiation.
Now for a geek that doesn't play with many radiation emitting toys and lives in insulated basements, receiving little UV exposure from the sun or non-concreted ground, might mean he is missing out on 4 or so mSv per year and it might make sense to stick a uranium rod under your floorboards or move to the Fukushima exclusion zone! Well, that or go outside occasionally and eat bananas.
I know we're gonna get all the "ha ha, it's an evil megacorp anyway", but damn it must be stressful moments to some of the folks at Adobe. :/ Especially if the source code leaks turn out to be true.
Leaking the source will be a big embarrassment for Adobe. I mean given the quality of the applications there will probably be lots of comments on top of functions that say:
We have no idea what this function does. The guy who wrote it left and it is used for backwards capability. It is also tied into main areas of the program and can't be removed.
It isn't just security either; I see lots of jobs advertised at the moment here in London. It is overwhelmingly what they call "DevOps" and Java development. I have been following the market for a long while, and I can see the same roles coming up again and again, so clearly the companies are having trouble finding people.
That doesn't mean you need to fall for these sap stories. It's the companies' own fault if they have incompetant HR or terrible business practises that force people out after short stints. In a free market if it is critical to their business and they stuff it up they should go out of business and good riddens.
On top of that, they don't actually know what they are looking for. Take this new buzzword, "DevOps"; it comes from "development" and "operations", and it means somebody who sits in the middle, between a development department and system administration; ideally this is a person who can do everything a developer does and everything a system administrator does, and such person is probably a developer who has grown into system administration.
I have done this dual job before and trust me, the HR types do not care one iota. If it saves money, great -- screw that guy some more. Who really benefits from a burnt out IT guy? The manager that can then claim that they got so much out of Joe that he had to move on to another job does. Many will unfortunately take all the credit for your hard work and you will be left stranded. Never fall for this (in case you are wondering I have not myself, but I have seen it happen).
I have to agree. I would have worked for Raytheon if they were interested in me as I have all the required study and would work initially for cheap, but they have basically said f*** o** to me in the past with no response. How am I supposed to now be interested in working for a company that only seems to want people with existing experience as well as skills? Sounds like they want to avoid training anybody and have poor HR people, do little advertising at universities, and cry like babies when they "can't find anybody."
I thought the Canadians were considered mostly harmless. Nope, sorry, my mistake (would be the response of a typical Canadian).
Oh and Australia has a much more populated Indonesia next door (on the global map it is almost touching) as the Mexican equivalent (without the tortias or the hats) and a spread out population similar to the US. I don't really know how this got so far off topic that guns are the main focus of this thread, but that is /.
I'm a registered Democrat, who has never owned or fired a gun, yet I'm disgusted at the faith-based gun control laws being advocated, despite all evidence EVER, showing they only have the opposite effects. And worse, exploiting dead children to push for gun control laws that undeniably wouldn't have saved any of those children. Universal background checks are a great idea, but all other gun control laws currently suggested are pure idiocy.
You could compare to Australia, which is very similar to states in the US in other ways, but has had successful gun restrictions put in place for a while now. If you don't want to look at the stats (admittedly hard to do with so much misinformation around) you could just watch The Daily Show's (3 part) take on it. Funniest is the 3rd part that debunks the myths of how long it takes to implement and includes stumbling around in the wilderness as a metaphor for US lawmakers on this issue.
A lot of open source projects have developers that for fun play with code and call themselves 'hackers'. I've done so in the past and often heard the phrase 'happy hacking'. I suppose the media and politicians/lawyers have completely subverted the meaning of this word.
On the other hand, whenever I hear the word 'politician' or 'lawyer' I now think 'scum' or 'on-the-take' by deafult and when I hear 'media' I think of mean old people trying to pull strings. I don't mean to, but this sort of naturally comes to mind. Words can sure change their meaning fast for people.
I bought a couple of OCZ drives over the last few years for different computers and they all work fine. I'm not worried that they will fail and wipe my data because I only put programs and operating system stuff there (as shouldn't all of us here on /.?). I never bought the 'high end' gamer stuff. My data goes on a HDD and when I compile stuff and install it, it then goes on the SSD for fast performance. When I am working on something distributed from SSD it is backed up online through a version controll system so I don't lose anything major in the event of a fire or disk failure. For servers, you should have an RAID array of SSDs and the OCZs have been cheaper, so you should expect that they might fail -- but this should not impact what you do.
Funny thing with Dell support is that the 'pro' support is worse than the Indian support. With the Indian support they usually agree to replace the part without much fuss, whilst the 'pro' support makes you jump through all the hoops to prove that a device is faulty.
Can someone explain to me how this chip could be calculating anything unless the quantum part was working?
D-wave is very secretive about how their machine operates and do not respond to academics who want to know exactly how it works -- this is the source of much of the speculation. On top of that you need to specially code your instructions for it, because it can only do a subset of what a general quantum computer could in theory do.
In a true free market I could offer my doctor services cheap and undercut those other doctors who went to school.
You can already -- it is called alternative medicine. You can even charge 10x as much and people will still buy your crap. Only downside is you might have to leave the country if you upset too many people, so maybe first move overseas to where the most gullible are and move back when they come after you with pitchforks.
Thanks for sharing the links. I'm very happy to be wrong on this, and it's interesting to see the progress made in the last couple of years on exoplanet discovery.
When I was in school the idea that we would ever actually take a physical picture of a planet around another solar system was science fiction. Decades later and we have pictures of many planets around other solar systems and even planets that do not orbit a solar system at all.
I like the sentiment of your post, but we currently don't even have a 1 pixel picture of a planet around another star than our sun. The current methods, at least until we get James-Webb and better telescopes out there, are using the wobble effect from the gravitational effect of the planet on the star, spectral analysis, and such indirect methods of observation.
Still it is pretty cool to look at the current list of habitable exoplanets and think of the types of worlds there are out there. The discovery in the article proves beyond doubt that water can exist like on earth on the surface of a large rocky body.
You want good for the environment then move back in with your parents.
You mean move upstairs?
Maybe download and run 'powertop'? This is a pretty nifty application that tells you were you are spending your power on Linux.
This should not be accepatable that the US is closing many of its telescopes (temporarily) that were doing long term observations and now doing stupid things like politicizing one of the fronteers of human exploration (the search for other planets like our own). Maybe there need to be more people to write to politicians to let them know that there are voters out there that value these things?
Science research and development, and related technologies, are what drives economies in the long term. Without doing the things you need to do in space science, medical research, geology, AI, philosophy, mathematics, etc. eventually you will be economic and technolgical sitting ducks -- like the indiginous populations around the world were in times of colonization. Many in the US know this, and it is not as stupid a country as it seems. Worrying completely about internal social problems IMO is self-defeating and counter productive for the long term economy.
Your flaw is that you don't think that 'useful' could be redefined. In the future everyone could well be one of:
- politician (they aren't going to propose laws to eliminate themselves)
- lawyer (they aren't going to pass laws to eliminate themselves)
- snake oil salesman (there will always be gullable people)
- banker (these guys will survive along with rats a nuclear holocaust)
*off to learn what star sign I am*
brother who is part horse and a sister that is part cat? Can I, p-l-e-a-s-e?